Art's Consolation

Though I usually focus on visual art, when emotions sink deep to the core, I reach for music. When I first heard that my mother died, I went downstairs to play “Moonlight Sonata”, badly, but I fed off the depth of feeling as a participant. It was consoling. Now I’m learning a hymn she liked, am hearing her sing it in my head right now, just thinking it puts it inside me. When I think of songs she used to sing around the house, I see her in action, a happy person living a satisfying life. Music is so deeply woven with memory, its power can be startling. I once sobbed uncontrollably at a rendition of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” at a funeral for a colleague I hardly knew. As writer Anne Lamott says, “Music is about as physical as it gets. What other art can make you burst into tears? “ Or like it says in the “I Ching”, “Music has the power to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.” We’ve lost so much in the past year. Normal patterns of living we’d come to take for granted were disrupted or erased and the duration of it is wearing us down. When patterns are out of synch what could make more sense than music for restoring rhythm to our lives. Like some have 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 empty space of melancholy to construct a better system. In ancient Egypt, the Temple Beautiful used all the arts to heal, but music in particular was considered very powerful. Music speaks to the physical body on many levels. Science has shown that high pitches stimulate the frontal lobe, home of imagination and other higher mental functions. Middle tones resonate with emotion and low pitches vibrate in the body. Our body is not just substance but layers of rhythms working together. Art connects to the actions of the body. Getting back to balance involves immersion in beauty. Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.’ – World Economic Forum, Why art has the power to change the world, 2016 I keep this quote on my desktop as affirmation of my conviction that the development of right hemisphere knowledge, the sense of meaning in the whole, is the first step toward positive change. The intuitive feelings that are the messages of this intelligence are most easily schooled by looking at art. As Philosopher Susanne Langer wrote. “Art looks like feelings feel.” To see and recognize is to better understand and people’s confusion about how they feel is part of the problem. Feelings direct thinking and need to be taken seriously. Our world is filled with traumatized people. Having tools to recognize our emotions provides a necessary step in order to move beyond them and the problems they cause by going unrecognized. The arts are the opportunity to heal that self-estrangement.

Exposure

Mental Entities

After a radio story on Thomas Edison, my imagination was fired up by his idea of humans as swarms of life energy units that persist for awhile then disperse and eventually join other energy units to form something else. As an image for death it’s more comforting than the image of a body decaying. It also puts emphasis on the energy of consciousness as opposed to the physical body. I’ve always liked the idea of a soliton as an image for a particular existence. Like the shape of an eddy in a stream that keeps its form as long as the conditions of the current and rocks stay the same, once the supporting conditions are gone, so is the shape. A similar dynamic occurs with a class. For a time we are a swarm of minds that each influence the other and bring out different qualities and ideas that none of us might have arrived at alone. It’s a mental organism that grows and matures over time. It’s a dynamic with its own qualities and behaviors. The mixing of different backgrounds and ideas fuels a broader creativity and the participatory energy has its own field of influence. When it’s time frame ends, the energy units disperse enriched by the shared experience and new understanding. The disintegration of any strange attractor (pattern of energy that holds its form) is a kind of death of a specific form, but the word shifts meaning with the understanding it was always part of a sea of energy flow that is constantly reorganizing. At every level from cells and systems, to societal groups and the larger fields of consciousness that organize the physical realm like a semester organizes a class, the patterns of collaborating elements of consciousness repeat at every scale. Too much emphasis on an individual physical body doesn’t give enough weight to the many collaborative mental entities with which we participate. When the entity disperses, the ideas and points-of-view are still available in the larger consciousness.

Pre-Union

Beauty's Guidance

One of my most popular posts, “The Sense of Beauty”, https://seeingmeaning.blogspot.com/search?q=the+sense+of+beauty ties together ideas that emphasize the guidance that our attunement to beauty can provide. Not the marketed beauty of glamorized physical appearance, but the inner response to what goes together, what’s in harmony, the sense of things in place. Philosopher Susanne Langer sees it as a sense in its own right, like smell and taste which don’t wait for cognition to decide if something is bad or good for us. What we see has within it a discernment of what matches, what is wrong or out of place in a scene, a precognitive judgment led by an instinct for beauty. In a time when we’ve been bombarded with so much behavior that’s been ugly, the importance of beauty needs revaluing. I recently read that left hemisphere thinking, which is what most education is directed toward, is narrow and utilitarian and not responsive to values. This is where the sense of beauty and right hemisphere assessments can balance the distortions that come with limited focus by seeing the whole as one. Alan Watts talked about the need for both spotlight and floodlight consciousness. The spotlight is great for seeing more of one thing but we need a floodlight to see the context, how it works with the rest of the scene. Focusing on one area is an act of separation. The floodlight may be dimmer, leaves out the details, but shows the whole so the spotlight can zoom in on what’s needs attention. Looking at art is an opportunity to refine the floodlight consciousness. The experience of art always starts as a whole. It refines our awareness of the feel of experience all at once. This leads to better understanding and attention to the intuitive feel in other situations, what’s right, or wrong, or off about it. Looking at art is training the sense of the whole and the values shown by harmony, graceful form, attention to detail, appreciation of virtuosity in all things. We all have an inborn ability to set the picture right when something looks off. We when respond to an image it connects to our own inner world. We’ve witnessed more delusion than we could have imagined and see how important self- knowledge can be. Looking at art is a powerful tool for learning about oneself. The pleasure that comes with beauty is a signal of the reward system in action, encouraging what is good for us and fortifying our capacities. With so much visual imagery in our technological world, refining the visual sensibility will develop a long-neglected capability necessary to navigating the future with awareness of the interlocked whole.

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