The etymological root of Art

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. 

Coda

Since writing this post there has been considerable interest in what I was thinking about. Follow the link below to see how one person's research has taken the idea on further.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rD1fQ-xPq-U

See also:

Fine art?

Embrace insignificance

Drawing elephants

Drawing and spirituality

Sanskrit Indian aesthetics

Why do we draw?

Hands, Hygiene and Hope

Washing the hands is another powerful visual trope that has emerged during this pandemic. 

One set of associations that are especially potent for the English speaking world are those of Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, who whilst sleepwalking in her chamber, tries to rub the stains of murder from her hands , crying out, 'what, will these hands ne'er be clean'. The 'Out damned spot' soliloquy now being used directly with images of hand washing, making a very timely point.

However for Lady Macbeth, ‘All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. While soap can eliminate the virus, it cannot help mitigate the psychological aftermath of murder, some types of contamination can never be washed away.

Washing is an ancient trope and is often associated with religious ritual, as in, 'Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin!'  (Psalm 51) This brings me to my second set of associations; hand washing is very like hand wringing and hand wringing is very closely associated with putting your hands together for prayer. 

From hand washing

via hand wringing

To praying

As John Wesley pointed out cleanliness is next to godliness, 

Prayer is often used to form a connection with invisible forces, to remove sin or to seek divine intercession. Hand washing is used to restore hygiene and to remove the traces of an invisible virus, whilst hand wringing is seen as a symptom of distress or it can be a feigned exhibition of distress. Many people with OCD are washing their hands over and over again, another symptom of distress; others are now praying to God to relieve them from the affects of a pandemic lockdown, there is a deep need to find comfort in times of distress and it emerges in different ways. You could argue that what prayer does is provide hope for those who have no other resources to turn to, a sort of last chance saloon; of course for the believers in religion it is a first, rather than last port of call. 

Durer

We have an almost subconscious collective mythic memory of the black death or plague that spread throughout Medieval Europe. It was spread by the bacterium yersinia pestis. Necrosis of the hands and feet being one of the common symptoms, the image below being the hand of someone who recently caught the plague from an infected rat.

Hand of a plague sufferer 

It is easy to see why the idea of a dark evil stain, could become associated with disease. However as a visual trope it has more recently become associated with Halloween make-up.

Hands made up for Halloween

There is though a very short step from the mock horror of zombie movies, into the visual reality of pandemic death. 

Ritual purification in Bali

In order to get rid of illness there are many bathing rituals. In Balinese culture, flower baths were used as healing rituals, designed to help both body and spirit. These have now being mainly turned into tourist attractions, but at one time they were an essential and integrated part of a whole body system of ritual cleansing. Ritual purification requires a follower of a religion to be free of uncleanliness, especially prior to worship. Ritual purification may also apply to objects and places, it is not just something reserved for people. Although not identical to physical dirtiness, ritual purification is often focused on removing body fluids and stains, all of which are generally considered to be ritually unclean.

Washing facilities outside the Blue Mosque Istanbul

When I was in Istanbul I was fascinated to see the importance placed on pre-prayer washing, something that is central to the preparing of oneself for an encounter with God in prayer. The whole body is made supplicant in Islamic prayer, which reminds us all of the reason for both kneeling and putting hands together in Christian prayer. Body and mind are supposed to be united in belief. 

Whether or not you are religious, there is a very important truth underlying these issues and that is that the mind and body are one unified thing and that physical actions are both a product of the mind and mind builders. Lady Macbeth's difficulty in washing her hands clean is clearly a deeply mental issue, not a physical one and our daily hand washing rituals in defence against an invisible virus, will also be building unconscious mental constructions as well as ensuring clean hands. 

See also: 

