Monday, January 23, 2023

The Resurrecting God (reading notes)

My interests in mythology, mythography, and religion at some point coalesced around William Blake who remains an important inspiration for my own work. As a skeptic, mythology and religion are an obsession of mine and I don't think my skepticism has ever eroded my ability to slip into that mystical space and see things from a weird and different perspective. This, ultimately, is hugely rewarding so long as it doesn't interfere with my ability to know a fact from a fiction or a fact from an opinion. 

An important question I wanted to ask was: Is mythological language better at communicating certain things than other analytical forms of expression that are predominantly meant to explain. Without drawing out my argument here, prophetic language is meant to demonstrate—not explain. And thus, I think it can be a valuable form of expression.

The Resurrecting God is an approach to making a complex argument using prophetic or mythological language. In this case, I've avoided language almost entirely to present a sequence of images. Blake relied on both forms of expression to get his points across, so now, with the advent of ai art, I can do the same without having to learn how to paint, draw, or illustrate. Hooray for me. "Phaw!" you say? Well, my hands shake and I've dedicated a lot of time to improving my craft of writing. So, that is all you get. 

So, with "The Resurrecting God", you have a sequence of images that tell a story. You have titles to the images which provide a context. The final image, titled "Ouroboros" is a directive to loop back to the beginning where the cycle repeats itself. 

As an artist, I'm trying to create a "prophesy" that both tells the future and the past at the same time. Is this a successful approach? Is mythological expression still valuable? I'm hoping that this post inspires that kind of dialog and gets us thinking about explanation, description, and demonstration as modes of expression. 

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