Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future…

From the Four Quartets …TS Eliot

Locate. To fix a place, to establish a spot and here our purpose is to reach from our location now, into an unknown future. It looks from Alexander Marshack’s work defined in his The Roots of Civilization, that the ability of humans to locate themselves in time was one of the great strides in the human project. Observations of lunar cycles were recorded on bone tablets or on spear throwers or other useful implements like arrow straighteners. Marshack, a journalist writing about the space program, deciphered the arcane marks fifty years ago.

It was essential for survival to know where in the solar cycle you were. To know by past observations, for example when to expect the return of the spawning salmon by knowing what time of year it was. A relatively cool or warm spring was an unreliable indicator of season. How would you know when it was time to head to your favorite fishing spot, or when was it time to be on the lookout for flocks of migrating geese? A calendar would turn out to be a great survival tool.

“Are you keeping time, or is time keeping you” says Wm Wiley’s famous character, the hourglass Buster Time. Here Buster appears as a song and dance team with wings to reference the flight of time.

Pierre Tielhard de Chardin (speaking of paleontologists—discoverer of Peking Man and more) predicted the future of humanity as moving toward a teleological end—the development of life as a spiritual project. “You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience…” de Chardin pointed out almost a century ago. He called this end the Noosphere or the Omega Point when biological processes evolve to spiritual awakening of the human body-mass when technology art and biology merge.

One of the thinkers in this merging was architect and artist Paolo Soleri.

Soleri’s city structures fully integrated art, science, economics, religion, agriculture— true structures of the coming noosphere. So, to talk about the future of art we are going back to a time when all human activity was an integrated whole. The debates about science and art, about religion and science, about economics and art all seem silly taken in the context of the Omega point. There is little doubt that the world is perfectly flowing in that direction. Perfectly flowing does not preclude human suffering because we all know that both tragedy and comedy are a part of the human genome. The creative mind is also part of the genomic tool kit. It’s bred in the bone as we like to say in our better moments.