Hi John B:
In a post addressed to 3WD your wrote:
> 3 Art. Wilber, in 'The Eye of Spirit', offers the best analysis of art I
> have come across.
Another excellent description of art's purpose (rather than an analysis) ,
came from Wilber in "Eye to Eye."
" 'To see the world in a grain of sand, and Heaven in a wildflower . . .'
But the crucial point is that just painting a wildflower will not do (that is
merely sensibilia.) One must FIRST discover Spirit, then see Spirit IN
the wildflower; THEN paint the wildflower--and Heaven will flow through
it (according in measure to the talent of the artist). The artwork,
regardless of the object represented, becomes transparent to the
Divine and a direct expression of Spirit. It thus partakes of 'something
sacred' as Picasso said, and no longer is merely an isolated patch of
sensibilia or individual geometry of lonely thought.
"That of course is the central definition of 'beauty' from the time of Plato
and Plotinus to the Scholastic's: an object possesses beauty to the
extent that it is transparent to the Divine, the it allows the One to shine
through it. Likewise, a work of art is beautiful (and good and true) to the
extent that it is translucent to nondual Spirit, that it lies which is beyond
itself to shine through--as Mondrian said, to the extent that it
aesthetically expresses the universal. And correlatively, an artist is
'good' to the extent that he or she can detach from the ego or transcend
the separate self-sense and allow superconscious to flow through him
or her into the work of art."
Substitute Quality for Spirit, the One, the universal, superconscious, the
Divine, etc. and you find Pirsig and Wilber preaching a similar gospel.
But nowhere did Pirsig make such a vivid description of what art was
really about. And, of course, "beauty" has been the ax on which I have
ground many a previous post because IMO it is the manifest
expression of DQ breaking through and transcending all other values.
Platt
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