Thursday, January 15, 2009

COLD!!!

You can tell in an old apartment building when the temperature hits zero or lower. The building begins to creak, loudly. Pipes through the building begin banging as if they're about to burst. Sometimes they do. As do old pipes in the ground beneath the very streets outside, bursting because of the cold so that water gushes from the concrete ground, freezing across the old city into beautiful white layers of ice.

When it gets very cold, colder still, one can hear outside at night the vast sky itself cracking. In its way, a fantastic, spiritual experience.
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By the way, isn't Fahrenheit a perfect artistic measurement? 100, the top of the scale, truly feels it-- as does zero on the bottom. When you dip below zero, then you're in dangerous territory.

Celsius, which Canadians use, is what you'd expect from a bureaucratic measuring system-- confusing; unrelated to human beings and to nature itself.

Similarly, bureaucratic literature so everpresent now is unartistic. True art isn't ultrarefined, regulated, and regimented, but discovers and expresses the eternal patterns of nature and God. Art traditionally, historically, was an attempt to express, or commune with, the Great Artist who created the universe. The best art transcendentally does this.

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