Artistic Faults

The thing is, I have enough trouble getting myself to start painting as it is. Part of that is fear; it terrifies me to see how badly a painting goes at its adolescent stage. But even more—far more—debilitating to my painting career than that is the conviction that painting is absurd.

Which it is. We are surrounded by pictures. We have absolutely no need for more. I say every home should have live art on its walls, but what it does not need is a collection of pretty, pat scenes that could just as easily come from photographs.

And now, not even an Impressionist can claim to be superior to the camera. There are programs out there that can turn a photograph into anything. Long ago I turned one of my own photos into a “copy” of one of my own paintings—or what could have been one of my paintings, but is not.

If there were no such thing as color photography, no Photoshop, no poster-size or wall-size prints, then it might make sense to dab colored goo onto a flat surface and hope that it would last forever. That is where things stood at the beginning of Impressionism, and critics and viewers laughed at the crude application of paint, because there was a need for pretty, perfectly pat pictures and these Impressionists were not filling it!

There was photography, but not color photography, so color began to be emphasized in a way it had never been before. Chevreul had published color swatches made up of patterns of parallel colored yarns, illustrating how alternating lines of analogous hues made for a brilliant effect. I only just this year learned about M. Chevreul’s work after ordering a copy of his book of 1860, and suddenly the brushstrokes of Van Gogh, Toulouse Lautrec, Cézanne, Cassatt and numerous others made complete sense. With all my art history courses, all the books I had read, why was it necessary for me to discover for myself why fin de siècle artists used long parallel brushstrokes of alternating colors?

At the dawn of the twentieth century an artist could do something with color which no photograph could do. But when color photography became available, and in the dark room colors could even be enhanced, the practice of painting “modulations” faded away, as the Fauves painted wildly distorted figures in unnatural colors. Almost the entirety of twentieth century art stands in reaction to photography, one way or another. The more “photographic” painters, such as Norman Rockwell, were relegated to the status of mere illustrators. Abstract art (later to be called non-representational art), happenings, installations, all stood against a backdrop of photography. And photography was everywhere: snapshots, magazines, movies, billboards.

So where does all this lead us?

I don’t find perfect art very interesting. Photorealism—and I see more and more of it these days—cannot hold my interest beyond a brief admiration that someone could and would take the time to do that. And non-representational images are everywhere, man-made and in nature. I enjoy looking at a pretty pattern as much as the next person, but it takes more than that to turn me on. By the same token, I enjoy a colorful sunset or towering clouds, but am not inspired by them to make a painting—or even a photograph any more. They are for observing and remembering.

Even other works of art that follow the rules of their given style, whatever style that may be, soon cease to intrigue me. It’s because perfect art exists, everywhere, in plenitude, and can be simulated by computer anyway. I may enjoy looking at it for a while, but I do lose interest, and I certainly do not want to make yet another example of it.

Cézanne’s work exemplifies art that remains intriguing. Art historians teach that Cézanne reacted against the Impressionists and their breakdown of solid form. Since they were painting with light, he chose to represent solid form not with light and shade, but with features of the colors themselves. Surfaces that faced the viewer, and were nearby, were to be painted in warm tones. Where the form turned away from the viewer, its color cooled, even to blue. (Personally, I am sick to death of the notion that warm colors come forward and cool colors recede. I am fed up with the oversimplification of colors into the two groups warm and cool, and fervently wish we could learn to categorize color more accurately and meaningfully—but that’s another topic.)

After all that careful and subtle work toward using color to create the illusion of solid form, Cézanne slams our perception back into two dimensions by rendering a wine bottle asymmetrically, and by mismatching the back edge of a table top as seen on opposite sides of the painting.

Why did he do that? Well, whatever the reason, it was not by accident—these were not mistakes—though critics of the day might have thought so. Cézanne’s paintings are fraught with contradictions and tensions, and while he may have been unable to paint like an old master, still he was skillful enough to avoid those “mistakes.”  His reasons were formal; he made a deliberate choice of just how high to make this side of the table top, or just how low to make that shoulder of the wine bottle. He may or may not have been able to explain in words, but he knew what he wanted and executed his intentions.

