The tie it all up part 6 of the TOE.

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six
Part Six - The final thoughts upon the Theory of Cohry Osborne and Eric strauss.

Note: To any reader who finds himself here first. Please, if you are willing, begin at the beginning of part one.

Note: To any who has read all preceding parts of the theory, thank you very much. There is no greater indulgence you could have afforded me than to read all of the theory from start to finish.

I am not guilty of choosing overly grand language if I say that this six part work - no greater than forty pages, and composed entirely in the blogger window - represents the culmination of my life's purpose and destiny.

It's frightening. I worry that, having reached this end so young, some aspecified and illogical supernatural force will rob me of my life or vitality. It doesn't make any sense, of course. It is just superstition run amok. I reassure myself thus.
But do not allow the above to mislead you into believing that these ideas belong to me. These truths belong to no one, though their origins lie in conversations between Cohry and myself. Where convention attributes authorship, then, let it bestow said conceit upon both he and I equally, for insofar as any conceit can be true, that division of credit is true and accurate.

It may yet prove that we were not widely read enough. Perhaps these ideas have already been deliniated elsewhere. It is possible. I attest with utmost force of conviction that the concepts contained within the work that concludes in this part 6 are of entirely original construction, and derived from no other specific writings. (Equally, of course, do I confirm that without myriad other specific writings, none of the preceeding truths could have been manifested in this mortal text.) So if there is another author who has arrived at these conclusions before us, I wish to know him, and to celebrate with him the presentation of these truths unto the people, credit be damned.

So, finally then, what are the ideas? They are simple enough, and deserve a final presentation.

Art is the act of manifesting immortal truth into mortal form, or the artifact born of such an act. A true, and therefore great and compelling, artwork is one which manifests an immortal truth, or an amalgam of immortal truths comprising a larger immortal truth, faithfully.

Immortal truths are entities of one of four Articles of Existence. These articles are time, light, space and agence. Each article expresses its truths through a specific medium. The media are, music, visual arts, mathematics, and text, respectively. Moral truths, though of the article agence, do not have an art medium, and can never be generalized, as it is not their nature.

There is much to be said regarding each of the arts. Music is the least well understood of all media, and a great deal about the strategies by which an artist can faithfully manifest the immortal truths of time can be taught and can be learned. Text, and mathematics, too are easily taught and learned. Each is much more well understood than either music or visual arts. Visual arts are particularly difficult to speak meaningfully about. Ironically, the visual arts have the most developed body of theory written about them.

Regardless, no specific strategy will ever provide adequate understanding of any art. No words will ever do more than point to any understanding at all. This is so because the truths of agence are not truths of meaning.


Please keep this last point in mind when reflecting on this work.


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Part 5 of the theory:

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

Part 5:


Ok. So what's all this about Agence?

Well, let's revisit our set of truths again, shall we? Remember those?

Let's imagine that the set of truths contained in it a fairly wide array of truths. In other words, let's suppose that it didn't merely contain "objective facts" but that it contained examples of as many different kinds of truths as possible. Let's say that having reached this point in our work, we go back and add to the set based on our new understandings.

The set will now contain mathematical truths, musical truths, true images and other visual truths (ie, images that resonate as true art and declarative statements about color and luminence) and of course observational truths. What are observational truths? Observational truths are either mathematical or visual truths. They take the following forms: This dog is bigger than that peach. Or, Carrots are orange. The former is mathematical and the latter is visual.

But there remains a type of truth that has heretofore been left undiscussed. Namely, moral truth. This is one that has confounded thinkers for ages. This is the one that causes all the trouble. The fact is that there are moral truths. Undeniably so. The culturalist - the moral relativists who assert that moral truths are merely varying but fundamentally equal cultural standards - are wrong. And their really obviously wrong. No matter what your culture, or my culture might say, it's immoral for me to grab your infant from your arms and throw it against a brick wall.

