11 • Purpose

finding meaning in what’s personally important

Goals

To critically assess …

• Whether art is what the artist or what the critics consider art
• The extent to which we are remade in the image of our art
• What elegance must have beyond purpose and simplicity
• How something immaterial, like an equation, can be elegant
• Whether purpose is more a matter of discovery or of creation 
• How the metaphor of doors and walls relates to purpose

Saucy Art

The spaghetti’s almost ready; maybe a little more. Not to eat, but for my art, tossed upon the floor.

Red sauce is often splashy; tomato stings my eyes. Goggles—a necessity, so supper’s no surprise.

( I made these special goggles with tiny wiper blades. A pair went to a biker bud for cool doo rag in trade. )

My splashy works are edible. So if one doesn’t work, a little cheese and meatballs, then eat it with a fork.

I wait until the critics say what they think my art means. Then I declare: ah ha, of course that’s what it’s meant to be!

Yet, as I make my saucy art, it slowly remakes me. Finding meaning like a child, in plates of tossed spaghetti.

What do you Think?

1. Who decide what art means — the artist or the critics? Is success guaranteed if the ‘failures’ are still good to eat?
2. We’re remade, a bit, in the image of our art (architecture, tech, fashion). Any ways art has remade you?

Elegance

I had a washing machine the repairman never saw, and a little motorcycle they made a hundred million of.

Both simple in design, not many moving parts. Those babies last forever and they’re clever works of art.

Modest and effective, elegant by design. Like the hole in a sink or bend in drainage line.

For overflow and backflow, no energy is expended to help them do the jobs for which they are intended.

Elegance is stylesheets, protocols and lyrics—whenever yield is more than seeded by appearance.

The simple may be physical ( in evidence, my brevity ) or conceptually accessible, like big ideas said simply.

What do you Think?

1. I’m curious — can you give a brand name of the washer or of the motorcycle?
2. The overflow hole and p-trap are so simple and effective. But is that enough to make them elegant? Could a quotation or an equation be elegant? What in your life is elegant?

Doors

If a door, open against my wishes, precludes me keeping position, where I’d stay weren’t it so.

If a closed door, perhaps locked, prevents me from egress, blocked from here to where I want to go.

Then I have onus of opportunity, to change its state personally, as a resolution is mine to find.

Or find it cannot change at all. That this isn’t a door, but wall. It helps to know the difference.

What do you Think?

1. Open doors that make me move — why not just close them? Do I find open doors in my life or do I find doors and open them?
2. What are doors that look like walls in your life?