careythinking

Ideas as Opiates

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 16:37:00 +0000

The gentleman seated to my right on the plane was thirty-ish, white, anxious looking, and gripped in both hands a fairly new copy of 'Atlas Shrugged'. A representative sample, right there next to me! So of course I had to ask. He said he was reading it to "understand some things" but that he had his own criticisms of both the content and the writing style.

He also had, it turns out, a lot of criticisms about society in general, and public education in particular. Probably not so fun for him, then, to realize he was sitting next to someone who is working on a doctorate in urban education. Tough for me too, I guess, though our long and rather far-ranging talk did help the time pass. And eventually, I know I'll paint it.

Watching the recent debt-ceiling dance made me recall that plane ride conversation, and made me reflect yet again on how people perceive and use power, political and otherwise. Or rather, how people perceive their own powerlessness, and how they react to that feeling. And how I myself react to that feeling.

Mark and I used to live in techno-land, on the other coast, where everyone has gadgets and things hum. We used to live in an epicenter of techno-hubris, too. And now we are on the other side, in Philly. Or "reality" as I call it. And reality here is complex and messy and slow. Here, I have a student job processing quality-of-life surveys of people with intellectual disabilities, people who survive only through the largesse of the county and the professionalism of their care staff. Yesterday I reviewed a survey completed (with the help of her staff) by a middle-aged woman who is both severely intellectually impaired and a quadriplegic. She lives in a small group home and she functions however marginally in the world only because her elderly parents engage with her staff to make sure she has growth experiences...like occasionally going outside.

I have had so many conversations with conservative-types, mostly men, over the last 10 years -- people who are, by any objective measure, possessed of tremendous social capital and power. They tend to protest that their power is threatened at every turn, and they object outright to living in a social order that, through things like public education or healthcare, diminishes their domain. The Rand-fan on the plane certainly perceived things this way. Which makes me wonder about their egos, as well as my own.

Part of me did want to just punch the guy. But a greater part of me wanted to hear why he thought what he thought about his own situation in life, because I need to know how they think. Just as I need to know how the actually powerless (whether in group homes or at Roxborough High) are impacted by his kind of thinking. Comprehending how the relentlessly self-referencing see the world matters. Because, it seems, they are making all the policy decisions now.

The View From Where You Start

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:42:00 +0000

If one encounters the contemporary art on display at Dia:Beacon with one frame of mind -- say, a frame that holds that much of what populates the contemporary art world is MFA-ratified forms of creative masturbation -- then when one enters this pristine, white-walled space and sees a quantity of what seems to be puerile content, that assumption may seem valid. But if one encounters the artwork at Beacon with another frame of mind -- a frame that holds that all one is about to see, upon entering the galleries, are individual visual forms of feeling, creative expressions of how an individual artist manages emotional reality -- then it is a pretty fascinating trip.

Painter Agnes Martin's work, on display in a mini-gallery at Beacon, is quiet and soothing. She seems to view emotional life as a constant stream of data from which one can take small snapshots, or in which one can create small pauses, and she captures this in pale lines on canvas. For Richard Serra, the sculptor of massive steel forms, emotions seem to be heavy obstructions in the path of thought. Some of them are totally impenetrable, and some of them need to be entered into -- but even then your perceptions trick you (you may think you are going up or down when you are actually level) on the path to comprehension. With his massive wall drawings, Sol LeWitt presents the emotional life as that which under girds all, as if feelings are all we are constructing and conveying, all the time. Sculptor Louise Bourgeois' hanging organic forms (and the giant spider that takes up most of one room) seem to say that over time feelings may dement you, and possibly devour you, unless you see them for what odd things they are. And Gerhard Richter's installation of reflective glass panels surrounding couches in a huge, well lit room conveys the very essence of it all: your feelings are self-created, and it is to yourself you should look for explication. And in fact, in his room of calm reflection, that is unavoidable.

One can maintain this frame of mind towards much of the work at Beacon. Bruce Nauman's neon/object installations and videos (in the basement) seem to convey that since feelings "live" in the dark they are not really comprehensible, and when exposed to the light, they are overwhelming and offputting. Dan Flavin's light installations: feelings make sense only in retrospect, when you look back at the entirety of the room they inhabit. Fred Sandback's string frame installations: emotions are an entirely imaginative act. On Kawara's series of paintings of time increments: feelings are moments in a series, and are not connected to anything other than time. And Michael Hiezer's imposing and creepy 'negative' sculptures cut into the gallery floor: don't get too close to feelings as they may swallow you whole.

There are a myriad of ways to interpret the abstract constructions and paintings at Dia:Beacon, of course, and that is the joy and the terror of abstraction. Your own free will is in play in each and every encounter; you are never simply acknowledging familiar landscapes. But weirdly enough, on this trip, I wound up doing just that. After exploring the art, we sat on the bench outside the building for a time, watching the Metro-North trains going by below us, looking at the boats on the Hudson, and it was all beautifully, richly familiar.

Houses of Being

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 16:31:00 +0000

Because I can intend to imagine a space or time or experience differently than what I observe or register daily, the exercise of imagination is not inherently liberating.