Moral truths are usually expressed through language. At least that's the intent. Many truths have a language equivalent. Two plus two equals four is as true as 2+2=4. Neither is the real mathematical truth of two objects in space being grouped with two other objects in space to make a set of four objects in space. Both are symbolic representations of that truth, just as saying that a flower is orange is a symbolic representation of seeing orange. Music has assorted symbolic representations of it's truths as well. They include things like sheet music notation and the image of a wave form. There are also auditory symbols for these things. By this I mean that I can speak the names of notes and rests and such. I can speak the color of an object.

What I'm getting at here is that language is how explicit meaning becomes portable. It is the way in which entities communicate with one another. It is not the meaning itself, however. The meaning itself isn't contained with the mortal manifestations of truth at all. A song doesn't contain meaning. It describes the immortal, intangible meaning of the musical truth that it manifests into mortal form. Language, then, describes the description of a musical truth. It is twice removed.

But there are some matters about which language is only once removed. Are these matters are moral truths?

Wikipedia says:

"In linguistics, a grammatical agent is an entity that carries out an action."

And it is in this sense that I use the word "Agence" and "agent." Agence is as fundamental a building block of the universe as time, space and light. Agence is what distinguishes entities from objects. Do plants have it? I'm not sure. But things that move - things that have volition - certainly do.

Now it seems like Agence is less necessary - less fundamental - than time, light or space. After all, you can imagine time, light, and space existing without agence, but not vice-a-versa, right? No. You literally can't imagine anything without agence. Agence is the source of all imagine-ing. This is not merely a semantic ploy. Any conception of reality is predicated on our ability to conceive. There's just no getting around that fact.

Heretofore, all known agents have been alive. But there is no reason to believe that only living things can possess agence. AI may yet prove that, in fact, non-living things can be agents. Hence we don't use the word life, which falls short in other ways too. We use Agence.

Here's an arbitrary fact. There can never be just one agent. There has to be at least two. I don't know why. But I do know that it is so. Because the characteristic that each agent necessarily possesses is the will to interact. Light refracts. Agents interact. It's what they do.

The highest form of interaction between agents is language. And the truths of Agence are moral truths. They are the truths of interaction between agents. The art of Agence is text. Text is closer to it's immortal truth than any other medium. Because visual distractions aside, text is really embodied "voice." Actual voices have built in duration. The are presenting the truths of agence in the media of space (sound traveling across particles) and time.

Text, on the other hand, has no duration. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but it is true. The reason that text will never be replaced as the primary communicative mechanism between people is because it is the only medium that allows "scanning." I can flip through a given piece of writing and find the bit I want to read. I don't have to listen to the whole thing, or risk not hearing the part I'm looking for by fast forwarding.

Text exists all at once, with no beginning, middle or end. A live speech does not. It can only be experienced as a linear path from point a to point z. Even when recorded, it can only be dealt with that way. Why? Because sound is the currency of time. And time must be dealt with on time's terms.

Human limitations are such that most of us can't process text in sentence or paragraph sized chunks. But speed readers, apparently, do exactly that. That's how they can read so fast. They've trained themselves to transcend the human HABIT of linear processing. The reason that they are able to do that is because text has no fundamental duration. The reality is that text exists in the domain of Agence. Just like light, space and time, Agence can't be pinned down by any of the other articles.

It is communicated through each of the other articles. Brail, speaking, sign language, and text each use either time or light or space to convey language. This is no different than sound using particles as a medium through which time conveys it's truths to humans.

There are other manifestations of Agence besides text, of course. Physical affection is one, for example. It too has no duration, or math, or color. True, it can only exist in time and space
and with light. But "inter-dependent" does not mean "indistinct." And one can argue that physical affection ought to be considered an art of Agence. Certainly, it manifests the truths of the article.

But not every manifestation of the currency of an article is an example of an art of that article. Noise is not the art of time. It is sound, but it is not art. Because noise is not an entity of time. A true melody is such an entity. I know this bit is troubling, logically. I'm just going to leave it as is, though. Maybe I'll get back to it at some point.

Is the love between two people, as made manifest by a hug, an entity of agence? Let's get back to this later.

