Author: Jennifer Ramey

Personification to Connect Us to Our Environment

Posted on Posted in aesthetics, Imagination, Nature1 Comment
Untitled photography by Matt Wisiniewski, from the series entitled
Untitled image by Matt Wisiniewski, from the series entitled “Wreckage,” 2011

Does it seem a farce to personify the world around us?  The non-person world is going on all the time, just doing its myriad things.  We share the same time and space coordinates as these non-person entities around us.  We even share significant amounts of DNA with many of the organisms surrounding us.  And yet, our brains are so composed to understand and shed light upon the mysterious that even this is not enough.  We familiarize ourselves (literally: make like family) the non-person objects around us through figures of speech like personification and metaphorical language.

We say that the plate is sitting there on the table, but it’s not.  It’s not sitting because sitting is a person’s verb.  Sitting implies legs and hips and the option to stand if it pleases.  The plate is definitely not sitting there, resting in the sun let in by the window.  And the window isn’t letting in anything.  It’s not because it can’t stop the sun from coming in either.  Like a computer program, the window has no unplanned functions and cannot improvise outside of its design.

Some linguists say that humans, on average, employ 6 metaphors per minute of speech or writing.  This includes both creative metaphors as well as “frozen” metaphors which are built into our language.  In their book Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff, a linguist, and Mark Johnson, a philosopher, outline a variety of examples of metaphors hiding within and actively influencing the ways in which we perceive reality.   Imagine, for example, the different conceptions of love under each of the following metaphorical structures:  Love is a journey.  Love is patient.  Love is chemical.  Love is war.  

Consider similarly:  Time is money; He shot down my argument; My thoughts are all over the place; etc.   After a few examples the layered nature of language becomes a bit clearer.

Untitled artwork by Matt Wisiniewski, from the Wreckage series, 2011
Untitled image by Matt Wisiniewski, from the Wreckage series, 2011

It’s hard to imagine a world without metaphorical language to help us understand what is going on around us.  Writer Edith Cobb wrote quite extensively about the nature of human imagination as a building tool and orientation factor among children.  In her book, Ecology of Imagination in Childhood, she describes it thus:

“Children strive to fill the gap between themselves and the objects of desire with imagined forms.  This psychological distance between self and universe and between self and progenitors is the locus in which the ecology of imagination in childhood has its origin.” (p.56)

The “imagined forms” of personification and metaphorical thinking alter our finite comprehension of the world around us.   If the trees can “clap” their “hands,” and we can clap our hands, here we have found a familiarity between an other and ourself.  Here we have built a meaningful, imaginative bridge connecting and expanding our sense of self and filling in some of the holes in the map of our surroundings, making familiar the mysterious (and potentially threatening) unknown.

These other things around us, occupying this moment with us — how do we outright refuse the sense of their presence and participation in this space?  There’s a constant story being told all around us, or perhaps a thousand narratives rubbing up against one another as within a great crowd, and each of us is the only witness in a unique theater.

Through metaphorical language and imagination, one reaches out into the abyss to find the object of desire (from Latin: “of the stars”).  We return from our reaching to find something of that same dark matter inherent in our own souls, confirming or securing our kinship with the other.  This relates and deepens the mystery, relieving one of the solitude, but not of the wonder.   Similarly, the stillness of the plates and cups on the table somehow also speaks to that deceptively quiet abyss inside of all of us.

Video collage by Matt Wisiniewski

A breeze presents itself now and again outside, affecting everything from the cadence of the crickets to the trees and their thousand clapping hands.  I live near the ocean and, as though in emulation, the wind often plays the trees like they were calm and distant, crashing waves.  Over this, the breeze is luring in the salty air from the sea.  Clapping and playing and luring, the non-person world requests an audience.  And I being the only one in the theater, witness it.

Annie Dillard and Thomas Merton on Pushing Passed “Good Enough”

Posted on Posted in aesthetics, drawing, Imagination, learning, painting, philosophy, Process, sketchbook drawingTagged , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”  – Thomas Merton

A thousand times a year students ask me, “Is this good enough?”  Their eyes gaze up at me from over a work of art that, yes probably, has hit all of the required standards, seeking some respite from the challenge set before them.  Good enough?  Compared to what? — I send the ball back into their court.  In that moment, either they fold, laughing, and label it “good enough” for now, presumably to be improved upon someday, some other day; or a light flashes within them, a neurological bridge sparks, and they begin the journey of passing through the center of their own potential.