And it strikes me too that to create a new known (to imagine a world in the mind's eye) with the goal of deeply knowing that place and returning to it whenever one desires is a form of... serious conformity. Which is why Inception was such a drag. The outcome of this type of imagining is that the grooves of thought are dug in, and as a result I can re-enter a space I have built in my imagining whenever I choose and so re-encounter the same emotional state that "comes with" that imagined space. The movie playing in Donald Rumsfeld's mind, of his imagined Iraq-war world, is a great example.

But to me, the exercise of imagining an object or place (or, frankly, re-imagining my own history) is actually the exercise of creating an imagined self.

This imagined self is made in a space just beyond the gorges of the mind (those really deep grooves which are carved from rivers of repeated, maintaining thoughts) and beyond the tracks of the normative, regulated, constrained, social. The intention in this kind of imagining is never to make it familiar and known, not to cut the groove too deep, but simply to experience this other self, or moments of non-selfness. Simply to experience unboundedness.

I think this is why creative types tend to not have fixed imaginative spaces but rather push forward to create new spaces (new selves) all the time; we are constantly cutting new grooves. The desire is always for more. We find no real comfort dwelling in the known knowns. And I am, even as I gain in age and experience, still mystified by those who do find such comfort.

Martin Heidegger once wrote that "Language is the house of Being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and those who create with words are the guardians of this home." (A very self-serving point of view, for a philosopher.) Heidegger was identifying what was in his perception the core of being -- language use as a sort of universal proof of conscious thought, of aliveness. The function of this seems to be to ratify a static sense of purpose. To ratify that being is about doing the thing that makes one feel as if one is in one's true home, or is protecting one's true home. One could insert any number of things into that quote (faith, sex, money, a political affiliation) and it would be equally self-serving.

But what if being a guardian of one house is a prescription for mental atrophy? What of being, aliveness, and consciousness and endeavors into the wordless? What if, because we perpetually think, the houses of being are infinite?

The Angular Distance

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 01:35:00 +0000

A few years back I had a weirdly visceral experience of nostalgia while just walking across a post office parking lot. We'd been living in Seattle for about 4 years, and rather than get used to the place, it seemed that as each day passed, I felt more out of synch. My intellect said time would ease the feeling but I doubted this.

Then that day, a sunny-ish day in a soggy Seattle fall, I walked across the parking lot and I was hit by the smell of wet leaves. And I mean hit; I stopped short, and breathed in...and then I was crying. Not sobby crying. Just weeping a little. Something, some feeling of loss which I did not understand at the time, mixed with a powerful memory of playing in leaf piles in the front yard growing up, mixed with another memory, of the briny smell of the Long Island Sound, came up and out and stood in front of me and blocked my way for a moment. And this is a "something" I've found impossible to paint.

There I was, four years into painting full-time, just past 40 years old, and I missed home? That moment, I now know, was the beginning of a process. The feeling remained beneath the surface for some time, and then with our relocation to California, it seemed to literally run my mind. And my tongue. When we visited the east coast this fall, I looked out the train window at one point and randomly blurted out to my husband "Hey, there's home!" -- not consciously knowing what I was looking at, just the places blurring by, all those towns on the once so-familiar train line.

That feeling is extant, and it has come to matter dearly. So now, due in no small part to the fact that my husband is a remarkable person, we have rearranged our life. After 10 years of living and working and learning and painting on the west coast, we are off, in a few weeks, with our things in the big yellow truck, driving 3000 miles, heading for the east coast. For home.

This Virgin Mary is 62% Cacao

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 18:31:00 +0000

During the recent run up to Parliamentary elections in the region of Catalan, Spain, candidate Alicia Sanchez-Camacho defended her (conservative) People's Party's campaign video, which depicted the candidate as a gun toting defender of Catalan gleefully shooting immigrants dead. She strenuously objected, however, to an advertisement created by the youth wing of the Spanish Socialist Party, which depicted a woman having an orgasm as she voted.

The Green Party candidate noted wryly that it would be "very difficult to reach orgasm voting for any of the candidates, myself included." But when all the votes were counted two weeks ago, Barcelona's pro-business conservatives and nationalists were the ones getting their guns off. They beat the Socialists handily, and took a giant step toward their goal of seeking more economic independence from Spain.

So, women engaged in immigrant killing as a vote magnet --sure. Women voters ecstatically doing their own thing? Not so much.

In fact, it was a challenge to find much of any female creative self-expression during my stay in Barcelona. There is a great deal of appreciation of the female form, of course. Its everywhere -- in advertisements, at dance clubs, shouted from random men on the streets as one passes by. The religious iconography here fetishizes women. I even saw an exquisitely carved pieta (the Virgin Mary holding a dying Christ) made out of chocolate.

There were stunning images of women in Medieval art in Spain -- women as saints, virgins, wives, mothers -- their faces and their roles carved in wood, static for the last 700 years. And the dictator Francisco Franco held that these roles were the only ones women could ever have in Spanish culture, at least as long as he was running the show.

The female form saturates much of the decorative arts and architecture of the Modernisme (Art Nouveau) movement. Gaudi's work is curves, curves, curves, and Miro's is soft, rounded shapes. Gaspar Homar, Ramon Casas, Luis Graner and Gaspar Camps created paintings and furniture pieces in which the 'figura feminina' is the metaphor for nature, for exotica, and for all things pleasing and beautiful.