What's interesting about text is that it is the form, not the meaning, that is true. Lies can be faithful manifestations of the truths of Agence. In fact, such a faithful manifestation of a truth of Agence is essentially indistinguishable from the truth itself. With text, you can get it exactly right.

But again, it isn't about meaning. A poorly phrased, but highly moral, sentence is not true, artistically. In fact, it isn't art at all. Art is the manifestation of immortal truth. There are partial arts. Most writings work in spots and don't work in other spots. And there are not arts - work that manifests no truth. And there are perfect arts. Some writings are perfect.

Here's an example, by the poet Tim Steele:

FAE

I bring Fae flowers. When I cross the street, She meets and gives me lemons from her tree.
As if competitors in a Grand Prix,
The cars that speed past threaten to defeat
The sharing of our gardens and our labors.
Their automotive moral seems to be
That hell-for-leather traffic makes good neighbors.

Ten years a widow, standing at her gate,
She speaks of friends, her cat's trip to the vet,
A grandchild's struggle with the alphabet.
I conversationally reciprocate
With talk of work at school, not deep, not meaty.
Before I leave we study and regret
Her alley's newest samples of graffiti.

Then back across with caution: to enjoy
Fae's lemons, it's essential I survive
Lemons that fellow-Angelenos drive.
She's eighty-two; at forty, I'm a boy.
She waves goodbye to me with her bouquet.
This place was beanfields back in '35
When she moved with her husband to L.A.

By Tim Steele

But wait a second. Get back to that thing about meaning, right? Right. Ok. It's like this. What we are talking about here are the truths of Agence. The currency of Agence is interaction – communication – not morality. Perfect manifestations of Agence are perfect communications. Evil communications can be perfect just as easily as Good communications can be perfect. It doesn't mean that there are not moral truths. Indeed there are. And they can be pointed to by the art of Agence, text. “I love you” points to a moral truth. “We should love one another” also points to a moral truth. Neither is artistically true, at least, not necessarily. But depending on context – the surrounding text – either might be artistically true. In fact, presented as they are above, I dare say that both phrases are wholly true art.

An earnest embrace of a loved one manifests a moral truth far better than any words can, but it might not be art.

The bottom line is that moral truths are not manifested in language. At best, they are pointed to. Language can contain no truth. It can faithfully represent communicatively true form, or it can fail to do so. But morality is a different matter. Morality can't be manifested in language. The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao.

Here's the problem. Whenever two agents interact, there exists moral truth. Each SHOULD interact with the other this way or that way. It is entirely between the two agents; the truth does not generalize beyond the scope of the interaction. The guy who dropped the bomb on hiroshima? He had a hundred thousand individual interactions. Each one was between him and one other person. And he made a hundred thousand horribly wrong, immoral choices. Each of which was absolutely wrong, but each of which was applicable to exactly that individual situation only.

But humans don't like that. We have an urgent desire to make those truths portable. And language is the only mechanism available with which to accomplish that. So we end up with a situation that is destined to cause more problems than it will ever solve:

1. Absolute moral truth exists.
   
2. It exists between two agents and is applicable only to them.
   
3. We don't want to accept that reality.
   
4. Language conveys meaning.
   
5. We use this quality of language to ascribe a portability to a moral truth that it just doesn't have.
   
6. Each linguistic attempt to represent a “portable form” of a fundamentally unportable moral truth is doomed to fail.
   

Even worse than 6, though, each attempt is destined to make immorality even more common. The very worst acts that humans commit are born of a failure to understand every action as an interaction between one other being, and every action that effects many beings is really a series of actions effecting each in turn – a series of specific interactions with specific individuals.

The absolutists are right. Moral truth is absolute. But what they don't understand is that absolutely anything that they might say will fall short of that truth. It has to. Not only can language not contain moral truth, it can't even manifest it. It can't even represent it. It can, at best, point towards it.

So we find ourselves in this situation where individuals are codifying morality between individuals in the name of “portable versions” of fundamentally importable moral truths. Thus we bomb Iraq. Thus the muslim extremists behead some random American. Thus we feel passionate disapproval of gay marriage.

