The Time is Now. The Library is On Fire!
THE TIME IS NOW. THE LIBRARY IS ON FIRE!
From the first cave paintings, Greek and Roman myths, the Dream of the Rood, the first fragment of music documented onto stone, through the ages to the first printing press, to motion pictures as well as different mediums of sound recording (wax cylinders, 78 rpm acetates, magnetic 8-track and cassette tape, vinyl records, compact discs, hard drive storage) and other various modern-day media – man has struggled to contain and document his ephemeral ideas.
HISTORY IS EPHEMERA
These acts of recording ideas for the purpose of relaying and communicating them have always been a struggle for humankind, and a feeble one at that.
This is, essentially, why the Library is on Fire.
Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. Man’s feeble attempt to make his mark on history, throughout the ages, reflects these facts. A prime and extremely literal example of this is the destruction of the Alexandria Library of Egypt in ancient times.
Though the perpetrator of this loss of human historical information is still greatly conjectured, it matters very little who did so (though interesting in relation to our assertions, the guesses of who burned the historical information contained in the library to which we are completely ignorant – we do not know who burned the information to which we do not know!) The irony is that these historians have no idea what information was contained therein.
Man had spent the ages of his intellectual dawning fighting against the ephemeral nature of history, creating cuneiform and whole documented systems of communication – only for these recordings to be lost for future generations.
Laughable or sad: you decide.
And in the grand schematics of our world, indeed it truly “makes no difference, it’s all the same”** as DEVO stated. One can wear a smiling-faced mask, one can wear a frown. All masks will inevitably drop to the stage. All will be forgotten.
Every living thing’s cumulative consciousness is eventually reduced to dirt, a post-it note with the words “everything I still remember” tossed in the trash, taken to the landfill to eventually decay to oblivion. The pursuit of information and knowledge storage, as we have said, is a feeble one, destined for failure on all fronts.
Furthermore, knowledge and information even in their “functional” and “proper” use are weak, shaky, often deceptive things. Someone speaks an assertion, a declaration to us, and not only will we one day lose that assertion through memory loss or death, but we can also not trust the validity of this knowledge given to us: lies, myths, fictions, the failing, vague sets of symbols we call language, the subjectivity of experience, even the ignorance seeping into said “knowledge” all serve to make said knowledge and information extremely problematic in our futile but instinctual pursuit of truth and wisdom.
These principles may seem nihilistic to some, but this is not the case. Situationist, maybe. The Library is on Fire is merely the case stated. How one reacts to this fire, this decay, is where the outcome lies. The world is, after all, reduced only to our cumulative subjective consciousnesses.
So, aside from inevitable decay, information may be faulty, improbably, unprovable. This often leads to physical and psychological human suffering, as well as unnecessary exertion of energy – another form of destruction. Many, unknowingly, stoke their own fire.
APATHY, PROACTIVE FLAWED THINKING AND DECAY ARE AKIN.
The poet/artist understands and makes use to his advantage these crises in language through the use of poetry, indeed he uses wordplay and mystery (the crumbling faults of written and spoken symbols) to his advantage. Cummings is one such example. Stevens makes eloquent and heady proof of these declarations***, taking whole words out of their construct of context, so as to provide pure mystery, wherein the reader is faced to confront the faults of information operating within logic’s systems.
However, the poet is not (usually) a hurtful creature: the priest and preacher most assuredly is. The main difference is that the poet’s assertions are aligned with no particular doctrine and are not taken as an improvable set of facts. The successful poet points to new corners of thought for the reader to consider, the writer of religion pushes the reader into a psychological labyrinth with faith (ignorance without skepticism) as a starting point and potentially dangerous actions (Holy war, intolerance, division of other religions, etc.) as an end.
So it is that the Library is on Fire can be a good thing. If the library is filled with flawed information, the destruction of this information is necessary to start on paths toward new information. But it is only a partial fire. The library, as long as there are people to read and write its information, will never burn completely to the ground. The library is perpetually on fire.
