There is No Such Thing as Art

It is four thirty in the morning, and in the middle of my fourth Good Eats rerun, I have received a revelation. It's in the title--more to come when I can elucidate it further.
(Several weeks later...)
Alright, let's get down to business.

Art. What the fuck is art? A portrait? A fugue or a statue? A blistering guitar solo? A pile of feces in the shape of a cross? Simply put, I contend that the question is a non-sequitur--because to call something art, or an art, is to err in the assumption that such a thing even exists. Art is nothing but inexact and partly-realized science.

Let's start arguing my characteristically sprawling thesis with a very small and specific example: the assertion that cooking is an art. To call something an art is to say that it's somehow different from a science--that there's something about it that's beyond science in some way, some spark of magic or inherent chaos to it. Anyone who knows my stance on randomness has already guessed that I don't think that's the case at all--cooking, to me, is the intersection of multiple complex and sometimes immature sciences, applied to an area that is poorly-understood and has an abundance of uncontrolled and unpredictable variables. Cooking times, for example, aren't random or otherwise beyond mortal ken--they just seem that way because they depend on the vessel, on the stove, even on the elevation of the kitchen. If you cooked the exact same pizza in exactly the same way in exactly the same place twice, they would be identical.

Now, this thesis is impossible to directly prove, for the same reason that humans invented the idea of chaos in the first place: it's impossible for limited beings like us to control every single variable. Even if we have carefully selected the ingredients, vessels, implements, altitude, cooking time, temperature, make and model year of the oven, and every other measurable variable from the grass the dairy cows were fed on to the server's relationship with his mother, there would still be tiny fluctuations that we can't control or even perceive without high-end scanning equipment--movements of air, little thermodynamic weirdnesses, and the statistical inevitability that a few molecules out of every billion will teleport somewhere else in the time it takes to make the pizza--and these will make the two pizzas different in tiny ways. The cheese will brown in different places, the crust will ferment differently, and the air inside the oven will circulate in an uneven pattern and subtly influence the way the ingredients interact.

You'll notice, however, that as we control more and more variables, our two pizzas will grow more and more alike--and it is from this that we can infer a pattern. The more primitive the implements we use, the more things are "left to chance"--that is, left outside human control--and vice versa. The variables aren't random--they're just beyond our ability to perceive or control. Yes, folks, he's saying what you think he's saying. Not only is there no such thing as art, there is no such thing as chaos. What we perceive as such is in fact a higher form of order--one beyond our ability to comprehend, but one so pervasive that we take it completely for granted!

Now consider, for a moment, what an example of high art, the kind that merits a capital A--say, Beethoven's 9th--would look like reduced to its most basic components. Take away the instruments, the conductor, the score, all the musical theory, and you're more or less left with a deaf madman whooping ebulliently at the audience.The emotion, the passion that old Ludwig poured into his work would still be there--all the substance and truth and Meaning that men learned in such things maintain that Art is all about--but it lacks any effective way of reaching us. We can't feel the ecstatic joy the composer feels, because we're not telepathic--all we see is his reaction to it, and it probably looks a little ridiculous to even the least jaded of us.What made him such an enduring and beloved composer was not some spark of divine beauty, but rather a knack, learned, genetic, or both, for effectively communicating ideas too vast and abstract for speech alone through the medium of music. This is, if one looks from the right angle, the point of all high art, if not of expression itself--to pass on an idea as directly and effectively as possible without looking so ridiculous that the observer's mind closes to it. Re-contextualizing somebody else's ideas to create the opposite effect, by the way, is known as comedy.

In future posts: I lay out the Antagonistic Order's liturgical calendar, elaborate on the importance of pre-Christian values, and get mistaken for a Nazi. This and other wacky hijinks await, in the next Letters from Amenti!

Well, fuck.

\m/

Because it's fun(ny), that's why.

I'm starting a cult.

I've decided that, with the sheer number of people committing acts of unspeakable evil in the name of various gods of goodness and light, it is the duty of the sensible people of the world to be hypocrites in the opposite direction. To that end, as of post time I am officially declaring the foundation of the Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer--a Satanic cult that commits random acts of kindness while pretending to worship the Prince of Darkness. And I can't stress the pretending part enough. I am not founding a theistic Satanic cult, and perhaps even more importantly I am not founding a douchebag Satanic cult in the mold of LaVey--in fact, I'm going out of my way to do the opposite.
The Antagonistic Order of Prometheus Lucifer has two faces--the first is the serious side. This is an earnest, secular philosophy based on Secular Humanism, Comtean Altruism, Epicureanism, and the dual ideal of Prometheus Lucifer. The second side, however, is to be our public face, and it's just flat-out silly--a parody religion consisting largely of ranting about darkness and insanity, taking heavy metal way too seriously, and pausing occasionally to help kittens out of trees and little old ladies cross the street. Other sanctioned pastimes include baiting conspiracy theorists, showing up at Westboro Baptist Church protests with counterproductive placards ("SATAN SUPPORTS DIVERSITY"), and setting shit on fire. In fact, the most important ritual in the Antagonistic canon shall be the Rite of Setting Shit On Fire. The second most important ritual in the Antagonistic canon shall be the Rite of Putting That Shit Out Before You Burn the House Down.

