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#14

PERPETUAL SHAMBALA

Abstract art begins before the mind can kick in and appropriate the images into what we call “reasonable” forms. As if to say only the immediately re-cognizable is reasonable. It grabs us and holds us in a space where we must relate to it in its language, not ours, because it refuses to be reduced to our idea about it. Only if we engage it honestly and humbly, can we have a happy discourse with it, but this discourse remains outside our mind’s familiar language.

I am thinking of how the whole world must look abstract to God, creating everything as He does for the first time and only once. Perpetual shambala.

Having no precedent, no pattern to go by, God must have to go by feeling, intuition and waiting upon “the thing” to come forth of itself. God (like every good artist) the insistent watcher, watching Himself create as the new thing comes through Him to emerge of its own will. How could the Creative pre-know anything?

To pre-know anything would mean to have a past and to be able to hold a concept. The urgency of existence and its incessant immediacy prohibits this. To quote the Book of Genesis, God says, it is done, He sees, and then he names it or “causes” it. He has no name for it, until it is created because it is not pre-known. Just as our children are not named until created, (Even if named in the womb, they are still created!) How can something that does not exist have a name?

God is the ultimate artist. He lives (like every artist) on the brink of perpetual discovery, in the empty space where the new thing pours in. Never knowing beforehand and never storing up anything. God Himself is the watcher, and even the receiver. Perhaps the ultimate receiver. ultimate receptive.

This is why in the book of Genesis, creation takes place in a no-man’s land: the space that precedes form and void. What do we know except form and void? How can we conceive of that which is neither something nor nothing? The simple answer: We can’t. Creation springs of itself—not out of something, and not out of nothing. It simply IS THAT IT IS—the articulation of a creative Principle that has no pre-conception, yet brings forth with infinite ingenuity, an entirely new world upon, literally, each second.

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 Susan Dane
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