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.

Renewal

Celebration in the Time of the Corona Virus

In the time of Covid-19, celebration has to be re-invented. As I do my regular neighborhood walk, I pass signs on front yards marking this year’s graduates. On one block people congregate around the sidewalk in widely spaced groups wearing pointy hats. The sign near the curb says honk to say happy birthday. A car goes by with a half-dozen metallic balloons hanging out the window, part of a party parade. Elaborate sidewalk chalk drawings mark family events, but festivity is tinged with melancholy with the mandated distance between us. I share the graduate’s disappointment. Commencement is a celebration of actual achievement and it is a meaningful ceremony to witness, which we will still get to do remotely in June.

A recent experience showed me that occasions held through the screen can be more satisfying than you might expect. This year, winning the Baker Award, we had a zoom reception. As the Mary Sawyers Imboden Prize winner, I feel deeply honored to be among the wonderful artists who won awards this year, I’d been blown away by the finalists in all the categories this year, picked who I wanted in all the categories and was elated that three of them won. With all of them I admire their skillfulness and originality, how they demonstrate the values behind the awards. The Baker Foundation and Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance did a wonderful job putting together our celebration, a champagne toast, sending a gift bag with chocolates and cheese and champagne in advance. The zoom glimpse of the other winners made me want to meet them in person and delve more into their work. I was left with a celebratory and happy feeling that graduation may be able to do that too.

A friend through my blog called this the testing period. Having room to think may start with what we don’t have but ultimately, we’re forced into new territory, have to be creative about rituals that might have been perfunctory before. Finding new ways to apply day-to-day energies, my neighbor is learning classical guitar on zoom. There is pleasure acquiring any new skill. It’s what that brain is built for. Creativity is blooming all around us as people figure out how to adjust and look at life in new ways

       

 I have always believed that hard work matters, that sharpening skills and devoting the time to the work itself would lead somewhere, but that my job was to do the work. I’m deeply grateful for this affirmation of my faith by getting this award.

Though graduation represents the culmination of a course of study, the word, commencement refers to the next steps. The real excitement is in what happens next, how the accomplishment can be applied, put to use as a threshold of new projects and vistas of possibility.

I felt better after seeing people in the reception. Zoom may not be as good as in person but it’s better than just a voice or words in an email. Seeing is important. Now we are finding new ways to make our events visible. It‘s the seeing that makes it feel real.

Isolate

Earth Day- Back to a Bigger Picture

Having one earth day is just a way to remind ourselves to think of the earth every day, to consider how much we depend on it and how we can contribute to healing some of the damage we’ve caused. Human self-centeredness blocks consideration of how deeply embedded in the earth’s system we are, and how we can operate in harmony with it rather than be led by the current attitude of exploitation that dominates our view of nature. Richard Powers’ book, “The Overstory” describes the intricate connections of the natural world starting with trees and the efforts to save them. His book is an example of necessary creative enlightenment that can show with a story how much bigger the picture is than our self-serving fraction of it. Consciousness is growing in relation to the ecosystem that supports us. We can’t exist independent of the scene of our lives. That starts with our home and branches into day to day activities, all surrounded by the movement of events and cloud of ideas that guide our current worldview. We are immersed in influences we don’t see but show in our behavior.

When Eldridge Cleaver said competition is the law of the jungle and co-operation the law of civilization, we hadn’t yet reached the depth of the jungle where winning and being on top have become the dominant values and bling the only currency. You don’t even have to be on top if you look like you’re on top, because in the day of social media, only the image matters, to look like the winners. Only the screen is seen. This creates a culture of comparison that undermines the confidence of anyone drawn into it as they adopt values that can’t satisfy. The outer image is such a thin skin over individual depth of possibility. In his book,  “The Evolving Self“, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi said that the development of the individual self could be as exciting a writing a symphony. The brain’s frontal lobe isn’t mature until 30 and the brain changes and develops with everything we do throughout life. This fact alone should be reason to pay attention to what is filling it. Do you want circuits sculpted by angry social media? We wouldn’t eat poison on purpose. Why would we poison our future with tendencies toward anger, intolerance and judgment?

Why should anyone measure themselves by another person’s standards?  Only that person can match that ideal. Having a goal of winning leaves too much out. There’s no opportunity to explore the unique qualities each individual possesses. Making choices to follow what you love and care about will develop the brain you want. Including the environment we share could be the beginning of a cooperative future. It’s time to crawl out of the jungle.

Collapse

         This drawing was first posted in 2012 but felt more appropriate than the recent one..

Loss of Pattern

Here’s a heart-warming image.  Children on my street sitting in lawn chairs with signs and balloons telling their elementary school teachers that they love them and miss them. Nearby, mothers are stringing their children’s art between the trees from yard to yard.At 1pm a line of at least a dozen cars goes by, also with signs, family, dogs and balloons. These are the teachers.

This is just one of the many levels in the changes we are undergoing right now. We miss the people we’re used to seeing, students, teachers, coworkers, and just as important is the structure that bound it together. Each loss reverberates throughout our patterns of daily life. Our routines are the rhythms of home extended beyond the actual residence, a specific loop of familiar imagery, our regular locations and people. Today on Zoom, ubiquitous sign of the times, a student lamented not being on campus, feeling the energy of our creative community as a support.

After the shock and abnormality, adrift without patterns of being, is a challenge to our creativity. 

What I advised my student was to take a big creative leap. Let the unknown open different directions.

It's been said about depression, that the system shuts down when the old ordering system isn’t sufficient for the volume and complexity of new content, the brain uses the space to construct a better system. The world wide calamity has reinforced how connected we are.  The arrogance and anthropocentrism that drove us off a cliff are humbled by the scale of this disaster. It’s an opportunity to build a just structure that considers how our species is integrated with the world gestalt.