Blog 77: Surprise Me

By admin | Published: November 5, 2017

I must admit to bouts of blindness; not ocular blindness, but worse, a failure to understand what was obviously before me. I have read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and always found it depressingly banal. I would read the poem, read various analyses of it, but in the end I just didn’t see what the fuss was about; it appeared to be some kind of glorification (he had written a long and complex poem after all) focused on the banality of modern life’s banality—then I read “Four Quartets” and I began to understand what Eliot was doing.

I have no pretensions at being Eliot expert and I don’t want to sound that way here, but T.S. Eliot was not praising the secular world arising around him with a poem, he was using the modern idiom in poetic form to condemn it. If “Waste Land” crucified modernity, “Four Quartets” resurrected it by hoping that the road forked, the wasted land would be escaped, and there would be new beginning. He does it in the Modernist language of course; when in France one must speak French.  I only wish that we had taken that different road. Artists must point the way back to the future, but we are failing to do anything more than reflect the wasteland of modern thought. After all, we are not simply animated pieces of meat and artists need to capture that fact or what else are they for? 

There is a great quote from Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, which is one of my favorite books. Mariette says:

And Christ still sends me roses. We try to be formed and held and kept by him, but instead he offers us freedom. And now when I try to know his will, his kindness floods me, his great love overwhelms me, and I hear him whisper, Surprise me.

So, perhaps I should not lose hope because artists might just surprise me.

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Blog No. 76: We are the only creature that names

By admin | Published: May 7, 2017

Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.  Genesis 2

We are the only naming creature that we know of. We name because our brains do not have enough RAM (so to speak) to consider reality directly, i.e., we need to shrink the world by creating a model of it in the form of ideas. We experience a virtual reality, which is a reduction and distortion of what is actually “out there”; then we reduce that reduction to names of the virtual reality we experience. For example, if we see a “tree” there is in reality no such thing outside of us as a “tree,” there are only the things we classify as a “tree” in our minds, based on our virtual realty experiences, because a “tree” is an idea about a thing that enables us to think about things that appear related, which we call “trees.” “When does a ‘tree’ become a ‘bush’?” is a question for man to consider because only man requires boxes to think about something; God, presumably not having this limitation would never confront this problem because God would not have the limitations that demand the use of models.

This also means that man names and therefore defines what he thinks gives meaning to his life. This may be frustrating and lead many to assume that this means that life is pointless, but this is the weight we must carry for being independent, sentient beings who think about such things. Whether God exists is obviously relevant because if He does we would have a point of reference, no matter how vague, upon which to base our value judgments. Those who believe in a revealed faith don’t need to define the meaning of life because it’s done for them by the God of their faith. To those who believe in a God that has a bit vaguer, however, the meaning of life question remains terribly important and very personal; Marcus Aurelius is a good example of how to go about this. Those who believe in no deity other than the natural world, have nearly infinite room to wander, but therefore also have no way to define “lost.”

It gets even harder. We can uses names of ideas to think about how to write a symphony or paint a picture; we can describe their effect on us. But, we can, only with great difficulty think about why these things affect us because we are in large part unknown to ourselves. Naming what we experience, however, is not the same as experiencing it as noted in prior blogs; subjective experience is a completely different thing. For example, we can say that Beethoven was a motivic composer, that he used key changes and high contrast in his work to increase the emotional impact of the music, that he was an example of right by merit overcoming right by birth in a social sense, but when we hear the great choral fourth movement of his 9th Symphony: “Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium,” we can only cheer with love and joy in our hearts even if we don’t actually understand the German or have any faith in life at all.

Photographic images are similar in that we can understand how an image comes about or describe its effect on us, but we cannot ever seem to get to the nub of things because we cannot name it; we can only experience it. Think about Ansel Adams’ great “Half-Dome” of 1927 that I am looking at as I write this blog. We can easily discuss the fact that it is a large silver halide print, toned with selenium, with very delicate tonal ranges on the face of an awe inspiring monolith, but it’s impact on us is a feeling, not a thing that we can reproduce directly in someone else by naming it.

More generally, what is it we feel when we feel something? Pain for example. Does naming it “pain” communicate the feeling? Can we imagine what pain feels like by describing it as “pain” or even “agony”? We can think about it certainly, but we cannot communicate it accurately as an idea—one can only understand pain when one is actually experiencing it.

In sum, we can find meaning in life through the use of words. We might converse with great philosophers of the past or with friends to discuss how they think about the topic; however, words privilege rational thought or subjective experience. Much of life’s meaning is experienced, and in the end incommunicable except through artistic expression or the mystery of faith; therefore, while we may be the naming creature, names can build boxes that limit our understanding of meaning in our lives.

