Essay 6: Probably preceding personal perception, ontogenies of otherness or objecthood opined of ourselves

I have a friend

I have a friend who is extraordinarily well-read.  He lost a library of 13,000 books to a fire and rebuilt one of over 8,000.  And even though he will lament a poor memory, he is a library.  Erudite?  Yes.  Pedantic or didactic?  Never.  He effuses an enthusiasm for the interests of others.  He never tries to impress people with how smart he was.  He just seems to be a living testimony and open invitation to how rich the life of the mind can be. 

In spite of a genuine desire to not show off, words slip here and there in conversation, giving him away.  I have a bit of the gift for vocabulary, myself.  Of all the areas of the brain responsible for different gifts, of my Broca’s area I feel I may indulge in a little braggadocio.  Absquatulate? I don’t need to hesitate.  Propinquity? No harder than 1-2-3.  Sesquipedalian? To that word, I am not alien.  Quaquaversal? I need no rehearsal.  I love words.  I don’t use them.  I mean, conversationally.  That would be a bit desperate.  But when I write, the words come rushing.  They belong on the written page.  They insist.  The big words.  The biggest word—the gesamtwerk?  The gesamtword!  The word that is the sum of all words.  Or the pith—the code—the alphabet-qua-DNA for such a word looming and not yet landed.

Two kinds of people 

All of this is by way of introducing a funny quote my friend was fond of which is apropos of what I wish to write about today: “There are two kinds of people.  Those who put things into two categories and those who don’t.”  I think it was J.S. Perlman who said this—my friend was a fan of a few humorists and this name comes to mind.  There are two kinds of people.  Either/Or.  The advent of the or—the arrival of the second category, the other, the non-self, the object—perhaps this awareness had been percolating for millions of years.  Probably preceding personal perception, ontogenies of otherness or objecthood opined of ourselves.  Hundreds of millions of years.  Jellyfish can orient themselves vertically due to photosensitivity in their brainless, undulating canopies.  They are all nerves and gelatin.  I am not a jellyfishologist so I am taking some liberties here, but basically they are floating eyes that can detect light and detect only light: in a way, they are living cameras, purely sensorial.

My friend, by the way, would probably know the term for a person who specializes in the study of jellyfish.  I know what a lepidopterist is—a person who studies leopards.  And an ornithologist is a psychologist who treats the ornery.  Ichthyology is the study of things you just don’t like.  But who knows what you call the study of the jelly?

Doesn’t folk-logic come from categorization?  Doesn’t artificial intelligence trace its beginnings to the humble cave-person who realized that she or he was different from a rock or a cave or a woolly mammoth?  Is such awareness inherent in any motile creature?  I wonder when we made the leap from being algae or lichens to being “beings” and knowing our separateness from the rock or tree.  A lichenologist is a person who studies the things people like, or likenesses, which is the similarities two things might possess and which, in turn, might lead to their mutual categorization in a class of objects.

Occam’s razor is one of the oldest personal shaving devices discovered by archaeologists.  The egg the rooster lays on the peak of a roof.  The path electricity takes—all are forms of either/or.  The razor leads to a beard or no beard.  The egg will roll down one side or another.  (You might have noticed some malapropisms by now, and the mal-birdism of stating that roosters lay eggs.  I hope you will enjoy this facetious word-play but that you won’t consider me igneous as a result of my attempted humor). 

There may be 3

Unfortunately, there may be more than two categories.  There may be 3.  We just don’t know.  This has been the subject of debate for thousands of years.  It can be seen in all disciplines and traditions.  Some suggest there may even be 4 or 5.  Of late, the dilemma of 6/7 has gone viral.  The maximum number of the universe, prior to the arrival of a particular rock band, had been known as the number ten.  But then the famous amplifier that was even louder and went to 11 was discovered.  One theorist holds that 42 is the meaning of the universe.  But I am a small numberist.  Yes, the Calabi-Yau manifold is meant to answer the question of tessellation in 11 dimensions and is a strong second opinion to the loudness of Spinal Taps amplifier, and a pretty good counterargument to the Hitchhiker’s dice.  But if I had to choose, I wouldn’t have to think twice.  I think I’ll go with three.

But that’s just me.

Unfortunately, too, there can be bad byproducts of the number two.  Me or you.  Us or them.  Good or bad.  Black or white.  No gray.  No nuance.  No ability to account for paradox, moral or physical or spiritual. 

Or aesthetic.

And that is really what I wanted to talk about: artistic paradox.

There are two kinds of art in the world.   

