Jim Bauer     
                                                  Final Paper 
                                                  Humanities 256
                                                  Esthetics 
                        GOD AND SISYPHUS 
                                in 
                        LOW AND HIGH ART 
     Beauty:  all of us enjoy it, but none of us quite understands
it.  How can we understand it, when we cannot render it concrete
and dissect it?  We can only experience it.  Let us then render our
ideas about esthetics in esthetic terms, myths and metaphors.   
     Let us begin our search for knowledge of art with a myth: 
the myth of Sisyphus, pushing his boulder to the top of the hill,
only to have it slide down again, and again, and again... Sisyphus
does not do this for the exercise; rather, he is being punished. 
His punishment has been well-chosen:  From within his eternal
struggle, he wishes for an eternal reward:  the resolution of all
struggle.   
     Sisyphus is an accurate representation of time for me:  I
struggle and struggle and struggle, but then I look at infinity,
and realize how little difference it has made. 
     And that reward of eternal rest, unreachable for us mortals,
is Time as experienced by the gods.  The Greek gods, the Christian
God, it doesn't matter....   
     But let us ask a rhetorical question:  how did the gods 
manage to steal eternal tranquility to their side of the grave? 
I say they did not steal it; it went there to be with  
them, because that is its natural place. 
     But, let us find out which realm of Time art belongs in.  It
seems to belong in neither; gods and mortals alike must share it. 
How immense we have made art seem!  It looms above us now, God-like
in its omnipresence.  But has art become bigger than God?  It has
if God is just a fiction that compels our imagination to believe
it is not fiction.  The strength of this belief makes me wonder if
the supernatural is nothing but a wish-fulfillment fantasy.   
     Seen as a wish, religion becomes a type of art.  But seen as
reality, it becomes the highest possible manifestation of art,
because implicit in any artwork is the wish to experience it as
reality.  But the theologian can offer us a fantasy with the claim
that it actually exists.   
     The religious view of the world thus compels us deeper and
deeper into itself, and so, we ride the crest of a wave of
eternally irrefutable speculations, into the mystic, where we have
found that reward which dwells with the gods:  death is now no
longer a barrier which keeps the living from this experience, for
mysticism is an identification so complete that the I-Thou barrier
dissolves, transporting us out of ourselves, and into the Other.
     Do I hear atheists shouting that unless I produce a deity,
all I have done is rendered is a poetic hyperbole? 
     There is no need for a deity here.  Remember that deities are
beautiful because they are created out of fantasies.  Take the
realiity out of a god, and you have not destroyed the god, you have
merely removed him from under the theologian's scalpel, putting him
under the psychologist's, instead.  In doing so, you have changed
the entity's label from "mysticism" to "altered states of con-
sciousness." 
     Before there was art, there was nature, before there was man,
there were waterfalls, forests, and soft, furry things which cried
out in the night.  So, before man could see beauty in man-made
things, he had to be able to see it in things he never made.  But
the experience is one of finding purposiveness in nature.  And
whether we believe that the Artificer exists and is God, or merely
the product of our own imagination, the pleasure remains the same. 
     What is necessary is to experience a compassionate intel-
ligence manipulating events, thus giving us the comfort of knowing
that our lives are not controlled by random, uncontrolled forces;
the same sense of reward Sisyphus strives for:  the knowledge that
our actions are not in vain.   
     And this experience of nature is mystical, because it is a
breaking of the barriers between Self and Nature; if I see evidence
of another mind controlling nature, that distinction becomes
confused.  My imagination is no longer limited to myself alone, it
moves outwards and mingles with rocks and stars and such, seeing
them as products of an imagination similar to mine. 
     But this awe at nature must be experienced by a mystic.  
Unless one has the conviction that experienced purposiveness is in
fact evidence of a deity's purpose, the nagging sense that one is
only fantasizing prevents the experience from assuming a sense of
total reality.  The esthete experiences eauty, but also remembers
to keep himself apart from it, while the mystic in his enthusiasm
inextricably entangles himself, his God, and his experience of
beauty. 
     But yet, even if we deny mysticism, the yearning to break down
the barriers between reality and fantasy lingers.  If one cannot
satisfy this yearning in nature, one must turn to art.  Though I
can deny the reality of God, when faced by a painting or a novel,
I cannot doubt that the world it depicts has a creator--see, there
is his signature in the right-hand corner, and his autograph under
the cover!  
     Now, having found a creator, I can allow myself the enthusiasm
to entangle myself inextricably with his creation.  To do this, I
drop the partitions between myself and the object I contemplate. 
I experience the joy of wish-fulfillment, and I also enjoy a world
whose every detail is purposive, because it has been crafted to be
that way.  The more completely I can conceive of the reality of a
work, the more I experience this joy--conversely, the more poorly
executed a work of art is, the more frustrating it is, continually
alienating me from the world it is trying to portray. 
     Do I hear objections?  Do I hear impressionists, abstrac-
tionists, avant-garde-ists, and all who do not work in realistic
styles, clamoring at me, claiming that I do not explain art that
is not realistic? 
