I am starting to have a much greater respect for time.

I wrote this at 05:10 on 03.17.06 with little sleep in my head and a whole lot of howard roark and the fountainhead.

ON BELIEF AND RELEVANCE:
Who says we need to be classical, traditional, sacred? What is sacred? What is the use of relying upon institutional perfection?

Perfection, blind creation, will get you no where except to empty shells.

Said the Dean of Stanton Institute of Technology to Howard Roark:

"But all the proper forms of expression have been discovered long ago."

To which he replied:

"Expression--of what? The Parthenon did not serve the same purpose as its wooden ancestor. An airline terminal does not serve the same purpose as the Parthenon. Every form has its own meaning. Every man creates his meaning and form and goal. Why is it so important--what others have done? Why does it become sacred by the mere fact of not being your own? Why is anyone and everyone right--so long as it's not yourself? Why does the number of those others take the place of truth? Why is truth made a mere matter of arithmetic--and only of addition at that? Why is everything twisted out of all sense to fit everything else? There must be some reason. I don't know. I'd like to understand."

Is there nothing new under the sun? Elements, basic, physicality, no. But ideas, juxtapositions, mental perception, familiarity, arrangements, relationships, details--YES! New things are made sacred every day. New traditions are forming as we speak. This is not instantaneous so there is time left for the traditions of the past to be clung to and remembered as they fade away, transform.
The problem comes with the denial of these transformations. If we were to properly give Christianity a name as time passed, it would have been altered a million times over, depending upon the region, town, province, family, individual worshipping. In some ways, it has changed names over time--totemism, paganism, zoroastrianism,judaiism, christianity, etc--with various branches between stemming to every other way of thinking, train of thought, way of worship. We worship because we do not want to feel alone, because we don't want to see ourselves as so small and alone, insignificant. But we always change, and our gods, our psychiatrists, our protectors and listeners, the way to salvation, are a transference of ourselves. The funny things about gods and human psychologists is that the relationship in many ways is all within oneself. Granted, the idea of prayers answered, miracles, karma, etc. The divine can answer. We are nothing without others--the reflection, the transference of ourselves.
We and the sacred are forever changing. God may exist in some form, some entity perhaps. But that is not the point. The point is that whether or not you believe in a god, the idea of god most definitely and undeniably exists. This is the sacred which will forever change, like the seasons, like the earth (all relative, mind you), because it is a reflection of ourselves and our perception of our place in the world and why we continue breathing and living, and I continue writing on this page as if it meant anything.
You believe in God--you have a perception of God.
You dont' believe in God--you still have a perception, an image, of God.
You know what it means to worship and have fait because you know what it means to live.
So what about relying upon tradition? It is a false refuge. The more you fight the passage of time, the more you will find yourself beaten down and suffocated with its pasage. It stops for no one. It may be true that there is a time and a place for everything. At some time, everything makes sense. But regimes change, empires fall. Nothing is static. "Times were good then." Perhaps they were only destined to be good then. Nothing gold will stay? It's just how everything works. The only way to be happily ever after, is to be dead. And that's just not living is it.

"Henry Cameron had nothing to offer against [tradition]; nothing but a faith he held merely because it was his own. He had nobody to quote and nothing of importance to say. He said only that the form of a building must follow its function; that the structure of a building is the key to its beauty; that new methods of construction demand new forms; that he wished to build as he wished and for that reason only. But people could not listen to him when t hey were discussing Vitruvius, Michelangelo, and Sir Christopher Wren." (ayn rand, the fountainhead)

It is 1922.
Roark, on the Parthenon:

"Look. The famous flutings on the famous columns--what are they there for? To hide the joints in wood--when columns were made of wood, only these aren't, they're marble. The triglyphs, what are they? Wood. Wooden beams, the way they had to be laid when people began to build wooden shacks. Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are, making copies in steel and concrete, of copies in plaster, of copies in marble, of copies in wood. Why?"

As visual artists we are responsible for everything we reveal. It's a chance to communicate--why not make it worthwhile? There is something to be said for ambiguity in art, but there's nothing to be said about an idle mind.


06:07
I remember Keith told me something interesting. If we were immortal we'd still all eventually die of cancer anyway. Man is built to be mortal. We were built to exist and to die. The beauty is in the wave, in generations to pass, in the overlapping of all ofo humanity. We are all part of a whole, but it doesn't mean we always have to answer to it. We are all children learning. We are immortal, not in our bodies, but in our knowledge, our energy, our writings, our creations, our remnants. This is evolution. There are wars, errors, and revolutions. There is no end and no perfection. Your troubles are not the end of the world, so don't worry.