Consider Bookhling

I had to wait for a long time for some of my test results to come in yesterday, so I thought I’d spend the day in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is only about 20 or so minutes away from my lab at the most. I sat down in front of the modern arts exhibition and began to jot down notes on everything that came into my head, ranging from weather to what to have for dinner, and etc.

And then somewhere along the line I began to have some interesting ideas regarding some parallel between the idea of metamorphosis, artificial life, art, music, and writing etc., so I jotted them down and decided to share it with you. The note was organized in rather chaotic manner (with drawings and other silly things) and written in a foreign language to boot, (as is my frequent habit when making personal notes) so this might end up not making much sense.

Some of the practices of art are very reminiscent of the practice of distilling the random pieces of lines, lights, and shapes to subsequent psychological and philosophical response of the human being and the world around the art object. The distilled ‘atoms’ of art objects are then reconstructed as the artist sees fit, into something breathing and constantly struggling and reassessing, something that is part of the world that is alive. Such practice can also be observed in the scenes of artificial life, where random bit of numbers are distilled into certain crystals of flexible pattern and form, which are then reconstructed into whole systems for the express purpose of turning it into, or at least get a hint of, a life. Will it be immature to suppose that certain seemingly random arts of the modern age, such as that of Jackson Pollock pieces, follow similar philosophy and goal?

If the parallel can be drawn between the medium of visual art and that of artificial life, how about music and writing? How can they come closer to a singularity without being confined by their characteristic medium? Modern classic seem to offer some glimmer of understanding for me, as they find a few simple yet poignant tunes and form them into simplistic yet most profound patterns of rich meaning and tapestry of metamorphic perspectives. As for how writing can achieve such an effect, I have no idea…

That is the problem. The art of Kandinsky can easily be visual, musical, and living. Yet how to translate a symphony into a writing? How to write a portrait of abstract thought and feelings? The subtle melodies to echo in the readers minds?

I do not believe I am mistaken in seeing some sort of commonality in the artificial life and arts of various format. Yet what is common between them is rather complex to define.

Perhaps the similarity between a life and an art is in their inherent intentionality to be given birth. The paints and the pieces struggle to come out into the world and walk among us. And when inanimate things created by human hands try to walk among us, we step into the realm of anthropological religion.

Modern religion came from branches of Animism in that religions generally try to imprint human face upon things that are usually inanimate and inorganic, like the winds and the water. In a foreign world the first approach of a human being is to humanize her environment, turn it into something that can be communicated with, albeit in some obscure and strange way that would defy normal human habits. Simply put, gods are created in order to control the world by human hands. The act of worship is really an act of communication. Just as we don’t yell at our computers to turn on and calculate the billionth place of pi like we would at living mathematicians, complex rituals are formed to translate human intentions into a language volcanoes and storms can understand. Inanimate forces and phenomena of nature are considered to have their own consciousness based on human understanding of humanity. Remnants of such way of thinking is apparent in still present sex division in the modern world, as we would often jokingly refer to men or women as unreasonable and pedantic about meaningless things. Perhaps current form of glorifying the object of one’s worship as one’s master became fashionable as the politics and religion became intermingled with each other at around the time of Mesopotamian civilization. Maybe the uneasy relationship shared between the fields of sciences, religions, and the arts reflects this complex web of intentions and commonality formed in the deeper recesses of the human psyche.

Perhaps the one ideal dreamed by the ancient and modern artists, from Pygmalion and African reliquary makers to Auguste Rodin and Mark Rothko is the world itself gaining intentionality, something so close to even the conventional notion of a deity. In the end attempting to create something like a god, when the form of the said god is very close to a human spirit, a god created in shape of humanity.

If there is one question I’ve consistently thought about past six or so years, it’s the nature and origin of creativity. Isn’t it wonderous and mysterious? All logic dictates that I should be eating and thinking about or participating in sexual reproduction right now. But I’m not. I’m participating in a creative work (regardless of how meager it might be), thinking about the nature of some abstract concept, while listening to a music I’ve sought out on the web. Activities that have so far eluded conventional attribution to genetic codes inherent in biological beings.

Sometimes I look out the window, toward some endlessly delicate and beautiful pattern of light and lines drawn by air and planetary motion. I can actually feel some kind of strange emotion I am not enough of a writer to describe in words. Time to time I look around myself in everyday life, only to discover that by some coincidental play of time and motion, something beautiful had passed by. And I feel a strange urge to describe it, to capture the moment in a medium that isn’t as ephemeral, to understand the essence of what made the moment what it was.

Such behavior doesn’t seem to be limited to human beings, although human beings might be the ones most eloquent in putting such urge and curiosity to the motion and the act. I can think of a few animals capable of displaying more curiosity about the world than their owners (as strange as it sounds, it’s true). Such observations lead me to believe that curiosity and creativity may be some inherent characteristics of all life forms with certain physiological feature, such as a brain stem. Maybe there is something within how the brain is structured that leads all sufficiently complex life forms to pursue their own visions of Pygmalion?

