Escaping from the cage

 

I am still searching for a more significant way to visualise what I'm thinking about. I'm always trying to find new links between my various interests, my butterfly mind is looking for ways to visualise embodied thinking, but at the same time is trying to respond to the fact that I have always enjoyed reading graphic novels and comics, but then I begin thinking about the fact that the quantum universe is vital to our understanding of the invisible worlds that surround us, and then there's what I understand as the Wyrd, whereby all the events of your life are interconnected by some sort of invisible thread, and this perhaps is something also vitally important to the establishment of my practice, and I still haven't worked through the full implications of Abstract Expressionism....... I'm lost in the fact that the interconnection between matter and energy is realised every time a leaf unfurls itself, but also in the way we use our external senses to perceive, this alongside the role of interoception, unfortunately makes for a flow of everything and a conceptual grasp of the importance of nothing. At least the realisation that all is flux and that being and doing are far more important than naming and fixing, keeps me in a permanent state of wonder.

It's always good to find a fellow traveller who has also been puzzled by what its all about, even if that person is so famous that they have become a cliché. 

In 'The World as I See It', Einstein wrote:

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. . . . The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self . . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

Calaprice, A. (2005) The New Quotable Einstein Princeton: Princeton University P. 206.

It's good to see that Einstein also thought that our personal experiences, thoughts and feelings, should be understood as interconnected with everything and not separate from the rest of the world. As he puts it, the optical delusion of consciousness is a kind of prison for us, and in being caged, we tend to build cages for other things too. We fall into our own traps, still not recognising them as the cages they are.  

We make cages both for ourselves and other creatures. 

We have gridded the world

We have tried to develop the cosmic grid

We have also gridded ourselves

A caged mentally ill man

We have invented the grid of control, both as a formal principle and as a construction made of real metal bars. This is a high-functioning understanding of consciousness, and it emotionally aligns us  to the unforeseen implications of our own actions. As the philosopher Epictetus taught;

“In our school, we picture the philosopher’s goal more or less as follows: bring the will in line with events, so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen. Pursue it, and the reward is that neither desire nor aversion will fail in their aims; and we will fill all our roles in society—as son, father, brother, citizen, man, woman, neighbour, fellow voyager, ruler or ruled—without conflict, fear or rancour.” 

One of the defining characteristics of the Stoics was an unwavering commitment to focusing only on what was in their direct control—their will, their actions, their effort. This taking responsibility for your own actions and becoming aware of the things that you cant control and thus not bothering with those things, seems pretty grown up, but it suggests that discipline is central to how we ought to live our lives and in that very conscious control, it seems to me that we sow the seeds of Fascism. Dictatorial leaders, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the subordination of individual interests for the perceived benefit of the group, are all possible outcomes that can begin, simply with the decision to 'take back control'. 

From Doctor Strange

There is a very different type of control exhibited when you begin to dance. You need to emphasise with your partner, and to pick up the rhythm that is now in place and the controls you need are ones of refinement in response, the fine tuning of yourself to the world, rather than the iron will of self determination. I see dancing as process for an animist connection with the universe; can you waltz with the seas, tango with the stars and twist to the trees?

Cosmic dancing

The image that opens this post was one I made as I thought about how we might attune ourselves to the wider universe and of responses to both micro and macro visions of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It was also an attempt to capture a moment within a cosmic dance that can be both planetary and human in scale, a thought that is both related to our clinker like internal architecture and the dark external sea within which we all float. This being a flow of forces that are as much a homage to the figure of Eternity as initially drawn in the Doctor Strange comics of the 1960s, by Steve Ditko and then by Gene Colan; as a reflection on the universe that was derived from the Chinese God Pan Gu’s gigantic corpse. In death his eyes became the sun and moon, his blood formed seas, his hair grew into trees and plants, his sweat turned to rivers, his body became soil and human beings, most interestingly, evolved from the parasites that infested Pan Gu’s body. A reminder if there ever was a need for one, that we are not some God's favourite children. 

The image of Pan Gu allowed Chinese thinkers to develop images of the universe that were in some ways like a Russian doll. I. e. that the macro and the micro are both connected and in many ways mirror each other, in a similar way to the climbing of a mountain being for a human like crossing a man's back is to an insect. I have remarked in an earlier post that several cultures at different times in history have come to a conclusion, that there is an analogy between the human body and the structure of the cosmos. In European traditions the head is analogous to the coelum empyreum or highest heaven. The chest to the coelum aethereum which is occupied by the planets and wherein the heart is analogous to the sun and the legs to the dark earthy mass (molis terreæ) which supports the universe. This layering of meaning is useful, as it allows us to find moments of epiphany in the everyday. The Chinese word for 'spirit', 'shen' offers us another way to think about how this idea might work. 'Shen' can be translated as 'spirit', but it has three distinct spheres of meaning. The meanings differ in degree or realm of application, but not in kind. 'Shen' is at a human scale, our "spirit” or “psyche" or the life force. 'Shen' is at the scale of our environment, and refers to the invisible 'spirits' that surround us; things intimately involved in the affairs of the world, but beyond the human realm. These spirits are associated with objects like stars, rocks, trees, mountains, and streams; they exercise a direct influence on things in this world and provide an animist framework for everyday life. 'Shen' in its third meaning can be translated as “spiritual”; in the sense of things beyond us inspiring awe or wonder and it cannot be comprehended through normal concepts. 

The fact that these three fields of meaning (“spirit,” “spirits,” and “spiritual”) can be traced to a single word has important implications, it indicates that there is no unbridgeable gap separating humans from gods or nature. All are composed of the same basic stuff, 'qi', and there is no ontological distinction between them. I would hope that this awareness allows us to grasp moments of epiphany in our everyday lives, that it helps us to create deeply meaningful and rhizomatically interconnected structures and gives to existence a flavour that wants us to taste life in its full potential.

For myself the cage of consciousness is that of perspective. 

The single eye, the tunnel of looking that is epitomised by the camera, is my idea of a visual trap or cage.

Advanced perspective is often compared to the photographic viewpoint. 

The screen of the camera is not unlike the grill through which you look into the prison cell

The camera viewpoint fixes the world down

Perspective lines pin down the world, just as as we do when we pin down a butterfly

Every photograph hides within it a holding grid

David Hockney was well aware of these issues when he decided to work on his photographic 'Joiners' which challenged the traditional perspectival spaces that had by now become the norm when people were thinking about how the world looked. A multidimensional viewpoint challenges the conventions of representation.

David Hockney: The Desk: 1982

However I'm very aware that an artist's work is very unlikely to change the viewpoint of a mass of people who now seem to use the selfie as a way of confirming their own existence. At first I found it a mild annoyance that people would step in front of paintings and get themselves photographed in front of them, but then I realised these moments were being treated not unlike the butterfly being pinned to a board; they were collected, owned moments, that you could stack up and place in a vault somewhere, to be added up and counted, rather than experienced and enjoyed. 

I must get out and walk about and draw more. When I do, all these worries quickly disappear. 

Moments

See also: 

The grid as a cage

Using viewfinders

Macro and micro embodied networks