oh...just me: December 2008 Archives

It occurs to me that I have an occasionally-troubled relationship with time. The patience of the Dutch impresses me: the decades and generations, for instance, of carefully reclaiming land from the sea. The paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the woodcuts and lithographs by M.C. Escher, bespeak a lifetime of deeply-responsive and engaged living. Vermeer, we are told, shows us not what he saw, but what he wants us to see, while Escher displays a full range of perception, from the mystic to the gory. Meanwhile, in contemporary cultural Holland, one is to walk with averted eyes past each other's open windows. Apparently there is nothing to hide, and equally nothing to display. Or (?) if there is, one must pointedly not look in order not to see.

I could hardly have chosen two more counterposed artists to see in one day. Vermeer is sensual, smooth, projecting pure tranquility. Escher seems stoned, depicting fantastical images worthy of hallucinogens (and the curators seem to agree). Yet each man is obviously the product of his times - offering up images that refract the psychosocial dynamics of their era according to their respective sensibilities. Vermeer (1632-1675) spends his entire life in Delft, leaving no traces except his paintings. Guesswork fills in details, the critic's gaze and audience's imagination craving the lush life his paintings portray.

Pondering the post-war psychological commentary about the "View of Delft," painted six years after the explosion of 1654, I hopped on the tram to Scheveningen. Vermeer, argue the curators, presented the life he wished, obscuring all unpleasant details.

Musing on the forces that brought me to Holland (personal, biographic), I enjoyed seeing the sea. The interlude was necessary (it seems, in retrospect) to enable some distance from the calm vision of Vermeer to the disruptive designs of Escher. The light streaming in the window onto the photography of Thijs Tuurenhout in the upper gallery of the Vermeer Centrum also turned out to be a kind of prelude.

Maurits Cornelis Escher's choices (1898-1972) are distinctly different than Vermeer's. Escher draws on Moorish imagery, Christian mythology, biology, and warfare. Good and evil, light and dark are pitted in constant competition. The primal contest of living with its everpresent companion death is represented starkly, without reserve, and disturbingly balanced: who knows which side will prevail?

I was startled by his range: mathematical precision in rigorous interaction with inspirational and indigenous knowledges. Some work reminds me of the art of American Indians of the Pacific Northwest, others of the hints and whispers of Goddess-worshipping pagans. The psychological entwines with the institutional . . . did he know how much the Swans (1956) begin to resemble the double helix? Could he have imagined that Magic Mirror (1946) evokes the quantum mechanics discovery of wave-particle duality? I imagine the powerful representations of war and violence in Escher's work have been well mined, but what about his prescience about the environment, as seen in Puddle (1952)?

I did not take many pictures of (what I react to as) the creepy stuff. It occurred to me that maybe this is a difference between liberals and conservatives in the U.S.? Liberals want everything to be happy, and conservatives know it just ain't so. Too simplistic, of course, but it was a new lens (for me) on that divide. Can you see the skull in the center of this eye?

Hurled at the audience in mockery of our mortality, these questions form part of the text of the three-dimensional "Virtual Reality" video of Escher's work (by Wennekes Multimedia 2007, too bad I can't find it online). Escher played knowledge against perception, daring us not to fear the miscegenation. Somehow, he managed to merge these modes into coherent art. Each single piece captures an aspect of universal complexity, while the oeuvre illustrates a purposeful trajectory.

Me? I get caught between trying to catch the essential qualities of lived moments and the progression toward a larger, cumulative contribution. The insight with which I opened this blogpost involved the spirit of my parents' lives as I was growing up: their ambition to be part of the class-conscious carnival with its exaggerated pleasures and lapses of ennui between episodes of spectacle. This may explain a deep kind of patterned cycle that I find occasionally interrupting otherwise steady progress towards my own longterm goals.

Oliver Morton is referring to galactic history, but the sentiment explains my desire for ceremony concerning the annual return of light. Over the last five years, I have intentionally cultivated this religious impulse into a celebration of human diversity: the need for solar nurturance is universal, encompassing all modes of spiritual practice and transcending every form of social and institutional division.

We human beings alive today live on the verge of the future - as this wonderful video demonstrates, "we live in exponential times." What we accomplish, and what we fail to accomplish, will set the limits for succeeding generations. A verge is "something that borders, limits, or bounds." The verge is a measurement in time.

The iconicity of the Earthrise photograph, taken by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968 (when I was five) as a proof of technological prowess and singular human interconnectedness, competes in the modern age with old, established ideologies. Our visual and visceral senses are immersed in strategic and incidental ways to inspire the gamut of human emotion. Mundane hopes, grand visions, and primal fears are inspired to motivate daily participation in the increasingly complex structures of interconnected global societies. The contemporary class values of intellectual and creative freedom require deep investment in the construction of social infrastructures that enable strong human ties across the many diversities which compose human experience and inform human wisdom.

The trick is how to institutionalize systems that enact the precious balance between control (by which I mean reliability of the system actually doing what it is directly intended to do) and democracy (by which I mean the actual freedom of individuals to pursue activities they value - see Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom).

The crucial tension, it seems to me, is a certain level of unlearning our confidence in prediction so that we develop a few more risk-taking skills. In Wouter's words from earlier today:

In everyday life, we generally do know what will happen if we turn left - we arrive at our intended destination - unless something happens, and suddenly we find ourselves in the middle of an adventure we never intended and do not necessarily want. Institutions are designed to eliminate - or at least minimize - such unexpected happenings. But by ruling out the spontaneous and sporadic, institutions also instill modes of conformity that threaten to mold us into compliant complacency. Then we - taken in aggregate as masses of indistinguishable people - are easily provoked into outrageous mobilizations including the co-production of horrifying violence - be it formal war or stealth co-optation of resources driving others to despair.

As Tumbleweed explained it the other day, we have the accumulated knowledge to predict how discourses play out over time if they are not interrupted immediately:

"First people say, 'They own the bakeries and the banks.' Then you have Kristallnacht and next thing you know we're liberating the Jews from Auschwitz."

But how does one intervene in such discourses without falling into another kind of fascism?

Merely regulating what people can/cannot say is hardly an answer; the repressed attitudes simply work themselves out in another way. Rather, we need a few mechanisms which routinely, habitually embrace the discrepancies of our differences as a matter of course. Olivia Judson argues playfully for "The Ten Days of Newton" to "embrace the discrepancy" of Newton's actual birthdate (which is different pending which calendar one uses), posing this as a new holiday to encompass all the variations currently celebrated at this time of year around the globe. She names Newton's foundational role in terms of the way we now understand our place in the universe, highlighting (among other achievements) his work with prisms. Newton proved that

The point is that we have the incredible decision-making power to invent systems composed from the vast array of imaginative potential in combination with increasing predictive competence. The question is whether we deal deeply with revealed knowledge or insist on creating new prisms (or keeping old ones) to distract us from what we already know is there. The desire for security binds the individual to institutional control, but safety (perceived and real) constantly fluxes with the organic compulsion to grow.

How many times can a person reinvent themselves? As often as necessary - if

• confidence in the relative security of life is guaranteed, the


• skills of reading the immediate for future implications are cultivated, and


• responding inter/co/pro-actively is modeled and implemented.

(I'm not promising its gonna be easy!)