More importantly, thus does red become blue and tall become short. Thus does doublespeak occur. And we end up with the fiercest opponents of liberty invoking the word in all of their rhetoric. It happens because meaning is not how the truths of Agence express themselves. They express themselves via communicative form, not via communicative content.

This is why relativists must come to embrace absolute truth.
Absolute truth is far to important to entrust to stupid absolutists.

Now form, though, is a different matter. Any successful writer will tell you that there is absolutely a right way to phrase a sentence, or a series of sentences, and a wrong way. There is absolutely a single correct diction choice, and every other choice is incorrect. This is so. This is the business of the art of agence. Nothing else.

But what about the fact that the "true" phrasing a hundred years ago might no longer be the "true" phrasing today? The question is an attempt to pin down the truths of Agence with time. Agence won't be pinned down any more than Time, Space, or Light will be pinned down.

So do moral truths have an art? Well, moral truths are definitely under the domain of Agence. And they are definitely manifested in the actions of one agent within the context of an interaction with one other agent. But it's a stretch to call "action" the art of morality. I mean, what's the medium? The fact is "art" needs portability if it is to mean anything useful. And morality precludes portability. So I'd have to say no. Immortal, absolute, moral truth has no art. It's just two people being good to one another.

Just the cleanup left to go... Until then,

eric.

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

El Theorio Grande - Part 4

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

Here is something I found on this website.

Hume (1711-1776): Asserted that all metaphysical things that cannot be directly perceived are meaningless. Hume divided all knowledge into two kinds: relations of ideas, i.e., the knowledge found in mathematics and logic which is exact and certain but provides no information about the world, and matters of fact, i.e., the knowledge derived from sense perceptions. Furthermore, he held that even the most reliable laws of science might not always remain true.

Now Hume was not the first to tackle this issue of "Knowledge." Not by a long shot. This question of truth - what it is, how to categorize, etc, has been the subject of philosophers' inquiries for as long as there have been philosophers. Plato and his "Platonic Form" were on the right track, but took a couple of seriously wrong terms and ended up dismissing the arts as unreliable, arbitrary endeavors contrasting against truth. And the problem that has remained unresolved is that of "objective" vs "subjective" truth.

I have the audacity to state that Cohry and I have solved it. I don't make this statement out of ego, or because I want to be confrontational or controversial. Rather, I make it because I want to be perfectly clear regarding the point, purpose, and significance of these present writings. I want that understood because I believe that disseminating these ideas is a very moral act.

Having gotten that bit of unpleasantness out of the way, let us proceed from where we left off. Obviously, the question "what is the art of light" is one that follows from the previous discussions of the arts of time and of space respectively. And I don't doubt that the answer is equally obvious - visual art is the art of light.

Let me now point out a very important fact that clues us into the accuracy of the assertion that light must have its own truths, and therefore its own art:

Math is the art of space. The currency of math is the particle. Particles are objects, and many particles make up larger objects. Objects exist in space. True math - i.e. math that is resonant art - describes the truths of particles faithfully.

Music is the art of time. The currency of time is the wave. Waves are defined by their frequency. Frequency is a function of time - that is to say that they only exist in domain of time. True, we only encounter them PHYSICALLY as they manifest through a given medium that is comprised of particles - i.e. a medium that exists in space. Nevertheless, the fundamental nature of a wave is frequency, which exists only in time. And try this: "hear" a pitch in your head. Conceptually, waves do not require space any more than particles, conceptually, require time.

Well, I'm sure you see where I'm going with this. Image - visual art - is the art of light. The currency of light is, um... well it's a wave. No it's a particle. Or it's neither. Or both. Or... Well, don't look to me for a definitive answer to this. It's lightstuff, whatever that is. It's the currency of light. I don't know enough physics to even posit possible ideas of how we might better understand "what light is" in the way that we understand "what a particle is" or in the way that we understand "what a wave is."

But I do know this. The question is unanswerable in some sense. The reason it is unanswerable is because the truths of each of these "articles" or "foundations of existence" cannot be pinned down by any of the others. Quantum Physics is all about how time can't be used to pin down space and how space can't be used to pin down time. Einstein's relativity theory is all about how light can't be pinned down by time and space.

