Morningthots on art, imitation, etc.

Art. Poetry. It all just means “making stuff”. A poet makes songs out of words. A painter makes an image out of pigments. 

Making . . . creating. We say that an artist creates, but the act is more like copying. You perceive sets of stimuli and imitate them. Some artists strive to copy the stuff of the world accurately; other artists place a high value on inventing new stuff. 

Two artists walk to the public square, where there is a statue of a goddess, and, on the way, they pass an alligator on the footpath. The first artist produces a painting that captures astonishingly well the appearance of the goddess. The second artist turns her canvas around to reveal a paradisal scene (nothing like the drab public square) and no stationary statue but a living gator-woman. Both artists perceived the sculpture before them, as well as the alligator that they passed during their commute; but the first chose to copy only the goddess, while the second fused attributes of both entities. 

What puzzles me is that the mind cannot seem to create anything from nothing: it can only refashion existing perceptions. Even the most unique and otherworldly imaginations are the result of subtler or more complex ways of copying. 

You spy a log of wood in reality. Nearby you notice a metal beam on the ground. Now you coax the wood and the metal into the barn and they mate to produce a wood-metal hybrid. Everything’s natural. Having witnessed the concept of change, you are now qualified to compose your “Metamorphoses” — a multivolume text that shall be considered your masterpiece. 

Think of light: it can be reflected or refracted. To reflect a perception means that the artist throws it back just as it is — the perception is not augmented, absorbed, petted or fondled. On the other hand, to refract a perception means that the artist bends, twists, or folds it, even becomes one flesh with the perception and procreates mutants, so as to keep our name alive upon the earth. Just as rays of light are refracted by the material of a lens, so is the genius of God by the mind of a poet. 

And what is God? The Demiurge. “Craftsman” in Latin. A maker of things: in this case, the world. Now, some quacks say that God, the Demiurge, tried to copy a perfect world that he had seen, but that he blundered and made mistakes in his rendition, thus our world, which we call reality, is imperfect. But other quacks say that God created our world out of nothing. I side with the third class of quacks, who say that both of the above ideas contain a portion of the truth, which is that God refracted the paradisal Nothing that he perceived, and then He coupled with it to procreate our universe: so the twistedness that we intuit about our reality was willed by God; it represents his artistic flair — our world is intentionally evil. 

And when the angels raped the apes, it produced homo sapiens. (Genesis 6:4.) And these increased and multiplied after the fashion of sculptors who couple their own molded images. The cold marble of one’s household god becomes warm in one’s embrace, and one’s offspring is Hercules. 

Other craftsmen prefer to use the medium of mud to make a self-portrait and attempt to seduce it by becoming all animals. (Genesis 2:18-20.) When this fails, you can engineer a revised copy, feminize the replica; then rid your garden of robots when they tire you. (Genesis 3.) Blame the begotten on one of your messenger cherubs, and have him slain if he ever traces his lineage. (See “The New Testament”.) Convince the world that this sacrifice was voluntary, and that it was your greatest gift to them. Invest in a ginormous generator of dour boss-types and flood the galaxy with their like. Statesmen, businessmen, banksters, lawyers, clergymen, officers, presidents . . . The Holy Spirit, in dove form, is hatching from its egg. 

I slept by the wall of my courtyard; and my face was uncovered. And I knew not that there were doves overhead, and, mine eyes being open, the doves muted warm dung into mine eyes, and a whiteness came in mine eyes: and I went to the physicians, but they helped me not. 

—The Book of the Words of Tobit (2:10);
Apocrypha, King James version

No, the physicians never help. (Luke 4:23-34.) It only helps to fall upon one’s sword (1st Samuel 31:4) . . .

So, among the two types of artist — those who attempt to perform an accurate rendering, and those who like to shake things up and instigate newfangled possibilities — I am firmly in line with the former: I dedicate my energies to crafting a meticulously exact sketch of our Demiurge in action.