Inclination Changes

Physicist Arthur Worthington's desire to prove the perfection of the splash, using drawings he made from observations of mercury droplets, was abandoned after flash photography made it possible to see that the droplets actually made imperfect, non-symmetrical splashes. This was both a scientific set back for Worthington and a spiritual bummer, since the connection between symmetry and spiritual perfection was assumed in the 1890's; natural symmetry was taken as hard evidence of God's sublime hand at work, and as a model for man's attempt to perfect himself.

With this new view on things, Worthington questioned how he (and all the other scientists that predated him) could "have seen for so long a perfection that had never been present" and he reasoned that the human mind's "psychological tendency to improve" had led him, and all other viewers, to "attend to part of the image with a preference for the part that is regular, and then tend to fill up the rest in...imagination."

About 100 years earlier, Immanuel Kant wrestled with the concept of aesthetic judgement (and imagination, and pleasure) in a long and intricate essay that hinges on the idea that there is a clear distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. "The delight which we connect with the representation of the real existence of an object is called interest" he wrote (living as he did in a time before secular, non-representational abstraction was everywhere). "The beautiful is what pleases in the mere estimate formed of it [outside of understanding]. From this it follows at once that it must please apart from all interest. The sublime is what pleases immediately by reason of its opposition to the interest of sense...The beautiful prepares us to love something, even nature, apart from any interest: the sublime to esteem something highly even in opposition to our (sensible) interest."

So, responses to beautiful things are on one level, irrational maybe but certainly comprehensible. And responses to sublime things are on another level, as awe or respect for something sublime is actually rational (an act of esteem) but not really comprehensible in the mind of man alone. Because for Kant, the sublime was tinged with something, a sprinkling of a spiritual perfection that is not attainable by humans.

It strikes me that Kant did a lot of "filling up the rest" in imagination. Living as he did before flash photography. And high definition tv. The core dichotomy (beautiful versus sublime) Kant deemed necessary for his understanding of aesthetics makes me question the need for this kind of thinking. I wondered about this last week while listening to Lauren Wye, a doctoral student at Stanford, describe the complex measurement-and-correction process used in radar mapping of a lake on the surface of Titan, the largest moon around Saturn.

We know from photographs and readings taken by the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that this lake, Ontario Lacus, is 18,000 km long, is shaped like a super giant right footprint, and is filled mostly with methane and ethane. Because of things I can't comprehend, like the actions of pulse echoes, sinusoid signals, backscatter and signal distortion, lots of mathematical hoops had to be jumped through to achieve reliable data about the surface of the lake and whether it is viscous or wave-filled.

Turns out, Ontario Lacus is kind of like a large pool of oil on the garage floor -- not choppy or wavy at all, but dense and sluggish. And working backwards from the data about the lake's surface features, scientists can now more confidently claim knowledge about all of the lake's content materials and what the bottom of it may be like. Which is fine, and nice to know, and alongside the data about Titan's other surface features, gives us a pretty robust picture of a place we've never been to.

Titan is similar to the other objects in our neighborhood, it has some gravity, mountains, impact craters, lakes, etc. Having that totality of information is wonderful, in and of itself, but the description provided by Wye of the the filters and sieves the data had to be pulled through to match a theoretical frame seemed...self-serving. Like reading Kant's neat categorizations of all things knowable in art, or one's reaction to art. Both seem to be exercises in proving bounded reasoning to itself, and both seem propelled by the notion that bounded/defined reasoning about objects is superior not only to guessing or projecting ideas onto the object ("Maybe a skillion years ago a huge space giant stepped on Titan and made the lake?") but to not projecting an answer at all.

But what if we all just waited until the Cassini-Huygens space probe or its progeny got down to the moon's surface, and analyzed the materials in the lake, and took photographs of its surface? And in the meantime we all lived in a state of not guessing or projecting, but simply not-knowing-but-open-to-knowing-someday?

This is not the point where science bumps up against art; this is the point where the expectation that humans can know the why and wherefore anything they ponder or imagine about (the why of time, what God has planned for folks) bumps up against a different reality, the one where humans recognize what we possibly can't know, and instead of covering up that apparent failing with a guess or projection, actually don't see that as a failing at all.

The drive to find a concrete expression about all things we encounter, the idea that all is knowable and therefore explicable, drives a pretty large percentage of human action, and interaction of course. But does that mean its a moral good? I'm not talking about remaining willfully ignorant about what is knowable, as it seems a human imperative not just to "improve" on what we see, but simply to know what you can, to learn more, to allow for contexts.