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Blog No. 75: Authority

By admin | Published: November 27, 2016

Catholic reform was as sensual as it was spiritual, for at the core of the Catholic faith lay the claim that all of creation is a gateway to the Creator and that matter and spirit are not antithetically opposed to one another. Exuberance is the hallmark of Catholic art and music from this period. In the nineteenth century, derisive moderns would dismiss this ebullience as baroque—a French word meaning “strange” or “bizarre”—but in the seventeenth century especially, lack of restraint became a virtue in Catholic aesthetics and so did the blurring of distinctions between the heavenly and the earthly, and this baroque sensibility became the very essence of the faith. Nowhere could the senses be more overwhelmed than in a baroque church at High Mass, and nowhere else could the stark aesthetics of Protestantism and its sola scriptura principle be more thoroughly challenged or denied.

Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire.

Authority. Who has it and why? A good place to look, historically, is the period of restorations after the Renaissance.

To grossly oversimplify, the Reformations were about answering the question of who or what has authority as the social and political structure of the Middle Ages gave way to raising secular rulers; a process accelerated by the printing press, which allowed the rapid transmission of ideas. These factors then combined with the Renaissance principle of ad fontes (literally “back to the sources” or perhaps better, begin at the beginning) to lead Northern Europeans to rely on the scriptures alone (sola scriptura) as the fundamental authority of Christian faith and not Catholic traditions, that had augmented scripture with the ideas of the Church Fathers and Greek philosophy, as imported through the Church Fathers.

The concept of ad fontes took intellectuals by storm in secular areas of study as well. The Enlightenment, following on the heels of the Reformations  shifted authority in the study of the natural world from classical authorities like Aristotle to empirical testing of theories. This shift in authority during the Enlightenment was arguably the greatest intellectual earthquake since the birth of Christianity.

As a modern person I imagine to the extent you’ve thought about it at all, you believe that the result of the empirical testing of theories is the most authoritative. Why? Most of us aren’t scientific experts and wouldn’t understand quantum mechanics if a good physics professor spent a semester trying to get it into our heads. The honest answer is we just assume it; take it on faith. We went to the moon didn’t we? This was the exact same mindset of folks in the Renaissance who had faith in Aristotle.  They didn’t know anything about how he arrived at his answers either. Put yourself in their shoes. This Galileo guy says the earth rotates! That’s obviously absurd.  Wouldn’t one feel it move? When a ball was dropped from a tower it dropped straight down. Wouldn’t the ball hit the ground in a different place if the earth had moved while it fell? For we moderns, it is appropriate to ask who or what has authority in the field we are interested in. Science makes an excellent claim to authority where one wishes to study the natural world, but what about man’s subjective experience of reality? Who or what has authority to speak about Art?

During earlier European periods, like the Baroque mentioned above, it was clear: church or secular noble aficionados spoke with authority because only they could afford it and because they controlled the conversation of the art tradition. This relatively small group, who had the free time and education to enjoy their passion knew who the “in” artists were and they competed for their time and work. It was they, along with the artists of the period who created some of the greatest, most innovative  and complex art, both visual and musical, that the world has ever seen. This was possible because of the confluence of money, the educated appreciation of a few men of long-term wealth,  and the exuberance of the era, turbocharged as it was by the Renaissance.

Who speaks with authority today as to what constitutes great Art? Who indeed.  We have no nobility. The key value of a noble class is long-term wealth, which allows its members to spend time engaged in interests other than survival such as art, continuing a conversation with generations of noblemen that at minimum guarantees a certain level of artistic achievement in the context of history . Sometime in the late 18th Century a shift in audience began to take place as a bourgeois class gained wealth and influence; think of the shift in musical aesthetic between Bach. extreme complexity, and Haydn, elegant long lines of music.  The vast middle classes had less leisure time than did their noble forbearers and therefore they  needed guides who could tell them what good art was. Critics arose in the  large metropolitan areas like New York or Paris who would determine what good art was. In the 20th Century this process reached its culmination with the rise of the art critic and the capture of the “art world” by the academy and auction houses. This led to a very theoretical form of art, where the explanation of the art became a necessary component of the artwork itself. Is this a good thing? No, but if one adopts a democratic-republican system of government there is no way around this problem unless the demos speaks up and/or is honored by the oligarchy that rules them, e.g., think of Jazz’s productive influence on classical music in the mid-Twentieth Century. For now, if a young, ambitious artist wants to succeed in any worldly sense, they must seek the approval of the professional critics, who notably cannot produce art themselves, but who nonetheless define the artist’s field of endeavor for them. The center no longer holds, but this aberrant situation cannot continue much longer; given what we now call “art,” it is difficult to imagine how much lower we can go.

