... but I now have a job. I just got hired on contract to Safeway as an analyst at their corporate headquarters in Pleasanton.

Fuckin' yay. I start on Monday.

I just read an article in National Geographic about artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude who do ephemeral art. I wrote them an email relating this story about my own philosophy regarding art and its inherent impermance. Caution: spelling is not art. ;) I rarely blog but I wanted to save this story for future edits. So read it or not!

While at a weeklong art festival I was priveleged to partake in the building of a structure which was meant to have several stages of artistic and spiritual realization. The intricate design and erection of the structure was the first stage ... and it was magnificent; layers upon layers of wood cutouts arrayed to form a Temple. It was called the Temple of Tears and the interpretation of its purpose was left to the admirer and participant to some extent. The designer and builder was usually on hand and encouraged participants to add to the meaning of the piece by writing on it or inserting personal objects of significance ... for the Temple at the end of the festival would be burned.

The Temple was built to be burned, designed to be burned, and the people who added things and thoughts knew they would go up in flames and smoke.

All week people contributed to the Temple and added their own meaning and significance to an already beautiful work of engineering, sweat, and conception. And on the last day it burned.

While watching this beatiful thing catch fire, the watchers and builders and contributers, I was moved by an appreciation for all the energy and determination and soul searching it took to bring it to this predetermined end. Yet, the appreciation I felt was emotionally superficial compared to my thoughts and emotions that coalesced nearly instantaneously when I was asked a simple question by a fellow watcher.

"Why is burning it so important?"

Thoughts swirled in my head and in some manner sorted themselves into a response, which is normally quite difficult for me on short notice. "Art is a person's or group's physical attempt at realizing an abstract ideal. The actual piece that is created cannot possibly fully or accurately meet the artists conception due to the constraints of material, time, or available funds. Burning the art, in my opinion, is the artists beautiful way of erasing his imperfect attempt and releasing the ideal back into the perfect form which is only and idea and can exist only in the mind."

I am not normally particularly philosophically inclined so my response surprised me and I have thought a great deal about it since. No art is permenant or a perfect realization of the artists conception. Impermenance adds a time factor to the appreciation of art. After it is gone, the only way to appreciate it is through memory or by a specific interpretation through another medium like film. A great deal of art can be made from others ideas and the actual implementation of them (note the art made with photography on Flickr.com of the Gates) but it is an interpretation only. Art using nature and fabric, the way Christo and Jeanne-Claude do, is made even more fleeting by being different at every moment from every angle ... it can never really be experienced fully.

One question (if you have read this far): Was the Gates project planned for the time of year when snow would be likely so that it had the potential to be seen within different natural settings?

ok, i was just catching up on my "classic" reading ... or call it what you will ... and was reading the introductory chapters of Deliverance.

in it there is a contrast between the "survivalist" mentality and the "sliders" - those who do their best with the status quo.

i thought about this for a while and reviewed in my mind all the different types of humans, the different ways they group themselves and build their skills and ideals. it is so varied as to be exhaustive and boring to review here, but settling back into what spurred the thought ... survivalists vs sliders ... i just wanted to mention the following:

thank goodness.

thank goodness for all those different groups who are ideologically diametrically opposed ... that the future will favor SOME of them.

thank goodness that for any given circumstance, there is a group of people out there who "know" for their "truth" that it is going to happen. these will be the people who survive best, carrying forward the genes of the human race most suited to that circumstance.

given the variability in the human race - both genetically and ideologically, we would be hard pressed (not that it couldn't happen) to imagine a circumstance where NONE of us would survive.

bear with me here ... i too have my opinions of what is moral and what is ideal, but those are morals based on what i think the future will be ... or what i fear it to be.

some of us will be right or some of our opinions will be right, whether those numbers are huge (status quo) or miniscule (in this example, survivalists). most of us, unless the future is predictable by pop culture (strike that - the pop culture group would still be disappointed that others disagreed, as would we all), would be disappointed in the resulting society. but most likely, society and the human race would go on, based in the genes and the culture and the skills held by those who turn out to be "right".

of course the annoyance of having to deal with all these opposing views of the world never leaves our newspapers with lack of fodder for ridicule or praise, but, as a second point ...

thank goodness we all exist with our differing ideals.

we might need them someday ... and be adaptable in ourselves to either join the winning team(s) OR not be so smug as to ostricize those who admit they were "wrong" for the unbelieved in outcome.

for it is all just probabilities for what our future holds and our learning and backgrounds only give us so much information to form our own opinions (and dare i say) idealologies.