You could look for hours and days and years, and still find something to wonder at.

Now to my work, Three Little Birds, and three of its “faults.”

As it recedes, the wire which reflects the sun does not thin “enough.” I did make a conscious decision to render this wire thinner in the distance, but only as much as this. Are you not convinced by the rest of the painting that I have the skill to render it in proper perspective? So why did I not?

It is not plausible that three wires would reduce to one at that distant pole. Well, they did, but here I must confess to thoughtlessly copying what I saw without prior thought. Still, for me, this thickness and triple wire save this painting.

The dark wires crossing the scene have no definite end. True. What would happen to this painting if they did? I don’t like to think about it. Or should I say the viewer might like to think about it?

Many of my paintings have such “faults.” Most of the time, quite honestly, these faults show up and I keep them because I like what they do for the work. “Faults” that do not work toward my visual ends, of course, I correct. But I am not painting pretty scenes. I aspire to more than impressionism. I prefer these “faults” to their alternatives. I am wondering this morning if perhaps my paintings that I do not like so much are the ones with no contradictions or implausibilities.

But especially interesting to me right now is that I had been entertaining the idea of magnifying such faults before the discussion that inspired this brief essay took place. I think, though, that I shall leave them subtle and troubling for the time being.

Identity is Unity

There is a connection between the berjillions of berjillions of elementary particles in the universe and the many self-aware humans on this planet.

Not everyone subscribes to the Big Bang Theory, but any creation story will suffice for my argument. I do believe that the Big Bang Theory could be correct, but that it explains only a tiny bit of creation.

Anyway, picture the Big Bang. Out of nothing energy is spewed, most of which is eventually coalesced into what we consider to be matter. Really matter is just specially configured little sparks of energy, but we don’t need to go into that right now. Here is the question: berjillions upon berjillions of berjillions of absolutely identical electrons (or pick your own particle) populate the universe. How did that happen?

Yes, John Wheeler did half-jokingly suggest to Richard Feynman that they might all be the same electron, and if you meditate on that, you can see that in an important sense, that is exactly right. Without the context of environment, location ceases to make sense, and there is no other way to distinguish these particles. And since the environment is just other particles, maybe it fades into insignificance.

But let’s back up to the creation of these particles. Whatever actually happened, somehow all those electrons came to have the same mass, and the same electrical charge. Did a first electron appear or get created, and then the others popped into existence as copies? How ever it happened, if electrons are copies of each other, some concept or idea guided the process. Some program of some type instructed: “GOTO primal electron. CREATE perfect copy. CHECK for accuracy.”

If instead all electrons bubbled into their perfect identical form because some previous state of the young universe generated them that way, then this also presupposes the existence of a pattern or plan. There is nothing logical about electrons that determines their charge or mass, unless these constants follow from some other fact, which in turn is random.

So did all those electrons burst into existence simultaneously? If so, then the proto-universe that birthed them had its own uniformity going on. Or if electrons were spawned sequentially, we must wonder how the Mother of these particles managed to remain unchanged from the first electrons to the last.

You see my point. However the building blocks of the universe came to be, whatever they are, their uniformity implies the pre-existence of idea. That’s huge. I don’t care what your cosmology says, it must recognize that idea guides creation.

But pure idea does not push around or create matter, which is an entirely different category of existence. That is an assumption I cannot avoid. So I am forced to realize that matter is not hard stuff—matter—at all. Everything is idea.

There is only one electron because there is only one idea of an electron—in this universe, anyway.

And what does all of this have to do with self-aware human beings?

That spark of spiritual self-awareness—pure witness, observer, Atman—after you strip away all of its “environment” in the form of ego, feelings, personality and memory, is the same in all of us. As with electrons, our subjective consciousnesses are identical and of a separate category from every physical thing that we believe exists. There is one idea of a pure witness and, by following the same argument I used for identical electrons, we get to the conclusion that there is only one subjective consciousness.

We are One.

In a post coming soon I would like to tell the story of how I came to understand the conjunction of that realization and my own (and your own) compelling experience of separateness.

