A history of expression
Long ago (I use the notion of time because it is something we believe we understand and because, quite simply, it was long ago, unfathomably so) there was a God.[1] This God (to refer to this entity as ‘God’ is wrong, but it is the closest concept we have to what this entity is) was capable of anything and everything. This God could exist at the same time as not existing, and not exist at the same time this God existed. This God was all, and this God was nothing.
One day, still long ago, this God decided (I use the term ‘decided’ although this God did not make decisions, nor did not make them)[2] to create. The God was always creating, almost as though this God was incapable of not creating, always creating while always destroying at the same time as never creating. This act, however, was different (again, I use the term ‘different’, that is, that which is unlike, but this God’s creations were always different yet always the same) from each previous one. This act was the creation of life, or more specifically, events which would generate life. Quickly (these things take both a second and an eternity), this God’s will was fulfilled and life began.
It wasn’t the first time this God created what we would understand to be lifelike, nor was it the last. Nor was this the God’s only undertaking, it was simply the result of one and an infinite number of this God’s actions and decisions and non-acts and non-decisions.
As expected, soon after life’s beginning, came a being similar to us. Even before humans could express their thoughts verbally, an early man, of the specie Homo erectus, sat in the shade, out of the grating heat. To occupy idle time, he picked up an oddly shaped piece of timber and began chipping at it with a stone implement, something he had done innumerable times while waiting for the might of the midday sun to fade. He felt something deep in his chest (or maybe he’d heard it, far off on the horizon). He stood up and looked about, dropping his things, feeling, almost, like he was doing something wrong. He looked at the others nearby, busying themselves with their menial tasks, wondering if they too had heard it. With his distress quietening, he settled back down, picked up the objects and continued, finding the mysterious sensation coming over him again. As he worked, this feeling murmured inside him, as one’s stomach does when hungry, until finally, when he was done, he blew away the dust and studied his work with pleasure.
This being, with his ragged piece of wood which, by the time he had finished with it, still looked like another tree branch, started something, the power of which his feeble mind would have no way of comprehending.[3]
The earth travelled around that same sun our ancestor took cover from almost one million times before we, as we know us, came to be. Initially we were unremarkable; we lived and procreated without thinking about life or about procreation. Our desire to express had not yet found a satisfactory release. Although we shared a collective feeling of solipsism, we also carried the belief that we were somehow unique. Only after the next form of expression was this distinctiveness perceived with some clarity.
Perhaps because of this belief, not long ago, we created. It wasn’t the first time we created, nor was it the last. We hadn’t yet pursued anything which could be considered grandiose or over-ambitious but even though we’d always been creating, we made the decision to create, to really create. In Ancient Greece, a man, Lunius, observed a small child, colouring in a stone with dried clay. He watched the child intently make a shape of colour (the first, a triangle), then choose another colour, and make another shape (the next an oblong), seemingly for no reason at all. Lunius was a farmer and, until this moment, had shown no inclination to express himself. Yet watching the child gave him a strange idea: he wondered if he too could do what the child was doing, and derive pleasure from it, to let something inside him out which he could otherwise not articulate. The thought excited him, and he hurried home. Lunius’s wife dyed cloth and, using her dye, he made a solution of colours: brown, ochre, gold. He then dipped his finger into the colours and began to smear it onto the wall, mimicking the child’s performance. Lunius found it pleasing.[4] He began simply, first making single-coloured shapes and outlines, then combining the colours to make patterns. With his hands and robe smeared with dye and the walls looking primitively kaleidoscopic, he stood back. What he had done made him feel as though, for a moment, he was not bound to this earth. Soon, everyone in Lunius’s village was patterning their walls.[5]
These acts were different from our previous feats and non-feats. This was the creation of art, or more specifically, the juxtaposition of common and uncommon elements which became known as art. Initially this act was no more and no less important than all our other acts; we simply created, and uncreated. But then art became necessary. We found that aesthetics provided us with something, something which we didn’t have, but needed. (Of course, in our delight we neglected to acknowledge that this was part of the plan, quite possibly the plan.)[6]
Our newly-discovered talent gave rise to a series of questions and conjectures. Soon (swifter than all previous events), the questions became assertions and reassertions of faith, the conjectures became facts. Amongst them were: God created man. Why did God create Man? Man creates. Why did God create? Man derives satisfaction from creation. Does creation satisfy God? Man creates to express himself. Does God express through creation? Man creates to find meaning. Is God, too, searching for meaning? Man is limited. Are we the limits of this God’s power? Man is so flawed; too flawed; perfectly flawed; flawed to perfection. Is God perfect? We decided and re-evaluated our decisions, polishing them before scuffing them to repolish. We then realised that man may not have been this God’s principal creation, but it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter because we were the God’s last, but finest, and first, yet worst.
