Do I read too much?

What does SHE think?

That question is instantly joined by another: Why do I read? Then there is, of course, What else could or should I be doing? And right away we can discount Sunny Juliet’s opinion, since hers is a distinctly self-serving perspective. In her point of view (I cannot imagine I’m misreading her on this), all the hours I’m focused on objects held in my hands is robbing her of my attention, and there’s no amusement for her in watching me, either, as what I am “doing” seems so little like doing anything.

 

Oh, my dear, impatient, so patient companion!

 

Even with a beef bone, she hopes for play with momma.

What do I seek in all this reading? That’s the “why” question. One answer is understanding. I want to understand as much as I can of the knottiest, most insoluble human predicaments, problems to which I will never have a full answer as long as I live. That answer surely elicits another “Why?” What is the good of understanding that leads no further?

 

Oh, tree in the garden! What knowledge did its fruit offer? 

 

I see different kinds of hungers for knowledge and understanding in different human beings. The pragmatically scientific want to take things apart, see how they work, and then do things that have not been done before. They are eager to change the world. Why? Sometimes for the betterment of mankind, sometimes just “Because we can.” Around those seekers, always, are hangers-on and parasites with no intrinsic hunger of their own for the knowledge and inventions, who do, however, care very much for the wealth that can be generated, wealth multiplying itself into the future, if only one makes a reservation early enough on the investment bandwagon. Theirs is hunger for accumulation, which is qualitatively different from hunger for knowledge. 

 

And yet, honestly, don't most of us have a certain hunger for accumulation? I look around my life and see art on walls, books on shelves, stacks of photograph albums, dishes of stones and fossils, and physical representations of beautiful living things.

Beauty and memories, memories and beauty. Objects that invite my eyes and my hands, pages that carry me over oceans to inhabit other lives and other times and also let me relive my own past years. Associations carried by these material objects are my real accumulated wealth, the objects themselves only carriers.

Does the quest for understanding life look more to the past than to the future? “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” wrote Kierkegaard. We do seek hope in the possibility of applying our understanding to the future. For example, restricting the question of “how we came to be where we are” to immediate family and acquaintance rather than society as a whole, I can see errors I have made and try to avoid repeating them in what remains of my time on earth. Sadly, human societies, with longer spans than individuals but always peopled by those shorter-lived humans, have difficulty learning from previous generations. Somewhere in his book, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the insatiably curious physicist wrote that we live our lives, see where we’ve gone wrong, and then die. For some reason, the simple truth of that statement, the flat-footed way he phrased it, amuses me no end. That's us, all right! And is that how it will be with our species as a whole? I wonder. They came into existence, succeeded magnificently for a while, then messed it up and went extinct. Maybe. Understanding too late--.

 

Besides understanding, however, there’s no denying the strong element of escape in much of my reading, and often these hungers pull in decidedly opposite directions. When the world is too much with me and I want to drown out the clamor of politicians who have once again invaded my thoughts with one outrageous act or speech after another, my hunger for escape pulls away from my hunger for understanding, and I can only feed them in turn, first one and then the other, these jealous rivals, setting aside Jimmy Carter’s Keeping Faith for The Moffats, by Eleanor Estes.

Looking for understanding,

the search continues.

Caveat emptor: I’ll stop here for a moment to remind myself and my readers that naming desires, like naming emotions, distorts our inner reality. They are not things and do not occur singly, and my attempts to tease out separate strands from an inchoate stream can be only a partial and misleading picture. All analysis distorts. Keep that in mind, please, and what I write here will not seem, perhaps, quite so absurd!

The open road! Escape!

And now I’m thinking that understanding and escape are very earthbound dimensions of reading hunger, very, very human, and that there is something else, woven tightly into these hungers and yet also very different, and that is our longing to live beyond the limits of our individual life spans, not only longer but also larger. You see instantly how the desire to expand beyond cannot be separated from hunger for understanding or for escape—and yet, do you also see that it cannot be completely expressed by those two hungers? We want something eternal, deathless. No theologian, however, I'll just leave that teasing suggestion right there.

 

I have more to say about the comfort of remembering, which also lets us slip time's constraints. 

