Lost in the Cosmos

al.)?
    (c) Art is an expression of sublimated libidinal energies (Freud)? Since the artist is presumably either oversupplied with such energies or overly repressed, it is only to be expected that he or she might also be subject to the various maladies attendant upon repressed sexuality.
    (d) Art, unlike science, is a kind of play (Dewey)? Therefore, artists are expected to behave like children.
    (e) Both art and science are ways of knowing and as such are the greatest pleasures of which man is capable (Aristotle, Aquinas)? So great, in fact, that the ordinary pursuits of life are spoiled by contrast and so the artist must go to heroic lengths to render life intolerable outside his art. What Einstein said of science might be said of art: I went into science to escape the intolerable dreariness of everyday life.
    ( CHECK ONE )

    Art, like science, entails a certain abstraction from its subject matter, albeit a different order of abstraction. And the better the artist, the greater the distance of abstraction. Thus, writers like Sidney Sheldon and Harold Robbins are as much in the marketplace as any other producer or seller. But writers like Joyce, Faulkner, Proust are able to write about the marketplace and society only in the degree that they distance themselves from it—whether by exile, alcohol, or withdrawal to a cork-lined room.
    Like scientists, artists make general statements about the world, not about forms of energy exchange but what it is like to live in the world—statements which reader or viewer confirms by his assent and pleasure (where else does the reader’s pleasure come from but the reader’s recognition of and identification with the artist’s work?), just as the scientist confirms scientific statements by tests and reading pointers.
    Although science and art are generally taken to be not merely different but even polar opposites—the one logical, left-brained, unemotional, Apollonian, analytical, discursive, abstract; the other intuitive, playful, concrete, Dionysian, emotional—the fact is that both are practiced at a level of abstraction, both entail transactions with symbols and statements about the world, both are subject to confirmation or disconfirmation. The pleasure of reading Dostoevsky derives from a recognition and a confirmation. The dismay of looking at a bad painting or reading a bad poem is a disconfirmation.
    For a writer to reenter the world he has written about is no small feat. At the least, it is a peculiar exercise, even uncanny—like Kierkegaard going out into the street every hour during work and blinking at the shopkeepers. At the worst, it proves impossible, issuing in the familiar catastrophes to which writers fall prey.
    Thought Experiment: A deductive-empirical exercise, something like Mendeleev’s project of deducing the periodic table of the elements, then looking around to see if there are actual elements which fit in the table.
    This enjoyable exercise is the deduction of the various possible reentry modes of the artist-writer or reader-viewer from the semiotic options theoretically available to any person so abstracted from the world.
    The experiment: Start with the world, that is, the same somewhat deranged place which everyone experiences in more or less the same degree. The world is the aggregate of your perceived environment encoded by signs: other people, family, house, marketplace, culture, myth, TV, past, future, and God as more or less real depending on whether you are an unbeliever or a believer, and even if the latter, then God as more or less problematical.
    Next, there is the self, the individual conscious artist-writer reader-viewer self, the movable piece in the world, like a token in a Monopoly game.
    The problem for the movable piece: How do you go about living in the world when you are not working at your art, yet still find yourself having to get through a Wednesday afternoon?
    Note: This game can be played by artists and writers or by non-artists and non-writers, in fact by all true denizens of the age, that is, any person in the culture who feels himself orbiting the world, out of the here-and-now, out of life in a place and a time, and experiencing difficulty with reentry into such a life.
    In order to understand the purpose of the exercise and be instructed by it, let us make the following assumptions which are probably more true than false but which at any rate I will not take the trouble to defend: that the present world is in some