On What I Know and Who I Am (Becoming)

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In Night Operation, Barfield offers advice for those suffering from "library-terror," that feeling that there is endless recorded knowledge in the world but nowhere to begin to understand it. Barfield's remedy is "to keep following always one particular thread of inquiry"—presumably with an inkling that eventually anything will lead to everything or at least to everything you need to know. Almost as long as I can remember, I have followed a thread. I have been in pursuit of something, something I knew not what and I have come to believe that this pursuit is coeternal with my being. The experience of receiving what I needed to receive when I needed to receive it, most commonly through reading but also through hearing or even mishearing, from thinking, being told or through what seemed an unbidden insight, is an experience that I cannot deny. It is not correct to conclude from this that my mind did not grow through direct experience. Alert receptivity (when we manage to achieve it) is the definition of direct experience, whether of art, nature, intellect, love or heartbreak.

One could argue, however, that I cannot step outside of my life to evaluate how it, how I would be now had I learned one thing when, in fact, I learned another. It is possible to conclude that, of course, everything seems as it should be because that is how it is. I know and love my life as it is. Had it been different, I would have loved that life, too. To that, I answer that my life is an unfolding, and just as it is possible to discipline ourselves to see becoming, to see not a leaf but leaf-ing, not natura naturata but natura naturans, I can learn to see—even to quite literally see—the thread of my life as the thread of my Self. For his part, Barfield looked forward to a time when ""a man is no longer regarded as a lunatic who divines that the things which happen to a person, and the order in which they happen, may be as much a part of him as his physical organism."

I am not an object acted upon, am not distinct from what happens to me, what occurs "in" my life. I am what I seek. I am what I learn—the serendipities and the disappointments. I am what I am coming to know and this is much larger than the appearance of myself as phenomenon. In What Coleridge Thought, Barfield explains that Coleridge, often accused of plagiarism, did not generally "borrow" the ideas of others but "adopted" them. The difference is that, in borrowing, one merely apes the insights of another. In adopting, the ideas come alive in one's self. One mind rises up to meet another in Mind. It is possible to adopt only what had been on the tip of one's own tongue to begin with. From this understanding, it is a short step to realize Coleridge's imperative that we should recognize our own creative activity as the creative activity of the Universe. Just as it is possible, as Steiner did, to think of a butterfly as "a flower liberated from its stalk," it is possible to experience Life, the same Life that animates everything else, transmuting itself, displaying itself, reveling in itself through me—through each and all of us all the time.

Many, many blessings for the New Year!

"The Poetic Narrative of Our Time" by David Whyte

Excerpt:  "It is the province of poetry to be more realistic and present than the artificial narratives of an outer discourse, and not afraid of the truthful difficulty of the average human life. A good poem looks life straight in the face, unflinching, sincere, equal to revelation through loss or gain. A good poem brims with reflected beauty and even a bracing beautiful ugliness. At the center of our lives, in the midst of the busyness and the forgetting, is a story that makes sense when everything extraneous has been taken away. This is poetry's province; a form of deep memory; a place from which to witness the intangible, unspeakable thresholds of incarnation we misname an average life."

From Night Operation

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Owen Barfield's novella, Night Operation, can be described as his "Allegory of the Cave." Through its characters, he explores what it means to see, to think and to create as well as the difficulty, when we are true to ourselves, of distinguishing between the three activities:


"There are two kinds of seeing.  There is just seeing—and there is being shown."

___

Words were uttered by the Gods at the start. Very well—but they have since been spoken by men, and most of them spoken very much amiss; and the things have followed them. Men call themselves 'creative' and fill a Library with books and pictures, and the world with things they have made. But in the end, for good or ill, they can only do what the gods are doing in them. It might have been otherwise if they had ever been fully born. As, who knows, perhaps they nearly were.

___

We shall do whatever we find to do, whether it's big or little, not because we think it's likely to succeed but because we are bound to. I don't mean compelled. I mean bound by the shape of what we've seen and by the fact that we've seen it. We shall know the direction in which our faces are turned, because there is only one way in which a face that has looked on that could be turned. And that's all we need to know. Prospects and hope are bunk. The only reality is resolution.

We also find the three protagonists experimenting with exact sensorial imagination as it is described in this passage:

Nevertheless, as Peet pointed out, amid all variety that same particular blossom with its own particular shape could be seen recurring over and over again. He made them concentrate on one of these to begin with, until they could recognize it when they saw it in another place. 'We haven't got a name for it,' he said, 'but that doesn't matter. Perhaps it is all the better. The point is we must become able to say to ourselves, 'This is this flower and not another.' After which they went on and did the same with a few more.

"Nature Fulfilled by Grace"

One of the readings from yesterday's Charles Williams' New Christian Year was this two-line gem from Coventry Patmore:

"I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now."  Not because they are so unlike your mortal experiences, but because they are so like.

--from The Rod, the Root, and the Flower.

This led me to explore the full-text of The Rod, the Root and the Flower where, so far, I have been delighted to discover that there are more gems where that came from.  The first passage is from the introduction:

A systematic Philosopher, should he condescend to read 

the following notes, will probably 
say, with a little girl of mine to whom I showed 
the stars for the first time, " How untidy the 
sky is ! " But who does not know that all philosophies 

have had to pay, for the blessing of 
system, by the curse of barrenness? Sensible 
people will feel shocked at my "paradoxes," 
which, however, are not mine, and are, as Coleridge says, 

the only mode in which realities 
of a certain order can be approximately expressed.

_____

Lovers put out the candles and draw the 
curtains, when they wish to see the god and the 
goddess; and, in the higher Communion, the 

night of thought is the light of perception. 

_____

Nature fulfilled by grace is not less natural, 
but is supernaturally natural. 

_____

Direct teaching cannot go much beyond pointing out 

the conditions of perception, and the direction 

in which it is to be looked for. 

_____

Goethe said that " God is manifested in ultimates";

that is, in facts of human nature of which 
we not only see no explanation, but also see 

that no explanation is possible. 

_____

The most pregnant passages of Scripture, 

of the wise ancients, and of great poets are those 
which seem to you to have no meaning, or an absurd one. 

_____

"Detachment" consists, not in casting aside 
all natural loves and goods, but in the possession 
of a love and a good so great that all others, 
though they may and do acquire increase through 
the presence of the greater love and good, which 
explains and justifies them, seem nothing in comparison. 

