Mandala of Loss 5

The Threat of Beauty

In Olga Grushin’s outstanding novel “The Dream Life of Sukanov”, a well-indoctrinated soviet youth says, “Beauty is for the bourgeois.” Art that didn’t support the soviet philosophy was rejected, not just because beauty was considered frivolous or subversive but because it had power. Authoritarian systems want to harness that power only to further the aims of the state or ruler. Dave Hickey in his book “The Invisible Dragon” was the first to bring to my attention how beauty is a threat to authority because it needs no authority but its own. Beauty has the power to command attention without anyone pointing to it. Beauty engages feelings. The intensity of the feeling is a gauge of how much it matters. As G.I. Gurdjieff wrote “Feeling is the foundation of common sense.” Art develops the range and depth of feeling leaving it to the conscious mind to find words for it. Nature offers endless opportunities to see a perfect collaboration of light, wind and clouds in the sky. The healing power of sunrise at the beach for the variety of people who gather to watch has a quality of ancient spiritual homage. When authority wants to decide what has value and what doesn’t, whatever stands out in itself is a problem. Theories and analysis that try to break down a formula for beauty can never work because the response to beauty is individual and dependent on the moment. “We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought”. Alan Watts Labels and categories have multiplied in the modern world, each one making a boundary. Every label separates. Categories and definitions cannot pin down the experience of beauty. Try as they might with theories about symmetry or preference, they can’t capture the magic that happens for the brief moment that light hits the damp leaves with a sparkle that makes the heart glad. As Elaine Scarry wrote, beauty is always in the particular. Experiencing beauty is a sensation that connects us to the beautiful, drawing us out of ourselves and into creation. We love the beautiful because in that experience we love. Attention is drawn away from ourselves and into the world. The only thing that can heal the pathologies that ravage today’s collective soul is the power of love. Rarely do the artificial sensations and flash of media exhilarate like perfect moments of amazement. But technology does gives us access to a wide range of art to meet each person’s particular sense of beauty. Art unifies. Even when exposing flaws, attracting attention still pulls attention into the world of feeling, it depends on the existing connection between us as human beings that resonates and communicates. Artists that strive for beauty are stimulating the viewers best qualities, unselfish appreciation and gratitude for those moments of connection.

Mandala of Loss 4

Waves

The confusion that accompanies loss is for me the inability to understand what happened to that life force and spirit. Going to the beach alone was something I needed to face before the year was out since my nervousness about going there now could grow into something bigger if I waited until next spring. Being with the ocean at sunrise is the most healing thing I’ve ever done. It gave me dynamic imagery to reflect on the metaphor that I am the water not the wave. Every wave seems briefly to be an individual before returning to the ocean. The water didn’t really go anywhere just dipped back under the surface. When I think of consciousness as being a continuous field with a multitude of portals, the image of ocean and waves is useful. The same water is still there, part of the whole and can emerge in other waves. Ram Dass suggests that life force and consciousness have been evolving for all time. To praise the ancestors is to praise the developing humanity that emerged in us. In Thich Nhat Hanh’s translation of the Heart Sutra his commentary describes how the interdependence of everything in the universe shows there is no separate self. We are all interbeing. He creates mental images that describe how much everything depends on everything else. What’s invisible is part of what’s happening. Not the tall grass waving, but the wind moving the tall grass in the sunshine on a blue sky. Focusing on things leaves out relationships. The meaning of anything shifts with the circumstance. These images help me think of Michael as everywhere, not gone. His wave has risen and crashed but the essence that made the wave and is part of everything remains and was there all along. I like the term cosmic reality because I see it as the fusion of spiritual and quantum reality. Where it’s all waves, the metaphors of quantum physics offer an outstanding lens to think of relationships beyond the visible. Quantum entanglement offers connection across distances, what’s connected stays connected so I like to think that in the unmanifest level of reality we are still interconnected there. Finding the right image feels like understanding. One of the foremost philosophers of art, Susanne Langer said it simply. “Art looks like feelings feel.” I’ve always used my work as a mirror to my emotional weather. With the heavy weather I’ve been experiencing over most of the past year, my images also provide a structure for my thoughts to better see the whole of what ‘s happening to me. Finding images that resonate does the same thing. It starts with the feeling and feelings will stimulate relevant associations. Visual art depends on relationships and tunes our sense of the meaning in wholes. In a time when some would drown us in labels and separateness, pictures tell a larger truth and reinforce our ability to see the truth of the whole ourselves.

Mandala of Loss 3

Time Again

Though we acknowledge the cyclical nature of time with the equinox, our cultural habit is to think of it as a line. My very first post in 2008 was about time. The circumstance was my resistance to the idea of linear time when my grandfather died. Thinking of the passage of events as a timeline entails a sense of loss as things disappear into the past, never to be seen again, so my theme centered on the idea of mapping time as an image not a line. Iain McGilchrist’s book, “The Master and His Emissary” describes how the dominance of the brain’s left hemisphere leads us to think its way of structuring reality is true. Linear time is the left hemisphere’s order just like separating, naming and sorting. The right hemisphere perceives wholes in an ongoing present and intuits the feeling/meaning of the whole situation, feelings being the first meaning in our sense of something in relation to us. When Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor had her left hemisphere stroke, disabling it, she said objects started to lose their boundaries and that she felt part of a continuum in the right hemispheres ongoing present. In 2008 I chose to think of time as an image and envision my grandfather’s life as a painting. Even when it’s finished it’s there. Though an insect crawling on the painting would experience the blue as happening before the yellow, the sense of past and future is created by its path. The ability of images to improve our understanding has been known by science for a long time. In the 2008 post I mentioned a National Science Foundation Visualization Challenge. The call for entries included the statement. “You can do science without graphics. But it’s very difficult to communicate it in the absence of pictures. Indeed, some insights can only be made widely comprehensible as images.“ Struggling to make sense of Michael’s disappearance, I find myself going back to the image. Though it’s hard for me to think of Michael’s painting as finished, having that image is better because not only did I paint on his, he contributed plenty to the painting of my life so far. Not just mine but his students, friends and colleagues. That doesn’t go away. Every human connection is adding to the big picture, what’s living and growing develops that area of the painting. When an area isn’t developing anymore it still influences whatever else unfolds, sometimes dramatically. We are all working on one big image of the evolving human consciousness. Similar to the way biologist Rupert Sheldrake sees the field of all human mind as including everything everyone has perceived; we are all sense organs for the whole mind.

Mandala of Loss 2