Art
(This is a post that with it’s sister over on Sightwork has been hanging for a couple of weeks. I’m not sure if I’m a slow thinker; I know I’m a slow typer which accounts in part for the style, but that’s another post, as is ‘The Digital Divide & the Self-Selected’. Consider this a Draft, maybe I’ll get time to fix it later.)
"Art’s task is to save the soul of mankind. …anything less is a dithering while Rome burns, because if the artist, who is self-selected for being able to journey into the other — if the artist cannot find the way, then the way cannot be found." Terence McKenna
In my adolescence, which lasted into my late 40’s early 50’s, I would have taken that quotation at it’s romantic face value; I’m not exactly sure what that face value would have been, but I guess that’s the point. Nowadays I’m of a more analytical frame of mind and two things strike me. The first is the phrase "self-selected" and we’ll come back to that in a bit. But first I want to think about the ‘task’ of art and the ‘burning Rome’ analogy. Here’s another bit from McKenna:
"It’s clearly a crisis of two things: of consciousness and conditioning….We have the technological power, the engineering skills to save our planet, to cure disease, to feed the hungry, to end war; But we lack the intellectual vision, the ability to change our minds. We must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior. And, it’s not easy."
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what constitutes common sense, or should so constitute and doesn’t. It’s hard to know where to start; I’ve heard several estimates of what we could have accomplished if we had spent what the current wars are costing on poverty, education, hunger health care, rather than on bringing ‘freedom’ to the third world.* My own common sense suggests that people in good health with enough to eat and the resources to educate their children will create their own freedom; that if you eliminate fear and need, good government will follow. How can this not ‘make sense’? How can it be a common sense that killing for an abstract notion is something we aught to be doing; what is it about the golden rule we don’t understand? We have the "technological power" to make a better world for us all, and we’re using it to poison the atmosphere; fiddling while Rome burns indeed. It seems like most of us know this, just as we know wealth is unequally distributed, and that it’s better not to be black, or gay, or different. We know all that and more, but what’s to be done, and why don’t we do it? Here’s a suggestion:
Make Art…
Could that possibly be the answer? Perhaps not, but if you don’t have a better avenue of approach I’d recommend you stop making excuses and get to work. I realize this sounds like a stupid idea; I understand that there’s a far better that even chance that you don’t believe that you could ‘make art’ even if you wanted to. I understand that you’re not ‘creative’. But if you think about it, you had to learn that. Learn the ‘not creative thing’ because as Picasso had it, "All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up." Leaving aside the gender bias, all children are creative. Artists are indeed ’self-selected’. They are people who decided not to ‘grow up’ not to accept common sense.
Art is a process of imagining the world, or of responding to the world, and I remain uncertain as to what the difference between those two would be. You might say art is a way of re-imagining the world and from there it’s a small step to imagining a ‘better’ world. Start small make something cool and beautiful; it can’t hurt and it might help.**
