The Artist And The End Of Times

"Nude Descending A Staircase" by Marcel Duchamp

(being ever-the-optimist, I refer to it as "Nude Ascending A Staircase...

 Walking Backwards, and having a Bit of a Tough Go.")

Asia Times
Wallis & Futuna edition
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB03Aa01.html
Front Page


SPENGLER
" It's not the end of the world - it's the end of you. "

I have told a story here somewhere about a young man who had become very interested in End of Times and the Book of Revelations, and was quite sure of the imminent demise of all things; within the space of the next five years his wife had suffered a stroke, he struggled with their three young kids, and after rehabilitation, his wife divorced him:  end of his world, his old world.

So it goes. It's hard to get the detail right, even though many, many of us are so spot on with the overall perspective of catastrophe...but the details! the time - the exact time! the place, the cast of characters...tough to do.

From some unknown place, an urge arises to create.
We could just sit there with a vague feeling of unease, forbodings, and anxieties. However, some of us feel the urge to create a large-scale epic with a cast of millions or billions. We order a re-write, we increase the budget of the imagination, we hire thousands of extras, and we set about to create a C.B. DeMille epic of whatever it was that arose into our consciousness. (In the young man mentioned above, it was end of times.)

We test market the idea by discussing it with our friends, and with people at the bar. We fine tune it.
We are fixated on this creative endeavour.

This is the urge not just to create, but it is the urge to be immortal!
Not satisfied with being tortured by our anxieties, we respond to the ancient impulse to create a memorous creation: a memorial to ourselves - the artist who created it - that we may not be forgotten...that we may live on forever...evidenced by the twin streams of progeny: our children and our mental creation!
Thus do we place our bets of immortality within both realms: the material and the immaterial.

Immortality is only possible to the Ideal. And it is the Ideal which was the plan of the artist.
The individual painting may burn, the statue may break, the novel may turn to dust, but the immortal structure of the Artisitic Idea that conceived and created those works of art is imperishable.
And is is not just Art as defined by the privileged elite of "Art", but it is the creations of all mankind, from the most sublime to the most untutored; they are the mouthings of the inarticulate striving to be heard, thus becoming immortal and one with the angels.

To live is to create; to create is to become immortal.
To become one with God in immortality is to create with Goals defined by a lifetime of struggling to be a moral person.

Therefore, if we desire immortality, our lives are the Moral quest and struggle; everything else is secondary.