 

More from Robert Kelly

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Theology of Mind

When I say mind, I mean desire. When I say desire, I mean you. When I say you, I mean your skin. When I say your skin, I mean the way in. When I say the way in, I mean the way into the dark. When I say the dark, I mean the place where there is listening. When I say listening, I mean listening to the word. When I say a word, I mean a bone. And when I say bone, I mean the ocean, but when I say ocean I mean a book. And when I say book, I mean the law. When I say law, I mean tethers and fetters. When I say fetters, I mean a knife. When I say knife, I mean wisdom. When I say wisdom, I mean your body. And when I say your body, I mean your mind.


--Robert Kelly

"Hedgehog" by Paul Muldoon

"Science" by Robert Kelly

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Science

Science explains nothing
but holds all together as
many things as it can count

science is a basket
not a religion he said
a cat as a big as a cat

the moon the size of the moon
science is the same as poetry
only it uses the wrong words.

--Robert Kelly

Barfield on Art and Science

"It is no longer enough that an occasional artist here and there should see his parcel of truth and speak it out, while the actual direction taken by civilisation continues to be wholly determined by a soi-disant scientific method of knowledge.  Science must itself become an art, and art a science; either they must mingle, or Western civilisation, as we know it, must perish to make room for one that may have spirit enough to learn how to know God's earth as He actually made it."

--Owen Barfield, from "Thinking and Thought" in Romanticism Comes of Age

"This Lime Tree Bower My Prison"

The following poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge strikes me as almost an unconsciously developed manual for Goethe's "exact sensorial imagination," the practice of seeing deeply into nature by, first, observing a natural phenomenon carefully and faithfully, then enlivening and extending the image of the phenomenon retained in the mind.  In his poem, Coleridge at first grieves his inability to follow his friends as they traverse a landscape with which he has become intimately acquainted.  As he travels the landscape in his mind, however, he realizes, not only that Nature is fully present in even the humble bower that he had cursed as his prison, but that the contemplation of the natural is, itself, an expression of Nature's vitality.  With this understanding, he finds himself in the presence of "Love and Beauty" and, in the final line, is able to attribute to one of his wandering friends a sentiment that could well be the motto of those who are awake to the potential of the Ugly-Beautiful: "No sound is dissonant which tells of Life." 

This Lime Tree Bower My Prison

ADDRESSED TO CHARLES LAMB,

OF THE INDIA HOUSE, LONDON

In the June of 1797 some long-expected friends paid a visit to the author's cottage; and on the morning of their arrival, he met with an accident, which disabled him from walking during the whole of their stay. One evening, when they had left him for a few hours, he composed the following lines in the garden-bower.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; -- that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.
                                    Now, my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven -- and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend
Struck with deep joy may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when yet he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.
                                            A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now, with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight; and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That Nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promis'd good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blest it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory,
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

--Samuel Taylor Coleridge

On The Next Big Thing

Although my idea of a video game is still something along the lines of Space Invaders or Pitfall (remember Pitfall?  I made up a whole backstory about that little pixelated guy), I found this gaming article in Slate interesting.  Here's an excerpt:

While gaming feels too much like a boys' club for my liking, the goal of  'trying to make more games that appeal to women' is problematic. The television shows that attain not just ratings but cultural admiration—like Mad Men—aren't usually created with gender targets, but with the goal of telling a story that captures the nuances of human experience. I would guess women like Mad Men just as much as men do, even though the values of the show's characters are overwhelmingly sexist. Similarly, I don't think gaming will broaden its audience by focusing on subject matter so much as execution and intention—the why that Hecker asks developers to consider in his talk.

After reading that, I stumbled on similar sentiments from The Guardian concerning Harry Potter:

As is often the case with cultural phenomena, it seems to have helped that Potter defied the conventional wisdom of the time. A focus group would surely have concluded – as the eight publishers who turned down the original manuscript presumably did – that there was no modern market for stories about a bespectacled wimp at a boarding school. But within a decade he was a billion-dollar brand.

The lesson here seems to be that, like life from the Primordial Stew, culture should be allowed to bubble-up from whatever pool it was born in.  Attempts to manipulate audiences by manufacturing cultural phenomena may succeed but they will not endure.  For me, this is another reminder that real shifts in mass consciousness should be regarded as gifts from the gods.  We can teach ourselves to receive them but we cannot create them.

A Utopian Vision

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A few weeks ago, I finished Peter Dickinson's children's trilogy The Changes in which the inhabitants of the British Isles are one day without obvious cause overcome with a revulsion for technology. People flee the cities but what follows is not the establishment of an agrarian utopia because, with the people's disdain for machines, comes superstition, suspicion and cruelty. What has stuck with me about the story is its fairness in casting medieval provincialism and contemporary machine-dependence as equally symptomatic of deadened minds. It is unwise to relax too completely into the corporate mind of any era. Our relationships with nature, with each other and with the artifacts of our culture require our vigilance to remain healthy relationships.

Particularly in Heartsease, the second of the three novels, it is clear that some characters have an affinity with animals and some with machines and, while Dickinson seems saddened that it is not common for people to be able to commune with both flesh and blood and metal and gears, he suggests that the feelings are not that different in either case. Almost every few pages into Heartsease and the final novel, The Weathermonger, one encounters a fascinated description of the personality of either a horse or an engine. In The Weathermonger, a young woman who fears technology more because of socialization than internal inclination realizes that the marvelous antique car on which she had come to rely has become to her more like an animal than a lifeless machine. The implication is that the vitality in our relationship with technology depends on us, on how well we make things and how well we care for them, in how we respect the life of the world that we have harnessed to make them go. This caused me to wonder what a society would look like if we all had minds like those of certain medieval Islamic scientists who thought of themselves as midwives when they were mining metals from the earth. How would we live, learn and work? What would our professional lives look like when our idea of knowing something is more like conaîttre (to be familiar with) than savoir (to know as a fact)?

To begin with, I think our first task as children would be to learn to submit to the guidance of love, to find our kindred entities, to commune with that with which we most desire to commune. In this, there would be tremendous power to live the lives of our choosing. More obstacles are overcome by passion than technology. Goethe, for example, was in love enough with plants to travel everywhere he could to see the different conditions under which they grew, to keep endless journals, make endless drawings, to animate endless pictures of vegetable life in his mind.  He was in love enough with rocks and with animals to make the same kinds of efforts on their behalf and go to great trouble and expense to procure specimens because he, being who he was, could not do otherwise.

