Possibly the most incoherent thing I have said yet

It is rather late and I cannot sleep. I do not think that it is not due to the noise of friends and roommates two rooms over laughing and enjoying their time together, or the coffee I drank 3 hours ago, nor do I think it is the fact that my mind is processing the pages of books that I just read and attempted to comprehend. I think, rather, that this sleeplessness, this existential mental-wandering, is derived more from a spiritual state of unrest as I attempt to understand the world around me, the beliefs I grew up with (and have interpreted and reinterpreted), and the role of the self in a society (that I do not wish to embrace but yet cannot and will not abandon in sheer dismissal). There are a few things that have been rather important to my thoughts lately, whether they make this entry cogent or continuous with my previous statements does not really interest me.

Now, I have never been an art critic and I have probably dismissed more art as pointless than I have appreciated, but their are two artists (but I will only briefly discuss one) that evoke certain emotional dispositions within me that I feel are worth mentioning: Andrew Wyeth and Salvador Dali. I know very little of these two artists and their work, but I have had memorable experiences with seeing both of their exhibits at the High Museum here in Atlanta.

Recently, upon visiting the Dali exhibit, two things srtuck me as important. First, the term "nuclear mysticism" and its understanding by Dali as an expression of the existence of God through nuclear physics and Catholicism. Second, the "discontinuity of matter" in which Dali expresses that in drawing a table artists are more aptly portraying the world by drawing said table as composed of millions of tiny flies as opposed to drawing it as one continuous piece of matter.

Is it possible that God exists in these two statements? Is it absurd to ask what these two statements tell us about our modern sensibilities of rational enquirey, actual lived experience, and the secular/religious binary? Now, I don't really know what I am trying to achieve in this journal entry, nor do am I really aware of the possiblity of answers that could emerge. I am more interested in the profound understanding of God espoused by Dali in light of what I would view as possibly constested understandings of art, modernity, and artistic interpretations of society, culture, and God.

In the end, I am no art critic and I am no theologian. But I am interested in what we can learn from both.