 

Through the Looking Glass brings back, for me, the excitement I felt when I ran into the kitchen to tell my mother, “It’s a chessboard!” Lewis Carroll had not stated it so baldly, and my parents had not explained the story to me that way, but all of a sudden, reading it to myself, I had seen the chessboard when the Knight told Alice he could go no farther because he had reached the end of his move, and I had to run and tell my mother, who responded, “You didn’t know that?” No, I didn’t, but the excitement of my discovery was not dampened by her amusement, because I discovered it for myself, as I still remember with pleasure. 

 

If I were to pick up right now, today, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, it would carry me back to the Parc Monceau in Paris (as merely thinking of the book carries me back), especially if I had the French paperback. One summer, day after day I went to the Parc Monceau with that book in hand, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’ être, lost in an Eastern European world inside the landscaped French world around me in my dream city far from home. 

 

And Wind in the Willows! I read that book to my son, giving the different animal characters different voices, and we had a wonderful time, which he still remembers. Then when the Artist and I had a layover in the Detroit airport on our way home from France, we read to each other (from a battered paperback copy that is here in my house somewhere, but where?) the chapter “Dolce Domum,” tears streaming down our faces, while all around us business people busily consulted their Blackberries and the contents of their briefcases. 

Are you still with me? Are you as tired as Sunny Juliet of my egghead ruminations? “Momma, get real!”

 

Real is snow in thick flurries and wind that drifts it across roads!

Well, here’s what was real for me on Monday evening as the blizzard swirled and on Tuesday morning when darkness had not as yet retreated: I was reading, for the first time in years, Jim Harrison’s novel, Dalva. First published in 1988, Dalva is written in the first person, the first and third sections in a woman’s voice, and what inspired me to revisit this book in 2025 was the new collection of Jim’s work in French translation that concentrates on his women characters, both in first-person stories and in third-person works with central female characters.

I have to admit that when Dalva first came out, it was hard for me to “hear” the female narrator’s voice, what with Jim’s own gravelly, very masculine speaking voice so familiar to my ear. Reading the book now is a very different experience. For one thing, Jim’s speaking voice has been gone for nine years, and he had been gone from Michigan longer than that, gone to live in Montana and Arizona. But also I am 37 years older than when I first read this novel. Thirty-seven years of varied life experience, shall we say, gives me a much richer perspective, and now Dalva’s voice comes through strong and clear to me, and I am loving this book, truly loving it, and have a much deeper appreciation for what the author accomplished, not only in writing from a woman’s point of view but in speaking so many truths.

 

It is somewhat a mystery to me how the rich can feel so utterly fatigued and victimized.

... 

 

Now there’s a specific banality to rage as a reaction, an unearned sense of cleansing virtue.

... 

 

The tomatoes looked as if they were suffocating in the glass jars, livid red and suffering.

... 

 

…I had told him that I was without a specific talent, other than that of curiosity, and he saw that as a large item. It is terrible to assume life is one thing, only to discover it is another. A highly mobile curiosity gives you the option of looking into alternatives. 

 

There is also, I must admit (Another admission? Is this post becoming overly confessional?) my love for southeast Arizona (a love that took me by surprise), and the way the mountains and high desert haunt my northern Michigan winter finds solace in Harrison’s descriptions of places not far from my former winter stomping grounds in Cochise County. He was just a couple of mountain ranges west and south. Hackberry trees along dry streambeds, mesquite on overgrazed acreage, eroded gulches, alligator juniper at higher elevations—all that. I came to know such country intimately.

How much poorer my present life would be had I not come back to re-read this novel! How many hungers it satisfies!

 

I would defend my answer to my own original question by noting that I spend no time whatsoever watching television and none drinking in bars, although as a word-addicted, dream-addled, introverted widow I do not hold my priorities up as superior to anyone else’s. All I’m saying is that reading is a priority in my life, and this is where I look for comfort and strength and beauty and understanding.

Also, never fear, Sunny and I manage a lot of dog-and-mom time, indoors and out!

 

Why Don't All Americans Trust Science?

The end of a robin's life -- why?

What Is Science?

The scare quotes around “science” are intentional, because – think about it – it’s such a vague term, isn’t it? What’s behind it, or, to use a different image, under its umbrella? I thought I’d start by doing a search for “what is science” and see what popped up, and this is the first site my search yielded: “Understanding How Science Really Works.”

