Sunday, November 19, 2006

Father?

Poor Mad Peter responds, “Religion is the mother. Next question….” He is suggesting, I suppose, that there must be a father of the arts. Is the father of the arts history, some necessity to say that here, in this place, a certain person experienced the world as a whole creation with a palpable order? Hocking calls this the prophetic consciousness. He suggests that whenever an individual deals with reality with assurance, with skill, there is art.

A pileated woodpecker just attacked a tree in our backyard. If I could skillfully connect that act to my world in a poem, or a painting, or perhaps use the rat-a-tat-tat in music, would that be art? On a certain day, November 19, 2006, at 8 AM, a woodpecker was in the backyard of Nancy Ruth, and she, observing, was connected to him (I assume it was a him, because he was brightly coloured), and they were connected to the world at that moment.

1 comment:

Peter said...

No--just settling the "which came first" argument somewhat heavy-handedly. To me, the religious impulse, the reaction of awe, wonder, even some fear to life, came before and informed the response of art.

How that happens is, to quote Shakespeare in Love, "a mystery".