 Recently,
in a communication with UK artist Andrew Campbell, I suggested that if
I were to be an artist it would be as a portraitist of miniatures,
drawing something tiny enough (an aphid, the knuckle of one finger, a
bird's eye, a single thread of a spider's web wet with rain reflected
by the sun) you could actually hope to really capture the true essence
(not in the photographic sense, but in the artistic/metaphysical sense)
in the moment, of that instant of 'Now Time' I've written about
when time stops and simultaneously expands to become eternal. I
wondered whether if you did this to a sufficient degree you could
actually create a "portrait
that becomes so miniature that it becomes the truth".
Andrew liked the phrase, and we dug deeper into this possibility. I wrote:
As a writer, the following comment
by ee cummings is, I think, the equivalent to my belief in a "portrait
that becomes so miniature that it becomes the truth":
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means
working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly
imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like
somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time -
and whenever we do it, we are not poets.
If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and
working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem,
you'll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who
wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow
up the world -- unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and
work and fight till you die.
One line of one poem. Can't get much more miniature than that. These lines are
portraits of reality, not imitations, not figments, not representations. They are the
truth.
I went on to say:
Man cannot grasp, and is intolerant of, complexity. As Watterson says
(via Calvin & Hobbes) it offends us that nature, Gaia, is
indifferent to us, that we humans cannot know and understand
everything, reduce it to simplicity. Religions, I believe, are of two
varieties: (a) humanist religions: those that attempt, absurdly, to
oversimplify everything, and fiercely, stubbornly disregard everything
that does not fit within that simple model, and (b) spiritualist
religions: those that personify complexity by imposing on it
something larger that is still uniquely human -- transcendent supernatural 'beings'
that represent and reinforce human ethics and behaviours, behaviours
that are archetypally and invariably (like Star Trek aliens) simplistic and human oid.
The first variety denigrates nature, ignores it, refuses it. The second
variety worships supernature as 'above nature'. Both types are
not only un-natural, they are nature- hostile. They both rephrase
the understanding of the universe as simple and unnatural, controlled
by humans or human-types. Why are we so desperate to have someone
in control, someone or someones who are infinitely wise and
somehow like us?
My philosophy is not spiritual, and the Gaia that I believe
self-manages all life on Earth is not human or human-type. Gaia is not
to be revered or treated as sacred. Gaia just works, in both
senses of the word. Gaia is all-of-us, connected, collectively, evolved
and evolving to sustain all-of-us, connected, collectively. Gaia is massively complex.
Far beyond our full understanding, just as the cells in my lungs lack a
full understanding of the workings of my 'whole' body, of which they
yet are an integral part. Gaia is real, not
spiritual. A brief thirty millennia ago we acquired the insane conceit
(based on some short-term modest success) that we could somehow
self-manage ourselves, apart from Gaia, and could even control and
master Gaia in our self-interest without destroying 'us-all' (I have
occasionally called Gaia 'she', but that is blatant pandering to
spiritualists and I'm trying to stop -- the only appropriate way to
describe Gaia is in the first person omni-plural, not the third person
singular).
Gaia aspires not only to maximize the quanta, diversity and balance of life-forms on
Earth, but their individual and collective joy and wonder. Why? Because
the rules by which Gaia self-manages (rules over which 'we-all' have no
control) are that creatures who are full of joy and wonder want to
live more than those who are not, and therefore do. By
contrast, creatures who are fierce, intelligent and/or prolific have a
temporary evolutionary advantage over those who are not, but that
advantage is not sustainable -- fierce, intelligent, prolific creatures
who have no joy or wonder have no felt purpose to stay alive, so they
don't. My evidence for this audacious assertion is my personal
observation that, except for us dissociated humans, I see and feel joy
and wonder everywhere in other species, from aphids
to ravens to spring peeper frogs to whitetail deer.
Those creatures live in Now Time, and their lives are hence 'eternal',
outside of (clock) time. You get closer and closer to these creatures,
then just for an instant you become connected with them, with Gaia, and
you look and -- there, now -- is reality, the truth, not the
representation, not it, but us-all, Gaia. Our task, as artist,
poet, philosopher, is to capture and convey that tiny, instant, eternal
truth.
In ten or fifteen years of hard work, one line.
-----
I met yesterday with Jeremy Heigh of Siftstar fame, and we talked a bit about complexity. We agreed that:
- While children seem to embrace complexity, adults seem to
loathe it. We wondered: At what point in our lives does this change,
and why?