The first screen begins with a broad statement: “Science is both a body of knowledge and a process.” Okay, good beginning. Facts and a way of gathering them? The site goes on to say that science is “exciting,” “useful,” “ongoing,” and “a global human endeavor,” but we could say that about many human activities, couldn’t we? We have to click to get to other screens and more specific answers to the original question. Pursuing the question, then, we are told that scientists seek explanations of phenomena in the natural world by means of observation, analysis of evidence, and the testing of hypotheses.

I appreciate the way this site lays out the limits of science, acknowledging that science cannot make moral or aesthetic judgments, cannot deal with the “supernatural” (not a big concern of mine), nor can it tell human beings how scientific knowledge should be used. The first and third limitations are ones I take very seriously. As philosophers say, “‘Should’ implies ‘can,’ but ‘can’ does not imply ‘should,’” i.e., we are not obligated beyond what is possible for us but just any possible course of action isn’t necessarily one that’s good to follow. And while we may look to science for certain relevant facts, we can’t turn to it for decisions about how we should live.

For a shorter definition of science, look here. What do you think of the definition? Did you read what is included under “methodology”? I’ll come back to this shortly, but first there is the question of public fear and mistrust of science.

So What’s the Problem?

Is it only ignorance and superstition that explain so many people these days backing away from science like nervous, trailer-shy horses? Many scientific issues are so complex, it’s true, that only the most advanced practitioners in their very narrow fields even understand the questions posed. I once worked in an office that had a “Science for Citizens” program among its many projects, but there is a limit to how far such a program can go.

Does human irrationality come into the picture? Doubtless, on some issues. Give me statistics until the cows come home about how much safer I am in an airplane than in a car, and I’ll continue to approach commercial flight with trepidation that rarely assails me on the road.

The way we’ve always done things, what we’re used to, what we learned back in school, etc. can all get in the way of our accepting new scientific knowledge, but I can’t help thinking there’s a lot more than that going on and that “science” and its staunchest defenders sometimes make serious public relations problems for themselves. Claiming intellectual superiority over the whole world is not a way to win hearts and minds.

For some people, “science” has become a religion. Again I use scare quotes intentionally, because if there’s anything science should never be, it’s religion. When “science” is used to cut questions short rather than to respond respectfuly, it comes off as dogma.

Science gives provisional truths, not eternal verities, and received scientific knowledge must always be open to question, but all too often doubts and arguments are dismissed if and when they contradict scientific research. Please, tell me more! Who funded the research? Over what length of time was it conducted? Has it been replicated? What long-term consequences might we expect? People for whom “science” is a religion have a tendency to speak and behave as if anything coming out of a laboratory is above and beyond question. In fact, it is scientific to question it further.

I want to go back now and pick up the Science Council’s definition of science, for which I only gave the link above. For those who didn’t follow the link, here's the definition:

Science is the pursuit and application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world following a systematic methodology based on evidence.

Further down the screen, the first item included in scientific methodology is objective observation. Repetition, verification, testing, peer review and assessment are also included. (Follow the link for the entire list.)

It is no secret any longer that conflicts of interest rage in academic and medical circles and infect much that is published in the most respected journals. This is not trivial. Read about it if you haven’t already.

Conflicts of interest, fueled by financial considerations or career advancement or both, easily lead to bad “research.”  How can a researcher be objective if his or her income or career hangs in the balance? For example, what kind of studies would be necessary to demonstrate safety for human beings of a given drug (or herbicide or hormone or industrial process)? One corporate-funded study? Six weeks of unaffected health in a couple hundred mice?

Here’s something else that has become common knowledge: all human beings are prone to a host of irrational biases. Note that uneducated lay people are not the only human beings to be so afflicted. Scientists are human, too. Go down the list of biases and see how many might affect scientific research, not forgetting for a minute that big money is usually involved, too. Once you get started, it’s pretty easy to see where problems can arise. 

A surgeon naturally looks for surgical solutions. A researcher funded by a pharmaceutical company is going to see big benefits in prescription drugs, probably the ones the funding company makes. Engineers seek to solve problems within their realm of expertise; they don't look to other fields. Confirmation bias assures each expert of the superiority of her or his professional approach; ingroup bias strengthens that conviction; etc., etc.

When an established researcher writes a paper on how published research findings are more likely to be false than true, is it any wonder the public doubts the latest pronouncements of scientific truth?

