With a little Grog

"Learn not to lose sight, not to succumb to the 

shortsightedness that lives in the city. 

Arm yourself with dreams to not lose sight"

Andrés Caicedo.

The aim of this text is far from answering a question. Perhaps we start to accept the following premise: art is intoxication. The joy, passion, healing that comes out with art is part of this drunkenness. Beyond the conceptual and theorical discussion, art escapes to any definition: we approach through an "epojé" and, however, we don´t arrive to where we want. "The Logos is general, but men live as if they have each their particular Logos" said the great Heraclitus. Does art fits in that aphorism? – Has Heraclitus been understood? Is there something to understand in art that goes beyond the art work...?–.

I

We will never be sensitive enough to expound on the art; we will never touch with enough sensitive the question about the art, any question about the art. This have a good basis. Our language (if we understand language like words...) does not approach to the Truth, to reality, even though the language we aren’t able to create for us an accurate Idea about the World. This is very well expressed in the text "Art and poetry" by Martin Heidegger, that show  how language is unreachable, and then Heidegger asks for the thing of thing, the useful of useful, the art-work of art-work, he asks for the substance, for the artwork´s beginning, many concepts that Heidegger defines like incompletes, inappropriate. Many times Heidegger says that we are talking in a very colloquial way... In addition the difficulty of translate, where expressions like "cosidad", "cósico" (thing-like) are neologisms that, in fact, are nonexistent.

II

"The thinking is like a suicide of reality, it is constantly throwing at the empty of interpretation" is a phrase by Albert Camus that appears in his "Myth of Sisyphus". I think (here I begin to interpret) that he´s right with his accurate phrase. However, we think this interpretation is not bad. Perhaps we are driven over there, like we are driven to world, to re-interpretive it, to give it sense. Art-work is half thing, a half useful, said Heidegger. We can add a third element and divide the art-work in three parts: a useful part, a thing-part and an interpretation part. This is it because we can´t split the art-work of its creator and it´s interpreter.

In effect, Roland Barthes had a position about it. When the author dies (and we changed word author for artist) the intending of creator disappears. Consequently, it can be interpretative independently from the creator wanted to say. In addition, we don´t know the artist what wanted to say: this is because when art is explained, art lost his charm. Truth, in Heidegger's terms, no longer appears. Uncovers no longer and, to that extent, it doesn’t appear the truth of the art-work.

III

As it’s seen, there is an intention that is to interpret Heidegger. However, if we use Popper’s terms, we can’t interpret objectively because we are in a temporal reality, in a historically determinate age with an ideology. However, it knows that art can’t be analyzed just like that...but Who analyzes art? Heidegger is writing poetry. The beauty of his words could be artistically, but in his intent to understand and to assist to the party of thinking, Heidegger uses concepts. We don’t have interest of the truth about these concepts, after all, concepts of human beings come to us. We are not interested in theories, because all of these theories have verisimilitude, facticity, possibility, etc. So art should have these features as possible. But the art has something more: drunkenness.

Every philosopher has invented a language and concepts. The text "Art and poetry" begins like that: "we understand here, origination, like..." In the word "here" is the argument. So, the drunkenness is here a state of exaltation. Now, we shouldn´t understand the drunkenness as intoxication, happiness or a simple whining. In sum it don´t be must take the drunkenness-state as a simple drunk. What is the difference? The drunk is a person and the drunkenness is the state of the person. No one hears "is drunk" but "being drunk". The drunk is a drunk by alcohol, but the drunkenness can be produced by other things (exaltation, emotion, love...)

IV

The poet Charles Baudelaire understood perfectly this, and like the poetry (art in general) isn’t be explained, we will not explain it (who matters the explanation!). But Baudelaire said it in his poem "drunkenness":

"Be always drunken. Everything lies in this:

this is the only issue. To not feel the horrible weight of

time that breaks us backs and makes us

tilted toward the earth, we must get drunk without respite.

become drunk, become drunk always!

By wine, poetry or virtue, as they see fit. "

The poem mentions the time. We are caught in it, although we are thrown into the world. We are an entity that has a truth in time, when we go out of it is because we have died, because our finitude has made us whole, and not aware of it. The art is to raise awareness of our finitude.

Ultimately, we are not sufficiently fine and delicate to address these issues. This is a reflection that I make from the text of Heidegger and other things ... I play the art from reality, for art, although it has its past, it always comes to reality, reality itself. Art is, in Husserlian language, an experience. Belongs to the world of life. I think when Estanislao Zuleta said that we need art as a vital impulse, he is saying that this need is precisely the throwing to the world.