Art

In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, the celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates said, "It’s a kind of devastating fact. Everything that you think is solid is actually fleeting and ephemeral. The only thing that is quasi-permanent would be a book or work of art or photographs or something. Anything you create that transcends time is in some ways more real than the actual reality of your life."

Oates' words echo the infamous closing lines of The Diamond Sutra, "So you should view this fleeting world -- a star at dawn, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud, a flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream."

I would never dream of getting in an argument with Joyce Carol Oates (correction: I would never dream of winning an argument with Joyce Carol Oates), but I would say even art is fleeting and ephemeral.  How many books, now long out of print, are forgotten and lost to the mists of time?  How many stories first told around neolithic campfires are still around today? Photographs fade, negatives disintegrate, and even digital copies are eventually forgotten and no longer seem relevant. And music disappears almost as rapidly as it is performed - the First Movement of a symphony has already been forgotten by the audience as the orchestra starts the finale.

But Oates did qualify art as "quasi-permanent." The pyramids still stand and we can still marvel at the beauty of Egyptian paintings and sculpture, but we have long ago forgotten the context of the art and kid ourseleves if we think we know what the Egyptians were trying to say. Today, we supply our own modern meaning and virtues to the creations.  So was the "art" created 4,000 years ago or is it created today in the minds of the modern beholders? Whitman pointed out that the poetry is not in the words written by the poets but in the minds of the reader - the poem is in you, the poetry is you.

I admit though, despite my minor misgivings, that I agree with Oates (and with the Buddha) - life, existence, and all that we know and experience is fleeting and ephemeral, and it is foolish to attach any  meaning or significance to it.