The Origin of Neither Art Nor Life

The website's name came from a phrase in Margaret Atwood's book, Negotiating with the dead. Published in 2002, the book talks about literature, the creative process of writers, and their responsibility to readers. 

In the book's second chapter, Duplicity: The Jekyll hand, the Hyde hand, and the slippery double, Atwood shares her observation that writers and artists' identities are dual in nature. 

First, there's the person living daily life. The one doing errands and is preoccupied with the mundane. The other is a persona that thrives in the realm of inspiration, occupied with art and beauty. 

Atwood sought a convergence between these two personhoods to identify how, in creating art, the two are merged into a single creative identity: the one that can be rightly called "the artist."  

 Alice with her kitten by John Tenniel (1871)

Using the Alice through the looking glass story as an analogy, she puts forward that there exist a "life side" and an "art side" to reality, separated by a metaphorical glass like what Alice gazed into. 

Alice entering looking glass land by John Tenniel (1871)

In the story, Alice goes through the mirror, and thus coalesced with the two planes at once. The real Alice merges with the "other" Alice-the imagined Alice, the dream Alice, the Alice who exists in the realm of art.

Relating this back to the question of the writer's identity, her conclusion is as follows:

Here is my best guess, about writers and their elusive doubles, and the question of who does what as far as the actual writing goes. 

The act of writing takes place at the moment when Alice passes through the mirror. At this one instant, the glass barrier between the doubles dissolves, and Alice is neither here nor there, neither art nor life, neither the one thing nor the other, though at the same time she is all of these at once. 

At that moment, time itself stops, and both writer and reader have all the time not in the world. 

The phrase "neither art nor life" is an apt description for this website's ultimate end. Like what Atwood pointed out in the looking glass analogy, art, as I understand right now, is a medium of revelation. 

They are symbols that point beyond the mundane and into an ideal. 

Now, what this "ideal" could be, I can only hope to know right now, but it is the website's goal to identify it. 

By examining questions on aesthetics, beauty, and the artist's role, the website seeks to arrive to such transcendent truth. 

A truth that is beyond artworks, a truth that is beyond the mundane, a truth that is neither art nor life.