Dreamwave|Dreamweave

Art is more original than the world.

Is that true? Or is this just language? The words in this sentence are common and the syntax grammatically correct. Yet, the many ways we can interpret these seven words overreach our self understanding.

From this, we can see that language belongs to itself. It uses us as much as we use it.

Do we see that? I’m not entirely sure I do. Language belongs to itself, because words and the rules by which we arrange them offer multiple meanings, right?

Writer and reader each, independently, declare the status of a sentence: each decides whether or not the sentence is meaningful—and if meaningful what it means. That sentence may, among various readers, have many identities. Which is the true one?

One might be tempted to say: “The status that the writer intends.” That is how the writer used language, after all: to express personal intent. But, subsequently, language uses the writer by presenting itself autonomously, among a full complement of interpretations.

Language belongs to itself, because language retains all its intimations.

Then, maybe art is more original than the world: we human creatures, evolutionary artifacts of seamless nature, open into language, into its landscape of many meanings.

Neurology evolved to a degree of complexity capable of accessing language and mathematics. Our biology makes language possible. And, in turn, language liberates us from our self-secluding biology.

What is the landscape into which language opens? Is it the same as the originary reality of mathematics? Does our biology interface a whole other order of reality through language?

Is it crazy to imagine that language is the presence of non-biological intelligence accessing the material universe through biology?

These questions admit us into the human equivalent of the electron’s wavefunction. We might call this indeterminate psychic state the dreamwave. Our function is dreaming. Neurophysiology reveals that the brain dreams continually—and one of its favorite fantasies is what we call free will: dreamweaving.

Our personal narrative, the fiction of who we say we are, as individuals and as human culture, is the deepest revelation of what is: the brain. Created and shaped by evolutionary forces, the brain creates and shapes us. We are the art of our neurology. 

And more original than the world.