Something is here to be described, yet how it is to be done is unclear. The only understanding between the object, the moment, and the human is that all things she sees in front of her is in this world, arising naturally from the chaos of the world itself. So she sets herself to recreating the world in her own vision, to capture the indescribable she witnessed for the fleeting moment. The world thus created is formed with a question, with an urge. The world thus created has a directionality, a philosophical intentionality. A whole world with an intention, temporary or otherwise, is disturbingly similar in its description to life. Perhaps she has created a life. Perhaps arts and writings intend to seep out into the world. Perhaps in the future, the art will come alive, breathe with us, and stare back into our eyes.

I’ve been reading the book called Jonathan Strange & Mr.Norrell by Susanna Clarke these past few days. Very enjoyable read. I’m almost through half the book already. The world the author created is charming and strange in a very beautiful and exciting way, and I can almost feel like I’m losing myself among her characters and phrases whenever I read it. Reading the book, like any other good book, is like a journey. I can get excited and tell other people of what I’ve seen and heard just as I can tell other people what I’ve seen and heard while taking a tour of some foreign place. I especially love her whimsical touch of adding references and notes at the blank spaces at the bottom of the pages regarding some of the interesting events and imaginary books, as such things lend much realism and joy to the world written in the book.

The fantastic of her world isn’t simply a random list of unlikely things portrayed in mystical manner. They are quite consistent in their aesthetic spirit and vision, and acts as a device to flesh out the world rather than the focus of it. Like this description,

“It was as if a door opened somewhere. Or possibly a series of doors. There was a sensation as of a breeze blowing into the house and bringing with it the half-remembered scents of childhood. There was a shift in the light which seemed to cause all the shadow in the room to fall differently.”

This distinctive atmosphere of the world continues without disruption, and creates a familiar and charming world filled with all kinds of possibilities without being chaotic, profound yet not pretentious. I must say that I really envy her for being able to pull something like this.

Reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell made me think of using such amazing and inherent capacities of fantastic worlds to describe the still life of the real; everyday objects and situations portrayed in different light and angle to capture the essences of the world. A sort of abstract expressionism of writing. Maybe I can have a whole blog full of such portraits and pictures (of words), forming a gallery of twisting corridors and grand staircases (this expression also lifed straight off the book) all existing in some twilight world called the net without an actual physical presence.

I don’t know. Maybe this is the type of argument present in physical photography. Should the photographer be able to capture a holy moment of the world at its natural or should the photographer poise the world to reveal at their fullest potential?

There is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. A drawing in writing. I am not only referring to some whimsical positioning of letters so that they might physically resemble letters.

I think I might be able to truly draw in writing, describing some still life and give it a true world and vision to breath in, so that readers might actually be able to see the drawing by reading, a single moment frozen in time yet open to so much possibilities, so much poignant musings. A photography of writing, a fogged window panes of Mark Rothko. I think it might prove to be a much amusing exercise. Just imagine whole galleries filled with writing, symbiotic with the world around itself like other visual medium, yet containing a whole new world within itself, frozen in time into some profound moment within that world, yet pregnant with all sorts of possibilities and outcomes. A portrait, written/drawn in letters to capture the emergent world beneath the skin.

Now I wonder, how I might be able to pull such a thing off.

Wouldn’t it be so interesting if I could write about a man with no conscious faculty of his own, yet operates from impressions and expressions of his own memories? The world without any opinion, in the lens of a man with no conscious faculty, might as well be the man himself.

    The plane was dark, and within the dimly lit air of the pale whiteness, the darkness gathered slowly together, circling toward the center into an even darker darkness. After a moment of shaping and gathering, it slowly started to slide across the plane. After the voices left him, his mind still numbingly echoing with the stir of the waves from a stone, he just stood there surrounded by horizons on all sides. It was as if the voices had collapsed his senses, taking down the drapes of the world around him and throwing him alone onto the naked stage. In his body, memories were being washed into his head in an epiphany of catharsis, one event after another going past his eyes like a screenplay, clicking around into unrecognizable mess of silhouettes. Blinking his eyes into the memories, he thought he could see the bare shadow of a figure embedded in those blinding moments between flickering pictures.

His heart began to pound once again, his whole body aching from the all the walks and slumbers he experienced as if he was in a dream.

Everything was still and quiet, snow falling from the sky onto the white ground, barely visible. Nothing seemed to have changed in the reflection of his eyes except for the deeper cover of darkness upon the land. With a single restrained motion his body slid across the snow, following the path still visible through the plane. The motion brought with it a little shiver, and a little growl from his stomach, almost magically appearing from a chasm of his coat.

The icy touch of the open began to penetrate into his body, calming the last sparks of his life down unto the milieu of pale ground contrasting against the darkness above. His body was slowly numbing away piece by piece, and his vision began to fade, making the plane of snow continuing into the darkness shimmer like the surface of water.

As his vision faded, stars rose unto his mudded sight, flickering eerily like lights of a candle. Beyond the stars gigantic columns of light soared into the dark, brightening the layers of cloud covering the air. His visions slowly came back to him, focused onto the lights from the horizon. It was a huge city, filled with buildings that pierced into the sky, continuing endlessly into the dark above. As he dragged himself forward, the columns of light continued to soar against the dark from the thin line between the pale land and the darkening air, like a gateway to heaven.