There is a reason that, even now, people talk about being "moved" by something.  We recognize the power of receptivity.  When we love something enough to surrender ourselves to it (or, to use my new favorite phrase, to see it "for itself" instead of "for ourselves") then its fullest nature opens up in our imaginations and we know just what to do with it, while the thought of doing something to it never occurs.  Kandinsky loved circles and saw them everywhere in nature.  Seurat saw points of light.  Nabokov saw shadows and mirrors.  They only had to grow confident enough in their relationships with these qualities to look as deeply as they could into what was already presenting itself to their minds.  The result was a collaboration, between themselves and their non-human partners, that stretched rather than violated the boundaries of nature.

If, as Rudolf Steiner believed, part of the evolution of a phenomenon is our concept of it—because it comes into being as the phenomenon we know through our knowing it—then our knowledge of a phenomenon is an essential part of the thing itself.  We and the world complete each other while, at the same time, we each have our very own world to bring into being, guided by our own particular love.  In a society that takes this fact as fundamental, doctors would never talk about diseases but would use their imaginations to sense the arc of their patients' whole being and help them to discover what they need to thrive.  Carpenters and mechanics would work with their materials in the way that Michelangelo produced sculpture, chipping away the stone to find the statue already inside of it.  They would love their materials enough to bring them to new life and the objects we "use" every day would be alive to us because of it. They would be our companions. 

Scientists in this society would be like artists whose job it is to help us see their vision of the world.  We would all be artists.  Teachers would exist to help us surrender ourselves to our art but without telling us what to see.  We would understand the world like we understand music.  Without stopping to consider what it means, our only care would be to sing our world for others.  Maybe we could think about our task as human beings as the creation of a kind of universal harmony of all our songs—because it is our job to express, not to explain—or maybe another analogy would be to imagine each of us bringing our own world into being through our own expression so that all of those worlds would come together as distinctive facets of a complicated crystal.  As we advanced in our love, becoming more and more sensitized, more and more at one with our own kind of knowing, we would be able to use our sensitivity to open up more and more to the knowing of others so that our world and The World would just grow and grow forever and ever.

“Life was a cosmic holiday.”

Without light enough in the sky or the air to reveal anything, every heather-bush, every small shrub, every blade of grass was perfectly visible—either by the light that went out from it, as fire from the bush Moses saw in the desert, or by light that went out from our eyes. Nothing cast a shadow; all things interchanged a little light. Every growing thing showed me, by its shape and color, its indwelling idea—the informing thought, that is, which was its being, and sent it out. My bare feet seemed to love every plant they trod upon. The world and my being, its life and mine, were one. The microcosm and the macrocosm were at length atoned—at length in harmony! I lived in everything; everything entered and lived in me. To be aware of a thing was to know its life at once and mine, to know whence we came, and where we were at home—to know that we are all what we are, because Another is what he is! Sense after sense, hitherto asleep, awoke in me—sense after sense indescribable, because no corresponding word, no likeness or imaginations exist wherewithal to describe them. Full indeed—yet ever expanding, ever making room to receive—was the conscious being where things kept entering by so many open doors! When a little breeze brushing a bush of heather set its purple bells a ringing, I was myself in the joy of the bells, myself in the joy of the breeze to which responded their sweet TIN-TINNING**, myself the joy of the sense, and of the soul that received all the joys together. To everything glad I lent the hall of my being wherein to revel. I was a peaceful ocean upon which a ground-swell of a living joy was continually lifting new waves; yet the joy was ever the same joy, the eternal joy, with tens of thousands of changing forms. Life was a cosmic holiday.



--George MacDonald, from Lilith: A Romance

"Missing the Point"

From The London Review Blog

Excerpt:  Thus as I walked around the Frieze show in London in October, it was easy to see that everything was all shiny and shallow, and that it was really a show for children with chequebooks, or adolescents with attitude. The work was silly. Maybe it could have been argued that it was all significant, part of a new movement towards something or other, away from abstraction towards a brash figuration, but I have never been able to listen to arguments. One of the artists had made a big ceramic thing and he was wearing girls’ clothes and looked like Little Bo Peep. I liked him.

Art is not a Dream

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In Wim Wenders' film Until the End of the World, a scientist who hopes to give the blind a way to see inadvertently creates a device that makes it possible to record a person's dreams and play them back at will, just like watching a movie. It does not take long for the characters who have access to this technology to start behaving like the most desperate addicts, uninterested in anything other than viewing their own dreams over and over again. I think that, obsessed as I am with myself, if a device of this kind fell into my hands, I would meet the same fate almost instantly.

A dream is a perfect, personal metaphor, a metaphor that only its creator can truly understand because it is not separate from its creator. A person knows in dreams things about himself that he could articulate in no other way, things that he may never be able to access in any other way, things that he may never even know that he knows. In our dreams, everything has meaning.  Everything is itself and at the same time something else. We are everything in our dreams—the characters, props, landscape and perspective. It is our mind come to life and knowable as our own backyard, more knowable than ever our waking selves may seem to to us to be.

Art is not a dream. Art is wakefulness. If dreams—most dreams, anyway, with the exception of True Dreams which come not from us in the way we usually understand our own being—are produced from and out of our own minds, art (True Art) has no truck with the psyche, or if it does, it is to show us the mind as it is in its nature, not as it appears to itself. Art is not a medium merely for expressing emotion, for highlighting a state of affairs or for teaching any lesson that can be taught in any other way. The artist and her life are incidental even, when it achieves the level of art, in the most unaffected memoir.

Erich Heller in his Art and the Artist's Self teaches us that, when the lens of art is focused on the life of an artist, even her suffering makes sense. What would otherwise seem flawed or broken is able to communicate perfection. Through art, we can experience the most profound sadness without becoming unhappy and the most sincere disgust without becoming cynical. Schopenhauer or Hegel would have us believe that art redeems the world but I believe that, through art, we are redeemed because we no longer wish to stand against the world, to fight against Nature, to see things the way they were not meant to be seen, to become something that we were never meant to be.

James Geary, metaphorically speaking (TEDtalks)

Lewis and Tolkien on Chronological Snobbery

...if we are to use the words childish or infantile as terms of disapproval, we must make sure that they refer only to those characteristics of childhood which we become better and happier by outgrowing; not to those which every sane man would keep if he could and which some are fortunate for keeping.

__________________

If we are resolved to eradicate, without examining them on their merits, all the traits of youth, we might begin with this—with youth's chronological snobbery. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism


Actually, the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Fairy-stories have in the modern lettered world been relegated to the "nursery," as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the play-room, primarily because the adults do not want it, and do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of the children which decides this. Children as a class—except in a common lack of experience they are not one—neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do; and no more than they like many other things. They are young and growing, and normally have keen appetites, so the fairy-stories as a rule go down well enough. But in fact only some children, and some adults, have any special taste for them; and when they have it, it is not exclusive, nor even necessarily dominant. It is a taste, too, that would not appear, I think, very early in childhood without artificial stimulus; it is certainly one that does not decrease but increases with age, if it is innate.


