details, ephemera, remnants

Art, as times I forget, is response, at once to outer projections and inner needs: a language of symbols and colors, tendencies toward an unknown goal - as Jung pointed out in the Mysterium (alchemic image of dreams). I forget and forget to respond, feeling an ideological urge, which only when it's suppressed, exhibits the conjunction of inner response to outer need. If the gist of postmodernism is in fragments and ruins found, then language is best borrowed and burrowed into, and there lighted a cozy fire, a good chair, and a glass of Bulleit. Our images are myteries, babel on: might be said. Suffice. Sufficient.
Who can read that: the uncertain sound St. Paul indicates in I Cor 13? A French horn, probably.
So I find that over the years I've sought to build my artistic vocabulary: quoting Cezanne, Goya, Lynch, Chardin, Perlstein, advertising.
I cannot write this out. I've just got to paint.
I paint, and then I look at along with the viewer.
As Jami reminded me the other day, when I said that a painting is not wall paper with a frame: one of my favorite paintings, a Daphne (depicting the moment where Zeus turns her into a tree to save her from the advances of Apollo) was bought because the purchaser liked how it went with her sofa - she could care less for the mythology or any other detail I told her about it. It went with her sofa.
And so music is chosen for its background sense, whether Mozart or Sinatra; and so many things function as background. What is foreground?
Are we human beings foreground? Are we background to other people's drama? What would it be to be foregrounded? At any one time what do we see and what, right before our eyes, do we not see? What are we missing now?
Berkeley said that "to be is to be perceived": the implication being that God, who sees all things, causes all things to be. Ponty addresses this problem of perception: that we exist not in opposition of subject to object, but that our bodies make a totality of perception, and that we are at once limited and expanded - or so I seem to be gathering. An impression.