It dawned on me that I could not find one exhibition of art made by women in this beautiful city. In fact, the collection on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona -- representing culturally relevant work from the last 50 years (paintings, installations, collages) -- was work by male artists only. The closest I came to seeing something of the female experience was a visit to the Monestir de Pedralbes, a Gothic nunnery built in the early 1300's, which houses a collection of religious icons selected and preserved by generations of nuns. Of course these women lived in tiny cells and worked and prayed all day, and were likely not ever ecstatically self-fulfilled. At least not in the physical sense.

For me, the contrast between the depiction of Spanish women as objects of desire on the one hand and as chaste religious supplicants on the other certainly reached its zenith when I saw a Virgin Mary one could lick. Not the same kind of pleasure as killing people who are unlike you, I suppose. But possibly as fun as voting.

Into the Same River Twice

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 07:45:00 +0000

Continuous circular thinking about the relevance of what one encounters in life is what blurs the distinction between being of one's time or being in one's time. And I am skeptical of the idea that one can ever create anything if one is continuously thinking that all of what one encounters is equally relevant, or deserving of reaction.

To me, being of one's time implies a state of mind where one maintains some intellectual objectivity or fluidity about the relative importance of what one encounters in daily life. Being in one's time = incessant Twittering.

Evidence that you are in your time: having an abiding belief that your view of things is comprehensive, that your thinking is socially validated by the act of you having lived your thoughts, and that your thinking is or should be applicable to all. Evidence that you are of your time: having a belief that your view of things is subjective, that your view is contextually valid, and that how you think is not applicable to all.

Those who are in their time seem to get pleasure from reaction, identification, classification. Those who are of their time seem to get pleasure from reflection, connection, expansion.

If you are in this time, you pride yourself on knowing all the knowable things, and on placing new experiences into a category, based on your own previous personal experience. If you are of this time, you take pride in allowing for new things to integrate themselves into your understanding over time, through experience and experiment.

If you are in this time, the space you make in your head for new information is space that is partitioned from pre-existing rooms. If you are of this time, the new spaces you make tend to be additions -- built with no blueprint, and inconsistently sized.

And perhaps that is the distinction, in the end: is your mind is a solid house with uniformly-sized rooms, built from a plan, or is it an endless series of rooms to be discovered, explored, and furnished? Or perhaps the distinction is deeper still, more a matter of how fearful you are of unplanned additions, and how you respond to that fear.

To paraphrase Charles Sanders Pierce, do you allow your mind to adapt and let truth happen to an idea...or is living (and thinking) all about shooting it before it moves?

Everything That Has a History of Its Own

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 02:28:00 +0000

Three scientists in bright orange jackets and black hats take up positions on the Antarctica ice just above an area where seals are cavorting and loudly communing. The scientists each have a different pose -- one lays prone on the ice, on has his leg extended back and rests his head on one arm near the ice, the other is bent over as far as he can go, his face almost stuck to the frozen surface.

All three are absolutely still, and they are listening to some of the weirdest sounds in nature, Arctic seal sounds, as part of their ongoing research. They are being filmed while engaged in this act of intense listening by Werner Herzog, who is following these scientists as part of his research for his movie "Encounters at the End of the World."

And I am watching Herzog's film, which is primarily about watching intense people doing their own intense watching of surreal looking Antarctic life forms. The image of the three orange-coated scientists burns into my eyeballs and my brain.

Then I immediately translate this image into my own version of the image, morphing the colors of the snow, the jackets, the shadows, incorporating in color and form the pleasure and awe the scientists express about their seal subjects, incorporating too the odd feeling that Herzog's film gives me, a feeling that I am violating the privacy of the scientists, the seals, and even the frozen landscape somehow by watching a film like his from the warmth and comfort of my Northern California living room.

I am translating as I go. We all are. And as I translate, I am imbuing something with something that was not there at the creation, at the moment of origination. As we all do, with our own histories, our own stories, with other people, or with the art we encounter around us. I am deriving, but I am also giving something a kind of life beyond its own moment; my painting of that image from Antarctica is a record of what I saw and is simultaneously a translation of an image, incorporating context and emotion and my own distance. I'll never actually see Antarctica, but I can know my response to the image I was presented. And the "life" of that painting will have its own arc, its own trajectory, which will never overlap with those three scientists, or with Arctic seal research, or with Herzog.

This activity of translation and creation happens ceaselessly, no matter how constraining the current cultural conversations may be. For which I am truly thankful. As Walter Benjamin put it about 100 years ago, "Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality...The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life...And indeed, is not the continued life of works of art far easier to recognize than the continual life of animal species?"

Recognition is connection. The Herzog film shows that some people will go all the way to Antarctica to be with their tribe (of eccentric cold-loving scientist-types) so that they may find themselves easily recognized, more easily translated, more connected than they may be elsewhere. I know that when I see a work of art that moves me in some way, it is moving me in part because something in the work is translatable, and therefore the work is alive to me. I think that people move us in a similar way; I am always awed by finding another person who is in my tribe. And sometimes, I paint about them.

I See it Feelingly

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 01:12:00 +0000

When I am creating an image, I am aware of my own role in translating what I know and feel into an art piece, and I am aware also of having my own standards for that creative process. Those standards are not based on a desire for difference or a desire for conformity or a desire for comprehension, or frankly any desire at all. If my work is, by any other person's standard, familiar, or does not conform, or is incomprehensible, so it is.