--J.R.R. Tolkien, from "On Fairy-Stories"

On “Chronological Snobbery”

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Recently, in preparation for guests, I spent some time cleaning the house more thoroughly than I normally would. (I am no particular lover of tidiness).  As I sorted through my stacks and piles of neglected objects, I recalled how much more present things seemed to me when I was a child. I remember a mushroom-shaped pin cushion with a heavy gold-plated stem and luscious green velvet top that seemed amazed at its own worthiness to display my mother's pearly-tipped dress pins. Then there was the salt and pepper shaker set—tiny red glass strawberries balanced on a prickly silver vine-- and the venerable, marvelous blue button box. It was my great-grandmother's button box, though it was a cookie tin in actual fact, and it rattled with so many buttons, so various and interesting that I wanted to tip the tin over my head and let the buttons trickle down the back of my neck or tilt the box onto the floor so that I could flex my toes amongst the treasure. Now, when I lose a button, I buy a new shirt. I am much less sentimental about objects—I don't really care what hangs on the Christmas tree and one tea cup is as good as another—but in achieving this grown-up detachment it is possible that I have stunted the growth of my relationship with the life of the world.

I understand now that boxes are for containing things and do not get lonely on the shelf and that my bathroom mirror has nothing to tell me that comes from inside itself and is not merely reflected from the space between it and the opposite wall. The problem is that my childhood intuitions were not wholly or inherently wrong. It was only when I began to think about them that they became a problem. It is not accurate to say that, when I was a child, I believed that all in the world was alive in the same way that I was. It was only gradually, in a confusion of thought and sensation, that I began to believe anything or have any ideas at all.  It is silly to look back on a feeling and say it is wrong because it does not match your subsequent idea when feelings and ideas are two different ways of knowing.

If our feelings, our intuitions, are misrepresented by our nascent ideas then maybe, instead of simply replacing feelings with a newer set of (more rational) ideas, we would have been better served to allow our feelings to grow-up, to inform and be informed by our ideas, so that we didn't end up trapped in the belief that one is "just a feeling" and the other is "just an idea."  If our early, egocentric beliefs about the world amount to clumsy attempts to explain our previously unreflected-upon intuitions (what Shelley called the "before-unapprehended relations of things"), the problem is not with the original intuition but with the ineffective attempt to explain it, with the very belief that anything can be explained through representation.

At this stage of our development, it is rationality that has not gotten its feet yet.  It is rationality that is the pretender-god, thinking it can grasp the ungraspable, but we laugh away our intuition because our rationality says that intuition is the way babies know the world and, of course, babies can't really know anything because they can't think about anything.  I assure you that there is nothing on the earth or in the heavens that is not possessed of some degree, some kind of life but, in my rush to maturity, I put this knowledge away with as much shame as I attached to my security blanket or first, unbearably awkward crush.

Perhaps the relationship between feeling and rationality should be imagined as more like a continuum than as a series of succeeding stages (something that is more subtly fluid even than Ken Wilber's "transcend and include" model).  A child cannot make a sophisticated aesthetic judgment (a judgment made from an intuitive sense of wholeness or, at least, a sense of how things fit together) because the child's judgment of an object cannot be separated from the immediate, visceral effect the object has on the child (the child feels that he likes or dislikes something based on egocentric, almost animal drives).  A child needs individuation, perspective (in other words, rationality) to see the object for itself, rather than for himself.

When a child has his needs met by food and affection, the world is a seamless perfection of regularity and proportion.  Objects are a functional part of that perfection, not distinct from it, but, when a child begins to distinguish the world from himself, perhaps he begins to expect the same principle of regularity and proportion to exist as conditions for (and within) the existence of objects (including other beings) as well as a condition for (and within) his own existence.  Everything breathes together, so to speak. 

In other words, he senses that everything is alive and, in a provisional sense, distinct from each other but nothing could be either alive or distinct from his internal world unless it was a function of the same rhythmic principle (manas or logos, we adults might call it) upon which his internal world operates.  All of this is felt and not thought, not consciously reflected upon.  It does not exist as a stage of oceanic, egocentric consciousness or as a stage of individuated, non-egocentric consciousness but somewhere along the continuum between them.  Empathy, a sense of kindredness, is only possible when we on some level know ourselves to be the same but different from the object of our empathy.  The less we feel our connection to objects, the fewer objects seem worthy of our empathy.  This is how we lose our feelings for rocks and trees and fail to see that this loss is as pathological as a loss of feeling for each other.

I do not want to remain a child forever. I want to use my rationality to understand the worth of an individual and the vital necessity of keeping my individual head above the crowd of sensations that is the undifferentiated world. I want to be able to appreciate objects for their own nature rather than simply love them because they are umbilically attached to myself but I never want to fully sever the cord. Abandoning the intuition of one stage of consciousness for the rational mistrust of another precludes the possibility that we can shape an intuition into a solid, reliable, grown-up thing—informed by our analytical mind that loves to distinguish but grounded in our empathetic mind that loves to relate. This will change, not only the way we think about rocks and trees, but how we feel privileged to make use of them. Perhaps when we understand that everything has a soul, we will cease to contrive such unworthy vessels to contain them. Then, all of our homes will be filled with objects that speak to us.

To His Books

Bright books! the perspectives to our weak sights,
The clear projections of discerning lights,
Burning and shining thoughts, man's posthume day,
The track of fled souls, and their milkie way,
The dead alive and busie, the still voice
Of enlarged spirits, kind Heaven's white decoys!
Who lives with you lives like those knowing flowers,
Which in commerce with light spend all their hours;
Which shut to clouds, and shadows nicely shun,
But with glad haste unveil to kiss the sun.
Beneath you all is dark, and a dead night,
Which whoso lives in wants both health and sight.
    By sucking you, the wise, like bees, do grow
Healing and rich, though this they do most slow,
Because most choicely; for as great a store
Have we of books as bees of herbs, or more:
And the great task to try, then know, the good,
To discern weeds, and judge of wholesome food,
Is a rare scant performance. For man dyes
Oft ere 'tis done, while the bee feeds and flyes.
But you were all choice flowers; all set and dressed
By old sage florists, who well knew the best;
And I amidst you all am turned a weed,
Not wanting knowledge, but for want of heed.
Then thank thyself, wild fool, that wouldst not be
Content to know — what was too much for thee!

