Art and artifice

This writing was prompted by reading an article at
http://www.nationofchange.org - How to tell good art from bad

~ ~ ~

I feel to start with a root statement that may or may not communicate a tone:
Our Father, Who Art (in) Heaven.
Clearly in this statement, art is the verb to be; the movement or embodiment of that which is felt arising from a wholeness of being is a desire, inspiration, or project that is not other than our life.
The nature of what IS cannot be defined, but the Movement and Quality of its being can be honoured as it reveals itself as ... the embodiment of intuition, thought and feeling as the tangibility of life. If we are beholding of this then our lives express it.

Artifice is like the fig leaves in the Adam and Eve story. It is that capacity of mind to imagine its own reality or self along the lines of thought it wants to be true - and which it gives preference to, over and above the Current Flow of Being Itself. This sort of self-will seems to overlay a personal signature of achievement and possession on the Original and the True and subverts it innate meaning to its own self defined meanings. In the attempt to make itself real it seeks any and every kind of self validation at the level of form and appearance, and becomes forgetful and defended against the realm of the presence of life in which the tangibility and visibility is but the revealing and identifying of the communion and communication of Life Itself.

There is another thing I'd add; the self in its own illusion can only make copies of what is already real. There isn't a fake 11 dollar bill in circulation anywhere - though such could of course be a project for a conceptual artist to undertake!

The imitation of life necessarily uses something of life because there is nothing else to use. In this sense ,there is often something that can be felt as wheat among the tares in the attempts of man to make or communicate the good, the beautiful or the true. (To want to communicate the ugly or the dispiriting or the meaningless is an indicator that the mind involved has implicitly called such 'good' by the act of valuing it with his or her attention and intention).

The idea of a separate identity - endowing some kind of string-less puppet with autonomy - is itself the artifice of a thinking to which humankind has been asserting possession of and becoming possessed by. Yet this is act and not fact, and so there are all sorts of moments in its experience of itself that transcend its narrow self limitation as it stirs or is re-membered in a presence of being of which it is often hardly aware and yet IS the only Thing Going On - despite the overlay of imaginations which suggest otherwise.

To awaken to that life is moving all things one - in any moment or degree, is to be stirred by qualities of being that inspire, heal and harmonize, this naturally communicates or extends itself through  the agency of its recognition. Such expression my yet be distorted and filtered by the mind of that one - and by our expressions, we become aware of such obstacle or block. This provides the life of inspiration and expression as a process of releasing 'self will' as a willingness to be as an instrument to the movement of being itself.
That life often communicates in ways that do not fit the old wine bottles is testimony to that we become blinkered and stuck in our thinking and our masks of artificial presentation.
It may be that to awaken and honour the movement of life draws us out of the apparent comforts and connection of the group that would (often unknowingly) stifle it - but that is not about being special so much as being alive and willing.

Every one of us is a special kind of artist. Our lives brush out from pallets of experience and desire that are both unique in expression and yet universal in nature. Art as something outside and separate from the Artist is the notion of a mind that has tried to separate itself from the Life that lives it!

"The seeing that it is good" is the recognition of God in the 'Creation'. That is of being moved or feeling stirred… of a shift from thinking to feeling.

Communication and communion are shared by their very nature and guided by the very intelligence that they express. The forms of our communication can be usurped as an attempt at coercion or manipulation of life - but then the channel of true communication is lost while the mind engages self-wilfulness. (Until it neglects or forgets to do so - perhaps as a result of being stirred and troubled or transported by an experience for which it could not account nor control).