A NEW CORNER
Art can be created in any capacity, but the only way art can stay important to an audience and an artist is through an evolution, a pushing forward, a continual breakthrough. How these new corners come about can be can be deceptively simple and excruciatingly complex.
THE TRIANGLE
As Kandinsky used the symbol of the triangle to represent the state of are, so will we, but we will make a few alterations to update our specific situation.
Discovery
When a song is first heard by a listener, it is new to that listener. If the listener chooses to like or dislike the song (based on varying levels of aesthetic pleasure and ability to relate), the action has, regardless, become an evolution of art.
However, art through commodification (see Adorno) weakly ensures at least one (if not both) of these things:
- the quality of the art has progressed or regressed to the level of a public release
- art has progressed in some way
This is not to say that the specific art piece (song, book, movie, painting, etc.) has broken aesthetic or artistic ground, merely that it has been placed into the public arena and therefore it has been decorated as having some basic functional quality.
These are two examples of functioning art that differ greatly in their unique aesthetic tendencies.
On a purely artistic level, however, the quality of different art pieces can differ greatly, regardless of public embrace and celebration.
Often, this celebration comes almost completely from the mass production of the art – record companies are designed to shove hot new music down the collective throats of a record-buying public. And they use all tools available – manufacturing, merchandising, live performance, marketing, publicity and public relations, as well as payola airplay tactics. The record company does this for a number of factors, rarely is it ever because of the potential for aesthetic breakthrough the art contains. In mainstream selling terms, art such as this runs too much of a risk of being an unviable or “lesser” commodity.
Sometimes they get it right, but mostly they tend to slow the triangle down.
A SAD WRENCH IN THE WHEEL
As General Boy of DEVO so succinctly summed it up:
“I request your attention to some serious thoughts. Artists and performers are usually good looking guys and gals who couldn’t hold a real job. Entertainment is sometimes the excuse by which these people perpetuate their selfish hoax. I ask all of you to join DEVO’s efforts to correct this situation from the inside out.” (TMWMTM 25:30)
So it is with this line of thinking that we align ourselves, along with DEVO, Kandinsky, Cummings, Stevens and Char, in declaring that ours is an aesthetic struggle to further art. You are either with us, or walking around aimlessly in some field somewhere. Regardless of whether you are an artist or an audience member, the effort to recognize this forward path is all you need.
Art has the ability to be avant-garde without being obscure, mysterious or esoteric. The avant-garde can be quite palatable to many. The Beatles are proof of this, as their art was embraced even though they abandoned old forms for new, more eschewed directions.
THE LIBRARY IS UNDERWATER
Every artist is a fighter, though the fight is a good fight. Though the artist is always invariably the underdog (either through unintended obscurity or the eventual death and decay of the artist/art), he must still keep fighting. It is during this fight that the artist finds themselves instinctually putting up their dukes, ready to throw the banal a surprise punch, most of the time only to get TKO’d through lack of talent, tools, or taste. The K.O. will inevitably happen to the artist or the piece of art – but the reigning champion will be art – as long as the art and an audience has survived.
Figure 7: the library is underwater
THE TIME IS NOW!
Not all good artists create good art. Furthermore, an audience’s taste for art is subjective. So one person may perceive a piece of art as “succeeding” (either in craft or concept) even as many others agree it has failed. The artist can either be sure or unsure of the validity of their own art. It makes no difference. Ultimately, a piece of art will stand on its own, for better or worse.
To paraphrase Ritchie Blackmore, “A successful musician is a success on their own terms. A musician who has popular success only means the music they make is fashionable.”
Regardless, it is within these hurdles that art succeeds. When can the artist be sure that his art ever happened? In the moment, the present. Subsequently, the artist can be reassured of its existence through the historical nature of memory, and the lifespan of the art. The latter, however, is an afterthought, a serendipity. The moment of creation is the only true time in which art succeeds for the artist (an audience depends on a standing, functional piece of art to relate, as in a live performance of music). This is a very Buddhist ideal – that perfection is in the pursuit of perfection, not an attainable end to the means but the means themselves and their culmination.
