Bøker av Lucian Krukowski

Musings are recollections of memories, of dreams, of ideas. Such recollections are persistent because they remain unresolved-whether as concepts about the world or as actions, taken or avoided, in art, life, and love. My musings are ripe because I have been chewing on them for many years. I am an old painter and a somewhat younger philosopher, and I remain concerned with how these fit together. So my first essay is about my journey through the landscape of such fitting. This done, I take on some art of our and other times that I revere or dislike. Then, as I am not a believer in straight paths, I go on to muse on how the world was before it began and how it will be after it ends, and how we can be who's and whats in places that are not the same. I return to art to argue against theories that champion brain over mind, and I enlist my artist-dog to illustrate my argument. My musings end with a broader journey that pits the alternate societies of crookeds and straights in their strivings for fulfillment-and their needs, on occasion, to come together.

Musings are recollections of memories, of dreams, of ideas. Such recollections are persistent because they remain unresolved-whether as concepts about the world or as actions, taken or avoided, in art, life, and love. My musings are ripe because I have been chewing on them for many years. I am an old painter and a somewhat younger philosopher, and I remain concerned with how these fit together. So my first essay is about my journey through the landscape of such fitting. This done, I take on some art of our and other times that I revere or dislike. Then, as I am not a believer in straight paths, I go on to muse on how the world was before it began and how it will be after it ends, and how we can be who's and whats in places that are not the same. I return to art to argue against theories that champion brain over mind, and I enlist my artist-dog to illustrate my argument. My musings end with a broader journey that pits the alternate societies of crookeds and straights in their strivings for fulfillment-and their needs, on occasion, to come together.

The divisions that mark my subject are three. The first is that point where the world begins--where it appears from out of the mystery of non-being. The second lies somewhere between its progeny and its future--the times between beginnings and ends where we, the beneficiaries of our being-here, come together to sing a celebration of the wonder that it happened at all, and then intone the fear of its ending. The third division is a speculation on ends--our own and the ending of the world.I use these divisions to locate a something that comes from nothing onto a historical tradition that imposes a value on the progression of that something, and so requires a judgment on all that has passed. I first discuss these through religious attempts to invest life and history with purpose--for they form the major explanatory traditions of Western culture and are a thematic source of much of its greatest art. I continue with an art-critical approach where themes of process and purpose are located in artworks through their stylistic histories and ambitions. I indicate how present art, when open to reconstitute such themes, could change the nature of today's efforts to give art polemical purposes, and so provide new reasons for its making. I conclude with some stories, unevenly biographical, partly fictional, which I offer as parables for the developed themes and their transformations. This last aim is to elucidate a view of art as providing specific symbols for a cosmology of beginning, living, and ending.