by Maurice Fitznuggly, Culture Studies Editor

Art is four-faced. It obviously looks:

    1. Back (the past).
    2. Ahead (the future).
    3. Within and without (the present).

Good art, not to mention great art, can look in one, two, or all three ways. But only the greatest art manages a fourth way, which is to look elsewhere and elsewhen, beyond beyond.

This fourth way is what the Zenists are talking about when they speak of "the finger pointing at the moon."

Take any of your standard religious, philosophical, or even transcendental homilies, maxims, or bon mots—"All is one", "Before Abraham was, I am", "Thou art that", "Neither this nor that". Each has a dual reference. One is to this time and place. The other reference—the direct experience of which (the so-called "unio mystica") is what gives rise to such statements—is to a something and a somewhere and a somewhen that simply can’t be talked about.

To talk about it is to lose it.

Gesture is all. And art is, as we often forget, all gesture all the time.

The only meaningful thing you can do is point at the moon. To do more, especially to speak, is to plunge immediately back into the temporal prison we know and (in spite of our many, varied, loud complaints and lamentations) love so well.

Art does a lot of pointing at the moon.

In a way, the non-verbal arts have it easiest because their practitioners from the git-go are free of the traps and limitations of words, which come with so much time- and place-bound baggage.

Stand before a Caravaggio or a Twombley and lo! at least for an instant the chattering monkey inside your head shuts up. The artist’s finger points, and having pointed, does nothing else. What happens next is up to you.

Generally (such is the force of habit and tradition), ol’ chattering monkey gets his bearings pretty fast and comes in loud and clear with his ever-ready and oh-so-clever voice-over.

Still, the finger is there on the wall, quietly pointing toward (as 2001 has it) "infinity and beyond."

So too with the other non-verbal arts—dance, music, sculpture.

The trickiest of the high-level human vaudeville acts is when we attempt to achieve that same "transcendence" by using the very tools of our imprisonment, words and numbers.

Poets try and try, more often achieving near-perfect obscurity than the blinding clarity they’re aiming for (poor Ezra Pound). Shakespeare is in a category by himself because not only did he pull off the nearly impossible trick, he did it over and over. And over. Until, for reasons we don’t understand, he decided to stop doing it and went home.

Mathematicians and scientists are similarly bound. Numbers count things. What a trap. But numbers also imply, and cleverly manipulated numbers imply (point!) as powerfully and with every bit as much infinite, paradoxical ambiguity as do Shakespeare’s words, toward that which cannot be spoken of directly but can only be pointed at.

Novalis, clever to the end, managed to put it all in three words: "We are cosmometers."

END

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