Cloud of unknowing

There's a murk that isn't an obstacle or trouble, where cloudiness is the object of the action. I'm thinking again about the way many artists discuss the preference to be in a state of not knowing. They want to facilitate the development of imagery but not from the realm of the idea - but rather from a set of conditions that will help present a state of mind or being that exists parallel with our thoughts, but would be described as irrational.

The author of the Cloud of Unknowing ( a devotional book from the late 14 th Century) talks about a cloud of forgetting where the experiences of life, reason, and religious activities - especially if they are religious activities - have to be left behind and not admitted in a devotional life, which is a state of unknowing. Loving yes, but knowing - not.

I think what artists are getting at is not devotional in the church sense but devotional in an existential sense. There's something about love that is valued higher than knowledge in art and the problem is that art is valued through the intellect.

Art criticism would be irrelevant to art practice because of this.

"The brain is the most over-rated organ, I think."
Woody Allen, Manhattan