I've been reading about primitive art. The author, Leonard Shlain explains the fundamental diffference between western academic art and the art of preliterate cultures thus:
"Primitive art differs from art of the Western academic tradition chiefly in that the tribal artist does not seek to "match reality so much as to "make" it...By doing so, primitive artists directly contradict both Plato and Aristotle, who believed that mimesis, mimicking nature, was an innate impulse of the human personality."
He then goes on to say how primitive thinking is parallel to childlike visions of reality, which is in no way a bad thing, as it is more useful to the modern standpoint of scientific vision to think this way. This is in a chapter in which he describes the flaws inherent in pre-Einsteinian thinking, when Newton ruled supreme, king of a non-interactive universe.
But times have changed with the advent of relativity, the universe has itself taken shape and form, and the primitive way of thinking of the universe as an interactive medium where our actions and internal desires affect what happens in the external is actually remarkably useful standpoint from which to view reality in the modern scientific era. As we exist, out very being bends space and time and we affect the rest of the universe.
I was thinking about a poem yesterday, milling over the words in my mind on the way home from Bexleyheath. The words were coming to my mind and I was creating reality as I went.
Being and Nothingness (unfinished)
I have nothing
I desire nothing
therefore do I not have
Everything I desire?
Mine is everything
Everything is Me
I am the man who had it all
because I am content to Be
But sure as reality was created in my mind, so it was that I opened Tao Te Ching this morning on stanza 64 to be confronted by the manifestation of Tao itself, proving that living itself is both linear and circular. What is created is but destroyed and what is destoryed is created.
Tao Te Ching
---- Stanza 64 ----
Therefore the Master takes action
by letting things take their course
He remains as calm
at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire;
what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people
of who they have always been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao.
Thus he can care for all things
Lao-Tzu, "Tao Te Ching"
The sheer joy of these coincidences in life never cease to bring a smile to my face.