“And as everyone in our day and age knows, the arts—especially those favored by the elite—are the clearest expression of the spirit of the times.”

Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 by Carlos M. N. Eire

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Blog No. 74: I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light

By admin | Published: October 16, 2016

The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be a hundred meals without mustard. The poem gets written. I have wrestled with the angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame. Neither do I have guilt. My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely. It does not include mustard, or teeth. It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot. My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.

From Upstream: Selected Essays by Mary Oliver

I am always struck by how the best photographs present themselves quietly. It’s quite frustrating to be unable to imagine a future image in advance, or to be hindered from finding a good image because I was really looking for the ghosts of prior images. The fact is that the next portfolio quality image almost always comes as a surprise! This is what distinguishes photography from painting, among other things.

For example, I’m quite happy with my recent images from the inner passage to Alaska. The fact is, however that I was transiting from Vancouver to Alaska on a cruise ship vacation and my wife called me out onto the cabin’s balcony to see the sites when suddenly the fog and clouds made everything interesting. I had no prior hint that this was where my best images would come from; I was expecting them to occur in Alaska itself. The best image of the lot was captured because I quickly pulled out my pocket Sony RX-100 to capture the leprechaun so to speak. This only goes to show that the gear is less important than the gift. We all would like to think that we can plan ahead, pre-visualize the shot and print the image that was in our minds eye precisely as it was at the time of capture, but for me this rarely happens; the gift is presented and it must be taken when it, not the photographer is ready.

This is one of the things I like best about photography. The hunt of course encourages an alert attention towards life, but like a small child images sneak up and surprise me, ironically the moment my attention lags. It occurs to me that the best things in life work that way and we must be grateful. As Mary Oliver said, “My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and howsoever it may arrive.”

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Blog No. 73: Having a better opinion of mankind

By admin | Published: August 27, 2016

Speaking of the thought of Marcus Aurelius, Montesquieu said “Such is the effect that it produces that we have a better opinion of ourselves because we have a better opinion of men.” This idea provides a fine means of evaluating art.

When engaging art, your standard should be whether it gives you a better opinion of mankind; if it does not, don’t bother with it, life is short; if it does, then stop and contemplate it. Does it move you? How does it move you? Why does it move you? What truths does it consider?

Let’s consider two works using this standard. Does Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can give you a better opinion of mankind? Not so much. What about Michelangelo’s Pieta? Certainly. What is the difference? The image of a soup can is simply a juvenile and facile complaint; something any freshman could come up with. The Pieta? It contains visual, emotional and intellectual worlds whether the viewer is Christian or not (although of course it is a richer experience to a believer). A young male,  the son lies dead in his mother’s lap. She is achingly beautiful, pure and anguished. Her God has allowed her son to be killed in the most horrible manner possible. How can one not feel that pathos of the moment?    Whether she is actually the mother of God, or just the mother of a remarkably innocent and loving son, her heart breaks and we can feel her anguish.

How does the artist depict this awful moment? In the purest white polished marble–innocence in physical form. How is it composed? As a massive triangle, the most stable shape known. It intends to speak truth, not a simple gentle truth like God is love, but a complex truth at the intersection of life, death and love. If aliens were to come to earth and ask me to justify mankind, one of the things I would point to would be this great work. An image of a soup can? Probably not.

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Blog No. 72, Blinded by the Light

By admin | Published: April 26, 2016

The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.

Mary Oliver, from “Good Morning” in Blue Horses: Poems

A world with God and a world without God is both exactly the same and completely different. A man knows a woman at work; he falls in love with her and their world has changed despite the fact that nothing has changed physically; the difference is love.

Why are we so blind to the obvious? We walk outside of ourselves and are blinded by the light that is reality. More often we hunker down inside ourselves and become wretched for lack of the love that we deny ourselves; like plants growing in the dark, we distort and blanch inside ourselves, when all we need to do is open the door. I try to photograph the dazzling truth of life that we can only bear to see on occasion; rendered to allow some appreciation of the dazzling creation that we are born into.

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Blog No. 71 What is the nature of the individual?

By admin | Published: March 1, 2016

Human experience is multifaceted; the natural objective world, the subjective experience of that world, the relationship between humans, the need for something beyond ourselves, eros and agape and everything in between. We necessarily choose a perspective, a paradigm to understand this torrent of experience because we are limited in our ability to understand it in totality. By selecting from that experience we can literally shape the world we live in and therefore we must choose well.

