No. 56: It’s not about you

Here is an excerpt from a wonderful commencement speech given by Joyce DiDonato, the great Mezzo. You can watch it in its entirety at: http://www.joycedidonato.com/2014/05/27/the-juilliard-schools-109th-commencement-speech-joyce-didonato/

Perhaps my favorite truth:

It’s not about you. This can be a particularly hard, and humbling lesson to face – and it’s one I’ve had to continue to learn at every stage of my own journey – but this is a freeing and empowering truth. You may not yet realize it, but you haven’t signed up for a life of glory and adulation (although that MAY well come, and I wish with every fiber of my being, that it WILL come in the right form for every single one of you – however, that is not your destination, for glory is always transitory and will surely disappear just as fleetingly and arbitrarily as it arrived.) The truth is, you have signed up for a life of service by going into the Arts. And the life-altering results of that service in other people’s lives will NEVER disappear as fame unquestionably will. You are here to serve the words, the director, the melody, the author, the chord progression, the choreographer –but above all and most importantly, with every breath, step, and stroke of the keyboard, you are here to serve humanity.

You, as alumni of the 109th graduating class of The Juilliard School are now servants to the ear that needs quiet solace, and the eye that needs the consolation of beauty, servants to the mind that needs desperate repose or pointed inquiry, to the heart that needs invitation to flight or silent understanding, and to the soul that needs safe landing, or fearless, relentless enlightenment. You are a servant to the sick one who needs healing through the beauty and peace of the symphony you will compose through blood-shot eyes and sleepless nights. You are an attendant to the lost one who needs saving through the comforting, probing words you will conjure up from the ether, as well as from your own heroic moments of strife and triumph. You are a steward to the closed and blocked one who needs to feel that vital, electric, joyful pulse of life that eludes them as they witness you stop time as you pirouette and jettè across the stage on your tired legs and bleeding toes. You are a vessel to the angry and confused one who needs a protected place to release their rage as they watch your eyes on the screen silently weep in pain as you relive your own private hell. You are a servant to the eager, naïve, optimistic ones who will come behind you with wide eyes and wild dreams, reminding you of yourself, as you teach and shape and mold them, even though you may be plagued with haunting doubts yourself, just as your teachers likely were – and you will reach out to them and generously invite them to soar and thrive, because we are called to share this thing called Art.

One can say the same about the visual arts.  It needs to be said not just to remind we artists that we do good, but also to recall why we should be doing it. Self expression is fine, but it is a merely selfish and egotistical act unless we remember that the real point and purpose of our art is to bring beauty into the lives of others.

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Blog No. 55: The Supernatural in Art (Part 2)

I am a customer of the Teaching Company, a great place to continue learning about the world. One of their courses is entitled “How Jesus Became God.” I was struck by the implication of this title. It is clear that the underlying assumption of the history professor giving the lectures is that Jesus was not God. The problem is that the discipline of history requires that assumption, and it is the hidden nature of this requirement that makes it troublesome.

Historians deal with “facts,” which is to say things that the historian counts as a fact, e.g.,  the historical record, archeological data, etc. The historian then makes reasonable surmises to fill in the gaps using certain protocols. For example, if early Christians said Jesus was killed in a degrading way, it is more likely true than if they said he died a noble death because normally people don’t brag about degrading things. This is particularly important in discussing the “historical Jesus,” because if Jesus were divine, the whole project would fail because anything becomes possible; surmises become untethered to “facts” because the true story is outside of history. The same problem arises in the natural sciences. Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist  was known to disfavor the “god hypothesis” because he felt that it left him nothing to do scientifically and therefore  he assumed that there was no god because his love of scientific inquiry forced him to make that assumption.  Again, the problem is that the god hypothesis forces one outside of the natural, which is the subject matter of the scientific project.

Thus, the entire modern version of the Enlightenment project necessarily begins with the assumption that we are no more than material creatures living in a purely material world. This assumption is perfectly reasonable, in that it has great utility, as long as it is clearly advertised. As discussed in Part 1, however, we know more certainly than we know anything that there is a supernatural, i.e., more than material aspect to our natural existence. This fact, a supernatural reality outside the natural world of cause and effect (combined with the modern physicists’ problem saying exactly what “matter” is) leads away from empirical and toward Art as a necessary means of knowing what it means to be human. This is not to denigrate the sciences in any way; it is just to put them in their proper place. Science is a powerful tool, but it is just a tool to discover how the natural world operates, not to answer all or even many of our most important questions about our supernatural experience of life.

