Week 22 6/2/19

Assume any point of view.

What is essential is to separate the false from the true, and appearance from reality.

Week 33 8/20/17

Events may be viewed as natural or contrived.

Those who attempt to control culture will be overcome by it.

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Greater Lengths

Cultural observations are, as often as not, personal matters.

Formal analysis of these issues is of no concern to anyone but the artist.  The academician regards them disdainfully, the lay person has no interest whatsoever, and the active music listener exhibits little more than subjective, emotional connectivity to the arts of sound.  Such things as aesthetic value and purpose are outside these areas of bias.

This is natural.  It is the artist as composer for whom these cultural forces determine the existential necessity for sustained effort.

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Reason and Art

Imagination and will bring potential realities into being.

It is insight and foresight that tell us who we are and what we can be, rather than having no other alternative than to live "in the moment" and passively accept the status quo.

The Creative Act and Its Double

Discernment is always required in recognizing the difference between appearance and reality.

Individualist expression is essential to art, and demands a devotion to strenuous work.  As a social phenomena, individualist expression alone is highly superficial, facile, and usually inconsequential beyond its sociological and psychological implications.  It should not be conflated with art, as is often the case, but viewed as another matter altogether.

An artist's work speaks for the artist, and for itself.

Displacements and Altered Perspectives

There is a balance between the desires of an audience and those of the artist.

Either may move or be moved by art. At issue is always the extent to which the one may move the other, as in the dynamic of the stone in water.

Inside, Outside, Over and Beyond

Create art using sound.

To listen and to hear is to experience sound in ways both active and passive.  It means to be fully conscious and also to apply that focus toward sensory perception on the edges of the unconscious mind, that is to say, to develop awareness of sonic events that are not direct and obvious, and that for the most part go unnoticed.

Expression then becomes essential, being the means by which to express the differences between appearances and reality, because the world is apprehended and defined by both.

Second Guessing, to Death

Only action effects change.

The contemplative mind yields insight, and the creative will acts accordingly within the parameters of proposed outcomes.  No outcome in any social order is ever permanent, and no total effect within the dynamic of culture is ever fixed and immutable.  To believe otherwise is absurd.

Equally absurd in the context of the human condition are demands for guaranteed outcomes, since these do not exist.  Action based on scientific method, with its associated meticulous refinements, may indeed place the human imprint on distant planets, but no undertaking that is predicated upon absolute foreknowledge of end results is possible in the world of human affairs.

True accomplishment comes from work leading to acceptable conclusions, and these are inspired by belief and confidence in the necessity and wisdom of change in the status quo.  This is the strength of risk, and of faith as well.  Nothing less, and nothing more, is possible.  Choose action.

The Beam in the Mind's Eye

Disaster comes from the failure to question; and so it has been wrought.

Think creatively.  Question self, question culture, question narrative and reality.  Think.

In Decline, Then Rising

Appearances alone are not acceptable.  There must be meaning, and there always is.

One does not allow culture to dictate meaning; neither does one allow it to deny meaning exists.

Aesthetics

Every type of art illuminates, but cognizance of meaning is not effortless. Nor should it be.

Failure to grasp the abstract nature of ideas and the inability to sense the realities of the human condition are the consequences of individual and social errors for which civilization bears little, if any, responsibility.  The state of ignorance is one of worthlessness, and it was ever thus.

Order and Flux

Observe the elimination of culture, and its replacement with ideologies.

Certainly this is never desirable, yet it is nonetheless within the rise and fall, the ebb and flow, as it were, of all things.

Momentary and Continuing

Attend to culture as it is experienced in personal ways.

This is how culture is extended and transformed.  All the rest is noise and debris.

Movement of Ideas

Culture includes both convergence and dissolution.

One may therefore realize both possibility and loss, choice and crisis.

Chaining Air

Certainly, cultural settings may be manipulated and expression held in check.

This is always done in the attempt to confine expression to narrow, "acceptable" limits.

And it always fails.

Art, Social and Personal

Media directs the attention towards external impressions, and interprets them for various purposes.

Yet, given its superficiality, imagery for mass consumption cannot rival direct experience, and does so only in proportion to weakness of intellect and will.  One may well consider all the implications.

Now, When, Where, Why

Consider those times and places that represent humanity's greatest cultural achievements.

Objectively, the elevation of culture, even at the most base levels, evolves in conditions that promote and defend the freedom of the individual and the merits of reason and work.  Without these, there is only the stasis of collective morbidity, held fast by the tyranny of small minds.

Fire, Impact

Culture changes, whereas human nature is predictable.

But cultural arts have the potential to alter ideas, attitudes, and perceptions, even to the extent of ennobling the individual.

Some artists consider these facts in terms of profound responsibilities; others give no consideration.

Withheld, Obscured

Consider those things not revealed.

It may be necessary to renew the idea of  "secret societies", as they were known in the past, simply to continue to convey concepts of realism and objectivity to those capable of making such judgments.

The artist must trust perceptivity.  For the artist, the eye, and for the composer, the ear, must reveal insights that may be expressed.  This is especially critical in a culture which declines to the state in which one may call day, night, and night, day, only to be celebrated for claiming such "belief".

Promoveo, promovi, promotum.

Limits

The future is unknown, though present.

For the composers, it is just over the horizon, that is to say, it is within earshot.  In the gradual, measured epochs of media and culture, there is only the present, continually revised.