Forgetfulness.

I had a bit of unexpected freetime today, so I visited the Met and had a little lunch with a colleague from my school. The Met opened a new gallery that was closed for renovation for as long as I can remember right by the Middle Ages art gallery. I took a look around, and one painting caught my eyes. It's titled 'the Aegean Sea', painted by Frederic Edwin Church, a noted American painter of landscapes. The painting itself is quite gorgeous, and the pictures on the net doesn't do it justice. The subtle shades of light and imaginative rendition of old Greek ruins are executed with master's brush work, the sheer size of the painting and its details engulfing the viewer on the spot. Yet it is not the painting itself that I want to talk about.

When I saw the painting, I instantly felt some reaction in my brain, instigated from the electromagnetic waves that went into my eyes, propagated by the network of nerves leading to my cerebral cortex. The established notion of the 'environment' formed by the information oriented, energetically transferred sensation in terms of human language would be 'beauty.' Simply put, I found the painting to be beautiful. What am I in this situation? I am a relatively huge and complex system of interlocking chemical networks, able to sustain myself through interacting with the environment using chemicals and chemically transferred yet fundamentally informational impulses. Yet I felt the undeniable sensation of beauty from certain signal from the world. What is beauty? What is art? What drives us to create again and again and wonder and despair throughout the course of our lives, like some strange metamorphic longing, an obsession with kind of immaterial condensation which we sometimes steal glances at through the medium of art and beauty of the world? If I am in this world, and if I am part of the causal system of the world, then this strange thing we call 'beauty', or 'soul', or 'will' must be a physical manifestation of some kind, fully replicable, explainable, and surmountable. The sciences and art in such a world we live in, belong together. The very fact that human beings are capable of feeling things and have certain peculiar predilections toward the acts of creation of things that doesn't effect the immediate survival of the individual is an indisputable evidence of the physical nature of the psyche, and the beauty and the will that powers a human being. And in that regard, again, I find this world to be beautiful.


As I was walking out of the museum I thought of a very elegant mathematical system for describing beauty of an art work without getting caught up in actual composition of the art work itself. Like all good sounding ideas, however, I promptly forgot what it was as I arrived home. I can only remember the incredibly satisfying fulfillment I had when I first thought of that piece of math. It was something to do with networks... And entropy, but the entropy wasn't important... It was in fact something to get rid of... Maybe if I catch some sleep I might remember it tomorrow.