--Henry Vaughan

On Losing Yourself (and Finding Yourself) in a Good Book

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In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favor of the facts as they are.  The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandise himself.  The seconday impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness.  In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this.  Obviously this process can be described either as enlargement or as temporary annihilation of the self.  But that is an old paradox; "he that loseth his life shall save it." 

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Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.  There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege.  In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality.  But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and remain myself.  Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see.  Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. 

--C.S. Lewis, from An Experiment in Criticism

From a Speech Delivered at a Farewell Party

"To speak of remembrance as you do is merely a clumsy way of expressing oneself.  Whenever we have experienced something great or beautiful or significant, it need not be recalled as if it were recaptured from without.  On the contrary, it must from the very beginning become interwoven with our inner being, become one with it, make us into a new and better person and thus creatively  live on forever within ourselves.  We must not long for the return of anything that has passed: in a sense there is no past; there is only the ever new that is formed from the elements of what we call the past; longing must always be creative..."

--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Once Forever

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I spent the evening rewatching the film Once with Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.  It put me in mind of a universal truth and of its equally true opposite.  Nothing lasts.  Everything passes away.  At the moment of perfection, the unraveling has begun.  We cannot continue breathing-in forever, no matter how good it feels to take in the air. Eventually, very soon, we must allow our lungs to release.  Yet when I was younger, and more recently but less regularly, I had the experience of stepping into a moment as into the frame of a photograph, of stepping not only into the scene but into my body, gesture, knowledge and emotions with the assurance of a dancer precisely hitting her mark.  I knew that, after I felt myself moving on, the moment would remain forever as it was.  This knowledge invested even the horrifying moments, and the awkward and confusing ones, with a flawless radiance.  Every breath was inexpressibly satisfying but sad.  Made up of longing and fulfillment and longing again, each was full.  Each was endless.  Nothing passes away.  Ever.

Link to a Song

More from George Macdonald

 

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"I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you," he answered, "but there is no provision in you for understanding it.  Not merely, therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature of it is inapprehensible by you.  Indeed I but partially apprehend it myself.  At the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you, not only do not, but cannot understand.  You think you understand them but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them.  You accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them: they are there and have unavoidable relations with you!  The fact is, no man understands anything; when he knows he does not understand, that is his first tottering step--not toward understanding, but toward the capability of one day understanding.  To such things as these you are not used, therefore you do not fancy you understand them.  Neither I nor any man can here help you to understand but I may, perhaps, help you to believe!"

"Paradox and Transformation"

A friend sent me a link to this excellent paper  co-authored by Nancy C. Maryboy of the Indigenous Education Institute, physicist David H. Begay and Lee Nichol of the Nyingma Tibetan Institute.  This section struck me as particularly significant:

"There is ample evidence of empirical thinking in all Indigenous cultures, an aspect of thinking in which the narrowed vision of problem-solving is vigorously exercised. The crucial point here is that the narrowed empirical vision is occurring in dynamic relationship with the wisdom matrix, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously."

My study of Goethe in the light of Pierre Hadot's take on ancient philosophy has suggested to me that, though Western consciousness has become individuated to the point of pathology, there exists a living stream of Western consciousness that has avoided this pitfall.   The consciousness structure that is emerging from this stream would, perhaps, look a good deal like Maryboy et al's model of indigenous cognitive processes in which "deeper holistic knowings naturally 'govern' the more limited empirical knowings."

Just for Fun

Musee Des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

--W.H. Auden

More on Beauty

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I have been thinking more about this subject of beauty, trying hard not to fall prey to either of what I see as the Scylla and Charybdis of the abstraction of Platonism or the materialism of the evolutionary psychologists. Specifically, I have been asking myself why a fine painting depicting an ugly person is not less beautiful than an equally fine painting of a beautiful person, even if our animal selves find the beautiful subject much easier on the eyes. The tentative answer that I have come up with is that beauty is the living essence of a thing. Its presence is determined by how much access we have through our perception of a phenomenon to the phenomenon's inherent dynamism. This would mean that beauty is always with us if we are able to discipline our consciousness to perceive it. It also suggests that capturing beauty in art is a matter of capturing the aliveness of things. I believe that, if we are fully present to a phenomenon in any moment, we will in a flash become able to see that it is not reducible to the relatively solid objects that normally settle into our minds—just as so often we fail to see our children growing until we look back and notice that they have grown but, when we do take notice, growth itself becomes present for us in a way that it had not been a moment before.

All that we perceive is, if we are only able to become aware of it, a spiraling dance of qualities never at rest but art seems, paradoxically, to show us a frozen moment unendingly the same. It seems to show us something captured forever as in amber or formaldehyde but, if it does its job, what it will in fact show us is a subject so truly portrayed that it appears to live and breathe only for itself in a state in which no explanation or description could do it justice. When we are able to achieve that shift in consciousness that comes to us from surrendering to the artist's vision, a subject artfully depicted will appear to us as a product of absolute necessity, as it never would appear if we were engaged in a utilitarian relationship with it in the world (can we call this new relationship an I-Thou relationship rather than an I-It relationship?).  We see, by virtue of the artist's depiction, that this phenomenon could never be anything other than what it is and what it is is true and right, "sinless and all-sufficient."

If we are able look at something for itself and not for ourselves, if we take out all the distractions of whether or not we like it, whether or not we need it or want it or if it is just in our way, whether or not it stimulates us in a way that we find pleasurable or provides us with an enjoyable frisson of fear or disgust, then we can accomplish the rare feat of re-producing the object in our imaginations without reference to our grasping, judging selves. Though I am not entirely sure that I can do it justice, I can say that this moment produces such intimacy, more than intimacy- identification!, that we become able to see the phenomenon in all its potential (whether or not that potential is ever to become fully manifest).  We are able to see that what something is can never be fully expressed within the limits of time and space.

A witness who perceived in this way, would not think (at least at first) to wonder whether or not she would have rescued Brueghel's Icarus or like the actual figures in the painting, failed to notice the splash when he hit the water. Instead of identifying with the rash, unfortunate youth or with the plowman who goes on with his work, instead of judging either of them, such a witness would find herself allowing the figures of the painting to inhabit her consciousness-- horses, sheep, shepherds, ships, sunsets and the shock of the plunge, all that she surveyed would begin to take root in her mind so completely that she would be one in essence with, not just each figure in the scene, but with all of them, with the scene itself as a dynamic unity.  Now, she can grow with the scene as its nature tells her that it would surely grow.  As Goethe expressed it when he described his process of "exact sensorial imagination," she would become capable of "animating, developing, extending and transforming" what she saw and, thus, become able to see with her inner eye, not the frozen moment of the unregarded fall, but the scene's inherent dynamism, its perfect aliveness.   She would see that none of its figures are separate, that there is no real division between horizon, sea and land and that all, even the distant buildings, are in some way awake to and within themselves.  All of the manifest and potential stages of a phenomenon, from abortive to stunted to fully in bloom, participate in its dynamic essence, in what Goethe called the Archetypal Phenomenon and Bortoft described as the "omnipotential form."  When we see from this wholeness, this infinitely dynamic wholeness, then all is beautiful.



