Bookmark 2020

Celebration in Time of Covid- Part 2

Six months from the last post by this title and the pandemic is even worse. Numbers beyond imagining six months ago, still galloping higher. Though many have given up on precautions, many others are celebrating in new ways. In my neighborhood, every street is alight. Looking down the hill from my bedroom window is a wonderfully disorganized succession of elaborate and imaginative displays, far more than in previous years. Children have made contributions, a lawn full of hand-painted Christmas lollypops is my favorite. As I walk during the day I keep smiling at so much inventiveness, the use of white clothes hangers to make beautiful, giant snowflakes hanging all over the yard. It’s refreshing just to walk around in the daytime and be drenched in everyday creativity. Going at night is even more spectacular. This is joy, this glimpse into the minds behind the scenes and variety of imaginations. Inflatables are everywhere. I’ve seen a chorus of singing penguins, and Santas, riding not just sleds, but cars and dinosaurs. One extensively decorated front yard even has a Grinch that’s taller than me and furry. Walking gives me time to examine the details, and people have really knocked themselves out this year. To see and feel that effort is uplifting. It’s a reminder of how spirit can be shown, and seeing it everywhere in the neighborhood fortifies the heart at a time when discouragement comes easy. Nature is cooperating. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen snow on the ground in the days before Christmas, natural encouragement to stay in, enjoy the transformed neighborhood, maybe bake cookies, and listen to the children sledding on the hill across the street. Two separate notes Having just finished teaching my last Illusionism and Personal Ideas classes ever, the break has a new openness about the ways my mind may range, one less thing knocking on the door of the current here and now. With a better sense of how to use zoom, I’m in a better position to enjoy the last semester ever. The collage painting I did over the summer is now posted on visualcommentary.blogspot.com And a hi-res image is on the Baker portfolio now is the Visual Commentary section. https://bakerartist.org/portfolios/susan-waters-eller

Open Heart

Grounding

When I think of good childhood Thanksgivings I think of my grandfather. In a family of restless people, he was a lively stillness and equanimity that was a pleasure to be around. His field of being was infectious and I felt more settled in his presence. My grandparent’s house was filled with the things they brought back from their time as missionaries in Japan and I didn’t recognize until much later that Buddhism may have affected him more than the other way around. The Methodism I’d grown up with seemed to have more to do with how to behave and wearing uncomfortable clothes. Unlike so many who remember wise sayings from their elders, I can’t remember anything he said, but more how he was. He was more of a place than a person, a place where I felt seen and accepted and he brought that place with him whenever he visited. Most memory is in imagery, no longer subject to time. When a loved one is sick and dying, that’s the imagery that fills thoughts of them. When they’re gone all memories are there simultaneously. At a time when people are apart for Thanksgiving, it could be grounding to remember grandparents or whoever has understood us in a way that mattered. The imagery of memory carries the feeling of being there, emotion better understood by repeated reflection. Gurdjieff wrote that, “Feeling is the foundation of common sense.” Strengthening what stirs positive feeling reinforces those circuits. Particularly in stressful times, this may help us keep balance. Understanding emotional signals lays the groundwork for symbolic thinking later. Intelligence is built on early back and forth interaction. The larger the social group, the larger the frontal cortex. The matriarchal bonobo group live in extended communities and have among the biggest of monkey frontal cortex. Recent research has shown that the greater and more complex the emotional communication in which a species engages, the higher the intelligence. Attachment is important because it makes a baby want to signal. Words are learned more easily with emotional connection. Emotion integrates various currents of mental activity. Who we’ve valued and the images and feelings associated with them could be a subject of conversations that include everyone that’s not there, vivid in their place in the painting of our lives, equally there with the areas we’re still developing. One of the positives students have attributed to our time of covid is better understanding of themselves. It takes so much psychological resourcefulness to be alone for extended periods. Thinking about people who have strengthened what’s valuable in us can bring us back to center. When we can’t have people in the flesh, remembering can keep the mental wiring active and the people in our head can keep us company.