There is a point in that process where, when one comes up against what is imaginable but currently inexplicable, then something like fear, or perhaps the desire for power over nature, or power over other humans, or the desire for connection overtakes, and...signal distortion is implemented, the concrete division between the beautiful and the sublime is constructed, the adherence to an unchanging set of rules is instituted, and we are bounded by description. The not-totally-explicable-yet is captured, limited, crafted into a version of "known" through a process of extrapolation, ratification, reiteration. Images become meaning, nature's perfection becomes sublime. Radar signals become a comprehensible physical feature, the surface of a lake on a distant moon.

This process is subjective, and context-bound; before flash photography, another reality existed. What if the research team at Stanford had claimed that the process they undertook was simply to learn about how radar works in space on a weird moon far away, not to define the smoothness constraints of a lake on Titan? What if Kant had claimed that his "Critique of Aesthetic Judgement" was not a prescriptive essay about the way man's mind is designed to comprehend art, but rather his own personal exercise in figuring out artistic taste in his time? What if ancients had claimed up front that creating systems of gods with superpowers was awesome simply because it was an exercise in human imagination applied to reducing stress about as-yet inexplicable natural phenomena?

What if the most sustaining, engaging, energizing part of being conscious was simply in recognizing that human capability, rather than using imagination on itself to create a bounded, word-filled structure one must adhere to when engaging in an act of imagining?

Critic Dore Ashton wrote of artist Mark Rothko that the painter was "dubious about the world of men" and strove to operate outside the "clutter of the mundane world" so that he could paint that most non-human experience, boundlessness.

Boundlessness. It seems like this is what Worthington and his colleagues bumped up against when finally really viewing the variations in the natural, not very symmetrical world. And this seems to be what Kant worked so hard to describe around in the geometrical proof that is "The Critique of Aesthetic Judgement."

Certainly we are all stuck here on earth, and stuck in our own heads...but we are able to consider unanswerable questions and unending space, to encounter endlessly mutating nature, and we are capable of imagining boundlessness, and creating about that, even if we can't inhabit it. Do we really need to always map the borders?

Spinning Above Flatland

Some interactions or conversations between people are not what they seem to be, but are instead art acts. You may not even be aware when this happens, and you may actually never have consented to being part of the art piece, but you are in it nonetheless. I have this experience fairly often and by now have learned to read the cues and ready myself, to some degree. I just had it again about 2 weeks back. And here is the story:

The setting is a local pub, the artmakers were myself and an acquaintance, and the subject of the conversation/art piece was his recent engagement in two simultaneous pursuits: Bible study, specifically the Book(s) of Samuel, and close reading of everything by Ayn Rand. Really. It was surreal.

The transporter of conversation was used to beam me into his internal sphere of self-justification (where all art is made) and simply by being responsive (or sentient) at all, I was part of his process. The product of the activity was not a painting, or a song, or photograph. The product of the activity was an emotional state, a very well-crafted one.

He first determined that I knew something about both Samuel and Rand. (He primed the canvas, loaded the film, readied the recording devices.) He then described to me the experience of talking in his group about the leadership qualities of Samuel, and then, after a very long meander, connected this to Rand's ideas about individualism vs. over-reliance on leaders. (Paint on canvas, a shutter clicking, tape rolling.) And finally he tied this all back to his own rather unnerving experience of being a parent to a little girl. (The last stroke. Now he was just ready to varnish.)

The process he was engaged in was not about grappling with the ideas of Christianity or Objectivism, but rather with seeking and finding justification for his own leadership role in his own family. The emotional state he had sought to craft for himself through this interaction was sureness, a solid, analyzed, and perfected sureness. And I guess my part in the piece was as the dark and unmoving background that cast that product/feeling into high relief, an aid in making his subjectivity as vivid (in his own mind) as a Bible story or Rand's philosophy of self-interest.

I am never surprised that the need to make this type of art exists, or that the need is so strong, particularly in people who feel otherwise constrained by their own lack of creativity.

But I tend to find that people who are not constrained just don't do this kind of artmaking in public, with unwitting conspirators as foils. And I would guess they don't need to, as they make something subjectively "perfect" out of their own vivid imaginations each time they paint, or print an image, or capture sound.

Bright Star

Last year, Dr. Paul Kalas identified the extrasolar planet Fomalhaut B, a cold gas giant about the size of Neptune orbiting around a super-bright star in our southern sky. Kalas was able to identify the planet via images captured (and manipulated with a corona device) by the Hubble Space Telescope. "It's a profound and overwhelming experience to lay eyes on a planet never before seen" he said at the time. But in truth, as with all we explore beyond our immediate boundaries, it is still a planet "never before seen" unless we grant the Hubble (and the Kepler, and any other unmanned spacecraft) human attributes. Photographed-by-machine is not the same as seen. Or is that distinction becoming meaningless now?

