"Man can embody truth but he cannot know it."
-William Butler Yeats
-William Butler Yeats
I've been making a lot of posts over the last 24 hours or so, which I generally want to avoid doing, but sometimes things are just happening.
For thousands of years from Plato to Descartes, the fundamental activity of Man has been considered to be extracting rational truths through thought, a solitary activity of mind. If you think about it, that's complete bullshit. A master carpenter or sculptor for instance may be considered the master of a tool like a hammer, but does his knowledge consist of the abstract knowledge of the hammer's mass or molecular structure or exact dimensions or the exact degrees by which a facet on the hammer's head is different from some other geometric face on that hammer's head? Absolutely not. His knowledge of the hammer consists of the embodied experience of using that or similar hammers in the pursuit of his craft. In many cases, such as a musician with his chosen instrument, the artist may speak of a relationship with their tool, as one body apprehending another body repeatedly through the life of the musician. And this is very much the case, it is a relationship between the body of the musician and the body of the instrument. Not only is rational analysis unnecessary to this kind of knowing, it would be actually counterproductive, because in the ideal state the instrument becomes as if a part of his body and these two bodies together are aiming towards something else, in this case music. Thus when an animist speaks of a relationship to an inanimate object like a rock or a place, this is not really as alien an experience as it may seem, we have these sorts of relationships all the time. It is only alien to rational thought, not to life.
For thousands of years from Plato to Descartes, the fundamental activity of Man has been considered to be extracting rational truths through thought, a solitary activity of mind. If you think about it, that's complete bullshit. A master carpenter or sculptor for instance may be considered the master of a tool like a hammer, but does his knowledge consist of the abstract knowledge of the hammer's mass or molecular structure or exact dimensions or the exact degrees by which a facet on the hammer's head is different from some other geometric face on that hammer's head? Absolutely not. His knowledge of the hammer consists of the embodied experience of using that or similar hammers in the pursuit of his craft. In many cases, such as a musician with his chosen instrument, the artist may speak of a relationship with their tool, as one body apprehending another body repeatedly through the life of the musician. And this is very much the case, it is a relationship between the body of the musician and the body of the instrument. Not only is rational analysis unnecessary to this kind of knowing, it would be actually counterproductive, because in the ideal state the instrument becomes as if a part of his body and these two bodies together are aiming towards something else, in this case music. Thus when an animist speaks of a relationship to an inanimate object like a rock or a place, this is not really as alien an experience as it may seem, we have these sorts of relationships all the time. It is only alien to rational thought, not to life.
Many (perhaps most) people, you sit them down in front of paper and pencil and tell them to make art, they would be quite totally lost, and you can feel this lostness, like you don't know how to begin. You have never begun to feel out these materials, you and they have never properly been introduced in this way. Since I am an artist, I would proceed to draw and not think about the tools at all, but only what to draw and how to approach it. Perhaps I wouldn't even think that, I would just begin to improvise. Improvisation itself speaks deeply of these kinds of relationships: not a solitary intellect engaging with himself, but an artist or musician engaging with what is around him, the instrument, his fellow musicians, his audience. He no longer even thinks about the mechanics of the thing, he is attuned to the musical conversation. The music is his product in a sense, the sense that it wouldn't be what it is without his talented body, but in another sense it isn't his at all. It is the product of the space he finds himself in and who he finds himself with, because the musician in an improvisational set with other musicians is not focused on himself or his instrument or his mind but on the sonic dance of each with the other.
You can notice this when you sit down to chat with someone you are very attuned to, you think of things together that you might never have thought of separately, because you are sharing a space in which your minds are coming together in the world. This can happen with your encounters with animals and plants too, if you are encountering them as another body and not merely intellectually. You engage and react to one another inside this larger space of engaging and reacting and creating and manifesting existence.
One of my favorite recent experiences is when I discovered that the (multi-trunked) cedar tree that I always considered to be one tree was in fact two: one that I already had sort of a relationship with, and one that I didn't. When I started to get to know this second very different tree, I had a very very strange sensation looking up its trunk into its branches that I was suddenly standing in that same place before there were any people around. When that tree was young, very few human beings would have been around. I very concretely felt that I was no longer surrounded by suburb, but by wilderness. Now does that cedar tree go around thinking about the 1890's all the time? I very much doubt it, but in conversation with my body, that's what came out. Squirrels, since I have a cat the squirrels often chastise me and Mango alike, and I talk to them. Initially they don't care, they are just making their alarm sounds, but then they start trying to grok me out, figure where I stand in all this. We are at that moment part of a connected space that is both between and around us, the squirrel and I. We are part of a collaborative realm. I watch how he moves, he watches how I move. When I meet a new tree and get a vibe for what sort of tree person that tree is, it is not that trees generally go thinking about people much or how to engage them. They are probably as used to ignoring people as people are used to ignoring trees. And then suddenly some weirdo like me comes along and they are like, "you can see me? You see me. Hi!"
