The nature of the self-awareness that now grounds art and the functional aspect of this self-awareness do not necessarily fully enter into the consciousness of the artist in the moment of his practice. That is, the artist only sees it in terms of the art. In the visual arts, in painting, the artist only sees it in terms of the motif. The mirroring, insofar as it appears here, is in terms of desire and its corollary. That is, in the moment that the visual artist sees his or her motif, the experience is one of a personal desire and a direct response. It is as if the artist finds the self in terms of the potential presentation – sees in some visual arrangement ‘in nature’ or in the ‘external world’ something that resonates with the core person and thus elicits the desire at the center of the creative act.
            The reflective corollary of the aesthetic act is the perception of the pure nature of the conscious actor. In a sense, this is the beginning of a legitimately ‘postmodern’ philosophy : the recognition of the existence of a pure awareness, in isolation and prior to all modes of intellection. The particular nature of its isolation is a relatively recent event, a function, specifically, of Idealism two centuries ago.
            The problem is, once we have isolated pure awareness, we still have to explain the uniqueness of the self. While the committed ‘materialist’ can argue ‘nature vs. nurture’ – as if the problem were entirely independent of our self-awareness – the very nature of art premises that individuality is as profound or essential as consciousness itself. When we follow creativity – whether intellectual or aesthetic – to its source, we find that, while the wholeness of awareness is the comprehensive function that ‘turns’ creativity, the uniqueness of the creative ‘leap’ is invariably a function of the unique value of the moment, the moment of an experiencer. It is this uniqueness of the value of the moment of experience that conditions both value and self. Nothing in causative analysis can explain this mutuality of moment and value.
            So it’s not enough to speak of 'pure' sentience. It is also essential to say that the moment of vision also always and necessarily embodies a specific value, a value specific to the moment of the experiencer which is also the wholeness of the moment of experience. Value exists neither in ‘pure’ consciousness nor in ‘pure’ sensation. And ‘pure’ sensation is all we receive from ‘the world’. So, finally, the assessment of value not only has to be assigned to the self, but also is ultimately defined in terms of the self.
            This is called ‘vocation’, a word that had primarily religious signification prior to the Idealists. And perhaps we have to remember that many of the Idealists were originally theological students. But they brought the word out into the frame of pure psychology and philosophy. Each individual life is a flow of specific moments of specific values, and, as a consequence, the whole of life is also a value.
            Now here is the paradox. Every moment is a whole expression of the value that is my life. But I cannot consciously simultaneously embrace and express that wholeness, at least not as a conscious abstraction. But the essence of creativity is that I can engage the moment in such a way that some act or series of acts wholly expresses the nature of the moment as value, and therefore wholly expresses who I am.
            If I seek some personal uniqueness, if I stand outside myself and try to create some conscious or tangible presentation of self, I will lose the art. At best, I will be a technician. My ‘art’ – and I can think of no better word – will only be masturbatory. But if I can find absorption in a medium – some traditionary vehicle for expression – in terms of vocation and in terms of the moment of experience, then I will simultaneously fully express myself and have some insight into the true nature of my ‘self’. But, in this case, the expression will necessarily tend to pass beyond the frames of accepted or understood technique. It creates technique as a function of self, and hence can only be seen in retrospect. The summation of life as vocation is inherently retrospective, although, if we are immediately open to it, we see the inherent luminosity of the values.

            Obviously, I’m highly philosophical in these writings, but equally obviously this is because, in part, I have experienced my own vocation in terms of philosophical creativity, a psychology of creativity itself. A legitimate artist need not understand anything I’m saying. But in order to have a substantial critical context in which art can arise generally, there needs to be some level of general cultural understanding of the contemporary basis of true creativity.
            For example, dancer should not be ‘thinking’ in any ordinary sense, much less operating in a frame in which he or she consciously conceives the movements as if in a mirror. But there is a ‘moment of the self’ even in terms of the purest body sense. Or, perhaps just the reverse, the ‘purest body sense’ – being the most absolute focus on the immediate moment of the body as ‘self’ – is the most direct expression of vocation as movement. As such, all formal philosophy falls away. But, by the same token, in this purest expression of the physical self, we have a very pure expression of body as philosophy.

            It is these paradoxes which are at the core of ‘style’.