Now, a bit of serious talk.

My patron--the enlightenment and progression that he represents--uplifted us. He gave us language. He brought us fire. He showed us that running around the savannah in the buff might not be the best idea. Prometheus is the spirit of inspiration; the force that drives us ever forward and lifts us to ever-greater heights of maturity, creativity, and social enlightenment. Lucifer is the spirit of defiance; the force that lets us look at the world around us and see all the myriad ways in which it might be different.
When one has only Prometheus, he has the insight to see the problems of the world, but not the drive and ambition to work to solve them--he makes token acts of altruism, but becomes overwhelmed by the crushing weight of gravity, the social pressures of living a normal life, and the light dies out for want of heat, snuffed out by sheer entropy. Conversely, one who has only Lucifer, and lacks the clarity and insight of Prometheus, becomes unstable--driven to right all wrongs but unable to see their deeper causes, he lashes out at phantoms and sees conspiracies in every shadow, and his heat can do nothing but burn indiscriminately until some kind soul extinguishes it.
Together, however, they show us the world as it is, in all its sprawling imperfection, and empower us to say, "No! I reject this flawed order, and all the ennui and inertia that binds us to it.” We must never accept that 'What Is' and 'What Must Be' are one and the same, and neither can we give up hope for 'What Might Be.' The future belongs to those who claim it, and neither the rock that birthed us nor the meat that imprisons us will halt our ascent.

And now that I'm finished declaiming the glory of Prometheus Lucifer, back to your regularly scheduled nonsense. Effective immediately, today is Zombie Jesus Day--the most feared and harrowing day of our liturgical calendar, when it is said that Yeshua bar Yosef rises from his shallow grave to feast upon our precious gray matter. To guard against his ravenous appetites, the soldiers of Lucifer are commanded to stockpile weapons and food, keep your power tools in tip-top condition, and make sure that as long as you are in your home, something in it is on fire. Zombies are scared of fire. Zombie Jesuses doubly so.
Good luck. Aim for the head. Hail Satan.

First Post; Our Enemy; The First and Only Truth

"And therefore I say, whatsoever they be that with Simon Magus take upon them to work such wonders--by soothsaying, sorcery, or witchcraft--are but liars, deceivers, and cozeners; Sorcery, witchcraft, soothsaying, and dreams are but vanity, and the law shall be fulfilled without such lies."

Reginald Scot was a contemporary of Shakespeare's; a witch hunter who traveled the length and breadth of the British Isles searching for sorcerers and occultists that he might visit God's justice on them--but like Houdini four hundred years later, his critical eye and relentless desire for the truth turned his quest for the supernatural into an eye-opening marathon debunking session, and after seeing one too many innocent old women and petty con artists murdered by mobs, his conscience made a skeptic of him. His 1584 book, The Discovery of Witchcraft, not only refuted the existence of witches, but remains one of the foundational texts of both demonology and stage magic to this day.

And this is quite an achievement, considering that nearly every single copy of the book was burned in 1603, when James I quite literally criminalized skepticism of the paranormal rather than admit that there was no such thing as magic.

Skepticism is not a popular position--it never has been--but we have come far in the last century, and there are more atheists, materialists, and assorted free-thinkers in the world today than ever before. We are beating back the forces of pseudoscience and mysticism, and spreading the light of reason even into the darkest corners of the world--but if we falter now, if we let up our assault in the name of fairness or tolerance or respect for the dignity of quaint native superstitions, we will be devoured again. We cannot afford to pity the faithful simply because they have trouble adapting to the idea of a world without gods. We cannot let ourselves be swayed by transparent attempts to cry persecution at those who question their dogma. This, therefore, is the First and Only Truth, the one absolute that I will defend without reservation: All that is sacred must burn.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that we are evangelists spreading a noble truth--we are the uninfected on a planet of zombies. The enemy has no face, no race or sex--it is a memetic lifeform, a self-replicating pattern that will do anything to spread itself. The infection will attack you in the guise of the people you love most--it will corrupt your friends and family, and alter their behavior to make them spread it further. It will hijack our dearest moral principles and use them to motivate the infected--turning the act of contamination into a civic duty, a moral obligation, even an act of love--but it cares no more for such things than biological plagues care for wind, or water, or blood. This is simply how it propagates--how it has propagated since the dawn of time. It has no capacity for altruism. It does not care about the truth. It does not comprehend justice, honor, or mercy. It will take whatever form best allows it to spread, be it ephemeral lowest-cosmic-denominator mysticism or raving blood-of-the-lamb fundamentalism, and it will do whatever is necessary to make you part of it. It lives in darkness, in the gaps between facts, in the shadows of the human heart--wherever the light of reason cannot shine--but a lone candle, a single awkward question or stubborn fact, is enough to repel it.

And I have Prometheus Lucifer.