P.S. I have been absent from this blog for many days because all my writing time has gone to another blog:  savebriggsroad.blogspot.com. That blog deals with an entirely different concern. Perhaps you will take a look…   

Dyads

Some days ago, as I was reflecting on recent work, I noticed that dyads showed up rather frequently in my recent work. Take a look at these:

The Parking Lot

The Homestead

Look at this painting of a single item:

The Blue Bicycle

           Two wheels! Also object and shadow.

            My most recent:

Ed's House

Pairs of pairs, for Heaven’s sake!

What does it mean? Is there a secret significance here, something symbolic? Does it represent, for example, a wish to be part of a pair? Or an awareness of being part of a pair?

Other paintings appear to represent something about choices.

The industrial or the natural:

Leaves and Steel

                In The Bridge we can choose to enter the dark door or we can gaze out into the green trees.

The Bridge

        The lit building or the dark copse:

The Grove

        The canoe or the dock:

The Yellow Painter

        We follow the zig-zag railing in The Patio to a point where we choose, again, a door or a little natural area at ground level. And look, there are two pipes in the ground.

The Patio

These pairs could characterize choices, some of which are fraught with meaning, some not so much. We could go on and on about choosing the canoe or the dock and what each choice represents in a life. What does it mean if we enter the door or go into nature? Three paintings juxtapose architecture and nature, most dramatically in the choice between dark trees and a brightly illuminated building.

I can assure you I was not thinking about choices or dyads when I created these compositions. I was looking at colors and shapes, as I was when conceiving the compositions of the many other, non-dyadic paintings I am not showing you here.

And yet, it is engaging to think this way. We do enjoy pondering possible meanings and significance to our own lives of these apparent symbols, intended or not. Here again is that recurring theme of self-reflection. When you think about it, symbolism functions only with self-reflection. For a symbol to operate as a symbol, awareness of both the symbol and its meaning is necessary, as well as the realization that their relation is symbolic! 

Is it interesting to wonder what was in the artist’s mind, especially if he claims not to have been thinking in terms of dyads at all? Possibly, but not for that long. Such pursuits are the work of art history, which is very different from the creation or the contemplation of art.

Once a painting is hardened into its final form, the important dialogue is between the viewer and the painting. The purpose of visual art is to engage the viewer and provide stimulus for contemplation, hopefully for a very long time. Symbolic content may be there, but its true value lies in what it does for the viewer, and the viewer has more important things to wonder about than the mental state of the artist.

I hope. 

Brahman and Idea

We can equate God with the sum collection of all self-awareness.

The trouble with imagining God as a personality working with physical reality is that in anthropomorphizing Him in that way, we trivialize Him. I have wondered about arguing that we are made in God’s image, and so we must resemble Him, but the resemblance must not be so strong as to include our weakness. No, we resemble God in our self-reflective consciousness.

God, therefore, looks out at us through every pair of human eyes we encounter. The owner of those eyes may or may not be aware of her own God consciousness, but she is conscious and she does have the capability to self-reflect, and so she carries God consciousness.

Sufis say that humanity is the lens through which God observes the world, a beautiful way to put it.

 For a long time I have been wondering, why would God need a lens? Why would God need the eyes of people?

The secret is that there is no reality. Reality is not real. We cannot prove that anything exists outside of our senses and so for all intents and purposes there is nothing outside our sensory sphere. Sure, physicists and mathematicians have proved that there are ten dimensions to reality, but those dimensions exist only as idea to them. And so, since we have no outside-of-senses reality to back them up, our sensory experiences are just as transparent, just as flimsy, convincing only because that is part of the construct.  

Would it be fair to say, then, that reality exists because God wishes it to exist? Yes, sort of, and yes, duh. An infinite consciousness is capable of conceiving infinitely many ideas, many of which (infinitely many) are capable of self-reflection and self-reference. Here, then, we have our multi-verse, hypothesized by quantum physics. I need to think about this more, but it seems right to suggest that a self-referent idea or program needs something to refer back to, something complicated enough to support self-reflection. Since to be truly self-reflective requires the capability of an infinite regress, that complicated structure must needs be very complicated. For such an idea to be so capable, it must appear to have some durability, and, hence we have reality with people in it. 

