Adam Blatner

Life of course is already huge beyond our comprehension, and adding depth is just mind-stretching. However, that is what I am bound to do: articulate in words what I’ve come to know:  It is my karma—I think. Also, I enjoy it!

Several years ago I did a cartoon playing off of the Peanuts’ cartoon strip, with the theme of Lucy sitting behind her little counter with a sign, Psychiatry five cents. (It’s a theme with many variations, a “trope.”) Only in my cartoon take-off I am wearing a wizard-like hat and the psychiatry 5 cents crossed off that label and scrawling instead, “Life Enlargement.” I realized I am giving up my role as a  psychiatrist, and with it my role as physician. It’s difficult to give up a role for which one works hard, goes through a kind of initiation. But the truth is that I have left the role of trying to help, and echo the word of Yeshua ben Yaakov, also known as Jesus, when he said “those who have ears to hear will hear.”  He said this kind of things many times, in case we overlooked it.

So my angle on life enlargement is to make art that stretches life. There seem to be multitudes of things we can do to enlarge life. Yesterday we took a class in dancing for the theatre—all kinds of moves—which reminded me that people are stretching their personal boundaries and helping others to stretch theirs in ways I haven’t even imagined. Woo-Hoo!

I also speculate for the higher dimensions. I myth-make, or speculate upon the small-g gods. I figure not only are a variety of endeavors expanding, but more people are getting born and the cosmos is expanding so that more invention is happening, including inventions to smooth the way or build on other inventions. All this is speeding up, an imperceptible acceleration. (Indeed, I am beginning to fall behind!)

If there were higher dimensions, how would we know about them except through the perspectives  of modern art? No, beyond modern art—that was reaching past  the 19th century! I’m talking about reaching beyond the early 21st century! What is its subject? Well, one frontier is my theory of beyond this dimension, the 8th dimension. Do I actually know what it’s like? No. Can I speculate? Yes. Dare I do so? Sure, but I frame it as post-postmodern art.