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No. 54: The Supernatural in Art (Part 1)

Do I believe in the supernatural? Yes, if by supernatural one means that which exists, but cannot be empirically verified. My subjective experience of the natural world is not verifiable, yet I know it exists. For example, a scientist could show that light of a blue wavelength was hitting my retina, that it was functioning properly by sending that information to my brain, and that my brain showed activity in specific areas, but she could not demonstrate that “I” existed or that I was experiencing the color blue. It is the subjective experience that escapes empirical detection because it is a different kind of thing, not part of the natural world–it is supernatural. The term “supernatural” may also be applied to ideas about the natural world. Where does the mathematical concept of a triangle exist? Without location, there can be no empirical measurement and no verifiable existence.

Can the supernatural arise from the natural as an emergent quality? I don’t know. It would seem unlikely since experience seems to be outside the causality of the natural world (or else it could be measured), yet it might be caused by something in the natural world because the only place I know of where the supernatural exists is in relation to a physical being, namely my body.

I do know that Art addresses, or ought to address the supernatural. I have previously argued that Art deals with beauty, and that anything that does not deal with beauty is not Art; it may have great social value or might make a fine philosophical point, but it is not Art.  The term “beauty” of course can be applied to the purely natural, e.g., a beautiful  diamond, but the beauty that Art is concerned with is supernatural. This is what distinguishes pornography from a Greek nude; the first is concerned only with a person’s body and its mechanical functioning; the latter is concerned with the person as supernatural being without the weight of materiality; the male or female “ideal” form that later evolved into the Christian idea of the person as a divinely important being.

To create and respond to Art is a supernatural exchange between supernatural beings. I am not claiming more than I must; I’m not speaking of ghosts, goblins or poltergeists. But Art is a kind of bridge between the natural and supernatural; a way of communicating the supernatural to the supernatural via the natural. For example, my images try to capture the supernatural aspect of the subject (physically reflecting the photons of light that are captured by the sensor in my camera) by the imposition of my viewpoint on it.

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No. 53: “All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee”

All love in this world is a token; a breadcrumb that leads to something more. To confuse the token for real thing is enter Dante’s dark wood; lost following the moon rather than the sun. How one goes about distinguishing token from reality, moon from sun, is the hard part.  It is here, where needed most that reason by itself fails. Think of all the most important decisions one makes in this life and the conclusion must be reached that reason, even with empirical evidence often fails to determine the outcome. Who to marry? What job to take? What house to buy? What ethics to follow?

When we were children our world was fresh and mysterious; adults were demigods; truths simple. At some point we discover that much of this worldview is false, and too many descend into cynicism, casting overboard everything they had been taught as misguided illusion at best, lies at worst. Far too many never awake from this slumber of the spirit, and worse, don’t even try to awaken from the nightmare existence they’ve created where they think themselves an “accidental collocation of atoms,” to quote Bertrand Russell.

We should be more generous in our evaluation; one cannot appreciate Art from this perspective. It beckons from afar and it takes an act of faith in our fellow man to follow. The understanding of Art and life is a journey; to truly understand great art we must be great-souled; to be great-souled we must begin the journey; we cannot begin the journey without having faith that it will help us understand who we are, what we are, where we are and why we live.

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see
All discord, harmony not understood,
Pope’s “Essay on Man”

 

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Blog No. 52: In eternity this world will be Troy

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don’t imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

Marilynne Robinson via John Ames, Gilead

It’s the pessimism of modernity I hate. Contemporary art reflects this pessimism. It was the world wars and loss of God that caused this pessimism. It is not warranted. We exist, which is a miracle and we die, which is also a miracle. The greatest miracle is our existence, so to fail to appreciate this gift, the gift of parents and wife and children is to show a lack of courage and imagination.

Art should reflect on the miracle of existence. Beauty is the glint of another world that shyly reveals itself to those who are looking for it. That’s the trick. You have to look for something to find it. The camera is the best means of doing this artistically because by necessity it is tethered to reality, yet it allows the data collected about that reality to be used by the artist to help the viewer see what is truly in front of them: the miracle of existence. It is more than that of course because it is a particular thing that exists. The miracle is that an individual exists. If one pays attention, it is the powerful existence of the individual before us that creates the awe; it is not vague; it is real. When we see only photons reflecting off of something, we see very little. It is the artist’s job to see imaginatively so that he can use whatever medium he is working with to present that reality to the viewer and awaken her to the world.

Whenever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it?

Id.

