Resonating with Inspiration
Rhythmic Mimicking
Energetic resonances roaming through the internal and external environments of life flow through the porous barrier of our biochemistry to become perceived. Once perceived, these resonances are energetically imitated by rhythmically shaking our hips, poetically manipulating the shape of our mouths, or plucking the strings of an bowed instrument. For a purpose that, if unraveled, points to the central seed of what it means to be human, this unique mode of reality-interfacing emerges when the structure of these inspirational resonances are mimicked or when artifacts imbued with that residue become crafted.
These resonances, like human signatures, provide an identity for some confluence of forces, some state of being or becoming, that has happened in the past or is happening now. In trying to further define this thing, cultures the world over have created personified representations. Often these are known as "the muses".
One of these muses is Venus. Within the confines of the Greco-Roman mind, this Goddess was the personification of fertility, sexuality, prosperity, and victory. Her form and principles have steeped themselves in the brew of the artistic mind for centuries at least, including the 1879 painting "The Birth of Venus" by William-Adolphe Bouguereau depicted above. Her features have been revered long before the birth of Greco-Roman culture, and many art historians studying prehistoric cave art and the piece-meal remains of archeological digs refer to all those voluptuous nudes dense with the beautiful curvaceous sway of erotic charm as "venus figures".
The bulbous and swaying rhythms evoked by these figures motions us toward an apprehension of the world that breaks radically from the cold contours of Euclidean geometry. No more straight lines, life is curved. Why are these figures so alluring? Perhaps it's an innate aesthetic sense that's tuned to noticing the qualities of unity, harmony, and proportion and when these are expressed in certain compositions, we define it as "beautiful".
If the earth is assumed to be some type of sentient being, then the main purpose of humanity’s aesthetic sense could be to make Nature, or the gaian entelechy if you will, become more aware of itself. Through expression we become mirrors reflecting nature upon itself to aid in the development of self-aware consciousness. By decreasing resistance to the electro-magnetic flow of inspiration, the circuitry of our bodies can resonate kinetically with the victorious sensations of the Netzach sphere.
Creative Injections
The need to express is expressive of our deep needs. Creativity, if looked at widely enough, is a fundamental element to all life. Humans, being life, have simply added an anthropocentric flair to it. A life-way open to frequent injections from the Creative Principle shows us how we are distinct (the part we play in the whole) and how we are similar (the whole we play in our part).
Sometime in the mythical past, back in the days of the time immemorial, the idea of artistic creation emerged. But practical people like historical dates, so in homage to that demographic, let's say that since the Upper Paleolithic of 40,000 years ago and perhaps further, humans have sought to create records of the imagination through visual art, music, and dance. All over the world, skilled people have given form to a mysterious unseen sheen of life by crafting artifacts that communicate ideas, emotions, and experiences to others. Motivations like psycho-spiritual health and mundane utilitarian uses help form what is created.
Although the history for these records of the imagination span countless centuries, within the tumultuous geist of the 20th century, profound changes and expansions percolated through visual art, music, and dance.
Art
The classical understanding of "art" that dominated for hundreds of years before unraveled quick during the 1900s. Photography and other technologies more or less eliminated the utilitarian need to produce exacting reproductions of people or places. Nature-imitation and the importance of objective draftsmanship became eschewed as more subjective renderings of internal and external environments were embraced. An internal truth was sought, one that expressed the intangible and spiritual aspects underlying the surface of daily experience. Early movements like the fauvists, cubists, dadaists, and surrealists, grew in their own right and sort of coalesced into the vision of abstract expressionism. Artists like Jackson Pollock created pieces of action painting by dripping paint over large canvases, placing the artistic emphasis on the activity of painting itself rather than the analytic or literary portrayal of some ancient mythology.
Music
In Northwest Slovenia a piece of cave bear femur with carefully spaced holes, known as the Divje Babe flute, opens up the possibility of musical instruments being constructed as long as 43,000 years ago. Since then, musicians have constructed instruments from bows, strings, and their voice, to communicate emotions, mythologies, and ideas in performance settings simply by alternating the relationship between sounds and silence. These compositions have grown into certain rhythmic structures passed down to newer generations. Sometimes this hampers the spirit of creativity. In
the 1950s and 1960s, jazz musicians like Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus sought to break up the conventions of jazz composition so it could return to its more primitive roots, assumed to be in parts of Africa. By individual and collective improvisation they cracked open new soundscapes of meaning.
Dance
Dancing seems to be one of the oldest modes of expression, probably acting to create group identity in tribal societies long ago --- ecstatic trance-state dancing is still practiced by tribes and rave enthusiasts today.
This form of nonverbal communication has been done in spiritual and performance settings to express emotions, create a collective identity, to exercise, and for social interaction. By coordinating breath and body movements in aesthetically pleasing and emotionally powerful ways, music, thought, and emotion can become rhythmically interpreted. Like most forms of expression, a conservative tradition can lead to a lack of vitality. To liberate dance from this stultifying state, twentieth-century innovators like Isadora Duncan, Merce Cunningham, and Loie Fuller dressed dancers in loose clothing and bare feet as they crafted kinesthetic expressions full of athletic leaps, free-flowing movements, and unconventional style's borrowed from non-western cultures. This grows into modern contemporary dance.
Oscillating Collectives
The above picture was taken at Drop City, an intentional community operating under the assumption that art was "all non-compulsive activity". The inertia of robotism that plagues the activities of daily life was be short-circuited so that our senses can allow a continual in-flow of energetic in-spiration, animating us like the breath of Athena does for the inert clay-creatures crafted by Prometheus. Once the muse becomes em-bodied, a distinct vibrational field oscillates around us. This energy, which has become integrated into our subjective experience, can be passed along to accrete into a collective resonance. This process is called entrainment. Back in the 1600s, Christiaan Huygens found out that two mechanical clocks positioned close-by would eventually synchronize their rhythms and function harmoniously. Likewise when two biological clocks (i.e. humans) are nearby, their rhythms can synchronize and function harmoniously.
In bold white letters five paragraphs below the opening title on the ifdawn.com website is written a perfect summation of Netzach's potentials: it represents the outgoing quality of the ego, expressed by those who desire to change the world forever by their presence." The old adage of life imitating art shines its wisdom once more.
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