Violets in the Street

When my stepmother was eighty-eight and I was fifty-nine she said, “I never realized how very thoughtful you are.”

It surprised and pleased me. What had she seen that led her to that conclusion? It also angered me to remember all the times I had been thoughtful in our family and never been recognized for it.

I pictured violets in the street. Every time I tell this story I picture violets in the street.

When I was ten and my stepmother was thirty-nine I went to a nearby field and picked a large handful of wild violets to give to her. She loved violets, they were her favorite flower, and she cultivated several small flowerpots of African violets. On my way home as I crossed the street in front of our house, the bundle of violets came apart in my hand and most of them spilled to the street. There were not enough of them left in my hand to make a decent gift so I let them go, and I went into the house weeping with shame and disappointment.

“What’s the trouble?” my stepmother asked as I lay inconsolable on my bed. I could not tell her. And I never did.

I call her my stepmother here, but my sister and I were never allowed to disclose that she was not our natural mother. It was never spoken of, even in our family, though my sister and I did occasionally speak of it. But that’s another story.

When you are a thoughtful person it doesn’t occur to you to say, “I’m being thoughtful right now.” When you are a thoughtless person it doesn’t occur to you to say, “I am being thoughtless right now.” No one can say that truthfully because to do so requires some bit of reflection.

When you are a thoughtful person you might remember something and say, “I was thoughtless yesterday,” and you will wince inside. It is very painful. When you are a thoughtless person you might remember something and say, “I was thoughtful yesterday,” and the recollection will bring you great satisfaction.

When you are a thoughtful person if someone says, “That was thoughtless what you did yesterday,” you will feel pain and think about what you did and apologize. When you are a thoughtless person and someone says, “That was thoughtless what you did yesterday,” you are aggravated and you tell that person that, one, you were not thoughtless and two, that it was the other person’s fault.

When you are a thoughtful person you are not thoughtful all the time, but you are regretful when you become aware of your missteps—and every time you remember them thereafter. When you are a thoughtless person you are not thoughtless all the time but you don’t think about it one way or the other, perhaps because you act out of a sense of duty.

There are many thoughtless persons in the world, and they are angered at the thoughtlessness of others. Thoughtful persons are also angered by the thoughtlessness of others.

But when you are a thoughtful person and are the recipient of a thoughtful act you are deeply grateful. When you are a thoughtless person you don’t notice thoughtful acts.

When my son was thirteen and I was thirty-seven I passed an empty space in the Walmart parking lot and took another two spaces beyond. He asked me why I did that and I explained that there was a car behind us and if I had taken the first one the driver of that car would have had to wait for us to get out of the way, whereas this way both of us could pull into our spaces. He remarked that I was thoughtful and I rejoiced inwardly because if he was noticing the thoughtfulness of others there was a good chance he would himself become thoughtful.

One has to work at evolving into thoughtfulness. Remaining thoughtless all one’s life is pretty easy.

When I was sixty-eight and my stepmother was ninety-seven I drove two thousand miles to be there for her and help out any way I could. The day I arrived she said, “I love you but I want you to go.” I asked why and she said because she didn’t want me to see her like this. A thoughtless person finds a thoughtful person easy to love. I wanted to tell her this was not the worst I had seen her but I left her room in tears. Her friend/caretaker chastised her then came out to talk to me and told me how older people could be but I was not crying because of my long drive but because this was a completely accurate and poignant depiction of my whole life with her.

I stopped in the next morning before my departure to say goodbye and I could tell from the look she gave me that she knew we would not see each other again. She wanted our goodbye to be somehow profound. She made no mention of regret over sending me away. I said my goodbye but was restrained. I do not regret my restraint.

A thoughtful person’s ability to love is not infinite.

Acknowledge Consciousness!

I recently finished reading a book by Stanislas Dehaene titled Consciousness and the Brain. This was the third book bearing a seductive title that had disappointed me to the point of anger. The other two are The Mind’s I by Douglas Hofstadter and Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett.

Each of these three books bludgeoned me with information about brain function and about how one or another kind of electrical stimulation creates this or that conscious feeling. Researchers have used all kinds of fancy technology to map the active part of the brain or plot brain waves and correlate these data with the experiences reported by the patient. The implication is that feelings and ideas and the subjective sense of self are not the stuff our consciousness is made of; they are nothing more than electrical impulses beeping around among neurons and dendrites and synapses.