Note that this is all in the realm of idea. We think we are living a hard life, but we and everything "around" us is idea.

The Word was in the Beginning because self-reference has something of a linguistic nature, even if it is in the form of some sort of symbol.

As this is just the beginning of a train of thought that began for me today, I need time to flesh out some of the assumptions contained in my argument.

Surely others have thought the same thoughts as I express here, and the scriptures of many spiritual disciplines treat of the same concept. I just need to figure out the correlations. I am putting together some pieces I have not seen put together before.

For what it's worth, I picture idea springing from Brahman like plumes of snow blow from a great mountain, like the whorls of tiny cyclones spin away from a whistle. Not creating the snow, not making the sound, but its nature and their nature somehow the same.

I know, I know! I thought I was going to be posting my art on this blog and all I am posting is this dang philosophy!

So now you know. This is my internal world, all I really care about.

Goodbye to Qualia

Cartesian Duality

The fallacy of the Cartesian duality is not in the partition of personhood into two categories, but that the division was taken between mind and body. To say, “I think, therefore I am,” is to suggest that my thinking is non-physical. Philosophers have argued successfully that the act of thinking is based in the material world, the action of a physical organ—just as would be the throwing of a baseball. The mind is part of the body. 

What is outside the physical is self-awareness, pure and unattached to thoughts, memories, or feelings. The proper separation of categories distinguishes the entire body of the person, including the mind, ego, emotions, ideas and memories, from the self-awareness of the person.

There is no difference between your pure self-awareness and mine. We can agree with Hindu theologians and posit an ocean of consciousness. If one center of awareness is indistinguishable from another, then who is to say there are multiple consciousnesses? Personally, I prefer to think of consciousness as something like a life force that injects itself where it can into the world. The picture in my head—maybe somewhat silly—is of a grove of cypress in a swamp, all inter-connected under the water and mud. The network of cypress is the force of consciousness, pushing into the world. The trees and the knees push up through the surface of the water and make themselves known, entering our physical reality in many places.

If qualia are the experiential part of our conscious life, then memories and feelings are qualia too, just as much as colors and cold. We may not be able to describe a particular type of quale to a person who has never experienced it, but we can “point” to the notion, with language. “When you think about something and your throat tightens and your nose and tear ducts tingle, that’s sadness.”

Death and Experience

 When we die we separate from the qualia of life, and can no longer experience the colors, smells, and sounds of this world. The reason for this is the loss of the function of the sense organs. We lose brain function as well, when we lose the brain. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect that we lose the ability to recall memories. If atman consciousness is eternal—and it may well be—still with no qualia to be conscious of, self-awareness must lie dormant in some way.

The discontinuity of death is, at best, a jump discontinuity, not a removable one, borrowing here from the terminology of mathematics. What this means is that at death, a change occurs in the nature of the experience of the individual. It is not like a temporary loss of consciousness, in which we wake to the identical experience we left a second or minute ago. Instead the continuous experience of our conscious life has abruptly taken a brand new course, with a completely different starting point. No filling in of experience will make the transition smooth and unnoticeable.

In the case of remembering our own history and assuming continuity of life experience, all we really have is memory. And memories are qualia, which give us information about nothing other than themselves.

The Theory of Survival

 What can survival after death possibly mean? To believe that I will survive death is to say that there will be a person of some sort with my memories. I have no connection to that person. Actually, I have no sensory connection to any person who might be living tomorrow, but I trust that one person tomorrow will have a continuity of experience—or at least the conviction of continuity—with memories of experience that I have now. To be a believable and believing future me, the person must have memories of past feelings and experiences that match his present. I can expect no such matching in the case of a person who appears after my death, whether that appearance is of an infant in another family, or a ghost in this world, or a new inhabitant of Heaven.