Ken Burns' droning documentary on the National Parks is best enjoyed with the sound off, as it provides the viewer with an astounding compilation of images from the earliest days of Yosemite, Rainier, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, etc. Without the cloying narration about how American spirituality is found and reflected in these great places, one can reach one's own conclusions about the impact of those images on the American psyche. Or one's own psyche.

No doubt the early white "discoverers" of the lands that would become national parks felt the same thrill as Kalas, proclaiming that what they were encountering was never before seen -- at least not by white people living elsewhere. The early reportage about (and paintings, drawings, and photographs of) America's natural wonders helped rally support for protecting those places, while at the same time ramping up racism against Native Americans and driving up tourism.

The images served to promote and advertise, and to capture and reveal the beauty...but also to challenge people to get there themselves, in order to get their own images and impressions, to stake their claim. Because any photograph, painting, or sketch of such a place was, while magnificent, still filtered through the artist's experience and limited by their skill; any other set of human eyes would see the same place as markedly different. So, in seeing, the impulse to own or claim or verify one's own view over the artist's presentation.

In the mid-1980's, the Infrared Astronomical Satellite was able to determine, through stellar temperature measurements, glow tracking, temperature variables, and an ambient temperature matching concept similar to the behavior of snakes (long story), that other sun-like stars out there were being orbited by solid material in a similar fashion to our solar system, which itself formed out of a circumstellar disk of swirling space dust. This was cool for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that this gave Dr. Kalas incentive to keep looking more closely at circumstellar disks to see if there were planets like ours within those disks. And as imaging technology advanced, he was able to determine the answer.

But by "laying eyes" on Fomalhaut B for the first time via images sent digitally from a space telescope, Kalas did not really see anything at all, if seeing a new natural wonder engenders claiming, owning, seeking to verify through one's own experience. Because no human eye has ever seen Fomalhaut B, only human-built machines have.

And though human-built machines which take space photographs can't morph/photoshop a planet as one might morph, say, a Ralph Lauren model, Dr. Kalas did avail himself of the coronagraph on the Hubble, to block out the brightest light from the star that Fomalhaut B orbits in order to capture greater detail. The manipulation was necessary, due to the limitations of our eyeballs, not the desire for a skinnier planet. And listening to Dr. Kalas describe the decades-long process of getting to this moment of image discovery, I was entranced by how little imagination-fueled-by-desire played a part. He described observational astronomy as engaging precisely because it was revealing and unsettling and meant constant challenge to known and accepted views. And he, for one, did not imbue what he discovered with any meaning whatsoever, beyond the fact of its existence.

No Ghosts, No Telepathy

I'm beginning to wonder if abstraction causes such discomfort in some because non-representational art is a reminder of what philosopher Colin McGinn calls the "cosmic loneliness" that drives spiritual belief.

McGinn notes that the sealed nature of human consciousness (i.e., I am and can only be in my own mind, not in yours, even though I'd like to think I can know your mind, or that dog's...) fosters, in some, a relentless loneliness. An antidote to this oppressive feeling is to believe in direct, ever present mental contact with another, even a spiritual other.

I talked with both a science professor and with an ethical humanist recently, and asked them about the same moment of awareness: the moment you look in a telescope and see the moons around Jupiter. The science prof said he has often had people take in the view and then proclaim that what they are seeing is God's creation. And I asked him how he dealt with that; he said he usually replies "How do you know I didn't create what you are seeing through my telescope?"

The ethical humanist stated that what those people were expressing was awe, but they just had to use the language of God to express it. I responded that I imagined what those people were expressing was something like fear, and that they used the language of God to make the unknown less fearful. But thinking on it, "cosmic loneliness" could be an apt description.

Art making and art presentation, especially abstraction (in my view) are such connected, human-to-human activities. Experiencing a great painting can feel like a means of traversing across sealed consciousnesses...but for many, this is completely dismissible. Because if what is viewed on canvas is not recognizable, it is not instantly verifying, and so not of value to the viewer's experience. Yet art created out of the minds of other humans actually is inherently verifying.

A view of distant planets through a telescope is a pretty one-sided, human-to-object-in-space activity, one which can give you reason to both celebrate that humans have created telescopes and reason to be in awe of, well, space. And often this moment of real awe gets taken and proscribed, made into a known, mapped, identifiable thing, a "God creation" -- in part so that one can feel less alone in the universe.

Yet seeing the moons around Jupiter is absolutely not verifying; this view says nothing to me (or any human) about human experience, only Jovian experience. Which at this point in time is utterly, fantastically unknowable.