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Blog No. 51: Objective and Subjective Experience

The example [melody does not equal sound] shows that there are concepts which direct our mental states but which can play no part in an explanatory [scientific] theory, because they divide the world into the wrong kinds of kind—concepts like those of ornament, melody, duty, freedom. The concept of the person is such a concept, which does not mean that there are no persons, but only that a scientific theory of human persons will classify them with other things—for example, with apes or mammals….

Roger Scuton, The Face of God

We use groupings all the time. Problems arise, however, when we fail to recognize that frequently we are using the wrong kind of grouping for the question posed. To be grouped, whatever is in the group must have some similarity; we don’t group “turtle” with “rough” because one has nothing to do with the other. Science groups as it does because the scientific project requires it to be organized that way—it has utility for the scientist. Groupings can shift as understanding shifts. For example taxonomy is changing as we shift from association by appearance to association by related genetic characteristics. There is no “right” way to do taxonomy; the scientist simply decides what grouping has the most utility.

It is an error to presume that the scientist’s grouping has the same degree of utility for other types of questions, e.g., to understand interpersonal relationships (which might better be considered by art, e.g., King Lear). When we do that, we treat subjects, you or me, like an object, e.g., a hydrogen atom,  and this is error of the gravest sort. It confuses material things with subjective things; the scientist judges how to organize people who are objects for the purposes of her taxonomy; the scientist loves her husband when she gets home.

A friend of mine recently made a suggestion that I think is helpful in thinking about this problem. He noted that we apprehend the world in two ways, objectively and subjectively. The world that we apprehend objectively is a world that we measure in one way or another; the world that we apprehend subjectively, we simply experience. The objective world is shared and measuring is simply an agreed way of talking about it; hypothesizing simply attempts to predict what future measurements might be. The subjective world is lonely, and we can only assume that others who appear to be like ourselves have similar experiences.  The objective worldview can demand proof; the subjective world is proof. Thus, when we group things that we can measure, we can group only by our measurements; when we group our subjective experience, we can only judge the experiences as similar. Thus, the two ways of apprehending the world cannot be treated as knowledge of same type because that makes an error of category; we mix apples and orange.

 

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No. 50, I Am But a Midwife

Michelangelo reportedly said: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” This idea is certainly applicable to photography. I create an image by removing or reducing from the photograph what is not the image. Another way to look at it is that I extract from the data collected by the camera. Regardless of how you put it, however, I midwife the image. As the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins said: “These things, these things were here and but the beholder/Wanting.” The image exists in the world but is somehow hidden; sometimes in the clutter of our heart’s inability to see what is in plain sight. As Goethe said:  “Few people have the imagination for reality.”

14. Hurrahing in Harvest
SUMMER ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise
  Around; up above, what wind-walks! what lovely behaviour
  Of silk-sack clouds! has wilder, wilful-wavier
Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?
I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,         5
  Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
  And, éyes, heárt, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
  Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—         10
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
  Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
  And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
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No. 49: “Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare” (Love moved me and made me speak.)

A fine opinion piece in the WSJ, “Art for Life’s Sake,” made the point that:

Few of us are unlikely to forget the evils of existence. The real risk is that we will fall into depression and despair; the danger is that we will lose hope in the human project.

Many believe that artists should reflect their culture, which post-WWI art certainly does. Surrealism, Expressionism, Abstraction, Pop all point to the artists’ reaction to a world without god, and therefore a world without love, which provides the context for our experience of life. Generally, fear, alienation, anxiety and an obsession with the inner workings of the subconscious mind of the artist continue to dominate art, especially as taught in the academies, but no response is offered.

Beautiful Art can be a balm and in our frenzied efforts to avoid thinking about anything seriously, the flippancy that hides our fear and alienation from the world. However, art cannot be delusion, and anxiety and alienation are a natural response to the situation we all find ourselves in. Therefore, Art can and should deal with the difficulties of life, but it can and should also present a response to these difficulties, not just surrender to them. In our era, Artists should lead by affirming their love of the human experience despite its difficulties through the creation of beautiful Art. To do this, artists may need to change from within. If Artists are humble and quiet they will again be open; once open, the love will be felt; once felt, the Artist will be move to speak because without love we are unable to see that God is in this place.

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No. 48: Humans ask the questions

I know that this blog is supposed to be about art, but every once and a while I feel like wandering elsewhere (it’s my Blog after all), see e.g., Blog No. 39.