I find it problematic that physical causes can interrupt or halt neural functions such as memories, feelings, and personality. Total anesthesia creates a glaring discontinuity in our awareness, albeit a removable discontinuity. This means that we could restore the continuity of consciousness by dropping in the missing experience—i.e. withhold the anesthesia. Still, I find the blank stretch philosophically and experientially troubling, as incontrovertible evidence that our consciousness depends absolutely on physical structure. Anesthesia is much more convincing than sleep, during which I continue to have experience. Disease and injury can cause brain damage that unalterably affects personality. Does a person’s “real” personality survive Alzheimer’s, a stroke, or a fractured skull, even though the original personality never again appears in this life?

Unless there is another duality, such as between a physical and an astral body, the theories of reincarnation or Heaven have big problems here. (I am using the term “astral” strictly as a convenience, and not necessarily as mystics might. Physicists seem convinced these days that “reality,” whatever that is, is composed of ten dimensions, if we count time as a dimension. This makes it conceivable that there is more to our existence than meets the eye here in the classic four dimensions. For convenience, I resort to calling the non-worldly part of us “astral.”) If we confine our examination to the important distinction between atman and the rest of the person, there is no memory function to carry forward, and reincarnation is meaningless. On the other hand, if there is a division between astral and physical bodies, and the astral body survives, then both meaningful reincarnation and taking up residence in Heaven are conceivable.

I make no claim that any of this is groundbreaking. My sole purpose is to report the thoughts I enjoy.

The Photo Essay That Doesn't Belong

Here is a little photo essay presenting my daughter Angela and me.

It is important in a photograph to depict something about the deeper feelings of the subject. Here you can see that Angela and I are serious contemplators of Universal Truth.

But it is important also to be lighthearted. In this next photo Angela smiles to think of our fortunate position at the intersection of quantum inspired multi-verses.

Angela says, “C’mon Dad, look into the many versions of your future. Look deep, deep.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she says. “Work it!”

 “Now you get it, Dad. You can come back now!”

We showed these to my wife Ann, Angela’s mom, and she said that they were not appropriate for this blog. I am very grateful for that comment, because it gives me the perfect excuse to say:

Yes they are!

If this blog is going to be authentic, it must treat of more than philosophical ruminations, more than the thought behind the production of art, more than all that high falutin’ serious stuff. This blog is a bit of my art, a performance piece if you will.

To exemplify its own theme, this blog must include what is real to this consciousness—even emotion, as in the post “Betrayal;” or silliness; or odd subjects that don’t seem to belong. If it is perceptible to this witness, it belongs.

This post is another example of the self-reflective, thanks to Ann’s remark and my opportunity to respond. And this paragraph is self-reflective on its self-reflection. As such, it epitomizes the very ascending spiral of self-awareness that I have been saying underlies everything meaningful that I do.

A computer could not do this and mean it. If a computer could do this, still it could not talk about being able to do this. Or else about doing that which just preceded this sentence.

A human composed this essay. And, though these words are pretty good evidence that a self-aware creature is experiencing himself in their production, there can be no proof for the reader. A computer can be programmed to mimic anything. A person, not self-aware, can say anything she is taught to say. But there is no need to present proof. I am observing the proof. I am the proof.

As such, I am inaccessible to you, who are your own proof, because just now you remembered to be self-aware.

Angela asks, “Are you going to tell what really happened when we took those pictures?’

No.

Electrons!

I’ve taken this post from a memoir I hope to finish soon of a canoe trip my daughter Angela and I took on the first 340 miles of the Mississippi River. It provides a good introduction to the material I want to talk about in the post to follow:

So much water!  I try to get my head around the notion that all this water is made up of molecules, two little hydrogen atoms clinging to a large oxygen atom like a miniature cartoon mouse head, all tumbling over each other.  Of course the molecules are not really solid, nor are the atoms, nor are the parts of the atoms.  It’s all about forces and big ideas. 

