I Saw It That Way Too

When you first learn to draw objects or figures, you engage in training your mind, not your eye. A goal is to see the parts of everything before you. Gradually, your brain allows for a way of seeing that reveals some essential elements in the process of constructing an image -- that all objects are held in space, are shaped and bisected or transected by light, and are impacted by color.

The other day one of my students was drawing a bowl that was turned on its side, so the opening of the bowl was facing her. And she kept moving her pencil in a circle, over and over again, because she saw the bowl (and all bowls) as round. She paid no attention to the fact that the bowl was lit from the side, so half of the bowl was in shadow; she did not see that what she was transcribing from the real world, the world of 3-d wholes, was actually two curved halves of a bowl, one in darkness, the other lit. Her eyes were fine, but her mind could not yet see the whole object before her as component parts, divided by light.

Another student was working on a sketch copy of a Monet painting of a farmhouse in which the artist had presented the house and the space around it geometrically; the structure, outlined in tones of brown, was intersected by trapezoids and parallelograms of light, and organic objects (like a tree and vines) were presented as vibrating circular masses of color. This student approached the sketch by seeing only the whole, without the geometric parts, and fixated to a point of anxiety on the "rightness" of the colors of the leaves.

Now I am sure I am stretching a point here, but reflecting on learning to draw makes me think about nihilism and all its philosophical cohorts -- including the idea that there are no complete objects, only parts, outside of us. But real nihilism (at least in my interpretation) really contains three ideas: that all there is is in your own mind, that there is no metaphysical frame for any human values, and that the destruction of an untenable or undesirable social order is ok, on occasion, as it will be ideally replaced by a newer, more effective, entirely human-constructed order.

I suspect the philosophical giants who wrote about and struggled with nihilism could not draw.

If they could, I doubt there would have been such furious debate about the existence of objects and component parts outside of the self...for if their minds had been trained to draw, they would have begun to see everything around them as parts, combining to wholes, held by light and space. Held by shared light and space. This sound simplistic, I know, and I do also know that philosophy is about language use, not the physical realm, but I think there is something to be said about the limitations of vision (of all kinds) resulting in limitations in philosophical pronouncements.

I've written before about the false reality created by scientists and theologians alike in the era before eyeglasses were in use; the limits of sight resulted in severely limited readings of the state of the universe and our place in it. The same occurred before the advent of photography. Generations ago nihilists justified their stance about the unseen as unknowable when the idea that we could actually see atoms was completely unimaginable -- but now we can even "see" down to the molecular level, our essential component parts.

Traditional nihilism was a reaction to the decline of religious belief, presented as a stark and frightening contrast to life without a metaphysical root. Modern nihilism seems a bit different, more about the promotion of the individual as an inviolate and pure ideal, more about self-aggrandizement as a social good. As if the only alternative to not having an innate, spirit-generated set of human values was to have no belief in or even sense of the importance of shared human values at all. And as if existence itself is not just an isolated but a static state, instead of a process of mutual engagement and retreat, a process of changing and reforming, a process of emerging from seeing only the wholes for years and years and then learning to see anew.

The Ministries of Oceania

I am beginning to wonder if I am feeling a strange sense of dislocation at the moment because I am a proponent of privacy and limits in a time that recognizes and respects neither. My generation evolved through the slow peeling away of privacy; my nieces and nephews are growing up in a world that promotes full exposure as not just a norm, but a new social good.

Living as I do at the ground zero of technological-advancements-in-privacy-stripping (Google is just down the street, Facebook is just up the road) and married as I am to a technology guru, I get a large dose of this daily. And in response, I often find myself floating on my own tiny cloud, made up of equal parts resistance and denial, trying hard to hover just above the furious expose-all activities on the ground. Truly, I do not want to live in a time where anyone and their mother can post pictures of me anywhere, or 'tag' me, or document me, without my consent -- but more so, I don't want to live in a time where people think that doing so is living, is community, is communication. But I do. As do we all.

I have moved beyond the "why" on this one; all the generations that follow me (I am 44 this year) will have no cognitive dissonance. They will not experience the death of privacy, the letting go of limits, any feeling of distant regard for others, because apparently now those things just do not exist as part of the human community. Instead we have endless reportage and visuals on all the moments of everyone's life available all the time. And I find the pressure to engage in this way of being totally exhausting. Not because I don't care about all those representations of real persons, myself included, commenting on themselves on the Internet, but because feeling that I am or we all are now required to care, as part of being human, is exhausting. And it makes me worry about others' understanding of free will.

A few weeks back, I got into a brief discussion about legalizing marijuana in California with a man who is all for it, and I pointed out that I would prefer that people who smoke pot don't do so near me, since I don't want to be exposed to THC or have it impact my brain activity against my will. I said I thought, as an aspect of a civil community, it really was worth considering the violation of others' free will when you are smoking a mind-altering substance in their presence -- unlike, say, the impact of someone drinking alcohol near me, which would not impact my brain at all. And this had not occurred to him, or anyone else around the table. To me this was the most relevant point in the whole discussion about legalizing marijuana, and here I was talking to some who were actually activists on the subject, and they had not considered what it was to violate someone's free will.

I do view human experience as totally subjective; like every other person out there, I see and think things in my own manner. I respect everyone has their own will, limits, desires. And though I do fail at times, I generally try not to impede. But I am, I find, often impeded upon, when I encounter people who do not see privacy as an actual aspect of a real life.

The wonderful thing about having a sense of privacy is that your life is shared with those you care for and trust, and strong bonds are built on the sharing. A dearth of privacy, of limits, makes everything shared seem commonplace and not unique; the singular experience of one's self, one's view, one's truly particular perspective is not reveled in or valued, but runs second to the communal self, the shared-on-Facebook self. And ultimately, and perhaps to me most disturbing, is the idea that shared information in a shared format means a shared emotional state -- or at least a shared sense of 'correct' emotional responses. But in truth, 90% of what I feel when I read others' status updates is never shared, and what is shared is often just...social pablum. And I doubt I am alone in this.

The poet Yeats said "It is no little thing to accept one's own thought when the thought of others has the authority of the world behind it" -- and he encouraged readers to strive to accept their own thoughts over others' anyway, because he knew the "authority of the world" is a seriously constraining idea. Because no, we don't all wear the same shoes. Conformity of response is a constraining idea. Not recognizing others' free will is a constraining idea. And perhaps setting aside respect for privacy in favor of swimming in the communal pool is the most constraining idea of all.

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.