An essential idea that I live by and share with my students often is that a work of art must pass through a stage of imperfection, even awkwardness, on its way to something better.  (Take, for example, this old caricature sketch of Carl Sagan by Zack.)

Old caricature of Carl Sagan by Zack

Born into a system of norms set strategically before us, it’s always surprising to be reminded that we are still ultimately at the helm of this process of what we accomplish and what we choose to bring into being.

We make sure our jobs are good enough to pay the bills, our health is good enough to get us through our days, our relationships are good enough that we can all get by without killing each other.   But isn’t it true that often we don’t take the opportunities to make these things more meaningful, more able to feed our spirits and raise that bar that has been set for us?  Have we any idea what’s possible?

The poetically irreverent  American novelist, Tom Robbins, once wrote: “we waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love.”  This is a reminder that our relationships, our jobs, our daily interactions are creative acts.  We must create the world we seek or else settle for a world designed by someone else for someone else’s vision of what is possible.  Our north star then is to find what moves us to raise our bars and push passed the point of “good enough” towards our definition of sublime.  The brave and brilliant American writer Annie Dillard put it this way:

“There is always the temptation in life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for years on end. It is all so self conscious, so apparently moral…But I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous…more extravagant and bright. We are…raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”

At a certain point, we have to ask: Are we aiming to settle for what the world has asked us to achieve, or do we see the potential for something radically more meaningful?  The first story has already been told.  The second is the story that you may have been born to tell.

Spiral Leaf (unfinished), Micron in black sketchbook, 2016, by Jennifer Rame
Spiral Leaf (unfinished sketch), Micron in black sketchbook, 2016, by Jennifer Ramey

The challenge of refining a work of art — and that may be the art of painting or of teaching, of building relationships or being a better or more authentic communicator — is complex to say the least.  Realist painter Jacob Collins said that this process “…is torture… There’s always some newly seen flaw.  But the little glimpses of beauty between the anxiety make it worth it.”   You can tell when your work is definitely not done, but by working on it, you also run the risk of overworking it.  And in the back of your mind, you know there is the very real possibility that your work may fail or be noticed by none.  On this Thomas Merton wrote:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.”

Annie Dillard and Thomas Merton are two twentieth century writers, working somewhere between spiritual pilgrims and fringe revolutionists, who spent their lives conjuring and stoking this devotional fire dedicated to telling a different story of being human in our modern world.  They found quickly that to do this one must abandon the temporary comforts of seeking affirmation and instead follow with steadfastness the vision of human potential that haunts their hearts like a calling.

Spiral Leaf: Micron, watercolor, and Graphitint pencils, black sketchbook, 2016 by Jennifer Ramey
Spiral Leaf: Micron, watercolor, and Graphitint pencils, black sketchbook, 2016 by Jennifer Ramey

The act of pushing passed our inherited story of “good enough” is nothing short of a miracle.  It’s the task of taking the antiquated, inherited definitions of “commitment” and “devotion” and “faith” and “beauty” and reclaiming them, covering them in graffiti, in your very blood, and letting them help you bring your vision of your great works passed product straight into the heart of the process.  Annie Dillard put it this way:

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

The Disembodiment of Knowledge

Posted on Posted in Education, learning, Media, philosophyTagged , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Thinking about Media with Socrates and McLuhan

“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”    – Marshall McLuhan

A gradual externalization of human knowledge began with the advent of written language, the first alphabets arising around the 3rd millennium BC, and the old Latin alphabet around the 2nd century BC.  Invented smack in the middle of a world thriving on oral traditions, alphabets gave humans a revolutionary tool for sharing and preserving information, knowledge, and wisdom.  This new vehicle for human thought seriously influenced not just how we communicated and documented our world, but it  changed the ways that we understand and respond to reality.  The brilliant and prolific writer, Marshall McLuhan, known best for his memorable statement “the medium is the message,” commented on how the invention of writing laid the foundation for our modern mode of thinking:

“Western history was shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic [alphabet] .… Rationality and logic came to depend on the presentation of connected and sequential facts or concepts.”

