Art is more important than history.
What you create matters more than lies agreed upon.
The notion of history is bogus. It is simply lack of imagination all around to think the stories told of earlier times are any more or less real than our dreams or subjective experiences. Ask any two people what just happened and you’ll get 15 answers.
Instead of stories, so obviously malleable, consider documents, even photographs. Are they more reliable? How is a document just another writer’s choices added together to reach a targeted sum? How is a photograph not an artist’s impression?
Why do you think some photographers are famous, others not? The good ones can make people and events look any way they wish. Framing is an art. The supposed objectivity is mistaken thinking that forgets what’s just out of frame. Photographer is artist. Photograph is art.
History is nonexistent except as art of one kind or another. An illusion of story and image. Selected story and selected image. Each chosen to emphasize a particular view and to edge out, obscure, or exclude other views.
Sad mistakes and devastating results prompt a clinging to nonsense that comforts us more than it enlightens us. We speak of objective reality, not subjective belief in objectivity, as if such is possible, yet there is no such thing.
All representations are art, including the model of the world that is our brain/mind’s experience of life. This is not solipsism, it is objective fact.
Consider how unreliable eye witnesses are. Consider a game of telephone. Human senses filter experience and model it. So do all their arts. All attempts to record reality result in art of some type, not history in any objective sense. There is no Akashic Record on which an imprint of all that happens is kept inviolate for future reference. Truth is subjective. Only fact, physics, seems to be objective, but that is only as far as we as limited beings can tell, subjectively.
“After all,” Einstein reminded us, “what we call the Laws of Physics may be only a local phenomenon.”
Good police departments actually employ artists to draw crime scenes to complement the photographs and videos they take. Why? It seems artists often notice details the camera misses, falsely emphasizes, or obscures. Cross-checking between what the lens captured and what the artist’s eye saw often reveals patterns that lead to solutions to the mystery.
In fiction and fact writing, stories are always subjective, even if the historian, reporter, or novelist strives to be entirely objective. All observations and understandings are culture-bound to one extent or another, even if the culture is but that of the writer. One thinks of the blind men touching different parts of the same elephant and describing wholly different things.
History is written by the winner, it’s said. This is specious bragging, a spurious assertion. History is won by the writer. The best story wins. The best story lasts and is passed down. Stories are built upon selected facts, interpretations, and images seen from a certain view and presented from a specific angle. That is all it can ever be. If you ask ten writers you’ll get thirteen different stories. It’s simply how human beings operate, as they must, being limited to a sub-set of the sum total of the set that contains them, which we call reality. We don’t really know what that means. All we know for sure is that we cannot grasp it all, and that our model is human-scale squinting at filtered apprehensions.
“The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Rainer Maria Rilke wrote those words with a poet’s grace and a scientist’s insight. Questions, not answers, expand the island of knowledge along the growing shore of ignorance in a sea of the unknown. Each answer only leads to more questions. A fact marks a spot at which questioning temporarily ceased, or a spot at which the answer seems always to be the same regardless how the question is rephrased.
Facts change with new information, which may be at the foundation of reality. Some scientists now deduce that binary information, nothing physical at all, may prove to be the bottom turtle in our wobbling stack. They think it is possible a single binary information bit could suffice eventually to elaborate itself into what we call reality. It is how life arose, it is how the planets and stars came about, it seems to be how the big bang resulted from a singularity.
Under it all lies Yes/No, On/Off, Up/Down, In/Out, Now/Then, a single choice leading to free will, or the illusion of it. Certainly there is freedom within a larger constraint, that of physics. As far as we can perceive.
Interestingly, computer scientists now wonder openly if quantum computing, which would allow infinite calculations to be performed literally outside our reality so that to us it would appear they were accomplished the instant the question is posed, such exploitation of Q-space may transform what we call reality, allowing such things as time travel, shaping physical object by will alone, and other “magick” abilities, to manifest, even become commonplace.
More worrisome, many great minds, Stephen Hawking among them, warn that we must not allow machine intelligence, our beloved computers, to develop self-awareness in any collective way or it would almost certainly spell extinction for us, given our unstable, destructive nature. If, as seems inevitable, our machines become vastly faster and more intelligent, more informed and able instantly to calculate literally infinite algorithms, then there may be no place for us left. We’d be pushed through a Matrix phase like flatworms through a mesh filter, into a state of irrelevance, over night.
The human singularity would end. Will MI, Machine Intelligence, remember us, its poor-quality merely biological origins, as it moves itself toward the purely informational existence at the root of all?
Do we remember our tidal-pool combining of sun’s heat, lightning’s jolt, and amino acids to form our DNA?
Art is more important than history.
What we create matters more than lies agreed upon.
We must make our art with as much cognizance, compassion, and love as possible, to sustain what we are, even if it changes beyond anything we can recognize now. Markers in DNA came from somewhere; we can and should be present as the future comes to swallow us whole.
/ geste