- As Picasso said, all children are born artists, and those who survive as artists
in their adult lives somehow manage not to 'grow out of' that ability like the
rest of us do.
It seems to me, therefore, that the idea of great art becoming truth, becoming 'real',
and the idea of children starting out as artists and
appreciators of complexity, and then becoming inexorably neither, are
connected. Also related is the acceptance, as we 'mature', of religions,
either humanist or spiritual super-humanist, anti-natural moral
codes that reject Gaia and the
reality of the interconnectedness of all life on Earth. Perhaps these
religions act as artificial, man-made 'hearts' to keep us going, to
replace the natural ones that had to be removed because, in
civilization culture, they wouldn't stop bleeding.
What deranged madness grips (most of) us, what horrific violence so
afflicts us, at some point in our young lives, that we lose our
artistic capacity, our capacity for appreciating and embracing complexity, most of our capacity to imagine, and our
ability to see and live a third way that is neither
rational (scientific, logical, intellectual) nor moral (religious, emotional, spiritual), but rather
natural (intuitive, sensual, perceptual)? Why don't we even notice the resultant dissociation from
reality? And how can we bear 'realizing' how much we have lost of what makes us 'us' (and 'us-all'), to the point we have to
fight every moment of our lives in the hopes of recapturing just 'one line' of it?
Perhaps when Eliot said "human kind cannot bear very much reality", he was telling us that, because we cannot conceive reality (it can only be perceived), we cannot, as we 'mature', understand it, and we therefore resent it, find it unbearable, intolerable, humiliating, terrifying.
A
complex, conceptually unfathomable Gaia does not and cannot 'fit'
within the rational and moral models that man has constructed in his
brain to make sense of his world. In fact, no complex (unordered), adaptive, 'unknowable' system that manages itself and
is indifferent to human intervention and even human existence, fits
within our rational and moral models. For that reason, complexity (and
Gaia specifically) is not only resented, but intolerable, in the same way that the mere concept of Earth not
being the centre of the universe was intolerable at the dawn of the
Renaissance. We have 'reinvented' prehistory as one of outrageous
disorder full of cannibals, fights to the death for no purpose,
constant deprivation and suffering, beasts 'red in tooth and claw'. But
as Jonas Salk said "If all the insects on earth
disappeared, within fifty years all life on Earth would disappear. If
all
humans disappeared, within fifty years life on Earth would flourish as
never
before." No matter how we try to destroy, rationalize or moralize it
out of existence, Gaia, the real, natural universe all around us (and
still, dormant, within us) continues to defy us, defy our understanding
and attempts to control it.
You may have read my self-confessional article saying that I believe
that I am damaged*,
a shadow of my former self. Somehow (perhaps there is a bit of artist in me) I sensed
this draining of capacity happening to me as it was occurring, and ever
since I have been grieving its loss. Perhaps unlike most people I am
just unable to get over this grief and get on with my new shallow life
living inside my head. Perhaps I am romanticizing this loss -- a
butterfly lamenting the loss of those hundreds of caterpillar feet,
when I should be rejoicing (re-Joyce-ing?) in the giving up of the
ability to dance in favour of the ability to fly. But somehow I feel I
have lost these capacities in return for nothing except an increased ability to cope with civilization, its demands and its restrictions.
This draining of capacity, this detachment from Gaia, this dissociation
from the instincts, from the senses, from the perceptions, from the
reality of Now Time, this terrible loss, is what we call socialization.
I'm
not angry about having been subjected to this process. We do what we
must, and this is the price of maintaining, for a little while longer,
our fragile, man-made, anti-nature civilization. Heretics must be
converted or suppressed, because the very tenets of the society that
6.5 billion people now depend on are at stake. If we were to accept
that self-contained human societies living as much as possible outside
of nature, managed by human hierarchies as well as possible, borrowing
massively from billions of years of stored resources, were non-viable, when there is now no other possible way
to keep those 6.5 billion people alive for even a short period of time,
we would have complete social collapse, anarchy, the chaos that our
rational and moral belief systems so abhor. This is unthinkable.
Let the artists and the children perceive such realities and horrors, for awhile, if they must. We'll get to them soon enough.
*(and perhaps everyone is, though I wouldn't presume to say so -- well, yes I would, but I suppose I shouldn't)
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