The painting is not there to convince any other mind of anything at all; the painting is there as proof to the painter that an inner life exists. The painting is there as a reiteration that an inner life matters -- that comprehension is possible, and reflection is necessary, and that aggression and action are often not.

This activity, done alone, to silent standards, with a self-defined process, to the satisfaction of only the author, is activity that does not cause harm to others, does not pull resources from others, does not impede on others. Almost all other human interactions, it seems, do all of those things. Sometimes unduly.

And when these things are done by people who are not aware of their own role in translating their feelings or experience into actions, or who are not aware that they can apply standards and judgement and self-control to their beliefs, real harm results.

Of course one reason this is on my mind is that it is election season in America again, and a fresh crop of strident believers has taken the national stage. Several of them seem unfamiliar with the idea of reason or evidence-based debate...but of course they don't have to be, because they base their movements forward in life on their own emotional responses.

Listening to them, I realize that I truly do not know what they see when they look at the same object, person, or moment as me. I suspect they see every one and every thing as tagged and named, all the better to organize into categories. I suspect their thoughts are tagged too -- "acceptable" or "unacceptable" and "blasphemy" or "God's very own words delivered into my very own skull." They profess as much; I should believe them when they do. And I should know what is coming next: the imposition onto others of a personal ideology that is not impacted by evidence or experience beyond the speaker's own feelings.

Any remotely sensitive person often becomes a receiver for others' emotional incoherence, and I would guess any super-intelligent person (yes I am thinking of you, random awesome NASA scientist) becomes a caretaker for others' intellectual mess-making, or intellectual vacuity. In this we have no real choice.

We all have to live with the loud crank who spews the stupid as if it is brilliance (yes I am thinking of you, Newt Gingrich), always unduly. And their limitations are harmful. Like this morning...when a gentlemen who had just picked up his dry cleaning approached a group of us clinic escorts outside of Planned Parenthood, and gleefully offered us all easy-to-use hangers.

Scary Monsters and Super Creeps

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:16:00 +0000

Back in 1993, I took a graduate school course titled "Education in Future Social Systems" which was taught by an odd Libertarian-futurist who looked distractingly like Dr. Tyrell from Blade Runner. This professor encouraged us to think about key factors (funding, technology, population growth, etc.) in the evolution of the publicly funded elements of our social system and to write a "futurist" paper on how society might look if one of these factors was resolved. This was to be a purely intellectual exercise, and the projection or premise had to be based on current data.

I thought the paper assignment was a bit silly, and had an inkling that whatever was presented would be critiqued through the political lens of this particular professor. So I chose to review data on the current prison population of the United States (which was somewhere between 1 and 1.5 million back then) and the gender of those incarcerated (which was about 93% male then) and the enormous financial and social costs associated with incarceration.

My "resolution" to this stark social problem was to propose that the majority of American men be killed, thereby allowing for (among other things) the possibility of a future social system in which large investments could be made in education as opposed to incarceration.

The professor's response was predictable: "Well, the incarceration rates for women are going up and up, especially for violent crimes" he said, "and in 20 years their percentage of the prison population may well equal the male population, and you obviously hadn't considered that!"

Well, actually, I had considered that. And dismissed it as nutty, based on all historical data I could find on women, incarceration, and crime. But no matter. Here we are almost 20 years later, and while the overall population of the country has gone up about 50 million since I took that course, the female portion of the prison population has increased...2%. Hmmm.

One day we will look back on this and it will all seem silly. Or misguided. Or just painfully, willfully ignorant. I can join a chorus of people this week who find themselves in the very unexpected position of applauding Ron Paul, a Libertarian-futurist who actually is able to imagine just how insane present-day conservatives will seem when looked back on by the next generation.

No, women are not going to suddenly (or even in 20 years) level the playing field in the imaginary-violent-crime-incarceration-game. And Muslim community organizers in Manhattan are not going to suddenly morph into anything else. But perhaps that really is the problem, in the end. We -- the others -- are exactly what we are. And no matter how well-behaved we are in the present moment, it seems we are just not to be trusted.

So as things stand this week in our current social system, women need to be contained and managed (to stem the invisible rising tide of future violent female offenders?) particularly via their reproductive choices. Thank you for that one, privileged white gentlemen of Virginia. Similarly, anyone "Muslim-ish" looking who is walking around downtown Manhattan (because walking leads to...terrorism?) should be harassed by white gentlemen of paloookaville. And apparently the same goes for anyone "Muslim-ish" looking who holds public office.

All this hooha is not really a result of stupid-evil intersections. This is the result of perceiving a threat where there is none. Much like my professor did when I offered my modest proposal about a very specific population reduction.

At least I didn't propose eating babies. Hmmm.

The Current-Worked Mind

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 05:13:00 +0000

I've been coming to an understanding about some things lately. For instance, Predators (the cinematic variety) may have awesome blade skills, but they see in low and slow infrared, while we humans (not just the cinematic variety) see at a higher energy level of the electromagnetic spectrum, so apparently that means we always get to win.

Looked at in a certain way, chemistry could be called The Before-and-After Study of Electrons. Ions have unique personalities, protons are smaller than we always thought, and atoms of the same type are not all the same mass, which means there is diversity all the way down. Not just turtles.