I was conversing with God one day when I thought we could talk about something that had been bothering me. “Is the theory of relativity correct when it says that the universe is subjective in nature? For example, the movement of body A can only be thought of in terms of another body B, and therefore A’s movement is necessarily relative to B. Surely there is more, a God’s eye view.” God smiled and answered, “Did you read that interesting blog at www.violetcrownphotographs.com about the fact a man can never know what it’s like to be a bat?” Puzzled, I said “of course.” “Well then, there is your answer.” More puzzled, I asked Him to explain. “The term ‘move’ includes relativity in it, duh!” I had to admit that I couldn’t think of an example where the concept of movement didn’t involve a comparison of one or more bodies to one another. “The thing to understand is that humans have no other way of understanding their world except as a human could understand it; a bat lives in another world uninhabitable by humans. As Professor Heisenberg has said, ‘There is no use in discussing what could be done if we were other beings than what we are.'” “That can’t be true” I exclaimed, “at least if there is only one reality.” But the dawn was beginning to break. “You mean, since I am human there is literally no other way for me to perceive the natural world except as I perceive it?” God smiled again (a bad sign), and said, ” I also gave humans a special gift: their reason. You believe in me because it’s reasonable to do so don’t you?” I agreed.

“Well, humans perceive the natural world the way they naturally do, but they can use their reason to understand their world more deeply can’t they?” Again, I agreed. “So, Einstein imagined the universe differently from Newton and developed a very useful theory humans could use to continue their exploration of the world around them and this theory understood movement to be relative and the universe to be subjective because it was humans asking the questions.” God continued, “I will tell you that there is a God’s eye view of the natural world because I stand outside it, beyond causality if you will.” I asked “How can the universe be both subjective from a human perspective, and objective from Your perspective?” God responded, “What if I were to tell you that space-time was a laminated solid?” “A solid?” I asked in amazement. He continued, “If it were an infinitely layered solid that could be flipped page by page, or slice by slice if you will, like a cartoon; Body A and Body B would not actually be moving, but would appear to be moving relative to each other.” I then asked, “So, humans would perceive movement, but in reality there would be none? Parmenides got it right! ” God gently said: “The key is understanding what ‘reality’ is.” The human experiences a past, a present and a future; if an electron could be aware as it traveled at the speed of light, it would only experience a present because at light speed there is no past or future. Which is “real”?

“Humans can only know ‘reality’ as humans are capable of knowing it, which is their ‘reality.’ It makes no sense from a human standpoint to speak as if there were more than one reality, but each species has its own reality that it cannot escape. Why do you think modern cosmologists are having such a hard time getting passed theories expounded nearly a century ago? Technology has advanced, but your way of thinking about it has not. I agree with Professor Feynman who famously said, ‘Humans don’t really understand quantum mechanics.'” “So, there is no hope of greater understanding?” I queried. “Of course, humans have only scratched the surface of what they are capable of, but accepting your limits will keep you from wasting your time trying to be something you’re not; men are not bats.” “You mean we can eventually understand that the universe is a solid?” In a tone of voice indicating that our conversation had come to a close, God said: “I never said that.”

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No. 47 Housekeeping

I recently read a wonderful book by Marilynne Robinson entitled Housekeeping. Marilynne Robinson incants a book of poetry in prose that explores the tenuous relationship between perception and “reality” and thus addresses the major theme of my work. The faithful, transcendental Ruth who is the protagonist of the story is contrasted with Lucille, her sister who chooses to be grounded in the “real world.” Ruth, however, tells a tale in which her consciousness speaks directly to us and merges her experience of natural life into the deeper mystery of things much as a primitive might when confronted with a dark woods or deep lake—pantheistically.

We cannot know the natural world directly, but only indirectly through our senses as organized by the software of our brain. This inescapably means that we are simultaneously observer and part of the reality that we are observing.  Ruth loses herself in this process, but her loss is our gain because her narrative poetically communicates her deep feeling for the mystery of existence. Consider this passage:

For need can blossom into all the compensation it requires. To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow. For when does a berry break upon the tongue  as sweetly as when one longs to taste it, and when is the taste refracted into so many hues and savors of ripeness and earth, and when do our senses know any thing so utterly as when we lack it?

Ruth realizes that need is more intense than fulfillment because our mental perception of the thing is more intense than the thing itself. The berry in our mouth has only the physical sensations a berry gives and is limited to an event in time; our mental image of enjoying the berry contains that plus all the other thoughts and sensations associated with it, e.g., a mother’s blueberry pie, a daughter’s purple smile, the thrill of stealing the neighbor’s berries as a child, the best blueberry we ever ate.

This is the power of Art; it leverages our imagination to better appreciate the mystery of our existence. It creates an emotional response in our mind; it creates new thoughts and feelings about the subject and sometimes about art itself; it creates a deeper  appreciation of beauty in all its forms. Housekeeping is a homeward looking  work of loving, transcendent beauty.

 

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