Another individual, in a room illuminated by flickering candles on another quarter of the globe, reread a grouping of words that he had, quite accidentally, made. Shih Xuan was a scribe for the court,[7] and it was his duty to simply write, yet the characters he had just committed to his bamboo manuscript did something (and, like his ancestor, he thought that what he had done was wrong) [8]:
Believing it was just a trick of the dancing light, he waited for the candles to calm before re-examining his work, only to find his first inkling to be correct; Shih Xuan had the strange feeling that what he had just committed to paper was somehow infused with a humanness. He thought about the words, listening to them resonate through the halls of his mind. He lifted them off the page, and silently mouthed them, rolling them around with his tongue, as though they were freshly picked berries. Their taste was unusual. It sent a new, strange flavour down his throat, to his heart.[9]
Curious, Shih Xuan continued writing. As he thought about the next sentence to be written, he discarded words and interchanged them with new ones, listening for their rhythm, and doing this gave him an intoxicating, vertiginous feeling. When he was satisfied, he gently dipped his brush into the ink pot. “Why have I not felt this before?”[10] he wondered. As he scrawled the characters, his thoughts, onto the page, he felt an amazing release of emotion. Upon completing this passage of writing, he pondered his experience, trying to make sense of it. Then he had the idea to write about it. He again carefully selected each word and, again, scrawled them onto his page.
Generations and dynasties and epochs faded and vanished from the collective memory and all the while this God watched on (and didn’t watch on because, quite obviously, watching is not amongst this God’s actions, and is this God’s only act) as we expressed ourselves, intrigued (and indifferent), for what we were doing was outside and apart from us, and peculiarly, we did it so voraciously. As the imagination expanded, so did the manner in which we created, but what intrigued our overseer most was the notion that such acts weren’t necessary for our being but, curiously, were necessary. We had a relationship with our work; it was forever apart, yet eternally attached to us, like our own children. We created art, but didn’t create art, and to us this is what mattered; we enjoyed this futile challenge. This God, perhaps because nothing the God had given life to (or what we would understand to be lifelike) had created unnecessarily, just as this God created unnecessarily (and exactly in the same way that this God didn’t), was amused by our efforts.
So this God did something unprecedented (but something which this God had always done) and disrupted the progression of events to make everything art, perhaps as a reward for our cleverness.[11] Everything was art, and hence, nothing was art. At first we thought we had – finally – achieved enlightenment, we were excited because we thought we had moved to a higher echelon of thought. But in this confusion we hastily forgot what art was and we stopped creating, really creating, because we didn’t realise that everything had always been art and art had always essentially been nothing. What bothered and confused us most was that our former creations, our masterpieces, lived on, that they lasted yet we could not replicate their beauty; in our indignation, we didn’t recognise that our expression had lost its voice.
We continued to create, we tried, but what we created wasn’t art. We created and never created and, just as readily, destroyed. We created and didn’t create while existing and not existing (I use the term ‘exist’ because, in theory we were in existence but…
[1] Enûma Eliš. Trans. L.W. King. 1902.
[2] Nor was this a decision in the true sense of the word. S. Robinson Drury elucidates this point. See, for example, Chapter 2 from Volume VIII of his series, Works and Non-works (1985).
[3] Although this being’s existence is mythologised, and he had no name, he has been widely referred to throughout history as Adam. For further reading, refer to The Adams of Antiquity by P. Önal (2003).
[4] Indigenous populations had been populating their walls with pictures well before, and after, Lunius. Indigenous Australians, for instance, recorded their beliefs and history in rock and bark paintings, and the Nazca created geoglyphs on the desert floor, meaningless from their point of view, coherent only to the watchers above. But Shannon et al. (1899) determined that Lunius’s paintings were the first done for reasons not religious or cultural, but rather as a form of expression.
[5] De Castro-Paixao, R. Wall Art of the Early Helladic Period. 1951.
[6] Martin, Alistair. Est Deus in Nobis. 1634.
[7] Shih Xuan is famous for his conjecture, made in old age, that the sun was simply the nearest live star to the earth. The moon, he believed, was closer, but dead.
[8] At this time, writers and the written word were viewed in the West with pessimism and lesser than the spoken word, Plato believing that writings were akin to painted figures; both seemed to be alive, yet neither could answer the questions they asked (Phaedrus).
[9] Fielding, D. ‘Chapter 4: China’s Shang Dynasty,’ The History of Writing (1990).
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ezek. 11.19: “I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh.”
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