Altruism is not limited to humans, and altruism and morality vary depending on one's environment, and one's level of wealth. The search for alien life is really just the search for biological potential. The Maunder Minimum that is coming up in about a generation will not, from what we have gathered so far, offset man-made climate change. A few proteins matter a great deal. Moral illusions can cause suffering. Why is it again that believing, in the absence of evidence, is considered a virtue?

The universe has no particular axis, and the universe is isotropic. And it's probably flat. Lightning is the re-balancing of a charge build up. Every element has a color spectrum. Chemical bonds have unique geometries, and the orbitals of electrons have different shapes. In the beginning, there were oscillations in the plasma. Then things chilled out. In the end, entropy wins.

The wave-particle "duality" of photons is not really duality...its more like photon situational awareness/dance dance revolution. And nuclear physics is the interminable study of predicting the probability cloud of every fricking isotope of every fricking element. Why isn't physics called The Study of the Not Intuitively Knowable but Nonetheless Possibly Logically Explainable?

Spherules leave behind simple and beautiful imprints in sedimentary rocks. Nobody really knows what the people who lived on Easter Island back in the day were writing about. Some pain fibers, called C-LTMRs, are very easily activated and express a protein that creates a neural circuit that makes pain stick around much longer than is necessary. I think there is a correlation between C-LTMRs and anti-abortion protesters.

Dark City went there with re-imagined dreamscapes way before Inception, but The Lathe of Heaven went there even earlier. The clutch lever is my friend, and a high side fall means the rear tire of my motorcycle is out of alignment with my direction of travel. The signs of the zodiac are named after star groups that are on the same plane of travel as the moon and the sun.

When you are navigating your boat by the stars, you must remember to watch the wake, and take into account that the current is always pushing you, one way or another.

World of Wonders

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 05:26:00 +0000

Every human starts out with one cell and we develop, via regulatory processes we are still learning about, into a collection of about 10 trillion cells. To date those 10 trillion cells have been categorized into about 300 types, and we know how to turn one type of cell into another type, and we know that different cells seem to have different preferences about where they like to live and what surfaces they like to grow on. And we know that the proteins within cells cluster together. Just like stars.

Another thing we know now is that "waltzing" pairs of black holes way way way out in space do their dance (follow their pattern of movement) in a way that echoes the movement pattern of electrons in their little tiny orbits around tiny nuclei in tiny atoms. This seems both revelatory and common sensical -- that the movement in atoms, which make up all stuff, echoes the movement of all objects made of stuff.

But who is the "we" I am referring to here? How many people really have an active engagement in the connections between atomic motion and the motion of invisible, immortal celestial bodies? And of course there is the question of what one does with the knowledge. Does knowing a thing compel one to spread the word? And what does knowing a thing mean, anyway? Facts are mutable, in time, and history is mutable as well. I used to "know" that punk rock would change modern life forever, that architecture was apolitical, that no one could ever be as bad a president as Reagan, and that Einstein wasn't a slut.

I also used to "know" that new endeavors of the mind were always their own reward, that curiosity was always a fuel for happiness, and that travel was always thrilling. But with age comes wisdom, especially about plane travel...and the recognition that it is patterns (of thought, of motion, of experience) rather than new and unique instances that make up most of what is.

So, if one recognizes a pattern, is one compelled to spread the word? I realize most of my paintings are exactly that. They are expressions about the sudden recognition of a pattern. I know I often feel something like compulsion when I approach the canvas -- not to capture something of myself there, but to capture a moment of recognition before it blinks by.

As if I can see, however briefly, what a vast collection of individual movements (thoughts, memories, reactions, words) looks like as a whole. And as if capturing that perception is worthwhile.

Whites at the End of Their Time

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:49:00 +0000

Pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty's liberal ironist engages in self-creation as a way of living a purposeful life, as metaphysical considerations (or supernatural forces, or promises of what happens after you die) play no definitive part in waking life. In bad dreams maybe, but not in waking life.

The liberal ironist is aware of their own context, of their own moment in cultural time; this person is not living to leave a legacy, or to appease a god, or to avoid hell. And since the languages (meanings, references, contexts, histories) this person comprehends are reality, this person is continually aware of the morphing of language use, manipulation, and rules.

Most compelling for me, on re-reading Rorty, was what he makes of an ironist striving to not be limited (I paraphrase) by the language use/context making/tradition of their upbringing. And just how does one not remain limited by the values, speech, context, and the "known knowns" in the world of one's parents and their cohorts? By expanding acquaintances, by expanding experience, by becoming aware of the connection between persuasive words and cruelty (which a liberal ironist abhors), and by expanding one's own language use.

This expansion process is a pain in the ass, and disconcerting, and means continual revision and revisiting of what one thought one knew. And it is also joyful, liberating, and awe-inspiring. Because the sheer volume of ways of being and ways of thinking among humans is staggering.

Recently I have spent some time with people for whom status competition is what life is about, and what they talk about is 1) the stuff they have, 2) the stuff they want their children to have, and 3) the hopes they have for acquiring more stuff. I have also spent time recently around cause-and-effect thinkers, for whom artmaking or meaning making is quite humdrum, since talking about the cosmos (and how complex a puzzle this is to decipher) is far more engaging than talking about anything a human could make. And I have been listening to the talk of deeply religious people recently too, and I hear them as bonded in submission, and bounded by moral illusions.