I cannot resist adding, though it disrupts the flow of my narrative, that, when Goethe described to his friend Schiller the experience of seeing the Archetypal Phenomenon, Schiller replied that Goethe was not "seeing" but "thinking." Goethe later wrote that "there is a difference between seeing and seeing; the eyes of the spirit have to work in perpetual living connection with those of the body, for one otherwise risks seeing and yet seeing past a thing."

More Rilke and Link to Article

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes. 

--Rainer Maria Rilke

"Angels to Radios: On Ranier Maria Rilke "

Possibilities

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Below is today's selection from Charles Williams' New Christian Year. Thanks to this website that is worth visiting every day.
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It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself prevented from becoming realities. A possibility is a hint from God. One must follow it. In every man there is latent the highest possibility, one must follow it. If God does not wish it then let him prevent it, but one must not hinder oneself. Trusting to God I have dared, but I was not successful; in that is to be found peace, calm and confidence in God. I have not dared: that is a woeful thought, a torment in eternity.

--Søren Kierkegaard: Journals

Interdisciplinary Hype?

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Here, Jerry A. Jacobs objects to the push for interdisciplinarity (or the more fashionable label, "transdisciplinarity"). A recent experience at a transdisciplinary conference suggested to me that many proponents of the approach don't quite know what the word, whichever word you choose, should mean. There will be no transcending of the disciplines unless each invites a new, more integrated epistemological basis for its work. Artists, theologians and philosophers must no longer choose between fearing or revering the pronouncements of science (or look to them to bolster their intuitions) but must become, themselves, systematically investigative thinkers. While, scientists must develop their aesthetic and philosophical sensibilities so that they can come to know the world as it displays itself in its fullness.

This does not mean an end to specialization. It means striving, within specializations, to maintain a cosmic view, one that never loses sight of the fact that the disciplines are a secondary expression of the world, rather than a lens through which we "see" an abstract world that is somehow more real than the one we know through our senses and intuition. How does the saying go? "I can explain but then you would understand my explanation and not what I said." A poem and its explication are not commensurate. Neither are a star and its chemical description. All that we know is grounded in the incommunicable. Without this fundamental understanding, there is a limit to how subtly one intelligence may communicate with another. With this understanding, the possibilities are limitless.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Ugly-Beautiful

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If a person has experience and a deeper insight into the processes of the universe, there will hardly be any phenomenon accompanying these processes that does not appear to him, at least in some of its aspects, as pleasant. And he will look upon the actual gaping jaws of wild beasts with no less pleasures than upon all the imitations of them that sculptors and painters offer us... and there are many such things, which do not appeal to everyone, only to that person who has truly familiarized himself with nature and her workings.

--Marcus Aurelius

Rediscovering the World

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...it could well be that ancient wisdom-- whether Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic or Epicurean-- was intimately linked with a relationship to the world; but isn't the ancient vision of the world out of date? The quantitative universe of modern science is totally unrepresentable, and within it the individual feels isolated and lost. Today, nature is nothing more for us than man's "environment"; she has become a purely human problem, a problem of industrial hygiene. The idea of universal reason no longer makes much sense.

All this is quite true. But can the experience of modern man be reduced to the purely techno-scientific? Does not modern man, too, have his own experience of the world qua world? Finally, might not this experience be able to open up for him a path toward wisdom?

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The utilitarian perception we have of the world, in everyday life, in fact hides from us the world qua world. Aesthetic and philosophical perceptions of the world are only possible by means of a complete transformation of our relationship to the world: we have to perceive it for itself and no longer for ourselves.

--Pierre Hadot from Philosophy as a Way of Life

"To Portray Rather than Explain"

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All except the quotes from Goethe are quoted in Pierre Hadot's essay "The Sage and the World" from Philosophy as a Way of Life
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Natural structures constitute both the initial and the final reference point of all imaginable beauty, although beauty is human appreciation. Since man himself belongs to nature the circle can be easily closed, and the feeling man has of beauty merely reflects his condition as a living being and an integral part of the universe. It does not follow from this that nature is the model of art, but rather that art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution.

-Roger Caillois

[The artist's] progress in the observation and vision of nature gradually lets him accede to a philosophical vision of the universe which allows him freely to create abstract forms... Thus, the artist creates, or participates in the creation of works, which are an image of the creative work of God... Just as children imitate us while playing, so we, in the game of art, imitate the forces which created and continue to create the world... Natura naturans is more important to the painter than natura naturata.

-Paul Klee

Art no longer imitates visible things; it makes things visible. It is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Paintings show how things become things and how the world becomes a world... how mountains become in our view mountains."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The desire for knowledge first stirs in us when we become aware of significant phenomena which require our attention. To sustain this interest, we must deepen our involvement in the objects of our attention and gradually become better acquainted with them. Only then will we notice all manner of things crowding in upon us. We will be compelled to distinguish, differentiate and resynthesize, a process which finally leads to an order we can survey with some degree of satisfaction.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is what they all come to who continually harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only half of experience.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Article on Education and the "Fetishisation of Change"

Excerpt: Sadly, the ceaseless repetition of the idea that the past is irrelevant desensitises people from understanding the influence of the legacy of human development on their lives. The constant talk of ceaseless change tends to naturalise it and turn it into an omnipotent autonomous force that subjects human beings to its will. This is a force that annihilates the past and demands that people learn to adapt and readapt to new experiences. From this standpoint, humans do not so much determine their future as adapt to forces beyond their control.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

Archaic Torso of Apollo
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
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We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Trying to Make More Sense

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There are some things from my previous post titled "On Making Sense" that I would like to look at more closely. In the earlier post, I conjectured that order is not what we see but how we see. This is because the human mind "sees" by coalescing coherent phenomena out of the vast amount of sensory data that is relentlessly available to it. It is, therefore, impossible to see incoherence because the act of seeing is, itself, the act of making coherence in the world. We can, however, see things that do not make satisfactory sense, things that leave us wondering what we have just seen. Some of these things, such as a lamppost in a wood or a talking lion, can be explained if we are able to obtain enough information about how these things came to be as they are. Because we understand lampposts, because we understand woods, talking and lions, we need only expand our worldview enough to include a context in which they are able to exist in a previously unknown relationship to each other.

