Tuesday, September 19, 2017
Shifting Images
If we thought of
ourselves as significant parts of a larger whole, why would we chew on our own
foot? The current widespread inability to care about other people and the
planet is because they are seen as outside and other. Unacknowledged fears and
dissatisfactions attach to the outside other creating the illusion we know
where the danger is. The devouring of the weak by the strong is the animal
tendency that the first law in human history, the Code of Hammurabi, was written
to prevent. A righteous society kept the strong from harming the weak. This was
seen as the step needed to transcend our animal nature. As Eldridge Cleaver
wrote, “Survival of the fittest is the law of the jungle. Cooperation is the
law of civilization.”
In a specific section “the Code” recognized and
penalized unproven slander, that human tendency to call out those faults they
themselves possess. I’ve come across this observation in Marcus Aurelius,
Marcel Proust and Willa Cather and psychology. Look at current public figures
for plenty of examples.
A precept found
in all religions says treat people the way you would like to be treated. I think
of it as the law of the mirror neurons, empathy cells, they are sometimes
called. We understand what hurts others through our own feelings so damaging
others requires ignorance of personal feelings. Prejudice and antagonism can’t
be solved with a surface veneer of proper behavior. It requires psychological
self-awareness, seeing the things we fault in others as the things within
ourselves we need to recognize and master.
Spending time every
week working with the I Ching is my tool for self-development. Its good advice
on how to be a “superior person” is
entirely dependent on the qualities in yourself you cultivate, where you give
time and attention. This is actually strengthening those qualities in the circuits
of the brain so it becomes second nature. To build on your own best qualities
creates the self-respect necessary to respect others.
Respect for every
individual creates harmony. Dividing things into categories divides us into
groups that emphasize the differences. Labels deplete meaning and sever
connections between people. When we call courtesy “Political Correctness”, it
turns the virtue into something scorned. With categories, you get sorting and
ranking, preferred and privileged, and the association with labels and brands
that keep attention on the surface.
Images communicate
through commonality, the way we all respond to what we see. The meaning depends
on the whole context and each person gets their version of the same essence,
the different details of life unified by the shared patterns of experience.
Artists can provide unifying images that offer a visual truth about our
connectedness. Though we may be an individual nest of skin containing organs,
we are nested in a family, in a community, in a region all the way out to our
shared planetary nest which contains us all. We are responsible for the
condition of our nest, and with the right images we can change the way we see.
Monday, August 28, 2017
Where is the Well
“However people
may differ in disposition and education, the foundations of human nature are
the same in everyone. And every human being can draw in the course of their education
from the inexhaustible wellspring of the divine in human nature….but we may
fail, in our education, to penetrate the real roots of humanity and remain
fixed in convention, or collapse and neglect self-development.”*
The limited
definitions that go with the labels and categories can’t begin to describe the
360 degrees of experience or the deep well of human potential. Images do it
better. Our feelings choose what we see, so our choice of what we look at
reflects our current inner world. Words may be markers for the types of things
we talk about but, except in literature, don’t convey the nature of experience.
Art is an opening to the well, the connection to what will nourish in a way
that develops the individual. It communicates through the universal metaphor of
where we are and the condition illuminated is understood by all human beings
because we’re built to move around in the world for the same reasons and by the
same mechanisms. We see the state of balance and the trajectories of moving
objects and know what to do in relation to them. The parietal lobes are
dedicated to the core consciousness of where we are, processing a visual/kinesthetic
understanding. From infancy, we learn the way the world behaves in a commonsense
physics that becomes so automatic it’s taken for granted, yet it’s a complex
multifaceted intelligence at the foundation of conceptual knowledge. Cultivating
that level of understanding is a way to build on our commonality. Human
differences are just the skin of who we are. Labeling all the differences emphasizes
divisions that are small given the foundation we share.
The particular
details of every person’s life are varied, but they are structured by shared
ways of living. The locations of our memories may look very different but the
similar patterns of satisfying basic needs are common to us all. The pattern of
home, the pattern of school, work, social gathering, create common circuitry
through the way we function within them. Given an image of a nest, we
understand its meaning by the condition of the nest, what is or is not there
that is significant. Understanding the meaning of surroundings and the metaphor
of where we are is developed by looking at art. This builds the circuits of
visual sensitivity and triggers personal reflection that connects with
universal human meaning structure. It needs no translation and creates bridges
where words cannot.
*from Hexagram 48
Ching The Well
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Roger Federer and Art
When I heard that Roger Federer liked
modern art, I was immediately curious about what, and though I never found that
out, the search itself was interesting. Most of the listings you get if you put
his name together with art are paintings of him and articles about his playing
as art. The best is the 2006 David Foster Wallace piece in the New York Times
describing him.
Beauty is not
the goal of
competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression
of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we’re
talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic
beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or
cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’
reconciliation with the fact of having a body.(1)
A decade later he is still winning grand
slams. Mihaly Czentmihali wrote that the creation of one’s own self can be as
exciting as writing a symphony. What moves me about Roger Federer and Serena
Williams is that they have done just that, created a work of art that sculpts
both body, skill and character out of the whole of themselves. Roger and Serena
are examples of embodied art in the realm of immediate intelligence.
When someone is centered and expressive of
the core of their being, that’s art. It takes skill to reach a relationship
with a mode of expression that enables it to be a natural extension of the
body, responses finely tuned to go where intuition leads. The body/mind knows
what it knows and can act before thought. This metaknowledge is part of the
initial feeling. Not just comprised of emotion, our feelings are as complex as
we are, responses from the whole picture of our background in combination with
our current state. Because Roger Federer has developed so many ways to hit a
tennis ball together with all he’s seen about how the opponents play he’s
developed a body/mind response that’s highly sophisticated yet unencumbered by
analysis. Like any artist he extends the range of what tennis can be.
In a short
piece in Art News, Andrew Russeth quoted a Sports Illustrated interview with
Roger Federer saying he liked modern art because it helped him keep an open
mind, that as he gets older it gives him inspiration. Watching tennis at its
best inspires me to stretch my own capabilities. Excellence is always inspiring.
Modern art
opens the mind by pushing the edges of perception. This enlarges the scope of
choices. Looking at art increases sensitivity to intuitive response and
awareness of how we’re led by underlying overall adjustments, the inclinations
that move us before we’ve figured them out. Art attunes our feelings to
meaningful form and so builds the scope of understanding. The brain is
structured to mirror the spatial world and understand the meaning of things by
how everything looks within it. The more in harmony we are with ourselves and
what’s happening around us the better we can flow with it. Focused attention
comes after immediate attention reacts.
Tennis is
a demanding and artful sport. Players styles are unique and bigger doesn’t mean
better. Women’s tennis is treated with the same respect as men’s and provides
just as many opportunities to be amazed.
The players we like best are as personal as the art we like, each with
an individual style of meeting the challenges posed by another. This year’s US
Open will include record setting players, still at the top of their form. It’s
an opportunity to be both impressed and inspired.
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