And this last reflection led me back to an article written a few years ago by Stephen Pinker, on "The Moral Instinct." In the article, Pinker discusses how social and neurological research has shown that "our heads can be turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we all may be vulnerable to moral illusions, the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes..."

Moral illusions are the blankets of mental safety we wrap ourselves in; moral illusions are the "universal" rules or laws that people claim exist and to which each individually clings to, or thinks other people should adhere to (like supporting racial segregation policies, or saying homosexuality is wrong) and they are almost always bound by an historical context. They are also often a justification for cruelty. And we don't tend to reason these moral illusions out, we instead engage in moral rationalization -- we "begin with a conclusion, coughed up by an unconscious emotion, and then work backward to a plausible justification."

Of course I wonder why (biological imperative, survival instinct, communal understanding?) we are wired to be susceptible in this manner, and lots of research is going on in that arena, I am sure. But Pinker sums up that, in our current understanding of this process, "our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing." This is a compelling question, why we seem wired to let "unconscious emotion" impair ethical, respectful, community-minded acts.

And that last thought led me back further, to a short piece by David Kirp about the Supreme Court's 2007 decision nullifying race/diversity as a factor in the assignment of students in public schools. Offering a reflection on the Court's moral thinking and language use in that decision, UCLA Prof. Gary Orfield said "This is the last generation of Euro-American leadership in the country...and we are blowing it. We're not creating a unified culture. Instead we are polarizing the country. Down the road this will be an extremely puzzling decision -- it shows the craziness of whites at the end of their time."

I keep that quote on a wall in my studio, since that is a context that resonates for me, as a denizen of this time.

A footnote: Artist/sculptor Louise Bourgeois, she of the disconcerting mom-as-spider sculptures -- and a clear-sighted creative force who seemed to not suffer from moral illusions, and continuously revisited and revised her world of self -- died yesterday, at 98.

Everything, All the Time

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Mon, 17 May 2010 17:21:00 +0000

I really believe that willful ignorance is a dangerous thing, right up there with intentional passivity and blind obedience. And it seems like this desire for mental safety (or for sentimental hygiene, thank you Zevon) is just the desire for a mythical permanent mooring, at a stable dock, on eternally calm water. No place for the curious. No place for waves, either.

This state of being is continuously touted as a good thing to attain, which is a value I have never understood. Or, to put it another way...why is it that people listen to Sarah Palin again?

To get to that waveless life you have to exert a great deal of control, or else be willing to be controlled -- in thought, word and deed. And I get that this can be pleasurable; someone else is doing the driving, something supernatural is tracking everything, you have clear rules to follow, you have excuses for loss. But there is also an element of such cruelty in this.

And what happens when you get bored? When you feel limited? When you find yourself yearning for a bit of a wave? When you start to wonder just why the things which you have been told must be there and are vital to your survival got to be there in the first place? In that questioning there is the matter of which will be crushed first -- your own desire for change, your state of comfort, or your self-esteem. I imagine this is harrowing. For a time. Until you give up and return to your blinkered path up the seven-story mountain...or you adapt to the actual, the real, the continuous current.

But promoting the desire for a mythical calm, an ordered-via-human-agency universe, is not just limiting to one's consciousness, its dangerous. It requires willful ignorance of human history and the preference for a personal-sized scope of awareness. It demands loyalty in the face of challenge, even if the challenge is factual. And it provides, as Palin's speechifying always does, a cover for intolerance of difference. For how can you share a world with people making waves if the divine goal is waveless calm?

Obviously something has to be done about "those others." You can't live with them, and risk becoming unmoored, and you can't kill them, or convert them, all. You need, beyond all reason, the stable dock. You need, beyond all reason, an enclave of safe. If you are a Tea Partier or one of Palin's grizzly moms, you want this enclave to be the future, to be in place for all generations, to be your whole country. And if it can't be a whole country, then you must work on creating it state by state. Starting with Arizona.

Aphelion is Imminent Too

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 20:04:00 +0000

Can one really understand how fear acts on the motion of belief?

One NASA scientist who is tasked with answering the public's questions about the 2012 Doomsday end-of-the-world hoopla has named this unique fear; he calls it "cosmophobia." Every day he hears from people who are actually fearful that an invisible planet (possibly guided by aliens) is on a collision course with the earth right now. Or that solar storms will cause a polarity shift in the sun and cause an earth-wide electromagentic pulse to wipe out all electronics in about two years. They fear the event, they fear for their lives, and they fear "the government" is covering up the truth.

Sure, people claim that they are scared of imminent death, but is that the root cause of the force that is fear? I see people react with fear to passive, non-threatening things all the time -- particularly to "challenging" works of art, and, of course, to abstraction. And anything in the cosmos is also an abstract idea, in the sense that it is out of the realm of our immediate experience. But why does it follow that the response is fear?

Is it that all fearful people think communication of any sort is an expression of a belief system, and therefore an inherent challenge?

