Order in the Court!

Lately, I have been thinking.

We watched a movie about Dunkirk 1940. Sitting ducks. We watched a movie about suicide bombing in Palestine. From the Newport Library, a video documentary about the first 20 days of the siege of Mariupol where the Don flows out into the Black Sea. The victims? Sitting ducks.

This collides with my recent thought that the mind of a human being seems to me to just descend – unless internal order is self-imposed.

Why does the human mind naturally degrade to – for instance - depression? Probably just Entropy. The same process that wears mountains down. Which seems to imply that to build, to impose order on the world is against natural law.

Next, my mind goes off to artists. I used to think of artists as sort of screwy.

Suddenly, I am thinking of artists as generally having orderly minds. Artists, whatever their medium, are struggling to express something that exists only in their “minds’ eye.” To express that “something” with greater and greater skill takes a relentless striving. This is an orderly mind working.

I have lamented to myself that, “these days everybody is an artist.”

Now, today, I am seeing this upsurge in artistic activity as an upsurge in the number of human minds that are orderly – and searching.

I don’t know if I am stretching for hope.

I am just seeing a trend in a way I didn’t expect.

Since roughly 2012, I have been doing a passle of writing. When I look back on those years, I suddenly realize the number of personal highs in that period. My mind has spent a lot of time on relentless, orderly, focused artistic expression.

Frank Lloyd Wright got me thinking about all this initially. In 1910, he was telling people he didn’t see how you can have beauty without “law and order.” He meant natural laws and the order of nature. More specifically, he was talking about the order in living things – the way the shape of the petals in a blossom is related to the branching of the leaves coming off the stem.

Of course, it’s true he also said that The Louvre is a “non-descript and banal structure.”

All kind of cosmic. The meaning hidden – from me also.

I am not sure if I am seeing the back of my head or not.