Art is the only thing that preserves...

Deleuze and Guattari wrote "Art preserves - art is the only thing that preserves".

I've been thinking about that for decades, but it keeps taking on new meaning. The idea, as I understand it is that the phenomenal field is in constant and continuous flux - unstable and unenduring, and we as aware observers have nothing to grasp onto at all - that is until we craft a memorial to a moment: and that's what art is.

They talked about "assembling blocks of affect", and "making a house out of curated sensation", but that is technical language. Art preserves, and it is the only thing that preserves - because it is a shelter.

We live in art, and to the degree that we can say the world we inhabit is stable, that is because we have given it that stability through our enduring aesthetic frames. Surely, too art is not static in it's memorializing, preserving nature - but it imparts the feeling of eternity, as so we experience it as eternity - for a time. It fills the entire scope of our perceptual capacity.

I am reminded of Ozymandias - Look on my works, ye mortals and despair!

For art creates gods, and gods, though immortal, are not eternal and undying. Even the gods are subject to change. All that which is named is subject to change.

Art preserves the frame of a moment: perhaps for a year, perhaps for a thousand years, but the all embracing plenum - some call Tao, some call Sunyata, Some call Ensoph - the plenum consumes all, just as it births all. Perhaps it should remain unsaid?