Our failure to answer the photon or light wave question stems from the fact that we are trying to pin down light with space and time respectively. Light shrugs and happily pantomimes either for us, but it's just being agreeable. It really is light. Not time or space.

And light has it's own truths. They are the truths of image. I'm hard pressed to come up with much more explanation here about this. It has to do with color, I know that much. And contrast, and all the other things that you can adjust for in photoshop. And I can tell you with certainty that visual truths are just as absolute and eternal as musical and mathematical truths. But it's really hard to say why.

The anecdotal tales of myriad visual artists attest to the fact that it is so, however. A visual artist may start with a very clear vision of what image he wishes to manifest. Or he may start with none at all. One thing, however, is certain. All successful, "true" pieces of visual art manifest the strictest possible adherance to a standard.

Let me explain. I make visual arts. And I don't have much of a natural talent for it. That is to say, I don't visualize well. I don't have a very clear inner image that I am working towards. But what I do have is a very clear sense of when something doesn't faithfully manifest that "inner image," and what part or parts of the work are at fault, and what might be a good candidate to remedy those failures. And I have perserverance. I can spend many hours on a little square of flesh trying to get it to look right.

But right according to what? Well, it isn't actually an internal image that I am comparing the work against. Some artists do visualize well, but not me. It is the truth that I am comparing it against. It is the truth that natural visual artists' "inner images" represent. That is to say, the image that artist compares against is the platonic form of the particular entity of "light truth" that he is attempting to faithfully manifest when he make visual art, if he is doing his job right.

And even though I can't see it very well, simply because I wasn't born with good "eyes," I have a very sensitive "untruth geiger counter" and it beeps every time something ISN'T truth. That's how I make good visual art. I get rid of the untruth until what's left is fairly faithful depiction of an immortal, visual truth. In other words, a successful piece of lookin' art.

The bottom line is that Hume and everybody else was barking up the wrong tree. "Hume divided all knowledge into two kinds: relations of ideas, i.e., the knowledge found in mathematics and logic which is exact and certain but provides no information about the world, and matters of fact, i.e., the knowledge derived from sense perceptions. " Is it clear now where Hume went wrong? Mathematical truths are not more exact because they're logical - "the relations of ideas." Mathematical truths feel more exact for precisely the opposite reason - because their physical! They're the truths of space - of particles and objects. In reality though, they are no more or less true than musical truths or visual truths.

And yet Hume was partially right too. Because it is so that each of these truths is closest to its true nature while still inside of the person channels it. Beethovan heard his ninth symphony perfectly in his head. He heard the melodies and tone and tempo and everything else about it perfectly in his head. And he was fortunate in that he never had to hear it's mortal manifestation fall short, which it necessarily did.

The painter knows what color that crazified sun in his picture should be. And he can mix colors for hours to try to get it just so. But chances are the shade will be just hair off when he's done, and the paint has dried and weathered a bit.

And math in the real world? Well, math approximates about as well as image or music. Which is to say, it approximates well enough to imitate the truths of stasis for a while in our dynamic universes. But no better than that.

Fortunately, that's all we need it to do. To approximate truth is all we ask of arts, because it is all we need from them.

And artists are able to produce work that gets close enough to be wholly rad. Which is really fortunate, because artists are the only connection we have between ourselves and truth. And I, for one, have no desire to live in a truth free world.

So that's it then? Space light and time are the articles. Math, music and image are the three true arts? No. There's at least one more installment. Probably two.

There's a fourth article, remember?

It is the article that I call Agence. And it's currency is language.

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

Continued Art theory...

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six

Part three of:
A Description
of Art
as Manifestation
of the Truths
of the Articles
of the Existence
of Everything.





So having disposed of relativism on both counts - in regards to truth and in regards to art - we revist our two sets of data.

We look again at the set of truths first. What do they have in common? Well, most are what we might call "objective facts." That is to say, they deal with objects in space. 2+2=4 is saying, essentially, that two distinct objects in space, when grouped with two other distinct objects in space, well make a set of four distinct objects in space.

