Mystics, artists, and Ben Franklin
With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings. Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
Timeless pillars of the human experience have never been understood, and never will be. From generation to generation, a corpus of perennial mysteries holds ineffable.
Of course, with our sciences and our histories we also have silos of observable, stable facts. Things to sink our teeth into—a confidence that most things are known and it is simply a matter of having the discipline to sift through archives to learn exactly what happened as it did.
But when we get into the realm of emotion, experience, consciousness, the substrate that most dictates the qualities of our life, from birth to grave, most of that has never really been captured in a resolution adequate enough to resonate with our unspoken, unarticulated inner feelings.
And the mysteries are not just timeless; our situation mutates at a rate that our great-grandfathers probably could not conceive. It is urgent to see through the mysteries of our weirdening present. Urgency ... this is the difference between the mystic and the artist. The mystic is immersed in a world of ineffable wonder, at all times, and sees no need to capture it into a bottle, for it is infinite, and it is their moment-to-moment relationship to it that matters. Why make a song or painting or essay? Those float in the ether, available to everyone, at any time. Let them find it themselves. But the artist is the fool who bottles lightning, for their own sake and preservation, but also to share it with those who are not looking. Th mystic sees. The artist sees and captures, maybe shares, but doesn't care about its reception. They bear no responsibility of interpretation. How could they control that, anyway? This is precisely one of those things that you have to have the wisdom to know that you cannot control.
But beyond mystics and artists are the Ben Franklins, people who think in terms of civic systems, who strive to build new architectures for people to interact and be within. Of course, megamachines exist. All day, we shift in and out of civic systems, yet not ones that care about mystics, artists, or the inner lives of anyone else. They are mostly extractive. Can we not build better things? The builder is an underlooked role, because all our psyches are underpinned by a particular machinery, half-emergent, but half-designed. And so there's value in traversing up and down the stack of mystic/artist/builder. You cannot just build, for the specialist builder is a mercenary, employed by capitalists with no vision or virtue. But a self-contained solo-builder can build infrastructure, even if it's local and quaint and modest, guided by his own principles, his own experience.
You cannot build anything worthwhile unless you embody the lens of the artist, making for making's sake, and the mystic's seeing for seeings sake, because only from those gaseous states can they crystallize a purpose that's worth building for.