Painter as an Ontologist:

Ontology is about the philosophical question of “What there is in the world?” There are all sorts of things, with their own thingly qualities. Put in other words, there are all kinds of material bodies, numbering in the zillions, yet each with its own material characteristic. There are animate things like bacteria, humans and plants among other such things; then, there are inanimate things like stones, metallic constructions, stars and rock formations and other minerals. What is so fascinating about the natural world is that no two things, apart from the mechanically produced artifacts, are exactly alike as no twins, even from the single egg, are exactly the same. Even from all those uncountable number of stones from a rocky coastal beach, it is impossible to find two exactly same stones in sizes, in shapes, in grainy textures as well as its internal structures. How could it not have been otherwise? After all, each ordinary stone has a history of its own, sometimes several million years or trillion years of history, possibly coinciding with the history of universe. A grain of dirt comes to rest. Another grain joins it. Many grains follow from a variety of sources, brought to a point of accumulation by accident. The accumulating grains are in the same size and weight range and share certain chemical properties. That’s why they stick together, there being a selection process of some kind. Grains come together, thus, in a layer. A muck deposit envelops a multiplicity of grains composed of a multiplicity of atoms, all of which follow multiple paths to their common agglomeration. Layer accumulates upon layer, stratum upon stratum. Over time, sediment folds and hardens into sedimentary rock, the birth of a stone. In such solidification of the initially fluctuating muck into a stable formation, a unique configuration of patterns along it sown grainy texture has been formed.

How about Water and Ice? When frozen, the entire body of water in a lake is solidly ice; and from the solid mass of the ice, a chunk of it can be cut out, the way a chunk of rock is quarried off a huge rocky deposit from deep inside the surface of the earth. There, then, is a material body of ice, formerly water. How about, then, the cubs of ice? Are they all the same as material bodies, other than their sizes? Ice is the result of a freezing process; it is not a different process from that of solidification, really. All material body came from what was once a watery form of substance, whether it was molten magma, lava of more or less sulfuric content or water. When temperature of the earth changed, to a freezing point, all those things that were previously in liquid form became solid forms, imprisoning whatever was in the liquid water into different layers of metallic or rocky sedimentations. That is how we can discover the fossilized animal and plant forms in the course of geological excavations. What shall we discover in the long process of Arctic Iceberg melting?

From the deep layers of Salt-deposit or some other metal deposits in the mines, we excavate fossilized traces of disappeared animal and plant lives; but, from the depth of the Icebergs of the Arctic Sea, we do not expect fossils of something dead. Instead, from the inside of the Icebergs, if it happens, we will come to discover FROZEN life forms, frozen but perhaps not DEAD. (Here, I’m merely talking about a possibility, a virtual reality possibility, which is not implausible. So long as it is not implausible, it deserves to be thought through, as the Virtual Historians are wont to argue for.) After all, don’t we freeze food stuff when we want to keep it preserved? Isn’t it already happening that some people, when they died, have their body or at least his or her brain, deep-frozen so that they can be resuscitated hundred years later?