4/17/13 What is art?

Eric Gilston

Philologically speaking what Art is and what it consists of as a thing or entity that one does or studies is a creative action or a pattern of organic energy that someone does when trying to symbolically express the divine or what the divine is in their personal view. There is something to this notion that hints at what Art is exactly. Wherefore, if the individuals conceptualization of the manifest natural world, on one hand, and on the other the latent divine world the latter consisting of the afterlife or any other empirically unexplainable phenomena; the former being of physically empirical phenomena that which is the sensual reality. Than what it is that art can be said to be exactly, is a pattern of organic energy that is expressed physically to capture the metaphysical unseen plane(s) of existence.1 Invariably the Order of Being here explains that everything in existence is made explicit by anyone(s) observing presence. If this definition of being is understood within what art is exactly, than art is a self-referential catharsis of the spirit or soul which is disconnected from its source, but being becomes a journey, in and of itself that connects the conscious with the unconscious paradigms of the human imagination. In this sense the physical expression of the divine are transubstantiated through the human imagination as patterns of organic energy that somehow symbolically represent the divine and/or natural worlds. Remarkably the act of being/living, in and of itself, fits into this equation or definition of art is, whereby life can be seen as the canvas in which the painter is free to express himself/herself within the boundaries of the natural and divines worlds. Even if the divine world is not seen there are many avenues in which one can open spirit, body, and mind unto in order to achieve higher purposes. An ontological reaffirmation in the act of just being that may never be fully realized, but can be grasped in varying degrees or another, to which spatio and non-temporal degrees of art (i.e space and time; respectively) seem to question the very ontological status of the individual. In Hamlets Mill, authors De Santillana and Von Dechends present their reader with a fascinating contemplation of the subject of art and what it is, as they begin quoting an old Norse Poem, entitled The Eddle, which goes as stated, The unbreakable fetters which bound down the Great Wolf Fenrir had been cunningly forged by Loki from these: the football of a cat, the roots of a rock, the beard of a woman, the breath of a fish, the spittle of a bird.

They go on to explain how it is that Shakespeares character Hamlet as well as his

1

Zukav, Gary. The dancing wu li masters. HarperCollins e-books, 2009.

ordeals led the hero to become the typifying prosopopy of the contemporary consciousness. Whereby his dreamlike intellect continues to unrelentingly waver in despite all conflict motifs. Insomuch as Shakespeare is able to convey a higher truth in the way in which Hamlet brings the poet out in us, it may be more significant that as we read, our interpretations reflect his persona in our own subconscious and conscious leitmotifs. For I personally view my own fleeting sense of self, in its infantile state of existence mirroring that of Hamlets of endless self-questioning, unpredictability of life, apathetic insight of that which will ultimately lead to the imaginations release from its chains of reasoning. As such they posit, this is meant to be only an essay. It is a first reconnaissance of a realm well-nigh unexplored and uncharted. From whichever way one enters it, one is caught in the same bewildering circular complexity, as in a labyrinth, for it has no deductive order in the abstract sense, but instead resembles an organism tightly closed in itself, or even better, a monumental Art of the Fugue.2 This intriguing musical work by Bach is perhaps one of the more reputable and illusive works he accomplished in his brilliant career, but it is the structure of compositions of the Art of the Fugue which is most interesting in this case. Wherefore the fourteen fugues and 4 cannons can be interpreted in their entirety as a governing idea of the work that is an exploration in depth of the contrapuntal possibilities inherent in a single musical subject. The point here being that when we enter the world of Art, that which is espoused by Friedrich Wilhelm Joesph von Schelling, as a more sacred art, one that in the words of antiquity is a tool of the gods, a proclaimer of divine mysteries, the unveiler of the ideas; I am speaking of that unborn beauty whose undesecrated radiance only dwells in and illuminates purer souls, and whose form is just as concealed and inaccessible to the sensual eye as is the truth corresponding to it. Nothing of that which is a baser sensibility calls art can concern the philosopher. For him it is a necessary phenomenon emanating directly from the absolute, and only to the extent it can be presented and proved as such does it posses reality for him.3 However much this quote fits only contention with Von Schelling is when he posits later through philosophy, nothing can be known about art in an absolute fashion.4 Here I must contend that there may indeed be an absolute truth to existence, and that we might begin to decipher the meaning of life, and its enigmatic principles, whence we understand how numerical and mathematical implications implicit and explicit in Art can be analyzed as not just self-referential understanding of thought and language, but also as a formal system of symbols that as he observed in an Ant nest function to which is predicated on the, The colony's teams, its signals, are low-level active sub-systems of a complex system. These signals trigger other signals. With this, Hofstadter draws a similarity between these team signals and the human brain's neurons and their interconnections and firings. The colony's team signals exist according to a caste distribution; in the brain, there is no caste distribution...but a counterpart can be found in what Hofstadter calls a "brain state." Now Hofstadter leaps into the full system, whether it be the ant colony or the brain. He believes that the full system is the "agent," that "the full system is responsible for how its symbols trigger each other." At this juncture,
2

De Santillana, Giorgio, and Hertha Von Dechend. Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time. David R. Godine Publisher, 1977. 3 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. Philosophy of Art. (p. 171) 4 Ibid. (p. 172)

Hofstadter poses the question that leads to the other side of his analogy. He ponders on the fact that a single ant brain does not "carry any information about nest structure;" and then he asks, "how then does the nest get created...where does the information reside?" The above questions provide Hofstadter the vehicle in which to launch his probe of the human brain; thus, he asks how this brain carries out the processes of thinking, how it spawns intelligence? Underlying everything in the hardwired brain is the reality of rules. In the elementary constituents of the brain, down to the level of the nerve cells, there is the presence of the rules. At this neural level, at this sub-strate level of the brain, there can be no interpretation. There is no imitation, because the rules in the brain's hardware are basic. Hofstadter succinctly states, the brain "has a formal, hidden hardware level which is a formidably complex mechanism that makes transitions from state to state according to definite rules embodied in it."5 For within Gdels theorem as witnessed in Bachs composition - with its emphasis understanding the relation between whole and the parts, particularly the diminutive and augmented forms which exist in the main thematic inversions and contrapuntal structure provide the framework with which we can deconstruct the symbolic Absolute and rediscover the True Absolute, and to tie loose ends up here with Hamlets Mill. In this manner Philosophy can know something about art in an absolute fashion, and as De Santillana and Von Dechend seemingly have much in common with Gdels idea concerning the formal system that underlies humankinds consciousness, they posit Behind Plato there stands the imposing boy of doctrine attributed to Pythagoras, some of its formulation uncouth, butch rich with the prodigious content of early mathematics, pregnancy with a science and a metaphysics that were to flower in Platos time. From it come such words as theorem. theory, and philosophy. This in its turn rests on what might be called proto-Pythagorean phase, spread all over the East but with a focus in Susa. And then there was something else again, the stark numerical computing of Babylon. From it all came that strange principle: Things are number.6 Only when we are able to see art in the sacred sense of its meaning by differentiating things as numbers for which I refer to as the Void that is present in being and non-being, can we begin to reconstruct the human imagination that has become increasingly decadent since the Industrial Revolution began the process of mechanizing the mind. Then and only then will the poet and/or poetess be reborn in each of us.

5 6

http://www.bizcharts.com/stoa_del_sol/conscious/conscious2.html De Santillana, Giorgio, and Hertha Von Dechend. Hamlet's Mill: An essay on myth and the frame of time. David R. Godine Publisher, 1977. (p. 6)