I have used the diagram below before, but have no apologies for showing it again, because I think it is important at a time like this to stress the deep and long history of ideas. It could be that when these times are looked back on, they will be seen as significant moments in a return to a kinder more 'mythic' relationship with the world, rather than the present capitalist one that sees the planet as a resource to be mined.
The Proto-Indo-European root of the word 'art' was the morpheme rt. It was associated with a dynamic process of universal creation. There are other derived ‘rt’ words such as right, rhetoric, worth, rite and ritual. Rt was associated with ‘creation’ and ‘of beauty’ but also moral and aesthetic correctness. It was concerned with what was 'right'. It also referred to first or original things, so therefore it was associated with creation and what was created. What was beautiful was also linked with repetitive order and ideas of moral and aesthetic correctness.
I'm suggesting that the prehistoric morpheme 'rt' is still resonant and useful for us to think about in relation to an ongoing search for what is 'right' and what it is that we should be doing as artists.
The oldest word derived from 'rt' that is still in use in relation to the original meaning is 'rta' a word in Sanskrit that represents the ‘cosmic order of things’. The Sanskrit language is considered to be the most faithful to the Proto-Indo-European root. The word 'rta' is from the oldest portion of the Rg Veda, which is the oldest known writing that still directly relates to the original Indo-Aryan language. 'Rta' as a concept combines both the 'cosmic order of things' as a physical order of the universe and as a moral ordering of the universe. Therefore 'Rta' is a pivot between the physical and the intellectual, between matter and spirit. It has been argued that this looking for 'rightness' is the oldest idea known to humans.
It would seem that in western Europe we have spent an inordinate amount of time considering the elements of (a)rt that are to do with making and skill and thinking about beauty as things separate from nature but not enough time thinking about the dynamic processes that lie behind how things fit together and the possibilities of using (a)rt as part of a ritual designed to re-attune ourselves to the ever unfolding act of creation and being joined in with and embedded into nature.
I first came across Rt or Rta in relation to the concept of a dynamic process by which the whole cosmos continues to be created, in the writings of Robert Persig, he introduces the idea in 'Lila: an inquiry into morals'. In his 'Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' I found an empathetic writer who seemed to really understand the importance of making things by hand. 'The physical order of the universe is also the moral order. Rta is both'. (Persig,1992, p444)
Understanding 'Rta' as a root out of which our concept of art gradually developed can help in the establishing of personal and societal well-being. For example, when making artwork we often have ethical dilemmas, but if you see art as part of the ever unfolding interconnectedness of life, decisions regarding environmental conservation informed by an awareness of Rta, would emphasise this. Something that has helped myself in the establishment of an ethical framework within which to practice. Any initiatives whereby you place your work within a social context can draw upon the concept of Rta to ensure that your work helped in the development of any community's internal harmonic structure and ability to recognise contact points with the world that surrounds it. Instead of trying to hold on to how it has always been, a community might be helped to embrace the fact that the universe is an ever unfolding event and that accepting change is a strength rather than a weakness.
N. b. A 'morpheme' is the smallest bit of a language to make sense, a morphological unit of a language is one that cannot be further divided.
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