Brief Moment

Why Art Works

If art is as inessential as the educational system treats it, then why has it lasted since the beginning of human time. After centuries of histories rewritten, theories of science overturned for new ones, celebrities shed as quickly as dead skin, art survives intact. No one corrects Rembrandt. Look into the face in one of his portraits and timeless humanity looks back. Looking at contemporary faces by Jenny Saville or Dara Engler and see the pain of our times, equally true, but sad in what they reflect about modern values and the anxieties of living today. As the philosopher Susanne Langer emphasized in all of her books, the arts are the best reflection of what’s true about human psychology. As she put it. “Art looks like feelings feel.” The art a person is drawn to is a reflection of their feelings, the ones they recognize from their own lives. This is an avenue of self-knowledge in the murky realms below conscious attention, the areas of human psyche that need morelight and clarity to avoid the sophisticated manipulation of perception managers that take advantage of what fears and desires lurk beneath the surface. Art takes you to the center of being human and if looking at it was part of a person’s self-care, an avenue to the bigger self is opened. Beyond the preoccupations of the mainstream surface, there is more to reflect on in the meaning an image has for an individual. Art stirs the mind with thoughts and memories connected to those feelings developing the intuitive understanding of emotions. At a time when emotional intelligence is prized, even in business, looking at art can be a first step to the self-understanding necessary to understanding others. Finding one artist that shows what you need to see is a bridge to a world of depth today’s marketing values eclipse. It’s not so much what art is but how. How balanced, how energetic, how intense. We feel these first as our bodies adjust to the requirements of the surroundings and apply them to the subject, giving it a mood or attitude. This universal sense of relationship to where we are, educated from birth, is free of the hazards of language. Near and far are positions in space that everyone understands in order to navigate. Visual form of any kind works the same way. Decoding the feeling of abstract space starts with which mechanism is responding. The body responds to the balance of the surroundings and its relationship with surrounding forms. If there is something like a figure, then automatic mirror responses to body language are active. If there something that could be read as a face, the part that understands facial expression adds information that hints at how the other is feeling. Whatever the feeling, it triggers associations with one’s own experience of that feeling. Brain systems that usually work separately, one which processes outer signals, the other involved in the inner world, are both active at once. Not only is the stimulation good for the brain, the intertwining of outer and inner strengthens their link. In a time when what to value has been eroded by modern culture, spending time with art can fortify our common humanity. Strengthening visual intelligence could help us see a bigger picture with broader implications and locate the problems hidden beneath the clutter of speech.

Late Summer Anxiety

Visual Culture- The Importance of Art Students

Today feels like the adolescence of visual culture, when the global culture’s mindset hasn’t fully developed its frontal lobe and is gobbling new games, entertainments and social media with a mindless avidity that is warm clay for manipulation by perception managers. Whether through front groups to influence opinion around the world to controlling imagery in popular media, it to aims at promoting a particular look and attitude. The insistence on certain norms is great for capitalism because so few fit the norms. This requires products and expense of time and money. When the images are limited people think those are the only choices. This leaves a variety of gifts and capabilities untapped. Like the undeveloped adolescent brain people are swamped by the images, believing what they see with their own eyes and trying to modify themselves to fit the norm. These images aim at deep unconscious strivings and aversions that twist people to commercial purposes. Unrecognized emotion is their motherlode. The universality of the image is hardwired, seeing humans' homes on fire, violence and dead bodies, and fear is the automatic adjustment to the scene. Remedying this is the task of art. Understanding the power of visual imagery is the beginning of resistance. Art and beauty offer what attracts and stimulates. Art is where people have the opportunity to recognize their deepest emotions and the thoughts stirred by them. When people respond to art they are seeing something in themselves. Once it is seen and conscious awareness understands those levels a person has a choice where they didn’t before. The internet allows more artists to be available to everyone. Not just museum collections but current art people are posting that reflects what modern life is like. It’s a resource for learning about the self that doesn’t show. What is responded to is a mirror showing some part of inner life. Having a tool to witness personal depth strengthens connection with what revealed it, not just the artist but humanity for sharing that emotion. It isn’t fear but love that summons up what will help other people recognize more of their own uniqueness. Taking responsibility for what parts of the brain are grown and cultivated should include exposure to great art of all kinds. This is what the modern art school tries to do. Today’s art students are alive to so many levels of information it must be creating very complex brains who can integrate them with training in visual sensitivity. That combined with the exposure to art around the globe, particularly what has been overlookedby the mainstream, can build a more comprehensive perceptual consciousness. Art is part of an ecological consciousness enlarging our view of the whole. New generations of art students can help others see what’s true in our technological hall of mirrors. Art shows what it’s like to be alive now.

