Contemplating an End

There is something awful about being confronted with a blank canvas--it watches you, unblinking. You feel an obligation, a pressure to address some demand: that you must imprint, thereupon, to the best of your abilities, the greatest measure of meaning you can manage. And it should have nothing to do with you.

This is the artist’s dilemma: that they are both the authors and the subjects of their works. An artist who essays expression for the sole purpose of demonstration or exhibition is naught but a narcissist. Art demands more than talent--it demands a concession. Nothing is more offensive to the true artist than the suggestion that they either demand or deserve praise; all one searches for in art is a means of expression that facilitates the profoundest of appreciations for the most nuanced of subjects.

Even in a painting bred from memories of trauma or of bliss, or from meditations concerning this abstraction or that, the canvas must represent more than its maker--when painting I must allegorize myself in order to understand my self to be an example of some grander trope. If one paints on the subject of pain from a memory of pain, then the painting should be of pain and not of that memory, for experience is meant to be drawn upon only as a means. The artist must, then, be flexible in their intent--they must be both in direct address of their inspirations and exempt from considering themselves privy to the whole of the making of it. This is most plainly seen in light of authorship; that an author has claim over a narrative concerning happiness is distinct from their having a claim over happiness as a whole. Is happiness not greater than any example of it? And is one’s personal experience of happiness not more profound than its narrativization?

Happiness is an end, and every peripheral not but a means of its address.

There are ends of two kinds: those which exist at the centers of given truths, and those which exist at their absolute peripherals. They are measures of finality, discontinuation, or fulfillment in either spectrum--both totality as well as conclusion. In a sense, ends cannot be cogitated, as, they being totalities, they exclude everything that does not constitute a part of that whole. An individual cannot, then, consider ends proper, but only as abstractions, for they are mutually exclusive from experience, and exist only in light of themselves. 

That a person is an end is wholly paradoxical. While a person knows themselves at present and in light of the past, they do not know themselves in light of the whole of their being. Abstracting this point in terms of the future most obviously underlines the truth of it: How can one wholly know oneself if one has not lived the whole of their lives? How can one lay claim to the knowing of themselves if they know not themselves at fifty years of age? At eighty years? What will their children pass on to their children, and so how specifically will one affect future generations? What of their will will be passed on? Will one’s employment some day lead to revelation? Revolution? One’s future contributions extend endlessly, and cannot be accounted for; again, ends are wholly mutually exclusive. Likewise, the past is entirely absent from consideration--one is never the who that they were, but only who they are. In order for an individual to understand themselves as true ends, they must not only understand their own totality, but the totality of their implicitness in being. The scale is altogether beyond comprehension.

How many canvases will I have the luxury of suffering through? Will they be beautiful? In my studies, I contemplated upon William Hazlitt: at thirty years of age, he could never know the beautiful thoughts he would one day record, or the volumes he would write. Every author has their number, and the question looms--what will my number be?

With every canvas concluded, one reaches closer to their end. It is a selfish right, but one should be allowed a desperate flee from thoughts of their own ends--that totality no doubt confounds and terrifies. This is the Figure Contemplating, who speaks, regardless of its ragged disposition, to the multiplicity in all things--it is, in itself, concluded, and not; a being both itself, and something else; an emblem reminiscent of the fact that, much like how one should not judge a film before the credits roll, or a battle before the last soldier falls, one cannot judge itself before its last breath is taken. That to do so would be naive.

In considering one’s end, one considers one’s blindness--that we are not just what we are, but more.