Bookmark 2019

Some of you may recognize MICA's fox building from the back, where the gargoyle's tail points to my classroom  Fox210

Joy

Observing joy is feeling it. Whether it’s a child bouncing beside a parent or the clumsy cuteness of a puppy, we smile at the full saturation of aliveness, feel the lift in our own bodies.

Watching Lamar Jackson’s pure joy playing football is as exhilarating as watching great tennis. It’s hard not to be infected by his level of involvement and be thrilled by the originality and thorough mastery of his game. We’re infected by his focus and enthusiasm. Wherever we find it, admiration points toward joy.

Joy needn’t be passive. What psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called flow is available to everyone getting deep into what they’re doing. Full attention stimulates the best brain chemistry whatever the thing we love happens to be, and though it often is, it doesn’t have to be serious work. I’ve come across many philosophers both religious and secular that say something to the effect that action is holy. Spinoza won my heart when he said that cheerfulness is always good because it increases the person’s ability to act. For him anxiety was all about ideas without the energy to act on them. Any action stimulates dopamine, the chemical of focus and pleasure.

On a small scale fast paced games are a good way to achieve one=pointedness. After reading Jill McGonigal‘s book, “Reality’s Broken, Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World” ,I decided I needed a video game in my life so settled on Tetris. I was immediately happy about the level of unbroken attention it demanded of me. That meant I was getting dopamine, and as the game got faster, the reactions were quicker. If I lasted long enough I could even achieve ta flow state in this minor version of self-improvement, When full attention is directed outward, the loss of self-consciousness is a great relief, and may be an important component of joy, attention rushing out to embrace the world. It’s an easily available adjustment to brain chemistry. So now, when I’m painting or drawing and my attention dips, I take a Tetris break, It clears my mind and pumps up my dopamine and I’m ready to get back into my work.

Joy, Peace and Goodwill through the holidays and into 2020.

Mock

Suspending Judgment

“All authority is an obstruction.”   J. Krishnamurti

One thing that can be crippling to creativity is getting bogged down in external ideas of right and wrong, best and better. This global conditioning focused on right and wrong answers creates anxiety about following the guidance of personal intuition. No attention is given to training this perception of the whole picture that is led by the sense of what’s missing or what doesn’t belong or as Nobel prize winner David Bohm said, by a sense of what fits. Looking at art and talking about how it affects you is excellent training in visual understanding.

 In more than forty years of teaching I’ve watched many a piece fresh with personal vision be sabotaged by the comment of someone else with different standards. Humans only have their own experience to go on, but it’s time to jettison the assumption that our experience builds the same outlook as others. If you grow up in a world where cheating and deceiving are all around you then you’ll assume everyone is a liar and a cheat and treat them that way. Marcus Aurelius may have been the first to observe our tendency to condemn our own faults in others. At the same time in China the I Ching was saying the same thing.

To suspend judgment opens an opportunity to see things as they are and examine our own lapses from harmony. If we can deprogram ourselves from judgment we’re in a position to actually observe what each person has to offer. Every individual can only develop by their own pattern of growth. As personal decisions accumulate unique style shines in its own way.  Judgment is useful in one way, everything you would criticize in others is something you yourself possess. If you see your own errors through this then your future observations will be cleared.

In the mid twentieth century, the philosopher Susanne Langer wrote many books about the importance of human feeling in organizing the mind. She felt that art was the best expression of human psychology and having beautiful things around was the best way to educate values. Elaine Scarry has followed up more recently with her book “On Beauty and Being Just” describing how many ways beauty cultivates what’s best in us. A program called Visual Teaching Systems goes into underprivileged areas and gets kids to talk about paintings starting with the question - what’s going on here. The ability to imagine answers to questions with no wrong answers stimulates the brain to such a degree that their test scores improved in their other subjects. Studies in intelligence have shown that most intelligent thinking happens when both hemispheres are working together rather than one dominating. Talking about art strengthens the communication between them while exercising imagination and creative thinking. Shifting our attention from judging and evaluating takes pressure off and let’s the mind extend its boundaries. Bringing art to everyone coulddevelop another dimension of intelligience that may be up to the problems of the 21^st century.

Condemn

The Theft of Beauty

 In the last line of my essay on Beauty I conclude, Beauty nourishes our better selves, and because we love what is beautiful, beauty stimulates our ability to love.

http://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/2009/02/sense-of-beauty.html

 So I feel duty-bound to combat the perversion of the individual sense of beauty happening in the horrorshow of advertising’s efforts to colonize territory that’s rightly controlled by individual responsiveness. The psychological capacity to respond to beauty is a necessary compass to lead to what is good for us. Today, it’s being reduced to a single kind of physical attractivness as the only meaning of the word. The day-to-day satisfactions of finding beauty by accident and anywhere is obliterated by the onslaught of a single look.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-illusionists/

This documentary exposes the depths to which advertisers sink in pursuit of profits. It is an industry that creates insecurity by the constantly reinforced message that one’s lovability depends on matching the impossible image they say is beautiful. Media sells a look that’s pathologically conformist in a world rich with variety. Once conditioned to the type that saturates the media, the rest feel devalued, invisible, which undermines the natural beauty available through their individual look. Real beauty is the result of harmony and happiness. The beautiful people I know are the ones who are comfortable with who they are, relaxed about being the person they were born to be. Smiling pulls the features into symmetry, often considered a primary attribute of beauty.

Young people are smothered in images pushing the same mold, pushing them farther away from the beauty inherent in each individual. Insecurity twists the features. Many of the more sarcastic and snide of media’s talking heads are starting to wear permanently crooked mouths because of the repeated sneer, and no amount of purchases will change that. The plastic surgery will still get pulled sideways by the facial expression. I prefer the radio for news, to protect my mirror neurons from the chemicals stimulated by nasty facial expressions. Obviously, I can’t look at the president.

The fact that a worldwide model of beauty is pushing a western look does violence to the natural beauty of every other cultural group. When I see a video of a beautiful young Japanese girl getting ready to have plastic surgery, the announcer is saying this is what they think they need to look like in order to succeed. Self-loathing is actualized when a person denies their natural beauty with an act of mutilation that will alter the harmony of their personal alignment.

The anxiety created by fear of not looking like the media standard stokes fear of rejection. Many avoid others but yearn for connection. They have products on all sides, ready to come to the rescue and the solutions cost too much. The theft of an individual’s sense of beauty and techniques of advertisers should be held accountable for the psychological damage.