Unending

Focused Seeing

At the end of last semester, when so many of us finished the school year on zoom, almost everyone commented on how exhausting it was, myself included. But it wasn’t clear to me why. It is only now, facing a full semester on-line, that I discovered one reason was I was thinking about what I liked about zoom teaching. Faces. When I reflect on what about my classes changed mid-semester, one surprise was how my image of each student changed. Instead of the figure hunched over the drawing in the corner I saw a face full of light and curiosity.

Faces are such an intense source of information that there is a whole part of the brain dedicated to them, the fusiform gyrus, a bulge of brain with two aspects, a part that reads the expressions and finds them even where there isn’t a face, and a part that recognizes faces we’ve seen before. Paul Ekman estimates that we can discern over 3000 different facial expressions. This is a scope of understanding we may not appreciate but is in active use in a zoom one to one.

The limitations of on-line teaching are opportunities to focus on what we may not have otherwise. One-on-one in person doesn’t mean the other looks at you. But on-line, the other has to look at the screen to see what’s going on, and we get a chance to appreciate the extensive information in a  face. The memories I have of each individual are always the face on the screen. This isn’t just because they’re the most recent, but also because looking at their faces showed so much more of their person than shy or anxious body language might allow. With some I felt like I’d never seen their faces before, and others seemed so much more relaxed in their own spaces, less exposed and self-conscious. So much of the role being played in the social world, the outer shell of identity, slid away. One-on-one is a very concentrated experience but it feels like it’s training something good, a greater awareness of the person beneath the surface, the individual human behind the labels. Like when I first got caught by tennis when I chanced on Bjorn Borg’s face on the screen, it feels like a privilege to witness something more real, connected to the pulse of being and not the shell.

Maybe with on-line teaching we lose something in group dynamics, but with in-person group dynamics certain personalities assert themselves and others try to disappear. The screen has an equalizing effect. Everybody is the same size tile or the whole screen, group or absolute individual. The more I reflect on it, the more the opportunities multiply.

Predict

Looking Up

When George Lakoff and Mark Johnson came out with Philosophy in the Flesh, it shifted the foundation of how I thought about concepts. The idea that so much of our conceptual language was made of metaphors for physical experience underscored the way our bodies participate in our thinking. One of the first developmental concepts is ‘more’. The feeding infant develops the early understanding of quantity which branches into areas from mathematics to our sense of injustice, that someone is getting more than another. Physical experience is entwined with perception, an ongoing dance of seeking and adjusting. What we feel as emotion is the adaptation of the body in anticipation of what might be required in relation to our world. We experience meaning before we put words on it.

Understanding facial expression and body language is a resonance with another’s actions, a direct knowing of how it feels inside to be in those behaviors. It’s a two-way influence. As facial expression expert Paul Ekman said, “Make the face, feel the emotion.” We don’t just smile when we feel good, we feel good when we smile. Body position works the same way. Changing a body position can change a feeling and attitude.

