FOR THE BROTHAS: CULTURE AND INTELLECTUALISM: HOW INSTANTANEOUS IS A REVELATION?

FOR THE BROTHAS: AN INTRODUCTION

It must have been about 20 years ago when I first began thinking about creating a "Cultural Salon" as a reaction to the mundane social circles In Washington D.C. The richness of intellectual and artistic interchange had died, college friends had moved, the internet had not yet become the phenomenon it now is... I romanticised about the Salons of the mid to late 1800's in Paris, London and Berlin and the cultural dynamo of the Harlem Rennaisance. I was fortunate enough to meet a gentleman, an artist who lived and traveled with James Baldwin... Jimmy he affectionately called him, and he spoke often of their small cottage in southern France and of the many Artists, Poets and Luminaries that dropped in to chat and relax. Well, the impressionists, cubists, modernists, etc. all hung out together famously in those days and shared their ideas with one another creating a creative greenhouse in a world that was rapidly changing. I longed to have lived in those times, to have met Cassat, Rodin, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Baker, Balwin, well I did finally meet Baldwin and others purely for the joy of intellection upon the arts. This was in the late 1980's and by the mid 2000's I happened to run into a friend of mine from Hampton University who had been living in New York since he graduated in the early 90s. Well, I was surprised to hear him comment that in all of the wonder that is New York he never met anyone who ever really had anything interesting to say about art, literature, architecture, science, fashion or anything... I was so surprised to hear this since it had also been my experience. Well here I am in 2011 attempting the Virtual Salon...

Sunday, December 15, 2013

HOW INSTANTANEOUS IS A REVELATION?

Antique Automata Circa 1880

HOW INSTANTANEOUS IS A REVELATION?

Antique Automata Circa 1920

In spite of the instantaneous nature of our culture no revelation is truly instantaneous although it may appear to be so. Virtually every revelation is the painstaking result of billions or even trillions of bits of data, hours and conceivably years of psychical data, etc., that have completed their long journey after being processed in our minds.

Antique Automata Circa 1920

One might argue, however that the principal element of revelation which makes it special is not its journey but rather the magical instant that the mind makes a conscious connection between elements which until that very moment were nothing more than random bits of information. The point of truth, which we call revelation, is that same extraordinary moment remarkably different from the moment before and the moment directly after.

Renaissance Automata Antiquity

Again, one might argue that were it not for the string of elements that build a revelation acting as nodes of connectivity or as a sort of learning continuum, then revelation would never be able to occur. On the other hand re-mixing, adding or subtracting any of the contributing elements of knowledge that would otherwise have evinced themselves as a certain distinct revelation might cause the revelation to actualize in a different way similar perhaps but not identical or completely different to the extreme that no revelation might result at all.

Automata

But because revelation is like a crystallized form of the entire spectrum of knowledge upon which it is built we must consider if it is to be credited as an instantaneous brilliance or as a brilliance that is incontrovertibly and inseparably the sum of its parts.