Art has been defined as that which has no purpose but itself. If I subscribed to a religious ideology, I would probably conclude that God is an artist. While I do not believe in an omnipotent creator that has humanlike personal attributes, such a creator would have to be an artist in creating a universe that has no real purpose. Even more profoundly, creating Man, a creature that exists for no real purpose than sustaining itself, could only be an artistic endavour.
Now, I am not religious. So, I am not writing to praise the virtues of a creator I do not subscribe to. Although, "Omni-artfulness" might be added to omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience as qualities of a divine being, such an addition is not mine to make. If any of my scanty readers has a decision-making power in any religious body, I would recommend they consider such an addition.
Before I get sidetracked into another unintended discourse on religion or on human psychology, I had better clarify the intent of this block of writing. It is the result of a bout of wandering thoughts, a disease I have been afflicted with for a long time. I have a curiosity complex, an innate desire to wonder how things work and why they are the way they are. Of course, I suspect everyone has a form of this affliction, but usually in a milder form or in one more limited in width.
My curiosity serves no real purpose, as far as I can see. I want to know how things work. But, the moment I work out one thing, I immediately focus on something else. No, I am not attention-deficit. I will usually work the how to a reasonable depth before I move on. It is usually only when the next logical step in the answering of the question is finding a use for the solution that I move on. Curiosity is like an art form for me. The only purpose it serves is to sustain itself.
I read quite a bit. It used to be mainly fiction that I was interested in, until I started writing fiction of my own. Then, I developed a gradual decrement in my taste for fantasy literature as I realized that my daydreams were often wilder than the novels I read. Often, while reading a novel, I would pause and imagine how I might myself have written the remainder. Usually, I would be disappointed in the authors plot and endings. I am not saying that I was more creative than the authors (after all, many of these books were international bestsellers), just that I could imagine plots that were more intriguing to me than the original works.
So, I slowly shifted to non-fiction. Now, I could not daydream the endings to these works. (Actually, I could. Unfortunately, that defeats the purpose of "non-fiction".) What I could do, however, was seek answers. I could read a work on any topic with a few questions I wanted answers to. If I realized that answers were not forthcoming, I would stop reading and change the topic. My topics of interest were not limited to a few fields of knowledge, however. I could (and still can) jump topics as far spaced as ancient Egyptian religion to microeconomic theory to cookbooks to self-help to technical knowledge inside the space of an hour.
But, I struggled to make a complete meal from my random grazings on these various pastures. I was gathering information from varied sources, but was not organizing it into knowledge that could be used for a logical purpose. Occasionally, as I tried to make sense of it all and put things into a semblance of order, I came to multiple loose ends, that were too short to tie up but too connected to be thrown away.
Then, one night, it struck me. I was actively seeking more and more information just to perpetuate my need for more and more information. I was not hoarding the information, however. I have forgotten or misplaced a lot of it and have wilingly given up even more. I was just accumulating it for no purpose other than making sure I always sought more of it. For me, it served no purpose other than itself. It was art.
While I might try to arrange this information into theories, the theories themselves are meant to serve no greater purpose. They too are art forms that have been created for the sole purpose of their own existence. Maybe, someday, some of it might make sense to somebody, somewhere. But for now, it is art, pure and simple. It exists for itself. And, if someday, it ceases to be art, perhaps it will turn into something useful.
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