Change
My father told of a Chicago he knew before the advent of the automobile. He lived from the time of horse and buggy to the moon landing, and such a span of change always impressed me. It has made me wonder what will be the markers that define my own span. There have been many possibilities, but I have come to think that we live in an era of such profound change that there will be only one marker dividing our time, the era before and after the internet, or, more broadly, the era before and after the advent of the digital age. Already people speak of those who are native born to this new time and those who are immigrants, having arrived here from another country, with a different mother tongue and a foreign culture.
Many years back, I was impressed by the ideas of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who wrote about evolution. He made the distinction between the human brain and the human mind, the former being the bit of organic matter residing in each individual’s skull. The human mind, on the other hand, comprises all of the mental constructs ever devised by human brains–all the words, music, ideas of self, images, objects, dreams, tools–it is the repository and source of all the cultural artifacts that shape our perception of the world. Each culture is a subset of mind, and each brain born within a particular culture lives and grows within that portion of the human mind a given culture encompasses. Teilhard thought of the mind as another sphere that encases the planet–like the lithosphere, the biosphere and the atmosphere. He called it the noosphere from the Greek word for mind.
Earlier, I was writing about the "cultural language" with which an artist "speaks". I was using the analogy of the spoken or written word to describe the interior process of making something. For example, the visual artist has a certain visual vocabulary, a certain visual grammar and tools that are used to make a canvas "say something". In many ways, the analogy of language is misleading because we naturally tie language with words, and a work of art expresses so much more of what it is to be human than that narrow range which words can reach. Even poetry, which uses words as its medium, gains its power from the way a word or phrase can carry reverberations of significance from beyond the prosaic letter. Art is the expression of the entire person–emotional, intuitive, rational, physical and spiritual. It puts blood in things. Ultimately, its medium is all elements of the noosphere that are at play within a given culture.
In previous eras, individual cultures were like valleys set between high mountains. Travel was difficult, and few brains made the journey from one to another. The Internet is a machine that can carry an individual brain to unprecedented expanses of the noosphere, and the artist today stands before a freedom that can easily be overwhelming. I am an immigrant. For what it’s worth, let me say this:
It is important to keep in mind the nature of the internet. It is bits of data with no necessary cohesion. Bits of data can be cut, pasted and combined with other bits without the slightest straining of ligaments and tissue. They are weightless, but human culture is a gravitational field. I recall well my experience when I first came in contact with classical European paintings in their original setting in a Cathedral. I had seen similar work on museum walls or in books, but here I was made aware that these works were part of a larger ecosystem. People worshiped before Piero della Francesca. They did not worship the artist; rather, the work has a life and purpose within that environment that makes their museum counterparts seem like dead butterflies pinned to a collector’s board.
We surf the web, but eventually one must break the hypnosis of the surface and embody depth. There is thrill in the freedom from gravity and, especially when young, a sense of sufficiency in the always new, the always being born. I now believe there is great wisdom in this, and it is always true; just as spring is always true, and just as with maturity comes a sense of return and the desire to put aside the things of youth. The trick is to know the time and be neither old with too much haste nor young with too much foolishness. The advance of the human spirit is always oppositional–first left, then right; first contraction, and then the expanse. In the end, as the French say, one wants to fly like a bird, not like a feather. I believe it will matter less which traditions one chooses to embody, but it will matter a great deal that one be able to incarnadine work into a living environment.
On the other hand, one wants to fly like a bird, and not like a chunk of lead. It is a good thing to master a tradition, but a mistake to ignore how a tradition thereby masters you. It is a common thing for artists to desire at times to "prove their chops" by taking up some traditional style that can allow them to demonstrate proficiency in an easily identifiable craft. In times of rapid change, there are many who will praise them for it. People will desire solidity and want the old time art just as they will the old time religion. It reinforces the comfortable ground, even as it inexorably shifts away. It is a long held tenet of the spirit that the rigid adherence to some external dogma is dead bones. In all things, people will so strive after the ought to be as to become blind to that which is and so cut themselves off from the joy in the green heart of creation. Life is a turning within and learning anew this present place. So, it does no good to overly revere the past. It is enough to know that in their time they were alive. Build upon the structures thus provided. It is the responsibility of the artist to give expression to this world and this time.
Love and gravity are at least analogous, and similar laws apply. My advice is this: attain mass, but keep your distance. Accept your masters with gratitude, but may they be few and quickly surpassed. You need the ground to make the leap. Leap.