There is art that anyone could have done.  And then there is art that is sui generis.  Art that could only have been done by one.  Onism?  Or Monism?  Moi-ism?  Toi-ism?  In any case, there are artists like Vermeer whom no other artist can approach, technically.  Actually, he is the only artist that has no equal.  (I may be being hyperbolic here—breaking the sound barrier, if you didn’t know.) 

And then there are artist like Picasso and Pollack.  Anyone could have done their art.  Sol Le Witt?  Marcel Duchamp?  Andy Warhol?  Lucio Fontana? Damien Hirst?  Who hasn’t cut a shark in half and put it in a giant aquarium?  Tons of those things at garage sales.  Seriously.  Some originality, please?  The more important question is did those sharks and sheeps and cows and horses sign all the legal paperwork to volunteer their bodies to be used for the purposes of art after they died of natural causes?  Please don’t tell me they were…murdered!

But I digress.  Anyone can do most of the art we see in the world.  Rothko,  Styll, and de Staël?  Not a law firm.  Even Bosch, Brugel, and Rembrandt aren’t immune to the abilities of artificial intelligence.  Only Vermeer will remain elusive.  All of this being said, what I am suggesting is that there is art that requires the long-term training of an extraordinary gift like that of Vermer, and there is art that requires being clever.  If what you do could be relatively successfully parodied by another person, I would say you are a cleverist.  Not “the” cleverist.  But one of many cleverists. You are guilty of cleverism. 

You were clever.  You happened upon a meta-hodos, or method of aesthetic production that resulted in a visual voice that is distinct.  And good for you!  You may be deservedly famous, rich and respected.  More likely, you are obscure, poor and miserable.  That is what we sign up for.  Artists.  Even those with talent.  We are glutinous for punishment. 

The territory of the polemic

To lean further into the territory of the polemic, I might say that all photography is of that latter category of art that is art which can be made by anyone.  Yes, I know this is going to push a few photographer’s buttons.  But soon, with AI, art of the highest grade will be made by no one.  Photography requires a finger or other body part capable of depressing a button—or a voice capable of speaking a command—or…or…or…  Photography does not require exceptional fine-motor skills other than that of the pointy finger.  Philosophy, on the other hand, is impossible without prestidigitation.

Now let me backtrack and back pedal and apologize and beg your pardon.  I don’t mean to minimize either the ability to use the finger, opposable, thumb, eyes, and all the other biological apparatii of the human being which obviously took millions, or hundreds of millions, or untold billions of years to evolve, depending on what you take as your starting point.  And if there are really eternally banging and contracting universes that eclipse our capacities for scale, perhaps we’ve been in the works in a perptual and unmeasurable Bergsonian duration of now.  Saltwater taffy machine.  Avalon, Catalina.  As a child, I would watch the mechanical arms turn the elasticized sugary ribbon into itself again and again.  A mathematician could give you the appropriate equations.  For me, that pink infinity was magic.  It meant there is really no beginning and no end.  The spirit of Epicurious stood avuncularly behind me, saying pantha rhei.

Ah, but I was apologizing.  No wonder so few people have forgiven me.  There is no clarity or urgency to get to the bone or the heart of the matter.  I must apologize to those great artists, all whom I mentioned as second to Vermeer.  They don’t require my apology, of course.  They are great and I am a nobody.  What I say doesn’t matter.  No, I must apologize not for their sake or the sake of their potentially bruised egos, but for my sake. 

In truly narcissistic fashion, I don’t really want to be an insulter.  I want a cleaner slate.  Whilst I can’t take back the damage that has been done, I might re-cast and revisit it.  What Pollock did is not easy, and his style was the result of an inimitable—not inimical!—corporeal choreography of muscle, tendon, bone and brain, of barn and Lee Krasner and America and hope—his movements were unique in the blockchain of time and space and unreproducible.  As are all our movements.  You see, ironically, I must capitulate if I am to follow my idea to its extreme edges: if I suggest that there can be a verisimilitude amongst styles of art that is easier to approximate for all artists except Vermeer, I must iron out the wrinkle that existence itself is they purist form of artistic expression and that even making derivative art or forgeries is, perhaps, great and un-reproduceable art as it can not be done in the same way at the same time by the same person ever again: narratively, there is no re-writing.  I don’t believe time is palimpsestic or scrapable.  I consider it written.  Whether pre-written or not, I leave that to each of you to ponder.  But as the surface of all time interacts with the chemistry or near molecular-emptiness of all space, it becomes etched.  And it couldn’t have been a forgery. 

This is not license to do bad things or make bad art.  But even the easily snapped photo, something that truly can be done by so many people and at least one monkey, is, truly, a masterpiece.  For, energetically, each and every action or non-action is simultaneously and paradoxically a unique grain of infinity and an indistinguishable piece of sand that dissolves into the shoreline of infinity.