And we soon conclude that all "objective facts" are of the same nature. They all deal with the relationship of objects in space. There are many examples of apparent exceptions. Indulge me for a moment, please. I ask this because the theory I present here is a synergistic one. That is to say, it's truth is apparent once all the pieces are in place. It then displays an elegance an intuitive rightness that I suspect will be for many quite convincing.

To attempt to answer all challenges to every proposition is rather like an attempt to study a species' role in an ecosystem. Without studying the whole of the ecosystem, one's efforts are doomed to inadequacy. One might learn something from the attempt, but it will fundamentally fall short of the stated goal.

Regardless, this evaluation of "objective fact" suggested the notion that the truths of space are conveyed in math. But remember, our line of inquiry pursued not the relationship between truth and math, but rather the relationship between truth and art.

So we considered the notion that math was an art. Again, I'd like to withold an analysis of why. At this juncture, it is still merely a matter of semantics anyway. So. Math is the art that conveys the truths of space. Now the truths of space feel particularly, intuitively -object-ively - true to us. They do so because they deal in objects, which are physical things that we can touch.

And we certainly explored the some of the many avenues of inquiry prompted by that idea at length. But ultimately, we returned to the obvious elephant in the room. If space has an art, what about time? What about light?

Music is the art of time.

Sound is to time as object is to space. It is the physical manifestation of the "article." By this I mean that space can exist, in concept, without objects in it to define it's limits, but in practice, such a conception is meaningless. There can be no "empty space" without "not empty space." Similiarly, time can exist without sound - without rhythm - but there is no means to mark it's passing. It is meaningless.

Rhythm is ordered frequency. It is what makes all understanding of time possible. More than that, is allows time to exist, just as particles (objects) allow space to exist. This feels less intuitively true, (for neither article does the statement feel particularly intuitively true, really) but if you really think about it, you'll see what I mean.

Cohry wishes to elaborate on a couple of things here (it's a little dense, skip it if you find it dull):

This relationship between melody and time was intuited upon reflection of 2 essential qualities of melody. The first is tone which defines the pitch of a sound and the second is sequencing, which if we define melody as one or more notes played within a given period of time, defines the spacing and duration of tones within that period.

Pitch here is understood as the way in which an organism perceives it, which is necessarily a pick-up of vibrations of air within that organism's' environment. The specific vibrations which can be accepted as tonal vibrations assume a constancy for their definition. This is understood as a tone's frequency, or pitch, and is commonly measured in 'cycles per second' or 'hertz'.

For example, concert pitch is defined as 440Hz, which is to say that when the vibrations in the air achieve a constancy at 440 pulses each second, this is agreed to be the pitch 'A'.

Thanks Cohry. But why is music the art of time?

Well, why is math the art of space? Math is the art of space because it describes the truths of particles. It speaks the truths of their shapes and forms and of the distance between them. It speaks the truths of their distinctness from one another. Additionally, the truths that math manifests are immortal. Pi is and always has been pi. It is both immortal and true. The symbol we use to describe it is not - it is only a manifestation of the immortal truth into a mortal form. But because math is precisely that - a rendering of immortal truths into mortal form - math is an art. (Astute readers might cry "circular reasoning" here. I beg a bit more indulgence.)

Similarly, music is the art of time because it describes the truths of waves - of frequency. It describes the entities of time, just as math describes the entities of space. Now that great song on the radio is not an immortal truth, just as the symbol for Pi is not an immortal truth. The great song, provided it really is melodically true, is merely a faithful, but mortal manifestation of the immortal truth.

In math we can get our brains around this easily. We can pick up the rock that math describes. And if the math is bad, and the description of the rock is false, we can easily test that and see that the false math is a lie.

The entities of time are melodies. And just as there is a single true mathematical description of two rocks, and myriad false descripitions of two rocks, so too is there a single true rendering of each distinct melody and myriad false ones. The true rendering gets the rhythm and pitch sequence of the immortal melody exactly right. And it approximates tone as best it can.