This morning I encountered a man who challenged me on my "belief" that we are all made up of atoms. "Don't believe it" he said, "you are made of the spirit!" I honestly had no idea what to say. It is tempting to dismiss his challenge as evidence of his ignorance, but if he does not regard himself as ignorant, what point is there in me claiming so? What is more interesting to me it the idea that he is threatened somehow (or his belief system is destabilized somehow) by...atoms.

If you want to change motion, you need a force which will act on an object and cause acceleration. But if you want to maintain the status of a belief, is a forcefield of fear required?

I wonder about that as the Catholic Church sex-abuse story grows globally, and as the impact of Arizona's new immigration status law plays out here...and as veil-wearing women in Yemen protest in favor of the practice of granting men child brides. The same atom-fearer mentioned above also believes that rape is "not always bad" since it is God's prerogative that sperm is destined for a unique egg, and man must follow God's law without question.

What is it like to live a life of submission? And if you submit to life within that forcefield of fear which is required to maintain your beliefs about weird art, or African American Presidents, or alien-guided killer planets...can you really ever view yourself as a free human being, as free as any of the rest of us?

Lip Liner is Extra Credit

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 19:52:00 +0000

Watching the new trailer for the "Sex and the City" sequel (does it really count as a sequel?) confirmed for me that I know absolutely nothing about being female today. The same goes for watching clips from the recent Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin rally...and every episode ever of any tv show with "housewives" in the title.

This is a shame, because I think all I need is some immersion training (well, maybe a lot of immersion training) and I really could get there. Some serious training on how to be a real 21st century American female, based on what all the ladies in tv-land and movie-land do...what would that look like?

The starting point seems to be external: to be female now, one must be aware at all times of one's hair and of fashion, and it is ok to let these things help define your inside world. In fact, they can serve in lieu of an inside world! The next step seems to be, at least in a hetero female universe, that you should be aware that men are looking at you at all times (which connects right back to point one, which is very nice) no matter your age, but most especially when you are in heels. In fact, that is the purpose of high heels. And the purpose of fake boobs, and stripper poles, and hair extensions, and so very many other things...but, we have to move on.

The next step would be to develop flirting skills and to utilize these skills as often as possible to attain whatever you require. Don't waste time on developing a work ethic or intellectual acumen or creative skills or the funny, because flirting (again, in hetero world at least) is way way better -- it is easy to learn, and it again involves men, which seems to be a constant element in female-ness training. A sub-category of this step would be teaching your female children flirting skills from an early age. But that step kind of overlaps with the next step, which would be: compete with other female, male-attention-focused flirters as often as is necessary.

Another step in the training curriculum would be about thinking things -- namely that, if you HAVE to think things, and you do so out loud, make sure those things are in alignment with what the men around you (or the men paying you at Fox News) are likely thinking themselves. Work to develop your ability to see things from a not-beneficial-to-females point of view, like being seriously anti-abortion, or rabidly pro-Catholic Church, or concurring that having 18 children is a blessing and that all men will cheat.

In fact, the best rule of thumb in this part of the training might be just don't think about what is beneficial to women (outside of the context of men) ever, because you'd be wasting your time thinking about an imaginary place. Plus you always need new shoes, so think about designer shoes and how great it is to have them instead. Also, always be thinking about providing the world with more people, and recognize that you are not a whole female person unless you have done so. And, as mentioned above, train the female offspring early and often on flirting, the male gaze, becoming mothers, hair maintenance, and fashion.

I am sure there are many more components to the training, and I blame my mother entirely for not completing mine. She really screwed up -- she taught me through example to cherish having an inner life, to love learning and expanding my brain, to define myself, to speak my own mind even at the risk of conflict, to be a loving partner and enjoy the mystery of maleness, to support and care about what impacts women in our society, and that high heels really really hurt your toes.

Worst of all, she never told me that I had to have kids in order to exist. She never said I had to do any particular thing, or focus on any particular thing, in order to be here and real and happy and female.

But eh, what did she know?

Your Mind A Bounded Set

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:50:00 +0000

All the planes were late; a gusty storm in San Francisco had everyone in an anxious hover. So as we waited and waited at the over-crowded gate for our plane to depart to Portland, I slowly browsed the newspaper. And I came across a headline which gave me pause: "France May Make Mental Violence A Crime."

France is considering a non-gender specific law that would punish anyone in an ongoing relationship who engages in psychological violence, what the French Prime Minister called "insidious situations...[that] can mutilate the victim's inner self." Part of the motivation for the law is the high number of victims of domestic abuse in France, and the high rate of females deaths from domestic violence. The lawmakers see this new law as a preventative measure, for use before verbal abuse morphs into physical contact, as it so often does.

The article made me reflect on how people have evolved their thinking on what violence is in general, and specifically on what impact others' words and views can have on the intellectually or emotionally vulnerable. In my mind I pictured the people gathered at Tea Party rallies, and I recalled a woman telling me once about her family's engagement in a church where people speak in tongues and fixate on casting out devils, and I envisioned the Limbaugh listeners I have known. Lots of elephant talk, as King Crimson would say, but persuasive and repetitive and mentally engaging talk nonetheless. And the end result of this type of talk is often violence, because truly the starting point for this type of talk is violence; partners who engage in psychological violence start from a place of personal insecurity that feels as real as a physical threat, as do the Tea Partiers. And I am fascinated by threat.

