Seeing all things purely as symbols leads to a state comparable to schizophrenia, in which all things resonate with meaning yet nothing has a clear signification. On the other hand, to banish the symbolic in order to see all things merely as signs, as recommended by reductive materialism, is to remove the dimension of meaning from our picture of the universe. The resulting state of being is the moral abyss of the psychopath.

Perhaps the use of the future tense in the phrase "beauty will save the world" does not refer to a historic eventuality so much as a moment beyond chronological time, a virtual event always in the process of happening yet never fully consummated. Perhaps the world has already been saved in beauty, and always has been. Is this the secret of art, whose power is to transmute moments in time so as to lay bare the eternity that inhabits them?

We need a faith to restore our capacity to feel, to affect and be affected with the same passionate intensity as our forebears, whose powers of feeling astound us so in the records and art of the past. The death of affect, to borrow a phrase from J.G. Ballard, is the true catastrophe of our spectral age, our spiritual Hiroshima. It makes questions such as whether life's riddles are answered at the Vatican, in Tibet, or by the Large Hadron Collider utterly meaningless, since it removes the ground we need to pose such questions in the first place. Neither religion nor science can give us back the ground. Only the imagination can. Only art can mend the rupture of the soul and the world, the body and the earth.

We have all met people who embody the New in their actions and words. We have all at one time or another done something so spontaneous and authentic that it suddenly revealed to us the wild potentialities that lie beyond habit and convention. The argument can be made that every mad, unwarranted act of love, becoming, or true self-giving is literally a work of art.

Creativity is freedom's most primal expression, though not the freedom we were sold under the banner of democracy. True freedom is less a license to do as one pleases than the power to be what one has no choice but to be, the capacity to follow one's inmost desire.

To create is to free oneself from the dialectical binds that keep the ideological in place. Thus, every act of creation is an act of resistance.

Since experiencing a work of art is as creative an activity as making one, idiology is not the prerogative of artists. In fact, trusting one's own experience over the dictates of Consensus may be all that is required to speak of artistic creation. While apolitical in itself, artistic creation becomes revolutionary the moment it is actualized in the world, because it transcends all that has been given as self-evident and calls on us to question and to seek.

If your purpose is to build a waking dream, discontinuity on the surface may be essential to coherence in the depths.

Beauty without symbolic depth results in ornament. Symbol without beauty results in psychoanalysis. Only when the two meet can we speak of art.

The characters we meet in works of art aren't people in the conventional sense but powers belonging to the aesthetic worlds that contain them. If anything comes first, it is setting and atmosphere, not character. You cannot take Macbeth out of the dank wilderness of the scottish moors, he is an aspect of his world, the expression of a place.

Unlike ordinary modes of perception, art forgoes the general in things in order to isolate their singularity.

Proper art moves us, while artifice tries to make us move.

Today, the propensity to be affected by anything is often perceived as a weakness. Given that we are constantly besieged by aesthetic objects looking to manipulate us (advertising, rhetoric an all the rest), our reservations may be understandable. But unfortunately the guardedness that is so essential to our mental well-being in this media-saturated world also contributes to the rampant apathy that is frosting over the globe like the beginnings of an unprecedented psychic ice-age. Wherever apathy reigns supreme, the "strong" are those who can boast that nothing affects them. Numbness and dumbness become positive qualities, and any passionate engagement with life becomes a cause for embarrassment.

We tend to see our "personal tastes" as positive personality traits, whereas they could just as well indicate limitations that we might overcome given the right opportunity, the appropriate context, and a little courage. Each person's take on reality will no doubt favor certain aesthetic experiences over others, but it may be that the world is filled with potential aesthetic experiences that our "tastes" prevent us from having for no good reason.

Any adequate response to the mystery of existence must be poetic, for only the poetic can take on the "why."

In a sense the first artist was not the painter in the cave but whoever dared give an answer to the enigma of the night sky with its million stars.

It is a strange thing to catalog the conflicting theories as to what the first artists thought they were doing down there in the caves, because the truth is that, to this day, we do not know why we make art. In the end, art may not be our invention at all. It may well have appeared in history as it does in the life of many individual artists:as an outside call, a sudden flash of inspiration, an inner wanderlust exerting such a powerfull pull that ultimately we would have to say that Picasso got it wrong: the early humans didn't invent art. Art invented humanity.