LITMIR.BIZ

There are many subjects that appear in this book: Philosophy, Art, Fiction, Poetry, God. They are each approached through language that fits their content–language that itself shares characteristics of the subject it addresses. There are thus as many languages as there are subjects–exhibiting different forms of «being about» their subjects. Such forms are variously called «analysis,» or «exegesis,» or «criticism,» or «speculation,» or «invention,» or «memories and dreams.» Issues become fragmented at the edges–the limits–of their language. Fragments, in turn, seek the shape–the boundaries–of their content. The forms of «aboutness» are as varied, and numerous, as are their subjects. There is no exhaustive listing. There is one subject this book is most concerned with. It underlies the others and questions the value–the possibilities–of mutual reciprocation. This, too, has many forms: «What can or cannot be said.» «Where are boundaries firm and where porous.» «What is gained and what lost through interaction between subject-contents.» «The many problems of synthesis.» «What the difference is between 'Actual' and 'Real' in theories of life.» «Contrasts between the nature–and the varying descriptions–of God and after-life.» The contention here is that all given descriptions are partial, and that in these partialities and their similarities, ways can found to construct–however slowly and painfully–the larger subject-nature of living and dying.

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Musings are recollections of memories, of dreams, of ideas. Such recollections are persistent because they remain unresolved-whether as concepts about the world or as actions, taken or avoided, in art, life, and love. My musings are ripe because I have been chewing on them for many years. I am an old painter and a somewhat younger philosopher, and I remain concerned with how these fit together. So my first essay is about my journey through the landscape of such fitting. This done, I take on some art of our and other times that I revere or dislike. Then, as I am not a believer in straight paths, I go on to muse on how the world was before it began and how it will be after it ends, and how we can be who's and whats in places that are not the same. I return to art to argue against theories that champion brain over mind, and I enlist my artist-dog to illustrate my argument. My musings end with a broader journey that pits the alternate societies of crookeds and straights in their strivings for fulfillment-and their needs, on occasion, to come together.

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The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins–where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future–the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends–our own and the ending of the world. I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose–for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending.

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This book is a narrative, interspersing prose and poetry within a compatible place. The boundary between these forms is porous, for intersections between them are not considered as a negative. Rather, they are seen as a method–a way to exemplify the various contents by bringing them into a new and less rigid order–and then to watch them change again.
The contents comprise a number of issues: Mind, brain, (soul), and their philosophical divergences–fact, fiction, and their pluralities of truth–rationalism, empiricism, and categorical confusion–an intersection of belief-systems generating a field of unlike places–pornography, eroticism, and their changing representations. There is a fantasy about the Devil's need for art in Hell, and some extended frolics with characters out of older comic strips. These are followed by ruminations on dying, ending, and their separate embellishments. Poems weave through and color all.
The broad theme of this book interprets culture as a history of transgressions between competing beliefs: Rigid borders inevitably lead to boredom, stasis, and oppression. Porous borders can lead to schism, communion, ecstasy, atrocity–as the passing case may be.

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