Calligraphy Quote – “A culture is no better than its woods.”

 

More calligraphy doodling (the doodling only really happened because I smudged the ink mid-way through).

The last line from a poem by W.H. Auden called ‘Bucolic II. Woods.’

“The trees encountered on a country stroll
Reveal a lot about that country’s soul.

A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
This great society is going smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.”

Auden had a wonderful voice.  I first heard it from one of The Books’ songs called “Be Good To Them Always.”  Their music, and in particular their sound collage technique, changed the way I thought about and made music.  Their influence is clear in this old track from high school.

A friend and I used to go “hunting” for sounds with an old Sony tape recorder.  Those are fond memories.  We would drive around with the Sony seeking out anything that might produce a novel sound.  It changed the way we looked at things.

One sample comes from finding an empty Skoal can littered under a pavilion; you can hear it rolling across cement.  Not surprisingly, playgrounds seemed to have the most interesting instruments.  A swing set sampled.  The hollow metal tubing banged on sometimes produced different pitches–sometimes even tuned!  Whoever produced the equipment most likely had no idea.  It was our discovery!  At one point in this track you’ll hear a clip culled from those manic contraptions called spring riders: the horse, fish, or car attached to a massive spring in the ground.

The song is called “Funny Nostalgia.”

Personification to Connect Us to Our Environment

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.

Barnett Newman on the Aesthetic Roots of Humanity

“Man’s hand traced the stick through the mud to make a line before he learned to throw the stick as a javelin.”

Mandalic Compass, for Matt, ink and pencil, 2015, by Bonsai Ramey

“Undoubtedly the first man was an artist,” begins a remarkable little speculative essay written in 1947 by Barnett Newman.  It proposes that the aesthetic act of wonder precedes the social and utilitarian acts of animal survival.  The aesthetic experience requires a mind capable of connecting disparate dots, that can render the non-local local, the concealed revealed, that can ask whether “to be or not to be.”  Although historically Newman is remembered as a modernist painter who challenged, and continues to challenge, with his large, minimalist color field paintings, I will always, probably, think of him as the one who wrote “The First Man Was an Artist.”

The essay was published in a periodical called Tiger’s Eye at that time when the home of modern art was shifting from Paris to America. Its power reminds me of that poetic power typical of essays of the past, from writers like Emerson, Stevenson, Montaigne, and Chesterton, which subtly illuminates the limits of analysis.  Chopping things up into little bits may lead one to understand a system and to a kind of wonder, but the analytical process of sizing something up, of measurement by separating something into its constituent elements, cannot grasp meaning.  “The whole is other than the sum of its parts,” as the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka wrote.  Other is the operative word, commonly misquoted as “greater.”  The whole (whether we’re talking about life or an artwork) has a reality of its own; no cataloguing of parts can ever indicate that reality, and that reality is what I mean by “meaning.”  Nevertheless, it is possible to court this connectivity, to glimpse the whole within one of its parts.  William Irwin Thompson writes that this glimpse is precisely what the sacred is.  In The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, Thompson writes:

To begin to understand what is going on in the…art of the Upper Paleolithic, we have to escape not only the ethnocentricity of academic male subcultures, but also the limited epistemology of social science.  We have to use the “Imagination” to recover a sense of the sacred. The sacred is the emotional force which connects the part to the whole; the profane or the secular is that which has been broken off from, or has fallen off, its emotional bond to the universe.” (102).

Matt's Mandala Compass

We could replace Thompson’s “Imagination” with “aesthetic sense.” The aesthetic is a connected, sacred, imaginal, intuitive, emotional force.  The modern scientific-material mindset has not done well to encourage the fostering of creative self-reliance and the health of whole systems, tending more toward bottom-linism and banal profit motives.  While it should be no surprise when intuitions are written off as airy ethereal “fluff,” it should be a deep concern that we are in the middle of an aesthetic crisis.

