Arts & Crafts

The human world is composed of art and craft, and they serve body and mind respectively. Art merges with craft, craft merges with body; this creates the ten thousand things of the human world. There is a certain irony or oppositional logic to the function of art and craft; art may breathe or speak but serves the mind, craft thinks and does but serves the body. One appeals to the immaterial aspect of humanity and the other the corporeal form, but utilise abstraction and materialism anti-parallel to assumption. Why this is, I do not know--but it is apparent.

This is the way of things. It means very little. Problems arise, nonetheless, in the conflation of art and craft and the way in which they affect the body and mind. Each are moved by the former, and momentum is the source of all trivialities in the human world as it is that which creates pain, suffering, love and passion likewise. All that has form is moved; direction is therefore at the fundament of the existential body and mind. Neutered by its inability to accurately and wholly understand direction, humanity lives under an illusion of it for the most part. These illusions inject into the function of art and craft a certain poison; it is one born from consciousness. Poison is that which is foreign to the body and does not live in harmony with it. Poison is not, alas, an evil. It is part of the balance. Poisons can introduce balance to an unbalanced body, can introduce unbalance to a balanced body as to create new equilibriums. Pure harmony is death. True harmony is one of motion and transformation. Poison is thus essential to nature as consciousness is to the unconscious. Alas, much like a lack of momentum is death, so, too, will poison kill. Poison in the arts and crafts is born from attachment to knowledge and a misunderstanding of its shortcomings; this poison is called lies. Arts and crafts lie and speak of the way of things. This is all they can do. They are poison and a part of nature. They are balance and unbalance. They pass through humanity in various ways; silently and with overwhelming force; and they pass with infinite or finite direction. The sum total of all is zero. All has yet to die in a static void of balance, alas, as nothingness has yet to be realised and all transformation fully stopped. This leaves us with no answers and no real questions; all has been laid out before us; we can choose to invent or to act, to believe or to seek knowledge. But all returns to zero, all returns to balance; Tao has created and is yet to destroy all.