     But I have done nothing of the kind, for it is, in fact, 
non-realistic art that benefits most from my philosophy.  Those
who only admire art which imitates life are lazy.  How much easier
it is to experience something which is like reality, than to
experience something truly alien!  Yet how wonderful it is to
experience the alien.  Look at a cubist painting, filled with
planes stacked upon each other in violation of all the laws of
perspective.  But being normally constrained to perceive within
these laws makes me wish it could sometimes be otherwise.  How nice
of Picasso, to have constructed this alternative world, so if I
make the attempt to apprehend it, I have discovered a new way of
using my eyes.   
     But once the fusion with art has occurred, art chooses to
remain Godlike.  Just as the mystic perceives God embracing the
whole world, so the esthete subsequently finds art embracing the
entire world.  Once I have perceived the world in a cubist
painting, I need never again be limited by perspective.  Art breaks
up my experience of the world as a stream of homogeneous sensations
by allowing me to experience alternate realities. 
     Life, everyday, banal life, is like a river:  it flows 
unbroken, until absorbed in the sea of death.  When it decides
where to carve its path, it is not adventurous, it does not scale
the heights of imagination.  Rather, it is moved by the Spirit of
Gravity, always seeking the lowest ground:  the most ordinary,
logical interpretation of the world consistent with sensual
evidence.  But art jumbles this topography, so that the course is
frequently interrupted by breaks where the current tumbles freely
thru Voids of thought and imagination before returning to earth
again.  At these points of illumination, reality is briefly
suspended, and life is interpreted imaginatively, as though it were
art.  These moments of free play of the imagination are the same
as the discovery of beauty (purposiveness) in nature, but made more
numerous by art, which has trained us in seeing them and seeking
them. 
     But art is like a mystic's experience of his God in yet 
another way:  Come with me now, and let us stand before a painting
in our imagination.  But what of our experience of each other?  It
has gone away, left behind when we left ourselves behind to enter
the painting.  And the painting has no room inside it for barriers: 
if we share an experience of Oneness within the painting, then we
are at one with one another. 
     But I have said that there are two sorts of time, and art is
bigger than either.  Yet, so far, I have only talked of art as
transcendent.  But what of Sisyphus?  Sisyphus must have art; we
all must have art.  But if Sisyphus is not allowed the transcen-
dent, what sort of art could he have?  
     His realm is pop art.  This man, trapped in a never-ending
continuation of the misery of mortality, perpetually pushes his
boulder up a hill of cosmic books, mysteries, westerns and
black-light posters.  No wonder he cannot get any footing! 
Sisyphus, symbol of eternal struggle, living in the realm of cheap
thrills.   
     The masters often require a good deal of effort to appreciate,
but the popular arts are, by their very nature, easily accessible. 
It seems less necessary to struggle for an enraptured fusion with
Shakespeare, when Marvel Comics can provide me with a similar
experience in an immediate, unrefined form:  placing myself inside
King Lear requires effort, if only to understand Shakespeare's
language, while placing myself inside the Incredible Hulk, with his
monosyllabic vocabulary, takes no effort whatsoever. 
     Yet once the initial identification with a work has been made,
the pop arts actually prove to be more frustrating.  Just as we
rode into the mystic on a wave alternating between faith and doubt,
when in the presence of a great work, I am sucked into it by a
similar wave.  My imagination constructs a meaning for the work,
which I cling to until I perceive anomalies which force me to cast
it off.  But the wish to understand the creator's motives remains,
so with faith in his mastery of his craft, I repeat the process 
again.  Even the smallest detail, in the hands of a master, becomes
a source of inexhaustible speculation.  When the senile astronaut
breaks the wine glass near the end of "2001," the feeling that
Kubrick deliberately hid some meaning in that seemingly trivial act
compels me to continually rework it in different symbolic systems. 
I move onward, deeper into the Work, led on by an elusive resolu-
tion that yet escapes me.   
     If I try this experience with a black-light poster, it does
not work.  The print does not have the infinite depth I require of
it.
     Yet the pop arts remain appealing.  Because they offer the
inverse of the experience of the Classics:  they encourage me to
absorb them, so that I play the role of a God myself.  But religion
and science both deny my omnipotence, so I am constrained to
exercise infinite power only in my fantasies.  When I daydream,
there is a deeper fantasy:  being God; making my puppets dance to
my wishes. 
     But yet, I understand the pop artist's fantasies, for they
are actually my own.  Like the pop artist, I am a product of my
times.  The novels of Philip K. Dick can communicate their
intuitions to me, for many of them are already implicit in the
science fiction and counter-cultures.   
     Sharing of imperfectly resolved visions only encourages the
genre writer to try to resolve them himself.  Pop art is an active
art form; it encourages further activity.   
     But some pop artists escape their dismal future, by oc-
casionally leaping outside of their genre confinement, such as
Shakespeare:  admired by the masses, admired to this day by the
scholars. 
     And, as we travel thru the history of art, we can look at
Sisyphus, and see that, ultimately, the boulder he is carrying is
the history of art. 
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