Stuck in the Primum Mobile

Before eyeglasses were invented and put into use, how the hell did nearsighted people see anything? And how did how they saw things impact how they thought about vision?

Up until the late 1200's it was generally accepted as a natural fact that vision was possible because eyes emitted light onto objects -- which seems a remarkably subjective/self-focused idea. And also kind of like a superhero power. Once the theory of vision through emission was disproved, less subjective studies of the eye led to our modern understanding of how vision works.

I tend to think humans go into any new endeavor eyeballs first, so trying to imagine a world where a large section of the population can't see beyond their feet stuns me. But this also explains how some of the more interesting theories of the universe were accepted as natural facts, before the telescope made looking up into the beyond possible. Crystalline spheres, perfect circular orbits, us in the center of it all...such very subject-centered ideas. And these were very sustaining ideas, for generations. Until seeing made things change.

Today I saw an item in the news about how researchers have imaged a single molecule. You can actually see in the image the bonds between atoms. A few hundred years ago, people looking up could only "see" crystal spheres, and people looking in could only "see" ethers and energies. And right now there are telescope cameras flying through space, sending back skillions of pixels that can show us something about the transits of earth-sized planets across the galaxy.

But these leaps forward in understanding do not mean much to people who find navel-gazing sustaining, to those who adhere to the subjective as if it is objective. The act of being objective about anything means that a portion of the self is restricted, or held in reserve, or suppressed in some way, so that new information can be taken in and identifications are not made from an entirely self-focused gaze.

Objectivity is not impersonal, of course, because we are still thinking through and filtering whatever it is we see. In contrast, true subjectivity is nothing but personal filtering, as exemplified by many a recent Town Hall meeting-goer...and anything Rep. Michele Bachmann says. And for some of us, that relentless subjectivity is a frightening, mind-numbing prison.

My favorite Twilight Zone episode "Time Enough At Last" spells that problem out exactly. Eyeglasses and all.

The Noise that Undermines Certainty

Blue is the first color I remember seeing, or being conscious of seeing; I was in a living room with a blue couch and chairs when I registered my own existence for the first time. I was three. My mother had taken me with her to a League of Women Voters meeting, and there were women in skirts, and a lot of talking, and cookies with what I found out later were apricot centers, and blue, all around me.

And this memory -- of the moment I was first cognizant of anything outside of myself -- is still completely color saturated. Which is a weird but familiar comfort, because I am addicted to thinking about color. Or perhaps by this point I am simply addicted to being conscious, which is the same thing. Seeing two examples of color-infused thinking recently is what made me reflect on this idea, and wonder if everyone is addicted in their own way to their own patterns of thought.

I saw a production of Electra a few weeks ago (a play about a daughter addicted to her own experience of grief/vengeance) that had a very spare set: a white wall, a red tomb, a red front door, and a cluster of barren, blood-red trees. I appreciated the spareness, but the director's use of this intense red was a distracting choice as the frame for a play filled with arguments about love and hate. I kept seeing a painting instead of listening to the modernized version of Sophocles' story being spun. But part of that distraction was to be expected, because regardless of the set, Electra is most compelling to an audience who get off on well-crafted insults, collusion, plotting. You know, like watching Real Housewives of New Jersey.

Watching the film The Hurt Locker was just the opposite, because it centers on a character who is addicted to a nearly wordless, intense, visual pursuit: defusing bombs. I know rationally that the film is also about the addiction our culture has to war making, or that a subset of us have to high-testosterone activities, and the consequences of such. But I found watching the main character work, watching him engaged in a life and death situation that depended for a positive outcome on his visual acuity, totally mesmerizing.

The life and death part of his job seemed secondary to him; the time-stopping focus he was capable of achieving when looking at a bomb and figuring out how to defuse it was what seemed to bring him intense pleasure and release. Time away from the work was presented in the film as just unavoidable downtime spent between one injection of the drug and the next. But the drug was actually self-generated. His character provided his own high by using his eyes and hands and concentration. And war gave him the best hook-up to a situation that would keep him generating that drug.

Which is what made me wonder about the addictive nature of consciousness itself. Like anyone else, I don't seem to have a say in what I can remember -- or in the colors of those experiences. What was said at the time is a noise or a sound I often cannot recall with the same acuteness, and I do wish I had better recall of words.

But I also wish sometimes that I existed in some surreal place where my color-thinking drug was always being generated and continually keeping me as high as I feel when I am deep in a painting. I have to wonder if that kind of wish holds true for any thinking being, and wonder how that impacts our choices about what situations provide the best hook-ups.

And I think, how lucky are those (especially in this day and age!) who have minds that are addicted to words. They can shoot up anytime.