Category Archives: painting

Worldview

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I got asked the other day what my worldview was. I was unable to come up with much of an answer. When I thought about the physical universe I couldn’t get past the dilemma modern science seems to be having regarding quantum theories that posit the idea of sub-atomic particles that are nearly unknowable. I mean, really, if the invisible, unknowable is what the universe consists of then what am I to make of reality at all?

It seemed to me the whole idea of a worldview presupposes some sort of underlying order driving the cogs of the universal machine. Like for the religious faithful, who, I think, can come up with a pretty thorough answer fairly quickly.

So, then I got to thinking about the nature of humankind-whether or not there may be some sort of ordered structure controlling the sentient.

I recently saw this movie, Hannah Arendt that dramatizes the philosopher’s acceptance of an offer by The New Yorker magazine, back in the 1960’s, to travel to Jerusalem to view and write about the trial of the notorious Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. As she views the testimony she becomes increasingly convinced that the man was nothing-simply a cog in the totalitarian machine that was Nazi Germany; amoral, lacking in person hood, simply doing what he was ordered to do.

Although an extreme case it seems to me it’s something we all wrestle with. Lacking a mechanism that balances the good of the group, the political, social or religious motives of the institution with the moral and ethical responsibility of the individual, the nature of humankind is as chaotic as the quantum universe.

I can make no more sense of a concept of worldview now than when I was first asked the question.

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Altered States

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I’ve been having these flashes lately of another time and place. Small things: certain smells and sounds, plays of light, will bring to mind thoughts, sometimes remembrances of earlier experiences, sometimes images of times and places I’ve never been.

Most often these ‘flashes of memory’ elicit almost euphoric feelings in me-a sense of idyllic existence, that, when I think about it, are hard to explain. I say most often because sometimes there’s an ominous foreboding which accompanies these forays into the fanciful.

These experiences are like visions into another reality. They occur with varying degrees of strength and fade and disappear fairly quickly.

Now, I’m no scholar mind you but as far as I can tell Martin Heidegger speaks of ‘being’ as a field, an extension of the physical/mental self to include one’s sensible environs. Our extended being can accumulate a lot of the detritus of daily life, an ever increasing weight of familiarity and the efforts and energies required of simply existing. So, by altering one’s being, that is relocating, one becomes new and fresh-at least momentarily.  But, rather than actually physically moving, my mental sojourns into past and fanciful places must serve to offer similar relief.

I’m glad I got this figured out. Now if I can extend these fancies and keep them mostly positive maybe I’ll be content to stay put physically while I travel far and wide mentally. I do know, though, I’ll still need to seek new experiences on occasion.

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Back from the Wilderness

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Having returned from the wilderness without incident I have quickly re assumed my generally distracted existence. While in the wilderness I managed to maintain my eating and sleeping routine almost to the minute. When I think about that I have to admit it seems pretty strange since I obviously had no deadlines to meet, places to be at a certain hour or people to coordinate with. I guess it’s pretty amazing how effectively I’ve been culturally conditioned. It does make me wonder about the nature of free will.

The only tangible remnants of my wilderness experience consist of a few small paintings that are now more real than the rock, water and vegetation they represent. And, as I view them in their balanced, rectangular format it’s clear to me they really haven’t captured the intense sensory experience that inspired them. I guess I’ll keep them anyway for their memory value. When I think about it, maybe there’s no better reason to produce art in the first place.

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Alone in the Wilderness (part 4)

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I’ve been thinking about who would really miss me if I were not to come back from the wilderness. I think there are people who would care but also that there are different degrees of mourning.

For instance you might feel bad at a friend’s disappearance but the loss might be harder to deal with if the deceased were a parent or sibling. If the lost one were a partner or spouse you depended on daily I would guess it may be really hard to take.

I have no spouse or siblings, but I guess there are folks out there who would consider my passing significant.   I don’t anticipate any problems returning from the wilderness provided I keep my canoe upright.  I have no desire to disappear.  The spirit is still willing.

Outside of any eschatological interferences I plan to return.

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Alone in the Wilderness (part 3)

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Another think I miss while alone in the wilderness is distraction. Other than the occasional animal rustling or bird song there are no distractions here. I can’t even get a cell phone signal.

The awareness of not being distracted makes me think I must be distracted a lot usually. I wonder how much of my life I spend distracted.

Which is one reason I didn’t mind falling in the water while trying to get into my canoe so much. It temporarily distracted me. Wilderness is so in your face, so absolute, such stark reality.

So, to deal with stark reality I brought along some distractions in the form of reading material and, obviously, writing pad.

One of the books is Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson. The person telling the story in this book reminds me somewhat of myself. She goes on and on about whatever comes into her head. She tells in the book about having once been mad. I don’t think she ever fully recovered by the end of the book.

I don’t know what that says about me.

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Alone in the Wilderness (part 2)

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I’ve been alone in the wilderness now for more than twenty-four hours. Other than the occasional canoe passing by I’ve seen or talked with no one.

Nothing particularly unusual has happened here other than last evening I fell in the lake trying to get into my canoe. I spent considerable time after that rigging up lines to dry things out which they pretty well were by morning.

So, I was thinking about what I miss being in the wilderness and one of the first things that came to mind is music which when I’m not in the wilderness I am usually listening to or is at least playing in the background.

I find it interesting how some musicians’ names seem to fit their profession so well. Take Esa-Pekka Salonen or Luigi Boccherini or Antonine Dvorak. When I say these names out loud I just want to repeat them over and over because they’re so rhythmic sounding (well, maybe not Antonine Dvorak so much).