A SAD WRENCH IN THE WHEEL OF ART
The process of making art should be free, and limited only to the tools and talent available to the artist. However, the process of the release of art often has fools who come along with it.
These people only stand to get in the way of the artists’ vision. They may think they are helping, but the best ones are smart enough to cast off such ignorant posturing. These people get involved with art for any number of the wrong reasons: vanity, ego, fear, greed. Sometimes these troglodytic hinderers are a necessary evil, but they are to be avoided at all costs. These idiots will arise more frequently as the popularity of the art increases – the artist battling these true soldiers of decay and lies is often the nature of the processing of art for mass consumption, the nature of celebrity and a sad fact of the major visual art, film and music industries.
TAKE YOUR STAND. ONLY YOU CAN DO IT.
There has never been a truer maxim to the artist than, “if you want it done right, you must do it yourself.” This does not mean that you cannot oversee others who are creating with you, or that you cannot entrust others to be responsible for a piece of art you work together to create. But you must be careful who you work with. A functioning crew works together to perpetuate and execute an artistic idea, the outcome being the piece of art as intended during inception, or something infinitely more profound. Furthermore, this execution should be a pleasant experience. Blockheads will only make it an unpleasant experience.
A lot can be done in one day.
You have the power, regardless of lack of tools or talent. Look to the materials available, and the energy within. What you desire may not coincide with what you can accomplish, but these are merely limits that, if perpetuated, will become possible in differing and ever-altering ways.
The Time is Now! Take your stand, soldiers against intellectual decay! Take your stand, poets of broken languages! Take your stand, artists painting on flaming canvases! The Library is on Fire!
Endnotes:
* here we maintain the masculine gender, for ease of use. No offense, ladies.
** “Wiggly World” by DEVO. Here the term is taken somewhat out of context, relating the declaration to the ephemeral nature of history, as opposed to fashion.
*** see Wallace Stevens’ “Add this to Rhetoric” and “Connoisseur of Chaos”
Devo. The Men Who Make The Music. VHS. WB.1979.
- The Library is on Fire: an inherent fact
From the first cave paintings, Greek and Roman myths, the Dream of the Rood, the first fragment of music documented onto stone, through the ages to the first printing press, to motion pictures as well as different mediums of sound recording (wax cylinders, 78 rpm acetates, magnetic 8-track and cassette tape, vinyl records, compact discs, hard drive storage) and other various modern-day media – man has struggled to contain and document his ephemeral ideas.
HISTORY IS EPHEMERA
These acts of recording ideas for the purpose of relaying and communicating them have always been a struggle for humankind, and a feeble one at that.
This is, essentially, why the Library is on Fire.
Art is ephemeral. Life is ephemeral. Man’s feeble attempt to make his mark on history, throughout the ages, reflects these facts. A prime and extremely literal example of this is the destruction of the Alexandria Library of Egypt in ancient times.
Though the perpetrator of this loss of human historical information is still greatly conjectured, it matters very little who did so (though interesting in relation to our assertions, the guesses of who burned the historical information contained in the library to which we are completely ignorant – we do not know who burned the information to which we do not know!) The irony is that these historians have no idea what information was contained therein.
Man had spent the ages of his intellectual dawning fighting against the ephemeral nature of history, creating cuneiform and whole documented systems of communication – only for these recordings to be lost for future generations.
Laughable or sad: you decide.
And in the grand schematics of our world, indeed it truly “makes no difference, it’s all the same”** as DEVO stated. One can wear a smiling-faced mask, one can wear a frown. All masks will inevitably drop to the stage. All will be forgotten.
Every living thing’s cumulative consciousness is eventually reduced to dirt, a post-it note with the words “everything I still remember” tossed in the trash, taken to the landfill to eventually decay to oblivion. The pursuit of information and knowledge storage, as we have said, is a feeble one, destined for failure on all fronts.
