Life and Death 2

Creativity and the turn to nature.

Finding Meaning

Art that creates the new and personal in the absence of social sanction, that reveals something remarkable about human experience, functions through signs and symbols that enchant.

Art, music, and literature act as a signs along the trackless way.

From a metaphysical perspective, immanent symbols of pure difference have an illuminating quality, take us where words turn back, and to a becoming that can only be palpated: sensed, felt and intuited, not reasoned.

The Problematic

Pure affect and percept communicate the idea. Not the Kantian transcendent idea, but the genesis of thought in real in the world:

Immanent, creative ideas that permeate everything, the very fabric of existence.

The cosmological is now largely left as a matter of science. Science remains the primary means for finding excitement and fascination in the universe.

But we need to at all times take heed of paradigms that embed in our thought, and embrace a perspective that there is never a final answer. We must stay with the problematic.

Answers offered are always challengeable. Procedures and processes are never perfectly objective, exclusive or beyond the scope of further investigation.

Paradigms

Socially and psychologically, we must still find meaning and fulfillment. But how?

Analytical philosophy has buried itself in its own system of enquiry and technicality to such an extent as to be of little relevance to how one might lead a fulfilling life.

Organized western religion is no longer compelling, except perhaps as a metaphor.

The gates to the wisdom of the east refuse to fully open to westerners immersed in a tradition of individuality that quite simply never developed in the east.

New Rapture

We require new rapture, new enchantment, modern symbols that inspire desire in us to overflow, and encourage us to exercise the radical freedom to which we have evolved.

To embrace the empowerment within and without, the creativity and life running through us.

We must create our own new visions: signs, symbols, diagrams, maps, paintings, stories, overtures that express the inexpressible, on a pure plane of immanence.

Immanent symbols that connect with the real.

Movements in art and literature over the years have summoned energies deep from within, the virtual, where pure difference is expressed temporally.

Along this path, we can sense a thread running through that speaks to themes of the wondrous and striking; connecting art, literature and music with the process philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

The Immanence of Nature

One such theme is that of the return to nature, to restore creativity and connection. As boldly asserted by Jean Jacques Rousseau:

“Nature never deceives us; it is we who deceive ourselves.”

Man was better in a state of nature. It is human society that has blinded man to the endless creativity and beauty from which we arise.

Henry David Thoreau would express similar sentiments:

We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us even in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavour. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts… I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…

Nature is not only immanent and real. Symbolically, it can function as a sign that inspires a connection with pure difference, a connection from within that flows without and vice versa.

The Free Act of Creativity

Nature can inspire us to exercise radical freedom. And it is the exercise of freedom, the free act, that is key to our sense of fulfillment.

In the words of John Steinbeck:

And this I believe: that the free, exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion, or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is what I am and what I am about.

Nature is one path, but not the only path to a connection with becoming. And what is clear is that no path is easy: all require the energy to break from slumber and routine, an energy and passion that flows; and the courage to carve one’s own path, even when faced with reactionary forces in society that would prefer we did not.

Individuality and art: we must enter and find our own path through the dark forest. As per Joseph Campbell, we must find our own bliss.

We must create our own pure expression of our participation in becoming in order to shine a light that has meaning for us personally.

The myth of the heroic quest must be reinvented to make sense in our own lives. And there are no templates from which to work.

The quest for fulfillment today is a story that remains unresolved and must be found by each of us on our own, and connecting with others.

I hope you enjoyed this article. Thanks for reading!

Tomas

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Excerpt from my forthcoming book, Becoming: A Life of Pure Difference (Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of the New) Copyright © 2021 by Tomas Byrne. Learn more here.