Even with an experience of the sacred, the question is likely to remain for one who thinks in material terms and seeks material proof: what sustains the underlying Celtic knotwork of things on Earth?  It is as unknown today as it has ever been, despite our becoming conscious of ecology and despite our looking to nature for models of how to live, build, and organize, as in the field of biomimetics.  We know it isn’t a substance, but the hard sciences only can deal with experimentally viable phenomena.  This rules out the possibility of science reasoning out the connection between human dreams and termite mounds.  Still, for our own lives, we don’t need to look far into the analogous ways of the wild to be thrown into reverie: why is it you never see a line of ants on a log in gridlock for an accident ahead?  Can the Department of Transportation take its next cue from the ants?  Questions like this are fantastic, practical endeavors for scientific research, and they may be the best hope for restoring a healthy balance between our species and the rest of the world.  This is the gift rationality offers us. But notice that the connectivity is understood by category (how is human infrastructure connected to insect infrastructure)?  How is a part related to another part?  Not, How is a part related to the whole of Nature?  The latter is the question we are all forced to ask today. Rationality reaches its limit.  To get at this question, other means are necessary.  Perhaps we are in the present ecological crisis because we have ceased to make decisions for aesthetic reasons, insisting always on the utilitarian angle.  We must learn to employ that ancient inherited aspect of us which is creative, for the aesthetic act is a byproduct of an intuition of wholes and the urgent desire to express them.

In its earliest flowering, according to Newman, “speech was a poetic outcry rather than a demand for communication.”  It is human to feel deeply, not just to communicate, and the need to express what is uniquely human in us is deep-seated.  It is even more human to become aware that however loudly one may cry out, the source of that expression and the purpose of that expression are one and the same.

“It is important to keep in mind that the necessity for dream is stronger than any utilitarian need.  In the language of science, the necessity for understanding the unknowable comes before any desire to discover the unknown.”

Matt's Mandala Compass Detail

How in control can a creature be?  We are in control in much the same way as a man who builds a bridge as he walks out in space across it.  He floats in the air and is free to hammer in the next board.  He extends the bridge, and he may choose to begin curving its path, but he is confined to build forward, standing on a small walkway.  Therefore, he is far from complete control.  His destiny is determined by the section of the bridge he has just created.

To Imagine the Real

back anatomy
Work of Man, pencil, 2013, ZR

All life is repetitive.  Repetitive forms, repetitive behaviors.  It isn’t strictly repetitive, for Nature loves surprises.  But you won’t find fiddleheads popping out of the ground in December.  Springtime calls them back to stage, always with that same quiet mathematical elegance.  Of course, the human species is no exception.  For all our cultural diversity, technical prowess, and uniqueness as a species, we tend to reinforce the rule rather than break it–despite the imagination to do so.  If the imagination is our most distinctly human faculty (let’s just say for the moment), why we do not make more use of it?  As insistent as the fiddlehead, it seems that we like to do things, for lack of better reason, because we’ve done them before.  It is bewildering to find no grounds for our choices.

So it is said, “We have much to learn.”  What do we mean when we say this?  Consider how radical a break this represents between our species and every other kind of animal.  Do dogs sit around and wonder how much their species has yet to learn?  I’m sure that if a single cat ever mulled over the idea, “I’m not doing enough with my life!” its entire species would vanish with the inanity of the thought.  And while I’ve always wondered what Emperor Penguins talk about during a huddle, I’m sure it’s not, “What are we doing?  This is crazy.  Maybe we should consider a change.”  Other animals might have to adapt to changing circumstances (most likely brought on by humans), but their adaptation is habitual and simple.  Do or die.  We perform the same adaption to environmental demands, for example, when natural disasters strike.  People pool their resources and share them unflinchingly, naturally.  When somebody says “we have much to learn” it is often as a wish that we had more to laugh about, less to lament, a wish that the species would get out of its own (and the rest of the world’s) way.

I’ve heard it said that “there is nothing unnatural in this world.”  I’ve said it myself many times.  I love the idea; but oh how we put it to the test!  Besides humans, is it in any animal’s nature to “get in its own way”?  It is a very strange thought, painting our kind very strangely.  As far as I can tell, the rest of life on Earth has no problem with this. Either an adaptational need will be seen and performed, or it will be overlooked.  Humans are radicals, natural born revolutionaries.   We believe we are all unique, paradoxically; and we are right: other animals know and never veer from their natures.  Human nature, we might say, is yet undecided.  Being left undecided, however, does not make the subject mute or forgotten.  If human nature is open rather than fixed, can it veer from itself?  To say we veer from our nature would mean we veer from what is held, or should be held, as highest in our nature.   It would mean we have faltered in our becoming somehow, in either the direction of the future or in the direction of the past.  There are, then, two questions.  Do we like what we are becoming?  And, Have we mistakenly discarded what is useful from the past?