Drawing the corona virus

Drawing and thinking: How to understand the virus

The virus is looking at you

More thoughts on the embodied mind

Drawing hands

Connecting the singularity 

Drawing as material thinking

The more I think about the last post, the more I am reminded of the issues surrounding drawing as a type of material thinking. I have in recent posts tried to open out my ideas on drawing as a record or trace of physical interaction, but another way of exploring this is to think of drawing as a particular type of material transformation. In doing this you can then think of drawing as a temporary space for a meditation on the movement between organic and inorganic matter. 
Perhaps I need to retrace my thoughts. Nancy Rubins' drawings were made of graphite on paper. Graphite, (it used to be called plumbago because it looked so much like lead), is a crystalline allotrope of carbon, an element that because of its high valency of 4, is very good at making connections with other elements, one result of which is that in science fiction we are often referred to as 'carbon based life forms'. Graphite is formed as veins within metamorphic rocks, and these veins are the result of the metamorphism of organic material in limestone deposits. I.e. graphite is a material made from a stone that is in turn made from organic materials. If you look closely at limestone or chalk deposits you will often see the tiny remains of shells. A sedimentary rock, limestone is mainly calcium carbonate (CaCO₃) which is what forms the mineral calcite. Calcite is made from the slow accumulation in shallow seas of a constant falling rain of shells, corals, algal and fecal debris. The slow time of a rock, if speeded up to the time awareness of a human, reveals it's complex entanglement into organic life. The structures of chemical compounds are often visualised through drawings, both two and three dimensional and the Rubins exhibition also included sculptures held together with tensed wires, structures that echoed those first of all explored by Buckminster Fuller. 

A basic tensegrity structure that can be thought of as a three dimensional drawing

Buckminsterfullerene, the chemical compound of carbon when it is found in the form of a fullerene has a shape very like a spherical football. These forms when visualised help us to think about how the world at a deep level is interconnected, and at this microscopic level there is a constant movement between organic and inorganic matter; humans being both made of these elements and existing in the midst of them. Our bones are made in a very similar fashion to the way that shells are extruded, both needing a liquid environment within which to grow. Our blood relies on iron as a carrier of oxygen around the body, which is why our blood is red, an octopus relies on the copper-rich protein called hemocyanin to do the same thing as our much more familiar haemoglobin, which is why an octopus's blood is blue. We are part of an ever changing dance of materials, materials that are constantly metamorphosing into interconnected organic and inorganic forms and as I make my drawing in chalk or graphite or whatever materials are available, in many ways I am simply performing just another materials dance routine, but one that for a brief moment, might help an often overly self obsessed conglomerate of chemicals in its self reflection.

Click on this video that was made to help people draw the Buckminsterfullerene molecule. 

Above is a drawing of buckminsterfullerene. Below is an image of one of Nancy Rubin's sculptures alongside one of her graphite drawings in the Gasgosian. 

Rubin's work could therefore be read as metaphors for the underlying structural elements in all things, whether these be organic or inorganic. The casting of animals into metals, now becoming a reminder of the essential elements that all animals are made up of. 

So a few points:

• All living things can make and transform chemicals.
• Suns can make and transform elements.
• A planet is a site for the accumulation of matter and of resultant complex chemical interactions.
• Organic matter is enmeshed into a complex entanglement with inorganic matter.

A rock is weathered, its weathered particles when they are small enough dissolve into water and as they do so they become chemically connected with other elements and transformed into new compounds. 

An animal eats vegetables made of chemical compounds 'sucked' from the earth by plants. The plants have been able to survive because they can trap the energy of the sun through photosynthesis. The plant made compounds are  broken down by the animal's digestion system and transformed into useful building blocks for its own life. Eventually the animal will die and the various compounds will be returned to the earth. 

It could be argued that all drawings are also material reflections on these processes. 

Drawing using charcoal made in the ceramic boat below

Boat for charcoal making

The charcoal I made for the drawing above was made in a fire that was partly covered up to reduce the amount of oxygen that could get to the wood. Sticks were laid into the body of the ceramic 'boat', which was ritually burnt and then the 'boat' was retrieved from the fire once everything had cooled. The ritual was a way of reminding myself where things come from, and how ideas can have complex entanglements with history as well as chemistry. The drawings made from the charcoal became a sort of mental re-enactment of the associations I began to think about as I drew. Because charcoal is burnt wood and I had been researching older myths, I was very aware of the burning of ships as a funeral ritual. Fire as a transformative element is central to my thinking here, but also the boat at sea, in particular the "sea in the middle of the earth," or 'Wendel-sae' as it was in old English. As of this day 19th of February 2018, just 50 days into the year, there have been 404 recorded migrant deaths in the Mediterranean sea.

The white marks were made from wood ash and the point I am slowly getting to is that I have begun to feel that drawing can also act as part of a series of rituals designed to help us think about what goes on. Hopefully not to privilege human ideas over other sorts of chemical transformations but to alchemically celebrate the interconnectedness of everything. 

A link to a bibliography that gives access to thinkers writing about the material turn. 

Recent posts related to the idea of drawing and material thinking.

Drawing as entanglements of life
Drawing as the trace of a touch
The world is drawing itself
Patternings, ties, entanglements and knots
Drawing as a model for life experience
Drawing to an end