We have a corporeal body. It is a physical entity, subject to all laws of physics. Yet, we experience ourselves, our internal lives, external events in a manner which provokes us to postulate existence of a corresponding, non-physical ontos, entity. This corresponding entity ostensibly incorporates a dimension of our being which, in principle, can never be tackled with instruments and formal logic of science.

A compromise was proposed long ago: soul is nothing but our self awareness or way that we experience ourselves. But this is a flawed solution. It is flawed because it assumes that human experience is uniform, unequivocal and identical. It might well be so - but there is no methodologically rigorous way of proving it. We have no way to objectively ascertain that all of us experience pain in same manner or that pain that we experience is same in all of us. This is even when causes of sensation are carefully controlled and monitored.

A scientist might say that it is only a matter of time before we find exact part of brain which is responsible for specific pain in our gedankenexperiment. Moreover, will add our gedankenscientist, in due course, science will even be able to demonstrate a monovalent relationship between a pattern of brain activity in situ and aforementioned pain. In other words, scientific claim is that patterns of brain activity ARE pain itself.

Such an argument is, prima facie, inadmissible. The fact that two events coincide (even if they do so forever) does not make them identical. The serial occurrence of two events does not make one of them cause and other effect, as is well known. Similarly, contemporaneous occurrence of two events only means that they are correlated. A correlate is not an alter ego. It is not an aspect of same event. The brain activity is what appears WHEN pain happens - it by no means follows that it IS pain itself.

A stronger argument would crystallize if it was convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated that playing back these patterns of brain activity induces same pain. Even in such a case, we would be talking about cause and effect rather than identity of pain and its correlate in brain.

The gap is even bigger when we try to apply natural languages to description of emotions and sensations. This seems close to impossible. How can one even half accurately communicate one's anguish, love, fear, or desire? We are prisoners in universe of our emotions, never to emerge and weapons of language are useless. Each one of us develops his or her own, idiosyncratic, unique emotional language. It is not a jargon, or a dialect because it cannot be translated or communicated. No dictionary can ever be constructed to bridge this lingual gap. In principle, experience is incommunicable. People - in very far future - may be able to harbour same emotions, chemically or otherwise induced in them. One brain could directly take over another and make it feel same. Yet, even then these experiences will not be communicable and we will have no way available to us to compare and decide whether there was an identity of sensations or of emotions.

Still, when we say "sadness", we all seem to understand what we are talking about. In remotest and furthest reaches of earth people share this feeling of being sad. The feeling might be evoked by disparate circumstances - yet, we all seem to share some basic element of "being sad". So, what is this element?

We have already said that we are confined to using idiosyncratic emotional languages and that no dictionary is possible between them.

Now we will postulate existence of a meta language. This is a language common to all humans, indeed, it seems to be language of being human. Emotions are but phrases in this language. This language must exist - otherwise all communication between humans would have ceased to exist. It would appear that relationship between this universal language and idiosyncratic, individualistic languages is a relation of correlation. Pain is correlated to brain activity, on one hand - and to this universal language, on other. We would, therefore, tend to parsimoniously assume that two correlates are but one and same. In other words, it may well be that brain activity which "goes together" is but physical manifestation of meta-lingual element "PAIN". We feel pain and this is our experience, unique, incommunicable, expressed solely in our idiosyncratic language.

We know that we are feeling pain and we communicate it to others. As we do so, we use meta, universal language. The very use (or even thought of using) this language provokes brain activity which is so closely correlated with pain.

It is important to clarify that universal language could well be a physical one. Possibly, even genetic. Nature might have endowed us with this universal language to improve our chances to survive. The communication of emotions is of an unparalleled evolutionary importance and a species devoid of ability to communicate existence of pain - would perish. Pain is our guardian against perils of our surroundings.

Roberto:

What's meaning of it? Its sense? Why did that Altamira Cave man paint those animals, Why? For magical purposes? as a religious act? What was his proposition? To communicate his personal views? Was he mad, as Vincent, did he see something different, that others didn't? Did he see animals in abstract? was he first person to think in abstract, was he first man? Was it a kind of pastime, a diversion, a game? Moreover, can we measure it? are there good and bad artists? What defines a great work of art? The recognition of public? In which way, its quantity or its quality?

I have always been a bit of a dreamer, with a facility to imagine in abstract, but years ago, when I began to read some poets, and other writers like Borges, Jünger, Neil Gaiman, something strange changed my view. What happened to my eyes? Why did my sight get so clear? Was it something mystical, beginning of madness? What is dividing line?

