Mosaic

Before one sees, one has to look. Seeing, in earnest, deliberately, fully, grants perception. Perception determines belief. Belief determines reality. Lingering intentionally upon that reality records it in memory. Just as perception is subjective, so is reality, and so is memory. From looking to seeing to perceiving to believing to reality to memory, then, all is individual, subjective. Memory, though, in its interweaving with other memories, achieves a pattern of juxtaposed, interlocking, or recurrent motifs, creating a mosaic of sorts of memory more elaborate often than mere seeing, perceiving, observation.

Art deepens the mystery. Through concealment and invention, art eludes the realms of definition, identity. Honesty is but subjective definition; reality, but subjective identity. In mystery alone is impartiality.

My art, if I may, is hyper-subjective, shunning objective interpretation. As vantage point determines perception, perception determines belief, and belief determines reality, my art strives both to remind you of nothing else, and yet to lead you to a familiar place in your own experience. Only as you have some blood that is mine but that I have never known, and I, some blood that is yours but that you have never known, is this possible.  

Interest, fascination, infatuation, obsession, love, all lie in mystery rather than identity. Words, as art, deepen the mystery. Mystery alone is objective. Mystery alone excites the imagination, freeing the senses to explore beyond the bounds of past perception, into that rarest domain, where fantasy, truth, and magic collide, first, then commingle.

At that place and time where truth and magic conspire, there is love. In that love, that true love, measuring time but in the intervals between seconds, there is an insouciance, an innocence, a guilelessness. As fate may not be coerced, cajoled, or counted on, nothing is predicted, nothing calculated. Everything, freely given, freely taken; all gain, mere surplus, encumbrance, embellishment.

Conversely, there are neither truth nor magic in thinking, deprived as it is entirely of innocence.

Thought is not likeness; it is interpretation. The moment an emotion – a contrivance of the mind counterfeiting feeling – or fact – subjective relevancy to subjective interest – is transformed into a thought, it is no longer emotion or fact, but opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in thought. All thoughts are accurate. None of them, however, is the truth.

And magic…? Magic delivers us from the lie of being truth, wherein lies the mystery. Where truth is a desperation of extremes, magic is an intoxication.

I will be your angel or your curse, your poet or your sorcerer. Treat me well, I will treat you better; treat me badly, I will treat you worse. Loyalty – the least of virtues – has nothing to do with it. I am not loyal; I am devoted. Justice, also – an hypocrisy, a parody – has nothing to do with it. It is all about balance. Right, as in equitability, as in parity; not in its incurious, parasitical moral sense, as opposed to wrong, determined by those in power, before whom, cowering, those barren of self-determination. There is no subjective right and wrong, no good and bad. There are only balance and imbalance – universal, eternal, unequivocal. 

Which leads us back to subjectivity, and to art. Art is personal, autobiographical. The depth of one’s experience cannot exceed the height of one’s experience, and vice versa. The depth of one’s pain cannot exceed the height of one’s joy. A life lived vicariously cannot produce art. A life without passion, devotion, adoration, sacrifice, commitment, obsession, pain, and joy cannot create art. The mosaic of your life may not be – should not be – digitalised, downloaded, copied, or pasted. The measures of its passing, its coordinates, its memories, faultlessly, unfailingly, are etched indelibly upon the Windowpanes of Eternity.