The descent into decadence begins when the natural loses its interest and fully blossoms into the unnatural becoming the normal; it ends in the suicide of the culture. I have often bemoaned the contemporary in these blogs, which is based on a dangerously false concept of the self. Until the late 19th Century, most people made little effort to define what we mean when we spoke about an individual person. An individual was a relatively stable being with free will to act in a conscious way, rationally or irrationally, but  always internally aware of the self; the Furies were outside of us, not inside of us. From the advent of the Enlightenment, e.g., Les Liaisons Dangereuses,  to the writings of Freud, to the rise of the social sciences this began to change; the Furies were us.

This shift in perspective as to the meaning of the individual reached crisis stage with the Frankfurt School and the rise of Critical Theory. The idea of a stable personality capable of individual judgment was gone, replaced by self-deluded entity that believed itself stable and with free will, but that was actually ever-changing, in the thrall of biological demands for food, sex and security, while immersed in a social network that silently dictated the thoughts of this poor deluded creature. In the first paradigm, the poet wrote words to creatively express an idea that required more than normal discourse; it required a leap of sorts. The poet intended the words to express his personal thoughts and to effect the reader accordingly. In the new paradigm, nothing of the sort happens; the first paradigm is delusional. The poet’s choices of ideas and words was determined not freely, but because of the secret agendas of the biological self as shaped by the objective outside forces of society, which is to say by power relationships. In western cultures the power is held by white males whose perspective served only to buttress white male power over those less privileged. Beauty? Purpose? Duty? Honor? Virtue? Vice? All delusions or worse, the tools of the privileged to suppress the weak aka “people of color.”

So, who are we? A free and natural people created by God with inalienable rights, free will and a love of truth or confused slaves living in a mindless world? The answer chosen determines the kind of world  we live in–we build our own prisons. In the contemporary world the truncated unnatural view of the individual has become the normal and our thoughts, through the nihilism of the new paradigm, create a culture of death. Why do I hate contemporary art? It is unnatural to man who is indeed a physical being, but who is also much more than that.

 

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Blog No. 70: Other Kingdoms

By admin | Published: January 26, 2016

“For art cannot live in the world of kitsch, which is a world of commodities to be consumed, rather than icons to be revered. True art is an appeal to our higher nature, an attempt to affirm that other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails. Others exist in this realm not as compliant dolls but as spiritual beings, whose claims on us are endless and unavoidable. For us who live in the aftermath of the kitsch epidemic, therefore, art has acquired a new importance. It is the real presence of our spiritual ideals.”

From “Beauty: A Very Short Introduction” by Roger Scruton

Professor Scruton’s book is a very interesting meditation on the nature of beauty. The above quote summarizes his position, one that I fully endorse. Many of my blogs point to the desert that is contemporary art, but this desert is a symptom of a greater malady, which is nihilism. If great Art affirms the “other kingdom in which moral and spiritual order prevails…” then there must really be that “other kingdom” or Art is simply a mirage arising from a dream.

When I speak of my efforts to capture the real thing, the Platonic form of the subject, I’m mumbling in my own inarticulate way to express what Professor Scruton has said with much more clarity. We are more than our bodies. I don’t know what that means exactly other than we long to go home, and to the extent we can experience a little of home here in this life, we ought to do so. Art in all its forms does this if it succeeds. I can only hope that every once in a while my little efforts bear some fruit that savors of home.

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Blog No. 69, Soul Matter

By admin | Published: October 21, 2015

Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five Senses….

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

How about a crazy hypothesis? Blake is technically correct.

Under this hypothesis our bodies would be composed of normal matter, which we sense using our sense organs,  and our soul would be composed of “matter” of a quite different type, something like dark matter.

Dark matter is not sensitive to electromagnetic radiation; we infer the existence of dark matter by its other effects on normal matter, i.e., it is sensitive to gravity, and therefore, its gravitational effects on normal matter imply its existence. The soul’s “matter” could be dark in that it would be sensitive to very little in our normal space-time, but would nonetheless exist (perhaps something like a Higgs Field?). Moreover, since matter is fundamentally packets of waves, it might simply effect normal matter as a sound wave has an effect on a tuning fork. How would we know it existed? Our subjective experience of the natural world implies its existence.

We are absolutely certain that we subjectively experience reality. We are almost as certain that there is an objective reality. Historically we differentiate spiritual things from material ones, but now that we know materiality to be an erroneous concept we may have to learn that spirituality isn’t what we thought it was either; perhaps  Mr. Blake was on to something.

 

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Blog No. 68: How small the cosmos

By admin | Published: October 13, 2015

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.”

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