 

The Brown Jacket, Oil, 1965, 32 x 24

The conclusion, which each author holds off until the end, is that consciousness is just an illusion. And they’re so smug about it!

Let’s assume for now that these three eminent scholars are using the word “consciousness” in the same way, referring to that subjective sense of awareness of self. This is a difficult thing to name; all the standard English terms are ambiguous. “Consciousness,” “awareness” and the like are most often used to describe mere wakefulness, and so are insufficiently clear for the purposes of this discussion.

There are terms that do work. The best among these, because it cannot be hijacked by folks that don’t understand it, is atman, a Hindu term. “Witness,” as used by the followers of Gurdjieff, is also clear, but only so long as we agree that we are speaking in terms of The Fourth Way. There are other possibilities, but let’s stick with atman.

If I can call an item “mine,” then it is not “me.” (Forget grammar for a moment.) “My” car is not me. I say “She ran into me” when another driver collides with my car, but she didn’t hit me. My clothes are not me. My body is not me. It’s an object I drag around but it’s not me.

More subjectively, I have feelings but they are not me. They are my feelings. My ideas, my thoughts are not me. I observe them. If I claim them, I am objectifying them.

Finally, my mind is not me. It is mine. “I have a good mind.” “I’m losing my mind.” Spending some time in silence, I sit and watch the mind cavort, tug at my heartstrings, worry me, chastise me. That mind is not me.

There is something that is truly I that watches what the mind and perceptions present. Well, I can’t really call it watching, because this atman does nothing, feels nothing, thinks nothing—just witnesses. That whatever-it-is is always the very last stop on any journey to the depth of introspection, but I can never get there, because even if I convince myself that I am identifying with atman, it is actually atman that is observing my mind thinking about identifying with atman.

Everything in our world could function just the same without atman witnessing. These days especially, with ever advancing technology of artificial intelligence, we can imagine a world of mosquitos and dogs and people programmed to do what they do, even to think about what they do, even to think about thinking, and yet never have this sense of “I-ness.”

And that is what these three authors are claiming is happening. They present the scientific evidence that the mind and feelings are brain functions, as if the brain is an extremely complex computer and no more. Well, maybe it is, and this research is profound and fascinating. But they go too far, inferring that since every feeling and idea can be theoretically explained in electrical terms, with no reference to an atman, then that must be all there is.

They conclude that consciousness—atman—is an illusion.

Look, I don’t know how or why this well-oiled human machine comes with atman, such an ineffable connection. I read books like these in the hope that someone else brighter than I has some insight into this difficult problem, but to say there is no such thing as consciousness, that it is an illusion?

“Illusion: an unreal vision presented to the bodily or mental eye” (Webster). Right, so to whom is the illusion presented? I know! Atman! Consciousness! The mere mention of illusion negates their entire argument.

These books just pissed me off.

I think they were written by robots.

Gratitude for Grace

Along the Blue Ridge Parkway. In 2014 I drove the whole thing, through Virginia and North Carolina, at the speed limit, 45 MPH. I just needed to be quiet for a while.

A minister friend of mine invited me over for dinner. He cooked, and while his wife and I sat at the table, he served us. I didn’t start eating right away and he said, “You’re waiting for the blessing. You don’t need to do that. The food is already blessed!”

Actually I had been waiting politely for him to be seated, but I didn’t think fast enough to say so, and instead picked up my fork. But you know, there is a whole lot more to say about this.

Certainly a human being is in no way qualified to bless anything; she can only request that God do so. Even so, do we imagine that God waits for our request before he blesses our food? Seems to me that our food is blessed by its very existence. That God provides for us, I am trying to say, is the blessing. But this is a quibble.

Shouldn’t the blessing, or grace, then, be an expression of gratitude? “Give thanks to Him and praise His name,” Psalm 100.  If so, how can anyone but me speak my thanks?

Let me, then, also express my gratitude for the company of an enlightened friend.

I am sure that he would be chagrined at my very non-traditional beliefs—or lack thereof—but no matter. Any human being worthy of the label can and should certainly be grateful for her life, her abilities, and her support by whatever you want to call this infinite environment through which we find ourselves drifting.

