What Can Be Art?

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about chancing and risking an
idea into action.  I'll find it again someday.

Perhaps some of the deepest magic of art is in the act
itself.  The frisson of the player on the stage proceding
with actions directed by a willful script.

As our positivists are saying, led by the wonderous Dulce,
if it's something, it ain't nothing.

The act of willing stone to the caprice of invention is
irreducebly vast, triumphant and sublime.  What one has
willed, how one has proceded is a frivolous detail in this
scheme.

Everywhere, the world is a thicket of texture, color,
shape all very capricious and chaotic.  The thundering
power of the chaos is generative.

If grey branches and limbs could heap into such a thick
tangle yet blue sky shine through in a thousand panes
radiant, there is absolutely no reason this blank boulder
before me should not scallop and twine or burst into a
pattern of thumping hearts.  For my eye knows the woods
are not embaressed as they carve the sky light.  All of
creation is unembaressed with its work.  Why not me.

Should I produce shame in a pinecone?

Belittle shadows along a steam?

Why me?

Let us be as brave as the tracery of treelimbs and the
woven texture of the grass.

Bill