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I think about art and religion. What does an artist want to give? Different artists offer us different things. But what is the best kind of art?

Generally I think that religious art is best, but this should not be understood in a strictly traditional sense. Even Yves Klein, when he paints a monochrome, can be understood as someone who wants us to SEE.

See what? It's a monochrome! Exactly. To see one color. To see that color is.

But that's obvious!

Should it be so obvious? Should we find the raw existence of color so very boring?

I think of those big beautiful sculptures of the Buddha, which are how many years old? What were the sculptors trying to say? Did they care about their artistic reputations?

I bet that many did not. Not in the least. I suspect that they felt something there, that they understood something that was finally worth chiseling into stone.

I myself have been in artist in just about every medium. I have wrestled wrestled wrestled with the problem of what to say with my art.

Some of my best lines were tossed off from a state of joy, of excitement. I was playing with words. I wrote down what delighted me. I forgot about the audience. I wanted to save these amusements for later. And that is why I wrote them, and didn't just think them and pass on.

I used to want to write fiction, as I have always enjoyed fiction. But the fiction I enjoyed was never the shallow stuff. I wanted fiction to say something about reality. I also loved Bukowski, Miller, Kerouac, Fante, and the autobiographical writers in general. Of course Dostoevsky is deep. Nabokov is a master of sensation and desire, of the slick phrase. All of this enhanced my perception of reality. In this sense, fiction served as a narrative form of philosophy, or human science rather than natural science.

In the last few years I've wrote less and less fiction, excepting some self-referential "meta-fiction," and concentrated on philosophy.

I'm not connected to any acknowledged philosophical community, excepting of course all the other living breathing thinking human beings in my life. We are all philosophers in the broad sense, as we all think sometimes on the grand issues. Yes?

For awhile, I wrote philosophy from the angle of what I playfully call "Satanism." Now this is just a philosophy that stresses the freedom of an individual to create him or herself. And of course it was largely inspired by Nietzsche, etc., and rock-n-roll, and Shakespeare, and all the great books I've been lucky enough to be exposed to.

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"Yeah, this guy proves in his new books that nothing can ever be proven..."

So far, reading was something he had only experienced in books...

(The above is not my line, but it puts a smile on my face.)

If it weren't for technology, the scientist would be lumped with the priest. We believe what serves us, whether or not we understand it all.

Logical consistency, divorced from practical success or failure, is something akin to painting or music. I talked to a chemist today with a doctorate. He had never explored Cantor, Godel, etc. And yet I have no doubt he would annihilate me at applied mathematics. He's recently invented a new form of paint.

Godel and Turing were obsessed with Disney's Snow White. Godel starved himself to death. Turing's last meal was a cyanide apple.

Hilbert spoke of the paradise that Cantor had created for mathematicians. I think Cantor's aleph notation, to mention a detail, is beautiful, but this paradise line amuses me.

I like math largely because it's as finite as we can get. The natural numbers are the bleached bones of pure intellect.

Of course I can't help but respond to words like "transfinite." Up, up, and away! Spengler was right. We want to fly through space that stretches endlessly. Faustian man lives in the future. No wonder Christ is painted so often as an infant. If the Christ infant symbolizes the project (the ideal future), his mother symbolizes the present which is the spatial-emotional matrix of this project. I lump emotion with the spatial because both are hugely important and yet difficult to symbolize. I refer especially to the paradoxes of Zeno and the number line. How many numbers fit on an inch of number line? As many as you want, and then some.

Our future selves are already present as seeds in the dirt of our present selves. Jung wrote this as well. And our dreams hint at what we shall become, to those who can read the signs. I'm not one of them.

I agree that life is complex, that language is a box of melted crayons. That's why my mathematical paradise is an integer as much as a transcendental. Of course the contrast is beautiful. That's why Euler's identity puts a smile on my face. All my favorite numbers arranged like ducks. And these numbers each hint at a different aspect of mathematics. It's as if they all decided to meet in the middle for a press conference.

1

1 (one) is the center of positive numbers. And -1 is the center of negative numbers. This is counter-intuitional, but quite reasonable.

The smallest positive number is 1 divided by infinity. The largest positive number is infinity divided by one. The logical middle of this spectrum is 1 divided by 1. Or 1 times 1.

Just as 0 (zero) is the border between addition and subtraction, 1 (one) is the border between division and multiplication. Division and multiplication are two ways to write the same numerical-sexual operator. To divide a number by x is to multiply it by 1-over-x.

what is the difference between 1 over infinity and negative 1 over infinity? is it zero ? And does zero equal, for multiplication/division the same thing as -1/infinity? and 1/infinity? Except that the sign can still change the polarity it is multiplied/divided by.

The negatives are an anti-world to the positives. Zero is the strange number between these worlds. And zero covers an infinitely small space of the number line. To speak figuratively but seriously, there is only one number. But this number is twisted into many self-related and self-grounded shapes by our complex notation. The two key manifestations of this number concept are one and zero, or presence and absence.

Only the tiniest point on the number line is absence, or zero. The rest is presence or reverse presence.

Ism

Sensation just is. Emotion just is. No matter how many concepts we pile upon sensation and emotion, they simply are. If we have become blind and deaf to anything, perhaps it is this. Experience is neither explained nor explainable. True, experience includes explanations of many kinds. But a close look at these explanations reveals that they are generally descriptions that integrate various aspects of experience into a causal nexus. And this causal nexus is a learned abstraction.

This causal nexus is so well learned that it is taken for some sort of ultimate truth. Causality is the primary modern superstition. It doesn't matter what Hume pointed out, because nobody reads Hume. And it's not that Hume is so important. Causality is so taken for granted that it has become an invisible prejudice. The invisibility of a prejudice is a measure of its power over us.

This is not to deny the utility of causality, for causality has earned its keep. But let's not make a master of our servant. Let's not mistakenly see the human experience as something boring and explained when it is indeed a strange and terrible miracle.

Self/World

Philosophy often divides experience between subject and object, or self and world. This division is not primary. The self is an abstraction. The self is a concept. The "self" is no more real than Santa Clause. The self and the world are one. Both distinctions are learned and not primary.

Love/Beauty

What we love is beautiful to us. What is beautiful to us we love. Love and Beauty are One. Love-Beauty. Art is difficult but Art is simple.

Perhaps the performing arts are the greatest of all arts. Music especially speaks directly to human emotion as few other mediums can. Acting and dance also take us there, though not as directly perhaps. Movies at their best are a fusion of all of these. And this Total Art goes back at least to Wagner and perhaps all the way back to Greek Tragedy and beyond.

"God" is "Love"

Concepts are idols. If God is a concept, then s/he is also only a proposition. A proposition must always be smaller than Life.

The New Testament has its share of crap, but at its best moments it's as good as anything in Western Foolosophy. Especially when the Jesus character defines God as Love.

"God is Love" means God is a human emotion. There are other good ways to use this word "God" but this is one of the best. The Jesus character contrasted a religion of "truth and spirit" with a religion of law and self-righteousness.

False religion means cooking up some concept of God and the rules for pleasing this concept. True religion is recognizing that God is incarnate in humanity, and that "God" is a feeling, a motive, or simply Love/Beauty.