You can notice this when you sit down to chat with someone you are very attuned to, you think of things together that you might never have thought of separately, because you are sharing a space in which your minds are coming together in the world. This can happen with your encounters with animals and plants too, if you are encountering them as another body and not merely intellectually. You engage and react to one another inside this larger space of engaging and reacting and creating and manifesting existence.
One of my favorite recent experiences is when I discovered that the (multi-trunked) cedar tree that I always considered to be one tree was in fact two: one that I already had sort of a relationship with, and one that I didn't. When I started to get to know this second very different tree, I had a very very strange sensation looking up its trunk into its branches that I was suddenly standing in that same place before there were any people around. When that tree was young, very few human beings would have been around. I very concretely felt that I was no longer surrounded by suburb, but by wilderness. Now does that cedar tree go around thinking about the 1890's all the time? I very much doubt it, but in conversation with my body, that's what came out. Squirrels, since I have a cat the squirrels often chastise me and Mango alike, and I talk to them. Initially they don't care, they are just making their alarm sounds, but then they start trying to grok me out, figure where I stand in all this. We are at that moment part of a connected space that is both between and around us, the squirrel and I. We are part of a collaborative realm. I watch how he moves, he watches how I move. When I meet a new tree and get a vibe for what sort of tree person that tree is, it is not that trees generally go thinking about people much or how to engage them. They are probably as used to ignoring people as people are used to ignoring trees. And then suddenly some weirdo like me comes along and they are like, "you can see me? You see me. Hi!"
Perhaps sometimes we may find ourselves in a crowd, pointedly trying not to be seen or engaged, and then someone does for some reason, and it is like you suddenly snap into a different reality and this strange and maybe vaguely threatening presence is interrogating you about something, or asking you the time, and you are suddenly thrust into a very different space, a space that has become charged between you two.
What does all this tell us? That the founding worldview of Western civilization which we have been working with for 25 centuries, since Plato, is wrong. We are not disconnected subjects viewing impersonal objects. We are all subjects in an intersubjective space, an immersed space to which there is no outside, no external point of view to which we can absent ourselves. And this space itself is more than the sum of its individual parts, but can create things that were beyond any individual participant. We are committed into the world from the beginning, we navigate through it with our whole bodies, caring and daring and regarding things as important and worth engaging in. Life ceases to have meaning when we cease to have something outside ourselves to care about and be engaged in, whether it is the collaboration of the musician with his instruments and fellow artists, a cook creating dishes with her whole culinary experience and not with recipe books, or a man who makes friends with trees. It is this connection to something external, and ultimately to something that transcends the human, that puts joy and purpose into our movements. These are not mere things, there are no mere things in the world. We are all dancing through this mysterium called life, and together creating new facets to reality and new interactions and music and strife.
What does all this tell us? That the founding worldview of Western civilization which we have been working with for 25 centuries, since Plato, is wrong. We are not disconnected subjects viewing impersonal objects. We are all subjects in an intersubjective space, an immersed space to which there is no outside, no external point of view to which we can absent ourselves. And this space itself is more than the sum of its individual parts, but can create things that were beyond any individual participant. We are committed into the world from the beginning, we navigate through it with our whole bodies, caring and daring and regarding things as important and worth engaging in. Life ceases to have meaning when we cease to have something outside ourselves to care about and be engaged in, whether it is the collaboration of the musician with his instruments and fellow artists, a cook creating dishes with her whole culinary experience and not with recipe books, or a man who makes friends with trees. It is this connection to something external, and ultimately to something that transcends the human, that puts joy and purpose into our movements. These are not mere things, there are no mere things in the world. We are all dancing through this mysterium called life, and together creating new facets to reality and new interactions and music and strife.
Don't miss this. You are not alone, we are all doing this together. You, me, the guy next door, the squirrel, the tree. And who knows what new doors in the world, previously closed, will open to the one who is able to see where the doors are. Master artists are master artists because they can expose new potentialities in life that were hidden to the rest of us, the potential in a piece of wood or a stone that only he could see, because he engaged that material differently from us. This is not a thing restricted to art, it is part of life itself.
I am intensely curious to find out what new thing will manifest tomorrow, what new thing we will find together, out of this great mysterious becoming. :)
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