The Animate and the Inanimate was a book (public domain pdf) written by child prodigy and polymath William James Sidis (1898-1944), detailing his thoughts on the origins of life, cosmology, the potential reversibility of the second law through Maxwell’s Demon, and many other things. This hypothesis corelates with the object of mystic cyclical synthetism that inspires all my projects in whatever realm. I had no knowledge of Sidis´ musings when I wrote my manifest “The All is an Egg“. I wish I had; it would have saved me countless days of puzzling the world together again. Not to mention that The Animate and the Inanimate go into territories that I didn’t even consider, but that aver to be crucial oversights. I’ve mentioned it already before; we very often discover that our proud inspirations are just updated history.
On the other hand, although Sidis’ light shone bright during his childhood and adolescence, he soon chose to fade away from the public forum, preferring instead to work menial jobs to earn a living. An unfeeling obituary appeared in The New York Times immediately after his dead in 1944 at the age of 46, stating that he was found in his room “in a Brookline boarding house, apparently destitute.” Unmentioned was the book in which he peered far past the era’s horizon of truth, presaging a century of physics, and unmooring our millennia-deep certitudes about life and death.
Though Sidis´ hypothesis has a sound mathematical base, it falls outside the teleology of the scientifically praxis since the current state of our technology doesn’t allow us to empirically test his hypothesis through experimentation.
The Animate and the Inanimate champions the universe as infinite—he discusses positive and negative tendencies. Regarding the origin of the universe, he claimed there wasn’t one—life (the universe) has always existed. Evolution has driven the changes humans document through historical records and scientific discovery. Stars are alive—“astrobiology”—and over epochs they finish a process of reversing the second law of thermodynamics. Another belief was asteroids likely brought microbiological life to Earth.
These are all themes that are offering very interesting visions upon the reality and are recurring subjects into the wide variety of my creative work. I decided not to incorporate this project into the works I’ve created for my series A Cosmology of Civilization but to include it under the chapter The Becoming of an Artist.
The style I use in most of my other visual works is usually determined by the subject and the message that I want to communicate. For this project I decided to stick to the impasto technique with strong curly brush lines, with yellow and blue as the dominant color palette. While the technique suggests a big degree of turbulence, the colors create a calming glow. It’s a style that Vincent van Gogh used for his painting Starry Night, and that seemed to me appropriate for the subject at hand in this series.
Shaharee Vyaas 