When something is above us we have to look up to see it. Eyes raised and even the chin lifted, these are behaviors we see in religious painting in states of wonder and awe. A gothic cathedral evokes those feelings by lifting our eyes upward. Looking up the hill we’re about to climb is a versatile metaphor for self-improving goals. On the other end of the metaphor if someone’s is standing over us after knocking us down looking up is being dominated. Whether we have agency, can do something about it, is the pivot.

Recently, when I was talking with a very conservative friend about statues being torn down I said that some of these people weren’t to be looked up to, and she said she wasn’t necessarily looking up to them, it was just history. So, I resorted to a different use of the same physical metaphor. Putting someone on a pedestal means they are idealized, to be esteemed, revered, considered above us. The higher the pedestal the more you look up. To what degree might that body position communicate a sense of eminence that is not deserved. The installation itself creates dominance. The message infiltrates the body unconsciously. When one man sits on a horse and the other standing on the ground it’s a clear implication of status. Without any need of inscription, statues on pedestals communicate stature. Where there is clear worth must be examined.

Slicing Night

The Power of an Image

Lately, a word I’ve heard come up again and again regarding the televised murder of George Floyd is, “ugly”. All over the world people witnessed a policeman with his knee on this man’s neck and all over the world people protested. Throughout the media commentary many speakers denounce the appalling ugliness of the event and I’m reminded of something Alan Watts once said- that morality is the aesthetics of behavior. Our sense of beauty is connected to our sense of rightness. We recoil at ugliness. We don’t need a law to see that cold-hearted murder is hideous, that slow death through suffocation, like any other torture, is hideous. We understand meaning through imagery.  A knee on the neck is what oppression looks like.

Unity looks like the protests. The collective “NO!” joined people together all over the world, brought together to reject the ugliness of a power dynamic built on obedience. Erich Fromm wrote many essays where he distinguished between authoritarian ethics and humanitarian ethics. In the first, obedience is the only rule, all disobedience could get you shot for failure to obey a lawful order, especially if you are not white. Humanitarian ethics is based on the idea, existing in some form in every religion, that we should treat others like we would like to be treated. We are asked to imagine the other’s feelings through ours as the only rule we need. How could torture exist if people were raised on that model? This is the evolutionary step that needs to be taken.

Laws are the authoritarian cage that keeps us in place. We need to find more cooperative structures of order that respect individual judgment and context. A ‘sentinel’ in the Seattle Police-Free Zone emphasized that the first step was listening, not assuming you know what’s wrong. When a ranting man knocked over a trach can, rather than getting on his case, the sentinel stared picking up the trash, others joined in and the man eventually apologized. How we behave has more effect on people than what we tell them to do.

Crisis leads people to express their depths. This was beautifully expressed in an image from the protests that showed a heartfelt connection between an individual protestor and a police officer. The earnest request for understanding reaches toward our common humanity and demonstrates the beauty of common feeling.

The psychiatrist Alfred Adler understood the power of beautiful form in developing character. He advised having beautiful objects and art around the house, particularly when raising children explaining  that art educated our sense of value, our sense of proportion and harmony. It is a reservoir of common feeling that resonates without language. Concerned with the felt inner life, whatever feeling it stirs generate new thoughts in each individual. We all have the capacity to understand each other. Looking at art from other cultures probes what matters to them, what’s different enlarges our capacity for understanding.

Beauty is a larger concept than mere physical attractiveness. It is a sense that connects us to the world. I think of connecting as a spiritual impulse and disconnecting as a criminal impulse.

The horrible image of one man squeezing the life out of another shows a tragic level of disconnection We feel it like a blow to the gut, this demonstration of how criminal our authoritarian systems have become. The protests are a connecting force aimed at positive change. This is our opportunity to consider how systems are structured, where different kinds of expertise might be better suited to some situations, and needs are addressed rather than rules policed. Public order should be guided by harmony in the community, settling disputes and complaints as they arise and coming to agreements about what will best resolve it.