I don’t know if it is schizophrenia, god’s gift or some other matter. Probably I am mad, but what does it matter with ART? Where is relationship between order, hard work, etc. and Quality of ART? Was Vincent a calvinist man?

Sam: Absolutely. Read his letters to Theo. Also study last two years – especially last two months of his life. The “madder” he got – more diligent, industrious, hard working and disciplined he became.

Roberto: Which ones of this list, all of them manifestly anarchs, unstable and inconsistent, do you consider not to be great artists?

Thomas de Quincey, Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Byron, Orson Welles, Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Mozart, Isaac Albeniz, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, John Lenon, Camarin, Michaelangelo, Rimbaud, Gaudi, Dali, Jimi Hendrix, Federico Garcia Lorca, Holderlin, Woody Allen.

Sam: This is quite a list. Still I think that it misses point. Art, by definition, is surrender of anarchical spirit to dictatorship of format. A painter is limited to his rectangular piece of cloth or cardboard, to his paints, to maxims of his language, however private. Art is sad documentation of capitulation of form to matter, of subordination of ethereal to material. It is a white flag in ever raging war between eye of spirit and eye of flesh. Even most prodigious and insane of writers must sit down, face sharply limited piece of paper, write in reasonably straight lines and succumb to most basic rules of grammar, of syntax, of meaning, of alliterative or other resonance. Even most deranged and non-calvinistic composer can use, as a maximum, dodecaphonic scale. This is what I meant by order and discipline. They are imposed, inherently, in very choice to engage in a work of art. Working habits are a natural extension of these spatial and temporal constraints.

Roberto: What about work of art? for example, what about Dr. Jekill and Mrs. Hide? Is it a masterpiece, though it was written in just one weekend under influence of great amounts of cocaine? Are images of E. A. Poe, mercurial, abysmal, mathematical as they are, unfit to describe century? Doesn't his Maelström mean anything to you, apart from a horrific picture?

Is it that my satanic images are just that? Were Michelangelo’s later sculptures worse than his first ones, unfinished as they are? Mention to me, if you please, great works of art from Calvinistic land: Le Confederation Helvetique. I love this country, my aunt is Swiss, but what great art works have come from Switzerland?

Sam: Art is picture of spirit shackled, furiously battling, striving to unchain itself, rebelling against form imposed on it, mutinously attempting to reflect world – no, to BE world – with all its chaotic pain, convulsive features, horrific beauty. It is spirit of God floating above abyss, an act of creation, as detailed in Genesis. It is precisely this unnerving, unsettling, terrifying, melancholy, raging contrast that a great work of art makes. Order and discipline applied to order and discipline yield government regulations and other gobbledegook. Order and discipline applied to tumult, chaos, havoc, disorder, anarchy, decadence (ultimately to death) – yield art. You must not confuse method with content, reagent with substrate. For where do we find greater order and discipline than in martial arts (they earned their title – “arts” – not in vain)? And where do we find more devastation, maelstrom, turbulence and disintegration of form than in war, their subject matter?

Roberto: If Art came from childhood, why must it require order, discipline... Is it not that every child is a little anarchist? Is that not true, that a child is like a terra incognita, plenty of anarchy, great views of upper lands? Why should wild horses be less beautiful than domestic ones? Are we not talking about Beauty?

Sam: I am evidently less a romantic than you, Roberto, for I see no art in children as I see no art in primitive people (in psychological sense, not in historical or anthropological meanings of word “primitive”). I see none in childhood but fear and anxiety, egotism and curiosity to serve it, cruelty and malignancy. Indeed, we grow out of it same as we pull ourselves out of quicksands. Children are incapable of being artists. They are manipulative Narcissists. Forever in throes of Big Bang of their personalities, embroiled in searing heat, unable to see a thing for brightness of their own formation. To be an artist, one needs to die a little, to experience entropy, to be as barren as those rocks of our moon. One needs to combine that primordial fire with cold formalisms of death. After all, our works of art are dead: letters are dead on dead, acidifying paper, paints decay, cloth frays and greatest sculptures turn back to stone. The mystical tradition of Jews (the Cabbala) says that first, most comprehensive and hitherto best, act of creation involved divine light which was poured into vessels (again, incoherent into orderly). These vessels – owing to a cosmic accident – broke.