We were in Portland for that city's excellent annual jazz festival, but we also stopped by the Portland Art Museum, where they had just opened a new exhibition of work by contemporary artists called 'Disquieted'. The intention of the exhibition is to show work by a range of artists who create art about the moment we live in, pieces "challenging our preconceptions and exposing our vulnerability in these turbulent times."

As you enter the exhibition space, you are confronted by a sculpture by Charles Ray, a life-like sculpture of a white woman dressed in a 1990's power suit and low heels -- a sculpture that is 10 feet tall. She has her hands on her hips and she is looking (eternally) down at you with disdain as you crane your neck to look up to her. She is the misogynist's nightmare of the emasculating female boss, circa 1992. She is the embodiment of a threat, and of disquiet, for those intimidated by women in roles of authority. Charles Ray just brilliantly captured a moment in our modern times, and seeing this sculpture first set the tone for much of the rest of the exhibition, which contained many reflections on forms violence (from the interpersonal to acts of war) in contemporary life.

For better or worse, I tend to believe that persuasive repetitive language is a form of violence, and feel dismissive language (and intentionally dismissive acts in general) are also forms of violence -- because they shove a player off the field of conversation when there is plenty of room on that field for all players. And this happens a lot in conversations where the two sides don't concur, or where the subject matter under discussion for some reason makes one person feel threatened. This happens so often when talking about art with people who are not art-inclined that I have gone through long periods of simply remaining silent. And it happens too when talking about esoteric subjects with someone who is defined by their practical responsibilities. A recent conversation I had with one such acquaintance (a parent of 2 small kids) went something like this: Me: "And after that I went to a very cool lecture, given by an Astro-geophysicist, all about the process by which NASA scientists developed an assessment model for analyzing whether elements on the surface of Mars provide an environment capable of supporting (bacterial) Martian life similar to Earth life." Other: "Not to be rude, but really, who cares? I mean, why should I care? I get so tired of hearing people spending money on science projects in space when, you know, we have shit to take care of here."

So then we started talking about that person's kids' Montessori school.

I think if one is a pacifist in one's approach to living -- meaning one is not inherently competitive externally and one tends to be on the reflective or analytical side of the seesaw -- fewer outlets exist for expression that is not impinged upon, or that is not forced or forceful, or that is not a form of persuasion, and yes, even violence. But creating a wordless reflection on the threat of the larger-than-life female is a powerful thing; creating work, like that shown in 'Diquieted', which reflects the weird tumult of life around us now is a powerful thing.

And in the silence of my own studio, after months of chewing on how my own brain makes sense of what I live, and how others make sense of what they live, and on how the incompatibility in that sense-making can result in such tremendous strife, I finally finished a new painting. It is called 'The Binding Problem'.

I Saw It That Way Too

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:57:00 +0000

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 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 sounds 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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 23:41:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 03:36:00 +0000

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 judgment (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 Judgment" 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 Judgment."

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:26:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:52:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:45:00 +0000

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.

De-constricting Fictions

noreply@blogger.com (Martha Hope Carey) — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 01:56:00 +0000

I tried to read Fielding's Tom Jones once and decided, after about fifty pages, that I really should not read books that don't like their readers. And vice versa. I find much of the enjoyment of reading good books is that they can propel you forward, can trigger something formerly unseen or unknown in your mind. But it can be enlightening to take oneself through reading a book again after a long lapse, precisely because the experience can take you back to places you have already visited. Odd places, sometimes.

This summer I'm re-reading books I first encountered years ago, and am going backwards with each page. On the list: Godel, Escher, Bach; The Lady or the Tiger?; Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind; all of Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse mysteries; Robertson Davies' The Deptford Trilogy; and anything I can find that explains what the frak Foucault meant by 'episteme', which I have lamely interpreted for years as meaning the dog whistle of an era.

(Every now and then I pause in this furious re-examination of logic and fiction and cultural history, see Carla Bruni-Sarkozy's blank stare of empty blankness in some photo on the web, and am reminded that there is balance in the universe. But I digress.)

Godel, Escher, Bach is a great read, now, but it reminds me of college and of boring hours spent sublimating lust and discussing irrelevant theories of everything. The Jaynes opus is also a really engaging read, but holding the book in my hands reminds me that the ferociously pretentious therapist my first husband and I met with as our marriage sputtered out had this very same book prominently displayed on the shelf in her waiting room. And Davies' work, which is pure pleasure, old-fashioned, fully crafted fiction, reminds me of watching my brilliant Mom relax into the welcoming weird world of a Davies novel while she sat in her favored reading chair in the living room back home. But all those real world associations -- college life, a starter marriage, a mother, and a girlhood home -- are now long gone.

I'll be glad to get beyond this current reading phase, which is also historical re-engagement, which is also brain twisting, when it expires. Or my head explodes. Whichever.

But I guess I do recognize that, as with anything that catches and really seizes hold of one's attention for a span, there is a purpose. This is mental fuel, and a distraction, and possibly an antidote to Palin fatigue. And perhaps it is also this reader's quiet little hurrah that anti-intellectualism no longer holds the sway -- at least in the executive branch -- that it did during the last decade. Which means some of us can revisit the pleasures of the percolating brain pan, and (at least in the privacy of our...bookshelves) let our freak flags fly again.