Braingasm

I've been feeling on the cusp of some sort of conceptual waterfall, or at least a moment of clarity that would illuminate my place in the world. It all came together when I picked up a book of ancient myths and began to think about them. Some gears turned and some transistors must have clicked in my head, because I had produced a functional definition of art--the broad sense of art. (Not that my definition is not up for debate.)

"Art's purpose is to further human freedom. It does this by creating new myths, and creating them faster than they can harden."

And, of course, I have to explain just what all that means.

Myths are obvious: they are attempts to explain the world. But they are not the same as actual attempts to explain the world in terms of falisifable and specific theories that have nothing to do with humanity. Myths are all about how humans see the world. Myths refuse to consider the (now) undeniable truth that nature (the universe, the Way Things Are, whatever) is indifferent to us in the here and now. Myth is an exercise of the imagination: a projection of the meaning that comes out of our sufferings and joys onto things that do not, in actuality, map onto such silly anthropomorphic ideas. By suffusing the universe with meaning in our terms, myths create comfort. For those who don't believe them, they create something much more vague: something we would describe as "sublime". That is the feeling I got as I read about Sumerian creation myths, how Enlil traced the rivers out with his fingers and sent the spring thaws to the rivers, wishing his creation plenty and prosperity. So myths are poems. That is how I view the. They are something to tell around gatherings; they are entertaining. They are cognitive frameworks for dividing up the world. (And much more honest than the monotheism which superseded most of them.)

What is the "hardening" of myths? That is when myths start to be taken too seriously. It happens in the generations after the original artists have died and we see parasites latch onto the myths: we see temples where there were gatherings, we see scriptures where there were oral cultures, we see mysticism where there was laughter, we see rites where there was joy, we see hierarchy where there was universal elevation. I need not get into my bile-filled disdain for most organized religions.

So, what do we do? Faced with the uncertainty of what comes after, faced with an eternal lack of knowledge, we turn to myths even today. Most of our lives are spent in imagination. And imagination needs to be unfettered. And unfettered imagination unfetters other inaginations. Perhaps in the end, we'll be able to see that God was made up by a bard and that superstition came from children's games. And perhaps every person will have their own imaginary pantheon they will look up to, not bow down to some old man. The ridiculously rapid pace of change in our society has unrooted most rooted myths (they fight back); this damages people, but it also opens doors to individualistic theology. Artists understand this implicitly, I would wager. So let us create new urban myths! Let us be as Zarathustra was, but not followers of his parables. We must make our own parables. What siginficance do ravens or wheat or groundhogs have to the moderd urban dweller? We need a mythology of streetcars and hospitals. We need to re-imagine most ouf our dreariness.

How? It's a matter of heuristics. This guy has his method. Others have theirs. I can't draw, but I try to rotate my perspective every once in a while.

Summary: the universe does not care. Don't live as if it does. Live with the knowledge that you make your head think it cares.

Consider: "Contingency. Just think on it for a while: nothing that happened to you or your causal and ancestral lineage stretching back to God-knows-what was neccessary."