The ability to experience phenomena is all about the relationships among qualities. The experience of particular qualities (color, texture, flavor, size, etc.) in particular relationships (spatial and temporal) equals the experience of a particular phenomenon. Typically, we encounter a world in which these relationships make it easy for us to form a coherent picture. Sometimes, however, the world seems strange. In addition to the odd and unexpected, an experience that has the potential to make sense eventually, there is another category of incoherence that never settles easily into our minds. It is the kind of incoherence we experience when we look at an M.C. Escher sketch in which we are provided with enough qualitative data to recognize certain objects, such as a staircase, but the spatial relationship is all wrong. In this case we are able to see something without making complete sense of it. We are able to see something that could not exist in the world that we typically inhabit. In this instance, our sense-making abilities let us down. (Cubist paintings and Gestalt images, such as the duck-rabbit do not fall into this category because we are able to see, not an incomplete coherence, but two or more kinds of coherence at the same time. This kind of mental flexibility, in my opinion, allows us a peek behind the veil of every day sense-making into a kind of thinking that is less dependent on rigid spatial and temporal relationships. We are able to make more sense out of the images, not less. It is significant that we can only do this when we learn to relax. Rigid expectations of what we will see prevent us from seeing what we do not expect.)

In my previous post, I also said, in so many words, that we participate in the coming-into-being of our world through the act of seeing (coherence-making). I also suggested that the order that is thus created is the source of all beauty. Later, I would like to explore why I believe that such order is real and not merely an ephemeral product of a mind that exists cut-off from what it perceives. For now, however, I would like to examine this idea of beauty. If beauty is an expression of order and order is the mechanism by which we see everything, why are some things more beautiful than others? Why are some things ugly? It occurs to me that, if we look at the various ways a thing can be unbeautiful then we can begin to understand both what beauty is and what our sensitivity to beauty reveals about the subtle and sophisticated ways in which humans are able to relate to phenomena. I am prepared, therefore, to offer a tentative list of the various kinds of ugliness. Before I do that, however, there is one view of what makes something beautiful or ugly that I need to, if not get out of the way, then at least attempt to address in a way that allows us to look beyond it.

Evolutionary psychologists, such as Daniel Dennett, tell us that we have been wired by evolution to find certain traits attractive because the perpetuation of these traits helps to ensure the survival of our species. We are not drawn to mates with signs of disease because such an attraction would inhibit our ability to procreate. We are drawn to puppies with big eyes, however, because this feature reminds us of infants and the desire to care for big-eyed babies keeps our species afloat. It is possible to extrapolate from this theory (and I am not accusing all evolutionary scientist of extrapolating in this way) to suggest that, when we see regularity and proportion in our environment or even majesty in the big, protective mountain range that surrounds our village, what we are experiencing is a hypertrophy of the instinct that draws us to similar features in our mates and fellow members of our tribe.

No doubt, some of this goes on when we perceive beauty but to reduce all notions of coherence, proportion and loveliness to these drives is reductionist and anthropocentric.  It suggests that beauty is, indeed in the eye of the beholder, that it exists in us and not at all in the world. I believe, however, that there is enough of the world in us and enough of us in the world to allow us to judge the world on its own terms, on terms of kinship that do not reduce us to mere products of the world or the world to a mere product of our presence in it.  This is how we are able to discern the difference between what is simply appealing and what is fully beautiful. This is how we are able to see Michelangelo's David as beautiful in the same way as a snow-capped mountain is beautiful, not just in the way a supermodel is beautiful. 

Having said that, I am now ready to share my "ugly list," or at least as much of it as I have been able to devise. The first category is found in both the human and non-human world. The others are found only in art or artifacts.

*First, there is what I would like to call the sublimely ugly. The French expression is belle-laide or "ugly beautiful." (In French, the phrase is usually applied to women who are interesting to look at but not conventionally beautiful.) A phenomenon that is ugly-beautiful may strike terror in our more primitive selves but, if we are sensitive enough, there will be no denying that it has been formed just as it should have been and that a magnificent example of such a phenomenon is magnificent indeed, even if it will not be winning any beauty contests. I recently had a thrilling experience of sublime ugliness while watching an exotic lobster (at least I think it was a lobster) in a fish tank. I could not help shuddering but neither could I look away, so true did the creature and its alien movements seem to its own nature.

*Second, there is the meretricious. The meretricious, the cheap and the tawdry, is not meant to be appreciated but to be used. (It may be objected that religious icons are meant to be used as an aid to contemplation rather than to be appreciated for their own sake and, while in my opinion, this does distinguish icons from other kinds of art, this is a topic for another discussion). Borrowing from the aesthetics of James Joyce (echoed in Joseph Campbell's "The Way of Art"), I can say that a creation of this kind (always human-made) is by its nature either pornographic (designed to awaken avarice or lust in the audience) or didactic (designed to arouse hatred or disgust). Such depictions are poorly rendered. Little sensitivity is applied to the relationships among qualities. Certain features are exaggerated in an effort to stimulate (or over-stimulate) the baser instincts of the user. You might find an example of art in a video game but its presence will be incidental to the game's purpose. You might find an artist who believes he has created something fine when what he has created is, in fact, rather cheap. Such a person has failed to understand that the human relationship with art is not manufactured but ordained. Art does not do what we want it to do. It is what it is.

It should be noted, however, that, just as it is possible to see two images in a gestalt figure, it is possible to use art in such a way that the beautiful is reduced to the meretricious in the mind of the beholder. It is also possible to use the meretricious in a way that encourages a desire for the beautiful. An adolescent, hungry for a sense of something greater, may begin with pulp fantasy novels but make her way to the much finer work of George Macdonald or even Shakespeare when the original material no longer feeds her growing mind. Perhaps this category, more than any other, tends to be mixed and open for debate. We are animals, after all, and we are much more.

*Finally, there is the surreal. In surreal works of art, some relationships among the qualities are deliberately distorted so that we begin to doubt our perceptions. These pieces function as a kind of experiment in our relationship with the qualities that make-up phenomena. Like an Escher drawing, they test the limits of our coherence-making abilities, leaving us with a feeling of deep uneasiness. The surreal fails as art when the audience concludes that all coherence-making is suspect, that if everything does not make sense then nothing does and there is no sense to be made. In all cases, the surreal should be approached with caution. Remarking on the "aberrations of the formally representational arts," Owen Barfield writes that…

in so far as these are due to affectation, they are of no importance. But in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world that he represents [such as when Dali recorded an image that was present in his mind as he woke from a dream]. And, in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who are themselves willing to make a move toward seeing the world in that way and ultimately, therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.

