Under the Aspect of Creation
What man calls creation is an unveiling of what was already in the world. The tower, the wing, the bridge, and the variation are imitations, and the universe answers whether they hold.
1 - On the Nature of Artificiality
Artificial comes from the Latin artificialis, belonging to an art, which itself comes from artifex, the craftsman, the one who makes with skill. His artificium was his trade or his skill, the thing he made.
The Romans also used it for a trick.
What trick?
It is to appear to be something other than what it truly is.
Artificial is that which Man believes he has created but has in truth only unveiled: something that has ever existed in the universe as part of God’s creation, and was merely uncovered by us.
2 - On Discovery
Man’s Act of Creation is simply an unveiling of God’s Act of Creation.
It is the Act of Discovery.
Like building a tower appears to the child as its own creative act, yet is merely a discovery of the laws of physics; a reassembly of matter, organised to mirror that which the child has seen elsewhere before it.
3 - On Imitation
What is the ‘unveiling’ of the natural world but a human replication of it?
Creativity is the openness to perception of the reality around us.
The wing was taken from the bird, the dome from the sky. The sword imitates the thorn and the tooth.
What has Man ever made whose likeness he did not first find somewhere in God’s Creation?
4 - On Finding Truth
But what is Truth?
Truth is Reality in the form of adherence to the Laws of the Universe.
As all else, Man thus unveiled these Laws through the imitation of Reality in the shape of Mathematics.
Thus, Engineering is Mathematics applied to matter; the proof whether Man’s imitation is a worthy replica of the universe.
And the universe answers: the bridge either stands or it falls.
5 - On Art
Art seeks new Truth: the perpetual reconstruction of Man’s Experiences in Matter in ways that they have thus far not been reconstructed.
Art bridges a realm of known, but unproven Truths, with the Reality perceived by Man. Mathematics is never absent, but untraceable.
Bach discovered Goldberg Variations the same way Gravity was discovered and not invented.
Strike two tones that wrestle against each other, Man recoils. Two tones in simple proportion, and they fall into one voice, as they always belonged together.
The hand that keeps time, wherever it was born, leans toward whole numbers.
Art is as much mathematics as mathematics is art; tail ends on a spectrum that seek to describe the Nature of the Universe.