Delay

My scanner won't connect to my computer. Since my essay to be posted today referred to the drawing, it's all pending until I resolve the issue.

Early Difficulty

Expectations

Lately I’ve been working my way through the Ted talks that focus on the brain. What they all stress is the role of patterns. Life is action. Knowing where any given pattern of action is headed is the general objective. The measuring and naming we’ve been so consumed with is just description. It freezes the continuous motion in one place and time. As David Bohm once pointed out, the concern with the names of things that results from the dominance of noun-centered language took the intellect down the rabbit hole of believing things are more important than events and treating ideas as fixed things. Bohm felt that the truth of any theory required an aesthetic judgment. This depends on relations within a context. The emphasis on relations in the visual arts can build awareness of context and sensitivity to significant patterns. The brain recognizes overall shifting patterns through the feeling of what’s unfolding. You can’t understand the way the brain works just by thinking about its parts or its chemicals. The flow of energy is an action involving many parts. Now that imaging techniques allow us to watch it we might take serious steps in understanding it. Patterns create expectations. Expectations are a primary requirement for perception. Inability to see at birth is more a matter of having no previous seeing to inform what is sought, than of any problem in the system itself. The system is there to be primed with the features of the world it will need to decode. Caretakers, as patterns of movement from above, lay the groundwork for the meaning of above and below with its emotional tone of dependence. The further association of light above and needing light to see builds the positive nature of “up” in our minds. In later life, we conceive of an improvement in our condition as “moving up” and a host of other familiar phrases. This need to “rise above” negative patterns is one of the essential points in Alfred Adler’s philosophy of motivation, that the difficulties of life can be the spur to achievement and high expectations are more conducive to accomplishment than low. When he coined the word “lifestyle” he referred to the patterns of action in an individual’s life and eliminating the ones that are self-defeating. Humor resists expectations, twists away from the predicted meaning. Illusion is a close cousin, running against the expected direction. Surprise stimulates dopamine which stimulates more curiosity. This is why the cultivation of humor and the pleasure of visual illusions is so good for our minds. It opens the mind to the new and promotes flexible thinking.

Last Resistance

The Pleasure of Improvement

I don’t usually write about the drawings I post but since this is the third time I’ve posted the drawing above I’ve already let viewers in on the process and what I’m demanding of it. Over sixty hours of work later I think I can finally let it go. Each time I posted before, I could see, once it was on the screen, that there was more to do to make it look as heavy as I wanted. For a while I’ve had this quote from Leonardo da Vinci in my mind. “The depiction of volume is the supreme mark of skill.” It’s harder than it might seem, with extremely subtle variations in light and dark that the eye doesn’t normally pick up. With many years of this behind the scenes goal, I’ve discovered ongoing challenge, pleasure and opportunity to reflect on what the depiction of volume communicates. With increased illusion of volume, the sense of weight grows. The idea of weight as serious shows in the many metaphors that reflect that attitude. What is heavier requires more of us, a burden, a mood, a responsibility. Surrealist use of illusionistic volume to portray psychological reality added a necessary seriousness to the absurd and implausible. The stronger the sense of volume is the more it’s felt in the body, as a real presence, and engaging the body is always a goal in illusion. As I’ve said to my illusionism classes, one of the benefits of learning this skill is that it can always be pushed more. In my study of brain science one thing that stood out was the idea that the brain rewards learning. There are lots of routes back and forth from the frontal lobe (most evolved mental properties) and the nucleus accumbens (primary pleasure center). It’s a pleasure to get better at something. Building knowledge and skills are our human survival tools. The involvement of video games is spurred by the pleasure of improvement. It doesn’t really matter at what. To push beyond past limitations takes involvement and concentration and that’s what’s being encouraged by the brain’s rewards. We’re meant to increase our capabilities and whether it’s improvement in a game, on an instrument or at baking, brain chemistry is there to reward achievement. We don’t have a good word in English, for satisfaction in the process of getting better at something. Not pride, though that may be a side effect, but joy in the act of stretching ourselves, in our participation in our growth. The state of flow is our best concept to appreciate it as an end in itself. The pleasure of improvement is in the doing, losing oneself in the process. Work done well is its own brand of happiness.

More Resistance

This is a continuation on the drawing posted in February. And isn't there yet. I always see new problems when I post it. Watch for the change.

Perceptual Intelligence

The heartbreaking pictures of the devastation in Ukraine, can be seen as the world body wounded and broken. The ugliness of the destruction testifies to what Alan Watts once said. “Morality is the aesthetics of behavior.” We recoil as the harmony of a functioning society is being wantonly destroyed. The outbreaks of violence all over the world are grown out of a pathological model of realty that sees reality as a machine where everything is stuff that can be possessed and exploited. Not caring about the history or the people, lives are destroyed for access to resources. This attitude of seeing the planet as a giant pool of raw material to use up interferes with the balance of the all-inclusive organism of the planet. The disconnection and imbalance reflects a psychological imbalance grown from an alienated worldview. Chief Seattle said, “The earth does not belong to us, we belong to the earth”. Organic intelligence is alert to the health of the whole. Since everything is part of an intricate network of interrelated systems, staying aware of the totality is necessary to moving in harmony with the flow of being that’s happening all around us. This comes naturally if the underlying model of the universe includes us as part of an organic whole. If we’re disrupting other aspects of the overall system we’re like a cancer, growing without heed of the damage and pain we cause, sucking up vital resources without regard to the host. Much of what divides us and keeps us from acting together is imagery that places us outside of things, casting us as the one that tinkers with the machine. This is the same image as religion’s large-scale Maker, which also puts the traditional God outside of us. It is more sensible to think of ourselves as growing from the planet like all of nature, not made by something external. The Gaia Hypothesis came out decades ago. James Lovelock’s conception was of a self-regulating quality in the earth itself. Just like the adjustments made in our own body, it responds to imbalances. This universal motion of homeostasis exists on every level and in every system, adapting to change to restore equilibrium. Persisting in the belief in man’s dominion over the earth may lead to the earth itself wiping out the source of destruction, us. The materialistic world of separate things has resisted seeing our interconnectedness because it’s a threat to a competitive attitude. Accumulating and controlling more of the planet does not serve the good of the whole. The narrow sight lines of a competitive stance focus on the end result and miss many of the consequences of that single-mindedness. This is where looking at art can help. Art puts the emphasis on the whole and what it expresses. It tunes attention to the big picture, so important to a cooperative attitude that sees relationships in the specific contexts and not categories and labels. Collectively, our different perspectives offer more choices and possibilities for solving the serious problems that we should be facing together. Putting the many ideas of the group in service to the world body is a collective effort that could revolutionize the way we live together.