being blind to what’s behind
I’m borderline bored today. Read some of Sources of the Self but there’s too much talk of God. Read about how he thinks we may be in a watershed time (written though in the late 1980s) and spoke of how we have a hard time imagining old ideas like the divine right of kings. I’m at the point where I have a hard time imagining God ideas – although I remember faith, I’m working with a memory of an experience, which is different than actually feeling it as real today. It’s like my thoughts last week on myth – as something we’ve overcome, or something which served us and does no longer.I must say I’m particularly animated by the idea that I live in a complicated and technologically sophisticated civilisation. This is something Firefly helped bring to my awareness, through their contextualization of humans spread out across a new solar system, having packed up everything and moved it off world, where they felt free to begin the process of ecological destruction to build complicated early 21st Century cities all over again since there was now many worlds of resources at their disposal. And how Joss Whedon talked of wanting a show that was about ‘us’ – early 21st Century Americans (including Canadians) and revisiting the Western. And so you have a future five hundred years away in which everyone is using things we’re familiar with, like keyboards (no mysterious interfaces like on Star Trek and printed tee-shirts, and everything very familiar to us, as if we have in many ways plateaued, similarly to the way the candle and travel by horse was familiar to people across the centuries before the lightbulb.
So, the idea that I’m living in an emerging global civilization, which is so complex, but which enables me to do almost anything, I find interesting and exciting. To be here when it’s all new and fresh. And what this all means opposed to the Old World, and old world art and culture.
As an artist, I’ve struggled to find my voice and my place within the culture. I’ve also been caught up in the myopia of industry – to participate in the segregation, to go to openings, to party with fellow cultural workers, to read the poorly written and poorly thought documents, all the while not seeing the forest for the trees, and all the while looking in a rear-view mirror as it were: things from the past, and cultural movements better seen through hindsight. Getting lost in what it all means.
We are cut off in the end, from the experience of our lives, what it means to be alive now and to be comfortable with our selves. I sense a great trembling before uncertainty in this regard – the Buddhists who tell us we can be happy now and who want to enlighten us, wake us up to the wonder already here in our lives, but simply getting us to pay attention to our minds and our thinking – this is all seen with a sense of skepticism, but also, I think, there is a deep nostalgia for misery. So used to complaining and to being entertained through moving picture stories, we fear the length of our lives and the prospect of being bored.
Northrop Frye’s article on boredom vs. leisure summarizes the cultural wars I’ve witnessed in my still young life, and in the end lays it all on education … which broadens our perspectives to take in more than what the narrow view offers, the narrow view being by definition limited and quickly exhausted, so we find ourselves bored. The leisured, on the other hand, move through life being productive, pursuing their interests and by default contributing to society and civilization.
But what does any of this mean? What is it to contribute to humanity or civilization or to society? Those ideas were dissected by the post-structuralists which encouraged what Waggar called credicide, draining from our lives the sense of meaning which animated our imaginations and hence our lives – gave us that sense of certainty we seem to desire.
Perhaps our need for certainty is genetic, stemming from the days when uncertainty about yonder hill could get one eaten by a leopard. If that’s the case, we need a technology to deal with it. However, like our obesity problem, we’ve fallen victim to ancient biologies – comfort foods being comforting because of their fat content, which was very useful in scavenging days, but no longer. We now know this through science, and the concept of calories can help us control what we eat, in addition we know that to burn extra calories we need to exercise. But do we have similar knowledge to help us live with uncertainty? Is Buddhism such a technology?
The question is not one of who to make art for – fellow artists and further for collectors. But how to make something so that for the next thousand years, anyone (or at least, some) can see it or read it or whatever, and know that I was a human being just like they are, that I felt as they do sometimes, and in so doing, help bridge the gap of time, help them feel like they are part of the bigger story of civilization. So today, in 2005, I can read St. Augustine’ Confessions and recognize a fellow human being, and learn something of the context of those times. Again, people are still reading Tolstoy’s War & Peace which is set two hundred years ago, and in the process are learning a greater context.
If myth has died out in our age, one sees how that narrative culture we live in has replaced it. The past century was one resembling the wipe of a movie – the fade in or the fade out, how briefly the two images are combined in one still. The Old World of horses and carriages, inkwells and candles; of killing whales for oil, was replaced by a world where we dug oil out of the ground, to fuel our combustible engines for what was at first called a horseless carriage, and inkwells disappeared into speciality shops and art supply stores. Myth died and was replaced by the novel and movie, either projected in two to three hour stories on a large screen (replacing live theatre) or was divided up into half hour to an hour segments for the television machine of living rooms. Poetry, which was exulted for so long in so many cultures, disappeared too into specialty markets, replaced by the lyrics of pop music. Firefly suggests this new world will be with us for another five hundred years.
Picking up on the rear-view-mirror comment: one thinks of the side mirrors, and this past week I was trying to imagine what vision for a rabbit must be like, with it’s eyes on the side of it’s head, forward and backward in their periphery. How would their brains assemble the picture? Our eyes both face forward, overlapping, giving us and animals like us (apes and cats and so forth) binocular vision. I imagine something of what a rabbit experiences could be seen by placing two side view mirrors in front of us, at the angle so that we see the sweep behind, and are blinded near what we experience as front.
If hindsight then, is 20/20, one should further argue that this is the case for animals. The whole point of our lives since the beginning has seemed to be better than the animals. To be human is to see what’s in front of you clearly, and to be blind to what’s behind.