Into the Fiery Forge (or the Great Unknown, if you prefer)

Now that I have a bit of free time on my hands, I can finally make a contextual post, if you take the meaning of the word as a literal sum of its roots (con = with, so context is literally "with text", or writing).  Note that I do this often - study the origins of things, the evolutions of things, and the reasons why something is the way we see it, or feel it, or think it today.  Words are a particular favorite of mine, and culture as well.  Indeed, our culture reaches far back into history, through many paths and many forms; whether you take it as the Judeo-Christian link all the way back to the Middle-East (specificically Ur in Mesopotamia, the Land between the Rivers), or even our physical roots as a European-descended society.  Caucasians, for instance, are named after the Caucasus Mountains in the Near East (a bit northwest of India, at the far eastern end of the Himalayas; there is a valley between them), from whence the Caucasian race is supposed to have originated, before spreading into Europe, the Middle-East, North Africa, and India.  And where did they come from?  Well, Africa, of course, somewhere in a once-forested Kenya, to hear the tale scientists assert (which is the best we have so far.  For all we know, modern humanity could have originated anywhere in the world, because pre- homo sapiens sapiens hominids have been found all over the world.  Yet as a strange coincidence, it seems humanity began in Kenya (whence all hominids originate), and I do not dispute this.  I merely like to dissect things.

But fast-forward nearly two hundred thousand years, and we begin to see humanity coalescing in several key areas, termed Cultural Hearths by the historians.  Coalescing in the sense that these are the beginnings of societies and civilizations as we know them.  Two such hearths that have been very important to Europeans, specifically, are the hearths of the Nile River Valley and the land of Mesopotamia, both of which were equally important to the Judeo-Christian faiths, especially the Bibilical accounts.

Speaking of the Bible, the history of the Hebrews, and later the Christians, can be used as one origin of modern European ways of thinking, and this path can be traced.  It starts in Ur before heading into Palestine, then into Egypt, then back into Palestine, then into both Assyria and Babylon (as these two nations conquered Israel and Judah, respectively).  Then Persia conquered Babylon, and some Israelites returned to Judah, but some stayed in Babylon.  Those who returned conquered Galilee and influenced the culture of the people living there, until eventually Greece and then Rome conquered the Middle East (including Persia and Egypt).  And most people should know the influence Rome has had on European civilization, even so many years after its fall.

What this means is that all human culture is inexorably bound, and though some might not see it, the society of today is bound to the societies of days gone by.  We are just as tied to places like these as we were back in the day; the rope is merely longer.

Persepolis in modern-day Iran was once the capital of Persia, its greatest city.  "Persepolis" as a name is actually a Hellenization (Greek-ification, if you will) of the Persians' name for it, Parsa, which means "the City of the Persians".  In the same way, "Zoroaster" is the Hellenization of the Persian prophet Zarathustra, who preached a proto-monotheistic religion of the struggle between a good god of light and his evil brother roughly 3,000 B.C.  Zoroastrianism, as it is called, was the dominant religion of the Persians at the time of the Jewish exile; interestingly enough, the Persian king was lenient towards the Jewish religion, and he even funded the rebuilding of the temple that Babylon had destroyed.

But that is enough of that.  A brief history lesson as a means of setting the scene for what this body of work is all about - my work is done in the light of what has gone before me.  I am was never much for 'blogs', and I have never done one before, as I would be more interested in writing a story or some such thing.  But I am pleasantly surprised at my ability to simply ramble on about words and history.  You might ask me why I have done so; partly it was an accident born out of explaining the word "Context", but it easily serves a deeper purpose.  Ancient cultures fascinate me, be they the Persians, the Hebrews, the Egyptians, the tribal peoples of northern Europe (including the Norse), the Romans, the Greeks, the natives of North America, and so on.  To see what these people could do with only their hands and the natural materials around them is fascinating, and I think every artist, architect, and artisan can learn a thing or ten from these people.  They did not need fancy power tools and mass-produced plastics to make beautiful art and architecture; their tools and products did not damage the environment the way ours do today.  The made things out of stone and iron, of wood and cloth and hide, of bone and precious metal.  And yet, though their materials were not as resistant as the average plastic, the greatest of their work still exists today, five to seven to ten thousand years later.  Most of what we do gets thrown in the trash in a matter of a few months.

So what is my aim as an artist?  I would posit that I am more of an artisan than an artist.  The reason I say I am more of an artisan than an artist is because I am equally artist and scientist.  It is in my nature; both of my parents are scientists.  Biology in particular fascinates me, as far as sciences go.  I am analytical; I dissect things.  I want to know the whys, and the hows, in equal measure.  But I also want to see the big picture: I want to see the forest, and the trees.