Furthermore, knowledge and information even in their “functional” and “proper” use are weak, shaky, often deceptive things. Someone speaks an assertion, a declaration to us, and not only will we one day lose that assertion through memory loss or death, but we can also not trust the validity of this knowledge given to us: lies, myths, fictions, the failing, vague sets of symbols we call language, the subjectivity of experience, even the ignorance seeping into said “knowledge” all serve to make said knowledge and information extremely problematic in our futile but instinctual pursuit of truth and wisdom.
These principles may seem nihilistic to some, but this is not the case. Situationist, maybe. The Library is on Fire is merely the case stated. How one reacts to this fire, this decay, is where the outcome lies. The world is, after all, reduced only to our cumulative subjective consciousnesses.
So, aside from inevitable decay, information may be faulty, improbably, unprovable. This often leads to physical and psychological human suffering, as well as unnecessary exertion of energy – another form of destruction. Many, unknowingly, stoke their own fire.
APATHY, PROACTIVE FLAWED THINKING AND DECAY ARE AKIN.
The poet/artist understands and makes use to his advantage these crises in language through the use of poetry, indeed he uses wordplay and mystery (the crumbling faults of written and spoken symbols) to his advantage. Cummings is one such example. Stevens makes eloquent and heady proof of these declarations***, taking whole words out of their construct of context, so as to provide pure mystery, wherein the reader is faced to confront the faults of information operating within logic’s systems.
However, the poet is not (usually) a hurtful creature: the priest and preacher most assuredly is. The main difference is that the poet’s assertions are aligned with no particular doctrine and are not taken as an improvable set of facts. The successful poet points to new corners of thought for the reader to consider, the writer of religion pushes the reader into a psychological labyrinth with faith (ignorance without skepticism) as a starting point and potentially dangerous actions (Holy war, intolerance, division of other religions, etc.) as an end.
So it is that the Library is on Fire can be a good thing. If the library is filled with flawed information, the destruction of this information is necessary to start on paths toward new information. But it is only a partial fire. The library, as long as there are people to read and write its information, will never burn completely to the ground. The library is perpetually on fire.
A NEW CORNER
Art can be created in any capacity, but the only way art can stay important to an audience and an artist is through an evolution, a pushing forward, a continual breakthrough. How these new corners come about can be can be deceptively simple and excruciatingly complex.
THE TRIANGLE
As Kandinsky used the symbol of the triangle to represent the state of are, so will we, but we will make a few alterations to update our specific situation.
Discovery
When a song is first heard by a listener, it is new to that listener. If the listener chooses to like or dislike the song (based on varying levels of aesthetic pleasure and ability to relate), the action has, regardless, become an evolution of art.
However, art through commodification (see Adorno) weakly ensures at least one (if not both) of these things:
- the quality of the art has progressed or regressed to the level of a public release
- art has progressed in some way
This is not to say that the specific art piece (song, book, movie, painting, etc.) has broken aesthetic or artistic ground, merely that it has been placed into the public arena and therefore it has been decorated as having some basic functional quality.
These are two examples of functioning art that differ greatly in their unique aesthetic tendencies.
On a purely artistic level, however, the quality of different art pieces can differ greatly, regardless of public embrace and celebration.
Often, this celebration comes almost completely from the mass production of the art – record companies are designed to shove hot new music down the collective throats of a record-buying public. And they use all tools available – manufacturing, merchandising, live performance, marketing, publicity and public relations, as well as payola airplay tactics. The record company does this for a number of factors, rarely is it ever because of the potential for aesthetic breakthrough the art contains. In mainstream selling terms, art such as this runs too much of a risk of being an unviable or “lesser” commodity.
Sometimes they get it right, but mostly they tend to slow the triangle down.
A SAD WRENCH IN THE WHEEL
As General Boy of DEVO so succinctly summed it up:
“I request your attention to some serious thoughts. Artists and performers are usually good looking guys and gals who couldn’t hold a real job. Entertainment is sometimes the excuse by which these people perpetuate their selfish hoax. I ask all of you to join DEVO’s efforts to correct this situation from the inside out.” (TMWMTM 25:30)
So it is with this line of thinking that we align ourselves, along with DEVO, Kandinsky, Cummings, Stevens and Char, in declaring that ours is an aesthetic struggle to further art. You are either with us, or walking around aimlessly in some field somewhere. Regardless of whether you are an artist or an audience member, the effort to recognize this forward path is all you need.