The advent of writing also relieved individuals of what was likely an ongoing and challenging task—that of memorizing and internalizing all of their stories, myths, rituals, poetry, recipes, and inter-generational knowledge.  What once only travelled by means of memory and the tongue, now could be written down and spread across great distances, enduring the test of time with acutely consistent messages.   Socrates spoke of this transition, and Plato wrote of it.  However, these two thinkers were not quite so keen on the convenience of writing, but rather wary of its effects on man.

“If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder.”

In Plato’s writing entitled Phaedrus, Socrates claimed that his true teachings would never in fact be transposed into writing, but spoken only.  So, can we say that we know anything of (the already very elusive) Socrates?   He feared the disembodiment of learning which he believed came with writing, including the loss of context, intonation, and response.  Still, it proceeded thus onward with the invention of the printing press, the telegraph, the photograph, and so on to the virtual age, each technological medium bringing with it great strides for the collective human thought-pool.

With such elaborate conveniences, however, one must wonder which muscles of ours have been allowed to rest, and to what atrophy?

Living alongside the Internet, for example, we today need remember little because Google will always recall it for us at a moment’s notice.  Nothing need be internalized or set to memory because it’s already stored in the mind of the global village, in the external memory of our collective consciousness.  McLuhan, who referred to these inventions as extension of man — a reaching outward, beyond oneself.  He was aware of and wary of this disembodiment, and yet he knew that this was the direction into which humans would need and choose to venture.   (And indeed we have–from living through online avatars, to visiting art museums via robots, to the Voyager space probes–humanity has created a multitude of extensions of our selves and species which enable us to reach further and with greater and more creative facility out into the universe.)

We expand adventurously outward into the universe with our tools as our tightropes.  Alan Watts once said that we “…are a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.”  From this perspective, our man-made extensions only reveal an ongoing natural  progression of extensions and connectedness between us and the universe.   Whitman, in his epic Song of Myself reminded us that we are “not contain’d between [our] hat and boots.”

Still, what other effects are included in this abundance of extensions?   Socrates went on to describe the burden of too much information:

“And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows.”

Mocking Bird, 2009, graphite drawing by Jennifer Ramey

Many of us have so little time today to spend in quality research of a topic in order to really understand it.  So we trust various news sources, reporters, writers, or journalists to garner for us information synthesized into an understanding.  And this sates many of our hunger pains or the social pressures to stay “informed.”  Yet these are second hand opinions, often from perspectives containing ulterior motives.   If we are seeking to learn online, the distractions alone can turn many sincere pursuits of knowledge into scenarios of kids in candy stores.

So, how we learn about the world around us is a tricky and mysterious process.  We learn whether or not we intend to.  One thing is certain, as McLuhan points out:

“Everybody experiences far more than he understands. Yet it is experience, rather than understanding, that influences behavior.”

Education specialists suggest that educators and learners need to bridge the gap between theory and practice—that is, to practice what is referred to as Experience Based Education.  We need more opportunities to practice and have experiences with a body of knowledge in order to effectively transform it into useful insight or wisdom.  We must embody it:  try it on, touch it, maneuver it.   If we try to build knowledge with bits of information which are housed—to varying degrees—outside our heads and out of our hands, it becomes significantly harder to synthesize these bits into meaningful, larger ideas, projects, or movements.

This synthesis produces all of humanity’s great emergent art forms and includes the alchemy necessary for making meaning in, improving, and contributing to our world.  Maria Popova, an articulator of interdisciplinary thought and a prolific author, writes:

“In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”

Our memories and experiences are qualitative and exponential “castles” which continuously build upon themselves.  Though it’s wonderfully exciting to live vicariously through film and sitcom and bloggers and vloggers, it is essential to remember that they cannot earn for us our experience or or make for us our art.  And though it is convenient to allow our technology to temporarily remember for us our stories, recipes, quotes, and poems, we must keep in mind that it cannot earn for us our wisdom.