The molecules are so tiny and there are so many of them.  I wondered how many there were in this bit of river.  According to the Avogadro constant, there are 6.02 × 10²³ molecules in a mole.  The atomic mass of oxygen is 16, I remember that from high school chemistry, and the mass of hydrogen is a shade over one, so the atomic mass of water is almost exactly 16 + 2 = 18.  A mole of water is that number of grams, eighteen.  Since a gram of water has a volume of one cubic centimeter, thanks to the French, who set these units that way on purpose, a mole of water takes up about eighteen cubic centimeters.  This little section in the river was about 30 meters wide by a hundred meters long, and I guessed two meters deep.  That made 6000 cubic meters of water right there.  Since there are 100 centimeters in a meter, a cubic meter is 100 × 100 × 100 = 1,000,000, a million cubic centimeters.  Every eighteen of these is a mole, so there are a million divided by 18 moles in a cubic meter—about.   Ten over 18 reduces to 5/9, and I know the decimals for ninths just repeat the top, so that makes 55555.5… moles in each cubic meter.  We’ll call it 60,000, rounded to the nearest ten thousand, because I just wanted to know how many zeroes my number has. 

I did not share my thoughts with Angela.  It would annoy her, but this is just arithmetic and high school science, and I was curious.  So many people would run from a calculation like that, but it’s interesting.  It gives me perspective about life and the world and the universe when I think about that, and to never ponder such things is to lead a life I would have to call impoverished.

Okay, 60,000 moles in a cubic meter and 6000 cubic meters in this bit of river gives me 60,000 × 6000 = 360,000,000 moles in this section of river, or so.  Close enough.  In scientific notation we have 3.6 × 10⁸, and that makes multiplying by the Avogadro constant easier.  But I needed pencil and paper for this. 

Later I figured 3.6 × 10⁸ moles times 6.02 × 10²³ molecules per mole makes about 2.16 × 10³² molecules of water just right there, give or take an enormous number.  In standard notation, that’s 216,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.  I wonder how many there would be in the whole river.  You’d probably only have to tack on 5 or 6 zeroes but I’m not going to do it.

Electrons are more general; every substance has a specific pattern of electrons, so I turn my attention to them. Each oxygen atom has eight electrons, each hydrogen atom one. So every water molecule sports ten electrons, and in this patch of river there were 2.16 × 10³³.

How did all those electrons come to be?  And each one indistinguishable from the next!  John Wheeler’s suggestion that maybe all electrons are just one electron showing up all over has an odd plausibility when you think about it.

But it is astounding to think, as many electrons as there are in a drop of water, as many electrons as there are in a world, in the sun and all the planets, that for light years and light years across empty space are other clusters of identical electrons, that the universe is full of all of these identical particles.  What an absolutely astounding thought!  If all of those electrons are identical in all of their properties, including their mass and their charge, and all the protons and neutrons as well, what are we to make of that?  Could they have been different?  How do we know they are not different here from some other galaxy far across the other side of the universe?  The thought that electrons and protons have no such physical properties at all, but are dependent on some kind of pure idea, some kind of logical necessity springing from mathematical/digital properties makes it possible to imagine that our universe is necessarily as it is, and does not vary from one region to another.

Or what if there is something implausible and arbitrary about the universe in which we live?  I can buy quantum theory and the arbitrary nature of subatomic matter, but I have a lot more trouble conceiving of a variegated universe.  A variegated universe is even more inconceivable to me than the notion that every one of its approximately 10⁸⁰ electrons is identical to the next.

We talk about particles but an atom is not like a tiny solar system.  It has layers of fog that hold different discrete levels of energy that are necessarily digitized in some way.  An electron, like a photon, can be viewed either as a wave or as a particle, but there is something necessary about the amount of energy in an electron or in a photon.  An atom, being comprised of layers of fog or energy which repel the layers of fog of other atoms, is categorized just by those spheres or spheres of influence or layers of fog energy, all the way out to the full periodic table of the elements, and it is those layers of fog, those necessary digital layers or spheres of energy that for mathematical reasons determine the properties of the elements, the way they look, the way they behave, the way they like to link to each other, and these are determined by something necessarily mathematical and not just because they “want” eight electrons in their outer orbit, as we were taught in high school chemistry. 

That’s all they are, atoms; just patches of energy-fog that we like to imagine as systems of particles because we know peas and marbles and sand particles, and because that energy fog will not allow itself to be divided or quantified differently without a huge protest.

I find myself contemplating very seriously the notion that all reality, each sub-atomic particle has existence only as idea.  Perhaps at some level religion and science will find common ground, but far deeper and far stranger than any of us has ever imagined.