The composer I’m thinking of now is Aaron Copeland who I guess doesn’t have a particularly rhythmic sounding name but his music seems to suit the wilderness. It seems to me Appalachian Spring would be really good background music for where I presently am. I’m not in Appalachia and it’s not spring but never the less.

I do know the title of that work really doesn’t refer to the season but rather a water source. I found this out only recently. Even so I still am inclined to think of the season when I hear the piece. Also I think of Jody Foster who sang Simple Gifts in an episode of Kung Fu for David Carradine who played Kwai Chang Caine even though he’s Caucasian.

The movie that I think of when I think of Jody Foster is Taxi Driver with Robert DeNiro. In it she plays an adolescent prostitute.

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Alone in the Wilderness (part 1)

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I’m all alone in the wilderness. At least it’s someplace I would call wilderness. I know for a fact no one lives within miles of here and there aren’t any roads within miles of here either.

That’s not to say there aren’t people around. I saw four people just minutes ago but they aren’t within sight now. For all intents and purposes I’m all alone. At least I have been for the last three hours and seventeen minutes which is how long ago I entered the wilderness.

Right now I’m looking out across a lake.

Although it’s been a couple of minutes since I wrote that last sentence I’m still looking across the same lake in so far as I haven’t moved from the spot I was at when I wrote the last sentence. It’s a beautiful scene; the sun sparkling off of the water, the variety of greens in the trees on the far bank, the multi-colored rock outcroppings reaching down into the dark water. It could be a painting.

Of course I know it couldn’t really be a painting because then what I’d be looking at would be some sort of pigment spread on canvas or paper or something rather than the real water and rocks and trees I’m seeing.

That’s not to say if what I was looking at was a painting that the painting wouldn’t be real. It is real in my imagination in so far as I can imagine this scene as a painting.
So I guess there’s no reason to think that the painting I’m imagining of the scene that I’m looking at is any less real than the water, trees and rocks.

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The Great Revivals

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Brother Abraham, the Semitic cleric and Biblical scholar, was telling me the other day about the great Revival Movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He said the movements began as a reaction to the scientistic attitudes brought about by Enlightenment thinking which the faithful found to be atheistic and involved a return to the fundamental beliefs of Christian doctrine and an irrefutable belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

The revival meetings, Abraham told me, were heavy on emotional content with lots of singing and praising and pretty light on intellectual substance which, I guess, was a real crowd pleaser because the revival meetings became quite popular with a lot of people finding God and looking forward to the next event.

The good brother said that these fundamentalist Christians were for the most part dispensational premillennialists, which means, among other things, that God will make good on his promise to establish Jewish dominion over the world, which, Abraham said, will certainly be good for him and that he’s looking forward to it.

As I think about what these meetings might have been like, I think I could have enjoyed the energy and reverie, the coming together of like-minded people in a celebratory gathering. As long as no one asked me whose fault it was that apple got picked.

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God-likeness

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I was thinking back to my school days recently.  Doll school was really a lot less about acquiring information than it was about seeking truth and the nature of doll existence.  We spent a lot of time contemplating the big questions, you know, like, does the universe have a purpose, What can we know for sure, Why is there something instead of nothing, does evolution explain human nature, does the free market erode moral character?

One day we got to talking about Plato’s belief that universal, Ideal forms underlay all our observable phenomena; that the things we see around us as well as we, ourselves, are imperfect representations of these transcendent perfect Ideals.  So that, the apple there on the table is a manifestation of the Ideas of redness, roundness, hardness and if we were to bite into it sweetness or tartness-it is an imperfect representation of the Idea of Appleness.

Our professor, Leonard D., then got us thinking about what universal ideals were existent in each of us; imperfect as we know we are, he asked, what are some of the ideal forms each of us exhibit?

My immediate thoughts were to my physical appearance which I am fully aware are far from ideal, at least in terms of Beauty although that does seem to be a bit relative to the times.  But certainly there is more to me than that.  There’s my personality and intellect: I think I’m reasonably intelligent, pretty compassionate, somewhat humble and unassuming and mostly friendly.  And then there’s my sense of responsibility and social participation: I pretty well keep things clean and orderly and I usually do my best to be a functional member of our doll community.

So, when I tried to envision Ideal universal DeiDei-ness, I supposed she might be more beautiful, smarter, more caring, friendlier and altogether more god-like, which got me wondering what it meant to think of myself in terms of god.  Should I be humbled by the realization of my obvious inadequacies or do I think of my relative god-likeness as an ego boost?

Well, that was all quite some time ago but I still think about the dilemma occasionally and how my behavior might reflect one position or the other.  I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion there are places and times for both behaviors.

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Migrating South

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Granny Applehead has been talking about joining the migration of the elderly to the warmer climes of the south.  She says that, as one’s metabolism slows down with age warmth is a primary need for any sort of comfort to exist.  She yearns for the nice dry walks and roadways and the easy availability of golf carts allowing a mobility that the ice, cold and snow prohibit.

Besides, she says, a retirement community offers the benefits of social interaction with others of one’s own age and, often, sensibility.  Structured days playing mahjong, drinking tea and attending concerts and lectures are pleasant distractions from our ever present aches and pains.  Everything about it points toward enjoying quality time in our autumnal years and prepare us for the day when the warmth of the cremation furnace will return us, dust to dust, to our mother earth from whence we came.

She jokes with her friends that she might instead opt for Plastination so that her children will be able to enjoy her personage gathering dust in the corner of the living room (boy, does that sound familiar).  It seems kind of morbid to me but I guess it’s just her way of making lite of the impending reality; the unknowns of death everyone must face.

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