Unscripted continuity.

Summerhill Pyramid Winery June 2022

Since culture is itself a poiesis,i all of its participants are poietai – inventors, makers, artists, storytellers, mythologists. They are not, however, makers of actualities, but makers of possibilities. The creativity of culture has no outcome, no conclusion. It does not result in art works, artifacts, products. Creativity is a continuity that engenders itself in others.ii “Artists do not create objects, but create by way of objects” (Rank).

Art is not art, therefore, except as it leads to an engendering creativity in its beholders. Whoever takes possession of the objects of art has not taken possession of the art.

Since art is never possession, and always possibility, nothing possessed can have the status of art. If art cannot become property, property is never art – as property. Property draws attention to titles, points backward toward a finished time. Art is dramatic, opening always forward, beginning something that cannot be finished.

Because it is not conclusive, but engendering, culture has no established catalogue of acceptable activities. We are not artists by reason of having mastered certain skills or exercising specified techniques. Art has no scripted roles for its performers. It is precisely because it has none that it is art. Artistry can be found anywhere; indeed, it can only be found anywhere. One must be surprised by it. It cannot be looked for. We do not watch artists to see what they do, but watch what persons do and discover the artistry in it.

Artists cannot be trained. One does not become an artist by acquiring certain skills or techniques, though one can use any number of skills and techniques in artistic activity. The creative is found in anyone who is prepared for surprise. Such a person cannot go to school to be an artist, but can only go to school as an artist.

Therefore, poets do not “fit” into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their “places” seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed, and its metaphysics ideological.

True poets lead no one unawares. It is nothing other than awareness that poets – that is, creators of all sorts – seek. They do not display their art so as to make it appear real; they display the real in a way that reveals it to be art.iii

Lake Okanagan June 2022 - 2

Wisdom and Spirit of the universe!
Thou Soul that art the eternity of thought!
That giv’st to forms and images a breath
And everlasting motion! not in vain,
By day or star-light thus from my first dawn
Of Childhood didst Thou intertwine for me
The passions that build up our human Soul,
Not with the mean and vulgar works of Man,
But with high objects, with enduring things,
With life and nature, purifying thus
The elements of feeling and of thought,
And sanctifying, by such discipline,
Both pain and fear, until we recognize
A grandeur in the beatings of the heartiv

And yes, I’m back in the Okanagan this week! Touching grass

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  1. Explains Thomas Martin of Wheaton College (archived):

    Poiesis is not the lyrical impulse associated with poetry as much as it is the making by which the poet (poietes) produces lively enactments associated with literature as it reflects on the nature of things. Moving beyond Plato’s notion of mimesis as a literal or passive copy of what happens to be, Aristotle conceived of poiesis as ranging over what might be in order to create a high-level product of the human intellect for reflection and the development of character.

  2. Indeed this was one of Virgil’s greatest gifts: empowerment.
  3. via Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse, 1986. 
  4. via Wordworth’s The Prelude.

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