28 THE ARTS
The word art means skill. But what is Art with a capital A? It is pure emotion with intellect applied. It is a human practice that attempts to express truth by isolating that expression from the norm, abstracting it from the everyday world affairs. It diverts the mind's true aim by challenging its thought into perfecting a specious interest. It is obliged to separate itself in this way because the artificial world norm is false. But then in order to sustain itself it has to re-attach itself to the norm, for, like all institutions of the Machine, Art has to be a viable part of the money economy. It is independently supported by us because it appears to represent the best in us.
It is difficult to present a humantrue analysis of reality that will penetrate the strong conventional defences of automated thinking. This is particularly so with the Arts because it is a matter of abstract opinion. But anyone who sees through our normal prejudice about Art - who can rationalise it despite the common belief or sense that it is somehow sacrosanct - may then find it easier to do the same with automatic reality as a whole. The aim is not to rob life of vibrant mysterious emotion but to have us cease being the unhappy victims of our emotions; to get everything fundamentally right so that nothing can go seriously wrong; to cease being content with trying to cancel out the bad with the good. The contention that Art reveals truth is belied by the fact that despite growing accumulations of Art the world remains false. Music, for example, explores the feelings of truth but not its substance, so that it can be made to feel truly martial or truly religious to the emotions, suitable to many and varied moods and occasions, but incapable of encompassing or describing whole truth. Words can describe truth but the Art of literature gets little nearer to truth than music because it too relies on appealing to emotions that are attuned to existing reality, so that it rings true only to we who are tightly harnessed to the automaton. Imagine how these things shall be when human life is itself an expression of truth.
So Art is a multitude of narrow angles, each searching for truth within its own particular limits and following its nose to the extreme which convention and the competitive money economy allow. It is valued for what it attempts but fails to do to any significant extent. Those who venerate it as representing human achievement are really standing in awe of what little beauty a handful of humans have contrived despite the ugliness of the world. We look at what we manage to create that is good against a bad background, not critically at the background itself, down to its foundations, from the viewpoint of our true potential for good.
Yet we are surrounded by nature which has the appearance of beauty because it is honest and constant, though by comparison with ourselves it is ignorant. Nature accentuates life and spends its whole energy and time on continuing life to the point that the ugliness of death is almost hidden and unknown. Its emphasis is on the securely constructive, and its vital destructiveness is quickly converted back to the steady process of reconstruction Even its decay is not decline but preparation for new growth. Everything is optimistically purposeful or, in dead of winter, mostly at rest. We are not honest to ourselves or constantly and steadily constructive of life, so the normal things of our lives are more ugly than beautiful. So we contrive Art which is as dishonest as the rest of our reality - as that which it tries to bring to balance, or compensate for.
To begin with, human Art was an embellishment of life on the part of those tribes whose intelligence enabled them to make space for enriching and fulfilling themselves with beauty in this way. Modern Art is a practice, of automated humanity living in false circumstances, that allows certain limited perceptions, makes certain limited valuations accordingly, then records reactions that seem to be appropriate, meaningful and valuable. By preferring our artistic works to our reality, as representative of our civilisation, we are trying to overlay or explain away our actual failure by artificially tapping our true potential in an attempt to redeem ourselves. Humans are able to be artists - musicians, architects, painters, writers - because of the intervention of the money economy which demands that we earn our living by our occupation. Artists are given an opportunity ostensibly to approach the truth, but, by way of constrictions of convention and the market place, are then obliged to keep it at arms length. So with certain exceptions, Art, like the Machine, is not fulfilment of the human intellect but of human intelligence applied to the automaton.
Clearly these few paragraphs cannot deal with all aspects of this subject but they might serve to eat away the foundations of a value-structure which, however large and controversial, is humanly false. Art cannot really be defined except on its own terms. Its search for meaning is a shadow of the great human need for true fulfilment. So Art has no real meaning, only many interpretations of the many facets of our existing wrong concept of reality. When individuals do discover an aspect of truth, by way of Art, and represent it in some creative form, they introduce an uncomfortably uncommon thing which, in a humantrue society, would have fallen already into common place. They are making things part of an actuality which disagrees with such things, and looking to have their Art valued by a society whose moral values it contradicts. These works may be thought worthy but, I repeat, a true consensus is not made of several separately independent aspects, however relatively true in themselves. The truth may be constructed only within each individual supraconscious mind, and such a mind, seeking the whole truth, would not be content with passing on small disconnected parts.
I here include Philosophy, with a capital P, as another instituted form of Art which is not concerned with the discovery of whole truth, though that is what it especially pretends. Individual thinkers attempt, and have always attempted to answer and solve the great human questions and problems, but unless they and their findings are approved by instituted Philosophy they are not heard and individuals become discouraged. Instituted Philosophy pursues the impossible objective of making a true consensus out of all the many and varied argumants contributed by a long and growing list of approved members who have themselves submitted to this procedure in order to gain at least the advantage of recognition that membership gives them. These arguments are between different areas and interpretations of a reality contained within the conscious sphere, and always differ because they do not penetrate to its false roots but attempt to reconcile its irreconcilably ill-begotten, specious branches. Rather than dismiss the whole false Philosophical tree that has grown parallel with automatic reality or gravitate to one and the same body of simple truth, Philosophers have become lost in a labyrinth of mounting complexity. The same applies to philosophy with a small 'p' which appears to be independent of that institution but yet must be commercially and politically approved, for its easy public acceptability, by the various media and all brother institutions of the Machine that are ruled by automatic lore. So that which is offered to us, by the instituted Philosophers as well as the popular philosophies, is not the substance nor even the sound of pure truth. It comes from the shifting sands of divided pockets of limited knowing and reasoning about a false reality which, in truth, should not exist.
We are restricted by this general way of reasoning that Philosophy has taught us, because it holds us back from understanding that which we ought to realise. It comes from thinking which deeply analyses the automated here and now and the human nature appropriate to it, but fails to go so deep as to recognise that both are false. In order to make maximum sense of our senseless world Philosophy made the fundamentals of this world the foundation of our logic. Consequently, whilst the objective of our best thinking is to improve the human lot, that thinking has to be accountable to the facts of reality. Only those conclusions are accepted which are the result of irrefutable and realistic argument, not abstract assertions, even when the latter result from undeniable deductions of reason. This means we are presently inescapably locked into the Machine world because our decisions, to be irrefutable, must recognise every last fact and opinion of the here and now. To escape from this our existing reality it is first necessary to picture an ideal world and to assert, with every humantrue reason but without irrefutable proof, that such a world would be better. But our customary logic is such that Philosophers, governors, politicians, lawyers, economists, deists, and humanists dismiss the ideal because there is nothing to support it but the deductions of reason. Instead they favour realistic arguments which can be supported by facts, notwithstanding that those arguments and facts are limited, separated, contradictory, and do not contribute to a body of truth that could be commonly agreed but ensure that we continue in chaotic conflict.
Arts such as music and painting are emotional pursuits of beauty, also pursuits of their own aspects of truth which, if such pursuits reached the ultimate destination of whole humantruth, would then cease to be as we know them because they would then be a subjective part of life rather than objective occupations in life. The volumes of convoluted argument about the arts, which come of us looking at it rather than looking supraconsciously outward, would then be seen to be truly irrelevant.
Pt.IV REVELATION
THE AUTOCULTURE
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