Two kinds of beautiful that are sometimes confused with the surreal (and to a lesser extent with the sublimely ugly or the meretricious) are the fantastic and the absurd. The genuinely fantastic and genuinely absurd are not ugly. Such art is true to nature in the sense that the phenomena depicted have what Tolkien called "an inner consistency." The fact that the relationships are unexpected but nonetheless natural (meaning that it seems to us that they could exist), forces us to reach beyond our thought habits to find a deeper order. For those familiar with the Harry Potter stories, it makes it possible for us to become muggles who are able to recognize wizards and witness their magic. 

In the medium of drama, this quality of inner consistency explains why reading Pinter can feel more disturbing than reading Pirandello. A Pirandello play is typically true to its own world, even if the audience (and the characters) are left with the task of figuring out what that truth is. We know that we are in the process of making sense and, even if we never completely manage it, we are not caused to doubt that there is sense to be made. In a Pinter play, on the other hand, the story proceeds as one might expect until an inconsistent element is introduced to make us wonder if we had been right about what we thought had been going on all along.  With Pirandello, we unconsciously assume that inductive reasoning is required to discover the laws of the world of the play.  With Pinter, our minds are set on automatic until they are jarred into conscious activity by an absurd surprise.

I am certain that there is much more to be said about beauty and ugliness and much more to discover about all of the subtle ways we can participate in the beauty of the cosmos. For now, I hope that, if nothing else, it has become clear that beauty is truly present for us only when we begin to wake-up to all that passes before our senses, when we begin to watch ourselves watching. The more we improve our reliability as witnesses to beauty, the more Beauty becomes alive in the world.

 

Suggestions for Further Reading:

"The Way of Art" by Joseph Campbell, available in Inner Reaches of Outer Space
An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis

"On Fairy-Stories" or "Tree and Leaf" by J.R.R. Tolkien available in The Tolkien Reader

Now Available!

J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life

A series of three illustrated lectures from the Wasatch Gnostic Society

On Making Sense

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I remember, as a small child, being fascinated with anything that was just beyond the grasp of my developing consciousness-- the cover illustration of Shel Silverstein's Where the Sidewalk Ends in which two children seem to peer over the crumbling culmination of the sidewalk at the edge of the world or the puzzling behavior of "my son John" who went to bed with his stockings on, one shoe off and one shoe on" (the possibility that he had been drinking before he fell asleep was still well beyond me). Like all children, I couldn't let these odd images go. I relished their strangeness and, to this day, I feel a reverberation of wonder when I recall anything that then caused me confusion. I remember what it felt like to feel my mind growing. I still love that feeling-- at least as much as I love anything else.

This article from the October 5 New York Times reports on the suggestion by researchers that encountering what seems to be a nonsense scenario, something that could not be expected to exist in the everyday world, sharpens the mind by causing it, through anxiety or just an innate desire to make sense of things, to work harder to find patterns in what it perceives. Even if the perceiver is unable to make satisfactory sense of the original experience, subsequent experiences are sharper and subtle patterns more visible. Thus, order comes out of apparent chaos. This got me thinking.

I do not believe that it is possible to perceive utter nonsense. Order is not what we see but how we see. It is the organization of the data that allows our minds to congeal objects and events out of what would otherwise be the "blooming, buzzing confusion" of raw sense experience. As thinkers such as Rudolf Steiner and Henri Bortoft have pointed out, thinking is involved even in the act of simple seeing. We would not be able to see (make a phenomenon out of) incoherence any more than we would be able to read (make a word out of) a string of consonants. Stumbling upon a lamppost in a wood (as young Lucy did when she entered the world of Narnia) is unexpected, yes, certainly improbable but not impossible. It is not strictly nonsense but, rather, not-yet-sense. Even in a story, magic wardrobes and talking animals make sense within the context of the story. Discovering how they make sense is very good for us. It tells us something essential about ourselves and the world. It tells us that there are other worlds hidden within our own.

Any incongruity, the lack of those ready categories that allow us to navigate an experience without actually having the full available experience, has the potential to cause us to suspect a deeper order, to cause us to suspect that the world is more wonderful than we had supposed. (Of course, the wonderful world is always with us but, when we are preoccupied with avoiding a collision with a tree, we need only register its presence, location and a vague sense of its properties. The thrilling coarseness of its bark and the delicate vein pattern of its leaves are of no consequence). The gift that comes to us when we read Lewis Carrol's "Jabberwocky" or Ionesco's "The Lesson" is that we do understand it on some level, that we do find order there. What we find, in fact, is the pervasiveness of order, itself. It is an opportunity to wake-up a little to the inherent sensicalness of the cosmos which is the source of all beauty.

The name that has been given to this process of waking up is deautomatization. In The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science, Henri Bortoft uses the term, borrowed from psychologist Arthur Deikman, to describe a process of coming to see the thought habits by which we organize our perceptions then learning to see beyond them. You can think of it as paradigm-busting. "Philosophy," according to Owen Barfield, "is the most wakeful part of a people's consciousness" and it has historically been the task of philosophers to "get outside of the plane of consciousness in which they normally lived." It has, in other words, been the task of philosophers to reveal a deeper order by, as Goethe expressed it, opening up "a new organ of perception." It is time that we all learned to see ourselves as philosophers.

These thoughts raise other thoughts. What first comes to mind is Tolkien's theory of "subcreation" which is a way of communing with the qualities that make up phenomena by using our imaginations to separate those qualities from our habitual, usually ego-based way of encountering them. I believe that this process, one that we would think of as artistic, has much in common with Goethe's scientific method of "exact sensorial imagination" and that both are ways of unlocking the extraordinariness of the ordinary. My second thoughts are about Rupert Sheldrake's contention that the laws of nature, including I assume those that govern our ability to perceive, should be regarded more as the habits of nature. Since our consciousness is part of nature and, in fact, participates through its organization of sense data in the creation of nature as we know it, I cannot help asking if a human ability to transcend thought habits might not amount to something like the ability of nature to transcend itself. Deautomatization, indeed.

These, however, are complex questions and will have to wait for another post. I am still trying to find a way to say a lot in a small space and I am afraid that I have not succeeded so far. Much is implied, little explicated. I'll just have to keep working at it. Perhaps the beauty of a blog is in the opportunity to watch it evolve.