The important thing to see here is that the entities are immortal and specific. Just as Pi is and always has been Pi, so too for a true melody.

Now we didn't always know about Pi. That doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just needed to be discovered.

And we didn't always know about the melody to "white christmas." That doesn't mean it didn't exist. It just needed to be discovered.

Of course music has its 2+2=5's as well. In fact, music is comprised almost exclusively of 2+2=5's. The reason for this is rooted in the impermanance of time. Time, necessarily, is like a river. The water won't stay still. It's never now, and it always is, but regardless, you can't hear a song in stasis. You can look at the wavform. That's very useful, and is a testimony to or ingenuity. But it is not the same as the holding a rock. Space is about touching things. And it is about stasis. So it's easy to "grasp." Just like a rock is easy to "grasp." It deals in particles.

Time deals in waves. You see? And waves are about frequency. As soon as you pin down a peak, the wave is no longer a wave. Because it is defined by series of peaks, not by any individual one distinct from the others. It, unlike space, is not fundamentally about "distinction."

But it nevertheless has distinct entities within it's dominion. And those distinct entities are called "melodies." Most every melody that you hear is a 2+2=5. Because people don't understand what they are doing when they "make" music. People believe that they "create" music. Usually they are right. The problem is when people create music, they create bad, untrue music. Just as it is much easier for me to create math than it is for me to discover it, so too with music.

2+4-3+8-7 x 6 x 4-8+0+10/3 = 12

There. That was easy. Much easier than discovering Pi. And it's just as true, right?

Of course not.
(I haven't actually crunched those numebrs. Watch it turn out to actually equal 12, ha ha.)

Same thing with music. I can "make up a melody" just like I "made up" that equation. And it will be an example of false art, just as is the equation.

True melodies are discovered. They come to you all at once, or sometimes in pieces. You have to learn to recognize them and embrace them when they arrive. How can you tell? True melodies sound familiar. They feel intuitively right. Just as 2+2=4 just feels right. They are the ones you find yourself humming after a listen or two.

But don't take this to mean that you should rely on memory to hold them!!! Absolutely do not do that. Even the slightest inaccuracy in rhythm - a subtly different cadence - or a single wrong pitch, will pervert the truth of the melody. And I know from personal experience the pain of losing a great melody. You should always carry around a tape recorder with you. Record all ideas. Evaluate them later. After a couple of years of this, you will be able to tell the true ones apart from the false ones with realtive ease.

Don't expect this task to be easy right away. And don't expect to do it alone. Find another artist or two who will provide objective feeback. Non-artists, provided they tell you the truth - good or bad - are usfeful for feedback too. But here's the tricky thing. You have to be able to stick with an idea even if all the feedback says it's a bad one. Because sometimes everyone else, given that your pool of everyone else is small, is wrong.

If you find someone who is an accomplished artist who is willing to give you honest feedback, and who proves himself right consistently, milk that person dry. Hit him up for feedback to the very maximum extent possible. Learn to like negative responses better than positive ones. There is no finish line. One's truth compass, when it comes to music, never reaches maximum accuracy.

Now most folks are so afraid of plagarism, or even the suggestion of it, that they will almost surely kill any great immortal melody they are fortunate enough to receive. They change it or throw it away.

Can you imagine the guy who discovered Pi saying, "Nah, this seems too true. I'm gonna change it to something else. Maybe 4.0 That's a nice round number."

Don't kill the melodies that come to you from nowhere. Don't kill them because they sound too familiar. Don't kill them because they're "goofy" sounding, or because they're "too catchy." Don't kill them because they aren't "hard" enough or because they aren't "your style." Don't kill them for any reason.

At the very least, capture them in their true form and set them aside for later. Let them live, even if you don't let them see the light of day for a couple of years.

As artists, we must learn to embrace truth. Embrace the true melodies that come to you. The "that sounds familiar but I can't place it exactly" melodies. They are the only ones worth keeping. They are a gift from the immortal, and you have a responsibility to manifest them into mortal form, so that they may bring joy to the people.

The theory: Part One Part Two Part Three Part Four Part Five Part Six