How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Being people on the this side of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, the Enlightenment, we assume that our ability to use logic will answer our questions, but we do so without much thought.
First, we never use pure logic in real life; real life demands answers, not just observation; answers require judgments to be made and we make judgments emotionally. Words and thoughts are not just ideas, they are ideas with an emotional charge; kill a woman or kill my sister are quite different things.
Second, the most obvious fact, our subjective experience of life is so obvious that we never even notice this most important aspect of our existence. I am not because I think; I am because I have a subjective experience of thinking.
Third, Art ought to address mainly the subjectivity of life, not the analysis of objective facts. Modern art criticism eschews any consideration of abstract beauty or even an appreciation of living, palpable beauty; it only values the political-social-historical in a work of art; it merely dissects the corpse, denying that it ever lived.
I was led to faith by art. As I wrestled with why I wanted to create images I discovered that the very thing I wanted to print as an image was not just the object I saw, but the object inside the object I saw so to speak, its essence. My subjective experience of the thing was what I wanted to give thanks for. I was alive! I had to thank someone or something for this miracle. Indeed the physicality of the world becomes more intense as it’s true self is experienced; material and spiritual in a sense melded. I’m never sure if this makes sense, but that is why I create the image–I can’t put into words what I experience in this life; I am in it and out of it. As Thomas Merton says in The Seven Story Mountain, “The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”
Blog No. 68: How small the cosmos
How small the cosmos (a kangaroo’s pouch would hold it), how paltry and puny in comparison to human consciousness, to a single individual recollection, and its expression in words!
Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
Being people on the this side of the greatest social revolution in the history of mankind, the Enlightenment, we assume that our ability to use logic will answer our questions, but we do so without much thought.
First, we never use pure logic in real life; real life demands answers, not just observation; answers require judgments to be made and we make judgments emotionally. Words and thoughts are not just ideas, they are ideas with an emotional charge; kill a woman or kill my sister are quite different things.
Second, the most obvious fact, our subjective experience of life is so obvious that we never even notice this most important aspect of our existence. I am not because I think; I am because I have a subjective experience of thinking.
Third, Art ought to address mainly the subjectivity of life, not the analysis of objective facts. Modern art criticism eschews any consideration of abstract beauty or even an appreciation of living, palpable beauty; it only values the political-social-historical in a work of art; it merely dissects the corpse, denying that it ever lived.
I was led to faith by art. As I wrestled with why I wanted to create images I discovered that the very thing I wanted to print as an image was not just the object I saw, but the object inside the object I saw so to speak, its essence. My subjective experience of the thing was what I wanted to give thanks for. I was alive! I had to thank someone or something for this miracle. Indeed the physicality of the world becomes more intense as it’s true self is experienced; material and spiritual in a sense melded. I’m never sure if this makes sense, but that is why I create the image–I can’t put into words what I experience in this life; I am in it and out of it. As Thomas Merton says in The Seven Story Mountain, “The integrity of an artist lifts a man above the level of the world without delivering him from it.”