Science in a World Where Everything Is For Sale

Oddly, perhaps, it was a book on economics that put the question of scientific objectivity in my head again this morning--that and (here I digress briefly) the fact that I posted a link on Facebook and got jumped on because not because of the information given (at least not directly) but because of the source of the information. The criticism was legitimate and prompted me to seek out better sources (which are easily found), but once again the question that emerged, for me, was: Who gets to wear the mantle of “science,” and who doesn’t? And the corollary question: How much respect should the mantle confer?

Joseph Schumpeter’s thesis back in 1942 was that capitalism was not headed for failure but that its very successes would be the death of it. I’m only about a third of the way through Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy but find it fascinating. Here, for instance, is a very strong, unqualified statement:

I have no hesitation in saying that all logic is derived from the pattern of the economic decision or, to use a pet phrase of mine, that the economic pattern is the matrix of logic.

Economic logic, he goes on, beats magic in being both definite and quantitative, and due to its successes it readily spreads,

...spreads under the pedagogic influence of favorable experiences to other spheres and there also opens eyes to that amazing thing, the Fact.

Human beings were self-interested, even greedy, before capitalism, Schumpeter says, but capitalism exalted the unit of money, leading the way to cost-profit calculations (what we know as cost/benefit analysis), and that attitude, or method—well, let him tell you in his own words—

...this type of logic or attitude or method then starts upon its conqueror’s career, subjugating—rationalizing—man’s tools and philosophies, his medical practice, his picture of the cosmos, his outlook on life, everything in fact including his concepts of beauty and justice and his spiritual ambitions.

[Facts! I am reminded of the Gradgrinds in the novel by Charles Dickens, Hard Times. Wealth and poverty feature in most, if not all, of the Dickens oeuvre, but in Hard Times, Schumpeter’s “matrix of logic” really comes to the foreground.]

Schumpeter thinks capitalism destroys its own support system. As capitalism “chases away” metaphysical beliefs and all kinds of mystic and romantic ideas, and as the capitalist world becomes more and more depersonalized and automated (what would he say in 2017!), and nothing is any longer sacred, everything can be questioned and held up for criticism, including capitalism itself. Rationalism, then, capitalism's motive force, is also its undoing.

If he is right—and his argument stretches over 400-plus closely argued pages, to which I have by no means even begun to do justice—then science too, as a natural outgrowth of capitalistic logic, is a self-cannibalizing proposition. Teach people to reject undemonstrated truths, and they will have no truck with your new shibboleths. Tell them to question authority, and they will question yours. Start down this road, and there is no turning back. But it was--and here's the paradox--the only road along which science could develop!

What about the money that built the road? When the project of “science” seems to have become primarily, in far too many cases, only another avenue for seeking profit at the expense of truth, when it comes to be seen, along with politics, as simply a tool to deliver increased wealth to those at the top by denying self-determination* to those at the bottom, is it any wonder there is growing public mistrust? Science, like politics, has sold out too many times to expect universal unquestioning admiration.

[* "For mankind is not free to choose. ... Things economic and social move by their own momentum and the ensuing situations compel individuals and groups to behave in certain ways whatever they may wish to do—not indeed by destroying their freedom of choice but by shaping the choosing mentalities and by narrowing the list of possibilities from which to choose."]

Here I would close with the old saw, “Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas,” except that that would be a terrible libel on dogs. Also, I probably need to say straight out that I am not taking an anti-science stance, nor am I opposing rationality. It's simply that I don’t regard scientists as gods, nor do I trust blindly in “scientific” pronouncements that come from behind locked doors of corporate secrecy. If you do, then in my opinion you are being neither “scientific” nor “rational.”

Returning to earth

My Brain is on FIRE!

On last Wednesday morning's walk

Up early in the dark on Sunday morning, habit too strong to let me “sleep in,” I read through the last few chapters of the first half of Pride and Prejudice, making notes for the discussion I am to lead on Tuesday night, and then picked up a book I haven’t had time to open in the last two busy weeks, Farmacology: What Innovative Family Farming Can Teach Us About Health and Healing (NY: William Morrow, 2013), by Daphne Miller, M.D. A review in Acres USA brought this book to my attention, and it sounded like a must-have for my bookstore’s section of new titles in agriculture and gardening, so I ordered two copies a few weeks back. Now I feel the same way I did the first few weeks of my freshman year in college, learning huge amounts at a tremendous speed and seeing connections everywhere. But let me begin at the beginning of Sunday morning.

