Bookmark 2018

Happy Holidays.
Here is this year's bookmark
with my gargoyle hugging
our house.
If you like print it out,
cut it out,
seal it between clear contact paper
and let it watch over your books.
Enjoy!

Offering

     Early in our marriage, I interrupted my husband Michael while he was practicing guitar, to ask what was the meaning of life.

    “To find out what we’re capable of” He answered without hesitation.

     When I told that to my class of excellent art students in our last discussion, there were murmurs of agreement all round. Whatever it is we have to offer we should find and develop in whatever form it takes. We feel that in our heart. It’s what the brain rewards to keep us growing.

      My brother Bill has an ability to connect with people, make them feel at ease. He radiates goodwill and empathy, so the fact that now, in his retirement, he’s going to be a hospice volunteer is a beautiful next step in building on that capacity. Each aspect of ourselves we choose to develop offers a window into deeper layers of personal possibility that wouldn’t be seen without new challenges opening new questions. We don’t know what we’ll find, the compass of the heart just gives direction about what matters to core being.

      People might not think of self-development as a gift to others, but it is the particular capacities of different individuals that enriches the world. This is the part that’s not manufactured, that’s not an algorithm, but the sense of individual flourishing led by what we love best. 

      Not using up time finding out what others think of us opens space to build a skill or learn about something that tugs at curiosity. Our pleasure in a task signifies the presence of the brain chemistry meant to encourage us. The more actively we pursue something the more we appreciate it. This actively combats the things that pull us down. When Yuval Noah Harari in his book “Homo Deus”,   says that google will know us better than we know ourselves, it assumes that like the rat with the pleasure lever, we’ll just keep clicking likes and checking for them all the time. We don’t have to behave like the rats.

      Consider the real world experiences that give you the most pleasure as a starting point.

Getting better at something builds understanding of the subject but also of who we are. This is learning about ourselves through what attracts us. The life that is not on the computer is not known to the computer, it may know many of our interests as well as what we buy and who we know. But if we have a life off screen we can have a private space and an enriched sense of what we can offer.

Birds

Tradition

Sometimes a tradition will have been repeated so often that our capacities for automation get involved and detach us from the holiday. Like the woman last night as she seated us at a table saying Thanksgiving is such a bother, there are many that feel it as an intrusion, a set of obligations that like Christmas, cost time and money.

The rituals we observe are just the shell, much of the content hollowed out by repetition. The conversations about how much better the holidays were when we were kids are symptom of the need to reinvigorate the Thanks at the middle of the event.

Recently, the TedTalks Radio hour did a program on joy. What stuck in my head afterwards was what one speaker said of the present-centeredness of joy. Where happiness is a sustained state, the quality of joy attends a particular moment, the way the light hits the greenish bird singing on the wire, the deer that emerge behind the house at just the moment when I’m feeling down. Joy accompanies the fleeting harmonizing of the world in a moment of sensory perfection. A different speaker talked about clouds as providing so much variety in collaboration with sunlight, so many opportunities to see something beautiful. 

Our thoughts often keep us from full attention to the sensory world. Thanksgiving could be a day of alertness to what I tend to call moments of grace which as the speaker on joy said are around in abundance all the time. Attuned to not just taste and smell but where the spirit lifts at the sight of what fleetingly captures full attention.

“Beauty, in glimpses and flashes, that is what the soul required.” (Anne Enright, The Green Road). Nourishing the deeper self is about attention. For Thanksgiving, gratitude for the good that we’ve received and attention to the possibilities of joy at any moment in the tastes, smells, sounds and sights of the day.  A sunset that takes your breath away is such a frequently available moment, why not spend more time looking up?

Quiet Dangers

Science and Aesthetic Experience

A recent article in the Crimson described a new class in being offered by Harvard Medical School in Neuroaesthetics. Teaching it is Nancy Imhoff, a specialist in the science of happiness, subject of her Ted talk. This connection underscores the fact that we get pleasure from the arts. Art makes us happy. Scientists map locations of mental activity to see what areas are activated at the same time and learn something about why that is. Where the activity is located connects to what is known about those regions. In this case, the circuitry associated with seeing something outside ourselves and the circuitry of thinking inwardly about ourselves two systems that usually operate separately, are both active at once. We’re either observing or thinking about what’s being observed or we’re thinking about something else going on with us. Looking at art got both systems triggers them both together. Art takes us into the experienced emotions of another person, through the viewer’s personal experiences of that feeling, and this is both a connection to the artist, and increased self-awareness in reflecting on what came to mind.

The originator of the field of Neuroaesthetics, Semir Zeki, found a place in the frontal lobe, the medial orbital frontal cortex, that always lights up with the experience of beauty. This is the area associated with value and sensitivity to what matters to us, reinforcing those qualities.  Alfred Adler was one psychiatrist that recommended having beautiful things artfully crafted around the home to increase sensitivity to value. Susanne Langer was a philosopher who felt the arts were the only proper mirror of the inner life. Her insights over fifty years ago are validated by recent brain science.

“You will never have a complete theory of aesthetics unless you take account of the organ through which you have the aesthetic experience,” Zeki said.

Referring to what the viewer experiences emphasizes the connection made between artist and self when two normally separate processes operate together. Far from robbing the arts of its mystery, the science behind the aesthetic experience is a powerful argument for re-emphasizing the arts in education. Insight demands response to wholes and arts is the way to educate the untapped potential of visual intelligence, the perceptual understanding of the whole picture. The idea that art creates pleasure signals its usefulness to human survival at a time when academic institutions are devaluing it. The brain rewards what is good for us. Self-awareness and attunement to harmony within the whole build important levels of our mind.

Beauty stimulates what is best in us adding circuitry in the frontal cortex, our most evolved area. The understructure made by the patterns of universal experience are represented by feelings, summarizing overall response. They are the glue that holds ideas together. Understanding the science aids understanding regarding why art has lasted throughout human history.

There is a unifying quality to art that information can’t reach as it itemizes things known. With art we feel together, the artist’s expression of emotion transmitting to the viewer’s experience of that emotion giving that shiver recognizing that underneath it all we are one not many.