Art has the ability to be avant-garde without being obscure, mysterious or esoteric. The avant-garde can be quite palatable to many. The Beatles are proof of this, as their art was embraced even though they abandoned old forms for new, more eschewed directions.
THE LIBRARY IS UNDERWATER
Every artist is a fighter, though the fight is a good fight. Though the artist is always invariably the underdog (either through unintended obscurity or the eventual death and decay of the artist/art), he must still keep fighting. It is during this fight that the artist finds themselves instinctually putting up their dukes, ready to throw the banal a surprise punch, most of the time only to get TKO’d through lack of talent, tools, or taste. The K.O. will inevitably happen to the artist or the piece of art – but the reigning champion will be art – as long as the art and an audience has survived.
Figure 7: the library is underwater
THE TIME IS NOW!
Not all good artists create good art. Furthermore, an audience’s taste for art is subjective. So one person may perceive a piece of art as “succeeding” (either in craft or concept) even as many others agree it has failed. The artist can either be sure or unsure of the validity of their own art. It makes no difference. Ultimately, a piece of art will stand on its own, for better or worse.
To paraphrase Ritchie Blackmore, “A successful musician is a success on their own terms. A musician who has popular success only means the music they make is fashionable.”
Regardless, it is within these hurdles that art succeeds. When can the artist be sure that his art ever happened? In the moment, the present. Subsequently, the artist can be reassured of its existence through the historical nature of memory, and the lifespan of the art. The latter, however, is an afterthought, a serendipity. The moment of creation is the only true time in which art succeeds for the artist (an audience depends on a standing, functional piece of art to relate, as in a live performance of music). This is a very Buddhist ideal – that perfection is in the pursuit of perfection, not an attainable end to the means but the means themselves and their culmination.
A SAD WRENCH IN THE WHEEL OF ART
The process of making art should be free, and limited only to the tools and talent available to the artist. However, the process of the release of art often has fools who come along with it.
These people only stand to get in the way of the artists’ vision. They may think they are helping, but the best ones are smart enough to cast off such ignorant posturing. These people get involved with art for any number of the wrong reasons: vanity, ego, fear, greed. Sometimes these troglodytic hinderers are a necessary evil, but they are to be avoided at all costs. These idiots will arise more frequently as the popularity of the art increases – the artist battling these true soldiers of decay and lies is often the nature of the processing of art for mass consumption, the nature of celebrity and a sad fact of the major visual art, film and music industries.
TAKE YOUR STAND. ONLY YOU CAN DO IT.
There has never been a truer maxim to the artist than, “if you want it done right, you must do it yourself.” This does not mean that you cannot oversee others who are creating with you, or that you cannot entrust others to be responsible for a piece of art you work together to create. But you must be careful who you work with. A functioning crew works together to perpetuate and execute an artistic idea, the outcome being the piece of art as intended during inception, or something infinitely more profound. Furthermore, this execution should be a pleasant experience. Blockheads will only make it an unpleasant experience.
A lot can be done in one day.
You have the power, regardless of lack of tools or talent. Look to the materials available, and the energy within. What you desire may not coincide with what you can accomplish, but these are merely limits that, if perpetuated, will become possible in differing and ever-altering ways.
The Time is Now! Take your stand, soldiers against intellectual decay! Take your stand, poets of broken languages! Take your stand, artists painting on flaming canvases! The Library is on Fire!
Endnotes:
* here we maintain the masculine gender, for ease of use. No offense, ladies.
** “Wiggly World” by DEVO. Here the term is taken somewhat out of context, relating the declaration to the ephemeral nature of history, as opposed to fashion.
*** see Wallace Stevens’ “Add this to Rhetoric” and “Connoisseur of Chaos”
Devo. The Men Who Make The Music. VHS. WB.1979.