Identity!

How do we begin to express in language our experience of Being. The obliteration of all boundaries of self with nature in which we are left in total awe of existing – a process of self actualization in its most pristine state unworthy of a mortal’s “words.” We are left to ponder and contemplate the unfathomable experience of consciousness on such a subtle beatific vision, where everything infinite makes sense in perfect harmony while in unison with pure confusion of what any and all of Being and existing truly entails. Let me begin by stating: “Life is Beautiful!”


Art is an expression of the different modes of being in the infinite particularities of finite beings in a futile attempt to transcend the experience of autonomy in one’s own realization of self-isolation. The artist reveals his art as pure expression for an abstract telos, where to interpret and appreciate the art is to redeem the essence of the artist in his being-extended in the form of creation. Art abstractly defined then, is all expression in the form of appreciating and communicating the experience of existing and the radical departure and rejection of dualism for an immanent appreciation of being-“in”-the world expressed and interpreted. Dualism characterized as a separation of the domain of the transcendent intellect-soul and the material-physical-phenomenal, and the production of art to unite the two with the medium at hand.


Beauty and our aesthetic taste for subjective particularism must come to terms with the task of finding a standard beyond some hypothetical abstraction such as “the” beautiful in the realm of transcendent form. To fully appreciate beauty in all of its infinite expressions in nature, interpretation of the “is-ness” of experience is crucial. To create boundaries or parameters on “what is beautiful” and “what is not” without close scrutiny of ones inherited tradition of aesthetic categories then is counter intuitive of being able to experience “life-being” as it truly manifest itself. Yet, one can argue even in our liberation of judging with subjective standards and categories of aesthetics, we are still left to reconstruct and develop our own appreciation of beauty. Can anyone, even a nihilist, dare to argue that the angelic are more beautiful than the beasts, or that the philosophers are in someway more pleasing than the politicians? It is as if there is some intuitive realization that a (thirteen-petal) rose in its eternal becoming is pleasing to the soul of the mystic than a field of weeds in its chaos. To create then, a subjective standard based on qualitative-aesthetic judgment, to refine oneself towards the “aristocratic” cannot be rejected, for rejection is to blindly appreciate the perverse standards of oligarchic and tyrannical. [Even these subjective standards of beauty can be argued against for the alternative view that everything is beautiful in its own way no matter how we judge from our own aesthetic taste.]


Contemplation or pure thought, when expressed in the form of language, to paint the picture one comes to be represented in the mind must come to terms with the process of actualizing the vision. Before we will the representation of thought’s vision, the internal dilemma arises – for what purpose is any and all of expression/art? Why extend myself at all? Have I not, through toil earned the freedom and right to my own existence? To offer my words to the most wise and distinguished as if to not realize my youthfulness is to transcend boundaries too daring even for my own standards, while to offer my words as some prescription as if I were already a distinguished physician of the soul is to glory in an arrogant delusion. To extend my thoughts for my own sake, although novel, seems to be an effort not worth embarking on. Can I not exist trying to fully actualize my full potentialities by learning to refine my portrait as an idealization in contemplating my eternal becoming? The infinitesimal task of appreciating the other as a manifestation of nature, to appreciate the “thou” of life can be best, in my own judgment be best accomplished in passivity and being a student of the moment at hand. But the impulse for the artist to shed all vestiges of corporeality, to undress himself and recreate the finer moments of his process to actualize his freedom beyond all costumes that may identify his own being as something “this worldly” is then a process worth embarking on beyond any simplistic explanation. To show himself in pure expression, absorbed in the moment, as if to say “here I am” knocking at the gates to the kingdom of thought, I believe is worthy beyond any need of explanation.


The artist creates “out-of nothing” from the void and chaos that exists in himself, a representation of the world that he comes to behold. Of course, out-of nothing is also symbolic of his own existence from nothing that has culminated in something not definable as chaos or a perfect systematization of anything “specific.” Why should the Monarchy of Beauty be defined and categorized as something distinctly definable by the inherited categories of human language? Is it not an imaginable possibility for the soul of the artist to transcend all boundaries of existence as if to leave behind even his own citizenship in the simplistic “given” political order that modernity has produced for a more aesthetically pleasing existence as a “created being” in the truth of the revealed world? With this self-refined view of the artist’s ideal place in the world comes the realization of a responsibility to uphold imperatives to the transcendent standards (abstractions they maybe) that have come to be embodied in the artist’s soul, the ought to the true, the good and the beautiful – “The lover of love!”