Art, Logic, & Linguistics
This morning on my walk to work I find myself considering the personal meaning which I find behind desiring the creation of art, as well as the meaning of art creation which existed during the periods of history where the transmission of ideas would be severely limited compared to today. What I see as a major concept that attributes meaning to art is: memetic transmission.
As our species' physical survival has become all but guaranteed on a global scale, our physical genetics have become less relevant towards that survival. The next-grandest goal of humanity can then become ensuring another kind of survival – the survival of ideas through history, through time, through the 4th dimension.
Genetics ensure the physical surival through time, they act as the carrier of the flesh through the 4th dimension. Less-elucidated humans and cultures in less-elucidated times of history might have led themselves to believe that this was the ultimate way for an individual to achieve immortality: start a blood lineage. I would rebut that belief.
Memetics shape the way that a culture forms, and then how that culture is propagated. The survival of ideas through time, the survival of specific patterns of neural pathways which make the same kinds of connections at various points throughout history. This kind of "immortality" can live beyond one's individual body or culture, and can influence the way that the entire world views the human image. But memes are as fickle as the medium they use to travel.
Genes, at the very least, are consistent; DNA provides a very physical and (mostly-)immutable blueprint for the human form, and I thank the universe for its existence every moment in which I continue to exist. A homo sapien can possess genetic mutations which are common, of course, but for the mostpart a homo sapien will be born much alike all other homo sapiens. A common foundation of data organization within the chaos of the cosmos.
{ I'm thankful that the human mind began accepting other mammals as familiar entities tens of thousands of years ago. May the study of other lifeforms help to expand our acceptance towards all beings which possess the spark of life in this universe. But I digress. }
Memes in the Lithic era would have had to have been passed through word-of-mouth: generation-to-generation, or in fortunate instances, clan-to-clan. This would have limited the amount of memetic mutation, but I'm sure as with physical genetics, neural memetics have standard and (indirectly-)observable "mutations" which come from heuristics and biases inherently present in the observer of the meme. This kind of mutation is something that we see *very* frequently in the hypermodern era, however these kind of heuristical mutations may have likely been concentrated along major socio-cultural borders in historical eras.
Memes in the post-writing era have much stronger staying power to be preserved through history, as humanity provides flesh for the knowledge to bind to. Physical flesh, we as humans understand. On the universal scale, our paper is macro-, like us. It is larger than the quantum, and it is smaller than the celestial.
{ I would say that humanity has a closer connection to our stars than to our fundamental particles, perhaps due to their co-existence with us as macro-level beings who experience physics-as-we-(normally-)know-them. Humans, of course, love to obsess over what we cannot understand, and so I am extremely empathetic towards those who *do* feel connected to the subquanta. But I digress. }
There is perhaps a difference to be observed between writing-as-fact and writing-as-literature. When writing is done to preserve facts, it is to serve the function of taking a quantifiable piece of the universe and giving it flesh; giving a fact the body which it needs to exist through time, independent of a human host. When writing is done for literature, it is to evoke emotion in others; I would say that this is the case of attempting to give an emotion flesh. The deepest desires of all humans stems from recognition; stems from the hope and the prayer that in the infinite vastness of the universe, another consciousness will experience a neural impulse which resonates at a frequency which contains an entire existence. Or at least the shadow of an existence, a memory.
Then we come to hypertext memes. Memes which travel at the speed of light around the globe. Shaping the minds of people from nearly every culture on earth.
In history, memes would only spread globally if they were divine, crystalline entities representative of much more than themselves. Cultural artifacts, both material and ritualistic, invoked to display the depth and breadth of the human spirit. Everything from the presence of the Great Pyramids to the traditions of Kabuki Theatre.
And so, perhaps one of my major complaints of my time might be that these hypertextual memetics are irreverent. The only apparent merit for evolutionary fitness seems to be "how quickly can this idea spread", which is incidentally quite cancerous.
When learning Nawatl, it is clear through its linguistic form that, for example, "tlakatl" means not only "human", but it also has the equal meaning of "it is a human". The existence of a human being is proof of the existence of a human being. While seemingly tautological, taking this fact at bare-face value does help elucidate a bit of Nawatl thought & philosophy.
"Tonalli", the heat of our Sun{, or even perhaps more broadly, the entropy of the universe,} is understood to contribute to the uniqueness of each individual human being's soul upon birth. And upon death, it is understood that a human's soul is returned to the same realm which (most of )humankind is returned to; a place where the souls of ancestral humans exist so long as they are remembered, and where those souls await reconstruction. On a fundamental level, it sounds as though Nawatl metaphysics included a concept (or is open to the interpretation) that matter and energy are one and the same, and are in a constant celestial cycle of conversion between each other.
If I gaze upon my hand, matl, it is clear that the hand exists, matl, "it is a hand". In most circumstances, it's probably not relevant that the hand stems from cells in my body which grow via the instructions encoded within its DNA. But, technically, every single time that an individual is referring to a hand - saying that a hand exists -, there are implicit background facts which also exist: "it is a hand" refines itself as "it is a hand which belongs to an individual of X ancestry and contains DNA received from parents Y&Z".
When giving flesh to concepts or ideas or emotions, one wants to ensure that the face (ixtli) of the flesh is representative of the facts which it contains. And the ability of the ixtli to reflect these emotions accurately is what allows it to be a more-divinely-constructed entity within the universe.
Under this set of criteria, the greatest works of human achievement are those which are unique in ways which possess roots, those which are founded in deep fertile cultural soil which speak to the uniqueness of the entire culture to which it originally belonged.
And so we exist in the midst of the Digital Renaissance. Digital media transmits at lightspeed, not only visually like in painted art or linguistically like in literature, but also tactilly in how they invoke ritualistic patterns of unified hand/body/avatar movement. For example, the ixtli of a video game may at first appear to be simple, but its substance can contain multiple interweaving storylines, or even several branching timelines, exploring the limits of human imagination while also invoking a media-derived culture within the individual.
[Written: July 14, 2023 | 1-Toçtli, 8-Qawtli]