An Epiphany at Dawn

Night Cloud, Oil, ca. 1980    Collection of Rachel J. Yokum

I am struggling with insomnia. Ann writes it off as age-related, but I believe there is more to it.

Every night I fall asleep in my recliner, which is actually good for me for reasons too boring to list here, then wake up between 2 and 4 a.m. and make my way to bed. I cannot get back to sleep except after days of working. I thought it was fatigue that brought sleep but this morning I had one of those epiphanies for dumb people. Maybe I can’t sleep because my mind is spinning over things I want to accomplish but don’t. When I do accomplish, I sleep. Maybe.

Anyway it is clear that my mind wants me to write in my blogs. Okay mind, I give up.

I’ll start with this long-neglected blog; thanks for finding it!

There’s another one just below this one that I published an hour ago. More to follow very soon.

Eva, I’m keeping my word to you.

Teach the Children--What?

Everything changed for me in a moment. It was in the kitchen. My son was there; he was the catalyst for my transformation. Up to that moment I had believed that we acquired our personalities through experience. We were born as lumps of soft clay, and the obstetrician’s fingers made great and permanent impressions. Our parents continued to mold us as our clay-stuff hardened, until sometime late in childhood we became unmalleable. But now, standing in our kitchen, trying desperately to get through to my sixteen year old, I watched as he argued back, setting up distracting roadblocks exactly as his mother often had—and yet I had been his single parent since he was small, raising him since the divorce!

Maybe children of child-beaters become child-beaters not because of their experience but because they inherit the child-beating gene. Children of alcoholics are predisposed to alcoholism because they inherit that predisposition. It has long been understood that we inherit our dispositions, but we inherit so much more specific tendencies than those.

Why is it so mysterious and surprising that identical twins raised separately buy similar cars, work similar jobs, even marry women with the same names? If you are convinced that we are what we are because of our experiences, of course those coincidences are unexplainable. But when we understand that we were born as very specific individuals, then we can easily see why identical twins would live parallel lives.

And speaking of direction, have you watched a flock of birds swoop around the sky like a great living cloud, or a school of fish turn abruptly in the same direction? It’s because they were born that way, and they are all the same bird, all the same fish. (Those birds that were different and those fish that were different went their own way and were picked off by predators.)

So what can we do as parents? Many of us have experienced frustration with our children, because they are who they are and will not bend to our corrections. But maybe we have neither the ability nor the divine right to impose corrections. Maybe it is best to allow our children to develop into the people they were destined from birth to be—within reason.

There are two qualities that I believe are necessary for a young person to cultivate: kindness and consciousness. The term kindness, I believe, is unambiguous, perhaps because it is visible to others. 

Not so easy to discern in others is consciousness, by which I mean mindfulness, self-monitoring awareness, remembering oneself, being here now. I find it quite difficult to make the concept clear, as apparently also do many authors. It may be too simple to be believed. 

There is being conscious in the sense of being awake as opposed to being in a coma, and there is consciousness of self in the sense of being self-conscious, or preoccupied with one’s image. I mean neither of these, nor any of several other possible misconceptions. The subject is worthy of a book-long discussion, and such books do exist. I’ll not attempt to write one here.

Anyway, kindness and consciousness don’t violate any decent character, and they are teachable.

Of all the things my father tried to impress upon me, three versions of the same admonition survive in me today as eminently worthwhile:

Pay attention

Think about what you are doing

Try to put yourself into the other person’s shoes

Other lessons were intended to socialize me and inculcate common courtesy into my behavior, and most of those took, over time. And many lessons were useless to me, even destructive, such as “do not be an engineer,” because he didn’t enjoy his profession, or stay away from Black people (he said colored), or do not aspire to be an artist, or don’t tell anyone your mother is dead. Those instructions went against my nature and were ugly.

But those first, big three—Pay attention; Think about what you are doing; Try to put yourself into the other person’s shoes—I remember those often, and thank my father keenly for them.

Every one of us has the capacity for kindness and consciousness—I see evidence of it everywhere—but we do need teaching and reminding. That, I believe, is the proper work of a parent.

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…