Tennis and Cultural Expansion

Watching the French Open this year renews my conviction that human excellence develops from the mix of all nationalities representing a range of styles and backgrounds. The best players school each other, push skills and uplift watchers with their stamina and virtuosity. Through cultural expansion we can move forward as a species, sharing knowledge and perspective. People have a choice about where to give their attention. It’s so much better for the psyche to choose admiration and inspiration. In a time obsessed with labels, individual excellence demonstrates that what matters is what we do, not what we are. Beneath the surface is the rich individuality that produces excellence when following a passionate interest. Watching tennis offers the privilege of sharing the peak moments of dedicated careers. When I was first caught by the look on Bjorn Borg’s face that started me watching tennis, I felt like I was being let in on something deeply private, intense and exposed. The appeal of virtuosity is positive brain chemistry. The satisfaction of pushing our boundaries is available no matter what the personal interest. Finding groups that share that interest can now reach all over the planet. In every area of life, we are enriched by difference. With more different kinds of people and backgrounds, our own choices are expanded. Society needs to make the evolutionary step that moves toward difference, not away. This weekend are the finals of the French Open. The play leading up to them has been outstanding and it’s a time when a shift of generations is underway. The legendary Serena Williams lost and the Russian and Czech in the finals are the next young women to inspire. The men’s final will be a battle between the current #1 from Serbia, Novak Djokovic who has been around two decades and emerging star, Stephanos Tsitsipas from Greece. Women’s Final are at nine am Saturday, men’s at nine am Sunday. They’ll stir some positive brain chemistry and give mirror neurons a workout.

Contact

Reflections on Teaching

One of the best things about teaching has been looking at and talking about student work. Nothing better demonstrates the limitations of words than to see how a single word can mean so many different things to different people. The word is no more than a category for the radically diverse ways we experience it. Given the topic Isolation, particularly in the midst of the COVID pandemic, students created images of moving particularity, merging physical confinement with the psychological impact. No matter how different the details, everyone understood the feeling. This is what we share as a species and why art can help unify in a time when we desperately need it. As classes became more international, the universal feeling that is understood by the mind as a whole through art, connected us in our essence. Visual art is felt in the body which picks up the nuance in small variations that words can’t reach. Each work can stimulate new conversations. After talking about a Chinese student’s painting, she said, “Thank you guys. You described my heart.” Awash in a terrible worldwide focus on surface differences, art connects to the place that we are the same, a place crucial to reinforce right now. Art is not just about culture, it is a picture of human psychology. Teaching has been a way to demonstrate the joy of being involved, the pleasure of giving attention lavishly and like when watering a plant, fostering growth. Showering students with attention is the part I’ll miss most, to watch something ignite and spread as they feel seen through their work. Art helps us past the external shell to where the essence connects. It communicates through generations and widely varied backgrounds. Every artist is a teacher on some level, sharing their insights or questions to stimulate the mind of the viewer. An image can change how we see. Art students always make me optimistic. From a range of difficult circumstances, they willingly draw from the core and make beauty. Thinking about them right now makes me smile as so much individual work through the years floods through my awareness. We share art. We don’t have to own it. Once seen, it’s available in memory. An observation that reflects a point-of-view, window onto a philosophical stance, the feelings resonate beyond words, unifying a diverse group by putting the emphasis on what makes us human. This year’s speeches by students at graduation showed me we’re in good hands. Evidencing a broad, wise and compassionate perspective, their generation will responsibly evolve human minds, tapping the diversity of potential too long overlooked. In the past few years I’ve re-connected to a few students from every decade since the seventies and it startles me even though obvious that the young people I knew could be facing retirement, enjoying results of hard work in middle age, on down to very recent graduates. I feel so lucky to have been part of so many people’s beginnings. They all feel like family to me.

Beyond Night

Interbeing

In an article at the Garrison Institute website, Thich Nhat Hanh talks about coining the word Interbeing to emphasize the extension of our being beyond the physical self. He quotes biologist Lewis Thomas saying our bodies are “shared, rented, and occupied” by many, many other tiny organisms that we depend on to make our own systems run properly. They facilitate the proper operation of all the systems of the human body, each separate system with a role to play yet contributing to and dependent on the others. We have many thermostat-like elements to keep us in balance and systems compensate where the balance is upset somewhere else. Brains are the best example of this since they grow and build mass in areas we use most and shrink in those we don’t. Some say that the planet as Gaia has the same properties. Wikipedia states that the Gaia hypothesis “proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system. “ We depend on so much outside the body. Our food comes through a chain of workers cultivating, harvesting, packing, delivering and finally put on shelves in stores for use. And that doesn’t count all the manufactured items we use. We move through a world of interaction and interchange, a web of systems that support every aspect of living. This is a worldview than can be shown. Images integrate and connect in a way that clarifies meaning. We’ve overidentified with the body as the edge of our being when we couldn’t survive without everything else. We each experience a specific unfolding within and dependent on the environment that supports us. We contain the genes of ancestors that combined in certain ways to make us who we are. Mentally there have been ideas and people that help us develop our way of thinking. Emotionally we have the people with whom our lives are interwoven. Even when we struggle with the world we learn about ourselves. Nature cooperates and gives up resources that we have up until now mindlessly extracted. Though the scale of the crisis we face may be overwhelming, once faced we can choose our place to make a difference. Thinkers are now considering the idea that consciousness could be the base of everything, not an outgrowth of human beings. Art can show alternatives, offer perspective to linear thinking which is such a thin thread through a big picture. Images can spur a speculative philosophy that can shift paradigms for the better. What’s important is to see.

Grief

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.