Casavaria.com :: Joseph Robertson

CONTENTS:
The Reality Question
The Distillation & the Brush
Expanding Potential for Meaning

CAVE PAINTING
ON THE MAKING OF MEANING

The Reality Question

Is anything real? Have we any way of knowing? Can logic abstracted from experience do the work of defining experience well enough to answer such doubts?

"Life is what we make of it", we often hear, usually at moments of reflection, in the wake of difficult or startling undoings. "Everything is what we make of it" is another variation, which leads to "Opportunity is everywhere", so that "The world is one's oyster" and "It all comes down to attitude". So reflections on the nature of truth and the origins of meaning are often feared or even dismissed for suspicion that they might lead (or lead necessarily) to shameless and corrupting relativism.

But really it is more important to understand meaning in a relative flux than to fear it or deny it. All sources of influence, truth or meaning, as we "know" them through experience, do after all partake of a relational apparatus: our senses depict to our mind some external object or concept, which we consume as fodder for our own examinations of what we call "reality". So the problem of the relative fluctuation of meaning, weight, power and import, must accompany all experience, all examinations of meaning.

It may serve us well to examine how "relational" experience leads to "relative" understandings of fact, and what exactly that process serves to do for us...

The Distillation & the Brush

It is the simplest construction: the color seeps in, a single shade mixing with the varied and ancient qualities of the rock. Texture is born. The act redefines the full gamut of existence. It says we are here, and we are made of presence, and we are aware, and we can articulate experience. The expressed fact and the existent being come together. Civilization is begun.

A brush moves over an uneven surface. It is tipped with pigment made from organic and mineral resources, a distillation of the environment. Its purpose is manifold, something beyond decorative, sacred. Such a distillation is undertaken, not merely to make a picture, but to depict, to portray, to record, to do with physical reality what the mind does with experience.

This place of pregnant circumspection, this house of record, transcription, scripture, is the center, the epicenter of human development, carefully urging stone to speak, to unlock the unspoken and renew experience. It can be said that this painting of a buffalo, a river, or a conflict, this expression of a set of values or of the no-longer real, on cave walls, is not so much an imitation of nature, but an imitation of the mind. The method is a more deliberate, slow and meticulous activity than the lightning leaps of the psyche, but it seeks a similar result, in a way that allows experience to be shared and given permanence. What is im-pressed within the mind is ex-pressed in a shared swath of consciousness. Now meaning can better be elucidated, discussed, examined, even fixed and secured. What is relational by method, is expressed in a new relational dynamic, an acknowledgement of the fragility of "known" truth, and so a collective intelligence can be cultivated and a civil order imagined and affirmed.

Does the strategic placement of pigment on petrified temporal refuse, in order to mimic the connection between sight and memory, done in order to recreate place, moment and purpose, bring meaning into being, or does it access an already extant and vital realm of real meaning? Can we know? Must we decide?

Expanding Potential for Meaning

Indeed, the dark recesses of the cave-dwelling artists' studio, the place where their study of the world played out, is in many ways a mirror of the mind. A shadowy opening in the weighty emptiness of factual progression, a repository for secret living, ensconced in galleries of one's own subjective portrayals of the uncertain world outside.

Language, art, law, religion, technology, livelihood, love and literature, each operate both within and beyond teh caverns of the mind, to cultivate, express and sustain meaningful relationships to our world. In fact, it is no stretch at all to say that "the world" we cling to as fact, is cultivated, expressed and sustained by these human explorations, these "humanities". And so, we live constantly within the question (which tends to bifurcate and continue): do we make or do we portray what is meaningful to us? And so, do we recast meaning for our own convenience, and would this constitute a deception? Is our world a fictional, if ingenious, invention? Or is our quest for knowledge and interpretation a legitimate attempt to overcome our own frailties and discover and establish "what is real"?

Because the imitation of mind posed by cave-painting also sustains the order that blankets and secures the beings who undertake it, whatever meaning initiates the project, or is conveyed by it, is also transformed by its being expressed, developed, dissected, shared. It expands, and by its expansion, it expands the scope of experience, expands the potential for meaning, even makes new meaning.

It is in this realm of captivation, depiction, and dialogue, this coneptual, idiomatic realm, where we say that a thing or an event "comes up", emerges into our experience, and yet this semantic milieu is itself a study of experience. The mind becomes truly mind when it observes and acknowledges itself, so it is thought. It is clear that as we paint the boundaries of the dark space of our known self, we are seeking only to know the world, or to know ourselves, but to execute a study of such that will allow us to further cultivate, maintain and transform them.

Mourning becomes survival. Angst becomes quiet. Knowledge becomes expression. Dream becomes reality. History becomes myth. Night becomes day. Energy becomes life. Distance becomes affection. One thing becomes another, is renewed or re-iterated, and time pushes forward, and we seek to make sense of the deep well of our consciousness, as it fills up with life. Intellect, literature, law, memory, ambition, speech, are cave painting. We seek to sample and describe our world by inscribing it with signature aesthetic ventures.

The distillation that becomes our ink, is itself a part of speech. It is the environment itself distilled, an expression of the environment, and the tool for elaborating a fuller expression of what occurs within that environment. The physics of the motion that spreads that distillation over the landscape of a blank slate, is also a part of speech. The sounds, the memories, the suggestions conjured by what is depicted, are all parts of speech. Above all, they are parts of the human process of giving voice to what stirs within us as we navigate the living, furtive, streaming mire of temporal existence. Beginning from this understanding of the fundamental question of how we come to seek, take note of, transfer and create meaning, we can study the brooding facets of human interaction, in all its tragic and uplifting beauty.