Wow! I had trusted the book would be interesting but hadn’t expected to meet my old friend (no, we’ve never met; I only know his work) Wendell Berry on the very first page. Only a few pages further in – by page 8, to be precise -- my head was humming like a basswood tree full of honeybees, when the author, through a chance encounter with a little book called The Soul of Soil, recounts how she began wondering if principles for rejuvenating soil could be applied to human health. When a presenting medical problem is simple, she writes, the focus of the physician can be narrow and simple, as well. “But most of the time our health needs are more complex and dynamic” --. I stop in my tracks mid-sentence, my own mind italicizing the words “complex and dynamic.” Associations to into high gear, branching out in surprising directions, and I have to put the book down to give myself time to catch up and slow down again.

This fall I’m taking a non-credit class in beginning drawing, the first art class I’ve ever taken in my life, and in our second session the instructor gave us exercises to do to move us from our left to right brains: “The left brain does not like complexity,” she told us, so when we embark on a complex drawing without recognizable, nameable parts, by attempting to copy a line drawing while looking at it only upside-down, the left brain “will give up and get out of the way.” When the left brain “gets out of the way,” we can no longer rely on pulling stored symbols out of memory but must concentrate on shapes, lines, and relationships, actually seeing rather than thinking about what’s in front of us. (And yes, the instructor, Elizabeth Abeel, does draw heavily from the Betty Edwards book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.)

You see the connection? Miller writes that most of our health needs are “complex and dynamic,” and I hear my drawing instructor saying, “The left brain does not like complexity,” and I see monoculture and pesticides, along with restricted diets, antibacterial cleaners, prescription drugs and supplements as left-brain “solutions,” spawning in their wake myriad new problems because they fail to address the real-world complexity. Miller’s mention on the same page of “reductionist medical training,” the conceptual division of the body into parts for focused study and diagnosis, brought to my mind Bergson’s intellect/intuition distinction, the intellect being our problem-solving, “engineer’s” brain, conceptually breaking reality into parts and often gaining a practical advantage by doing so but making a mistake by believing the analysis has uncovered a deeper reality. The tools created by analysis (i.e., reductionist thinking), Bergson insisted, must always misrepresent reality in order to make its manipulation possible.

Miller contrasts reductionist with holistic, Abeel and Edwards draw the line between left and right brain, and Bergson distinguishes intellect from intuition. I'm only on page 8 of Miller's book, and my head is already reeling, as Wendell Berry and Henri Bergson and drawing and seeing and soil and farming show themselves as always-already aspects of one great whole.

I need to pause here and make it clear that neither Bergson nor Miller would have us do away with intellect or analysis. We need intellect and its work. We must always remember, however, that “the map is not the territory," and that there will always be more to reality than the most minutely painstaking analysis can show.

Back to the rest of Miller’s show-stopper sentence, but let me begin again at its beginning:

But most of the time our health needs are more complex and dynamic, just like the soil, and most of what ails us today – depression, anxiety, diabetes, heart disease, fatigue – is multifactorial, chronic, and not well served by a static and highly focused approach.

“Static” is what analysis gives us. Snapshots. But life is never static, as Bergson insisted over 100 years ago. We are not machines. We are not laboratory creations but living beings – as Wendell Berry reminds us over and over, creatures of the soil.

I want everyone I know to read this book – farmers, medical workers, office workers, parents of young children and older, retired people. “Can’t afford” fresh local produce? I saw a great bumper sticker not long ago: “You can either pay the farmer or pay the doctor.”

This is what happens when one lives surrounded by books. What did Christopher Morley’s old bookseller character say about books being more explosive than dynamite, by virtue of the ideas in them?

Meanwhile, the list of recent topics I have yet to cover here in “Books in Northport” grows ever longer: “Leelanau UnCaged,” visiting poets (Fleda Brown, Arturo Mantecón, and Mark Statman), and soil erosion are the three on the top of the list, unless, that is -- exciting as those topics are -- they get bumped down the line by yet another glorious streaking comet of written excitement that I can’t wait to share. Would it be possible to combine topics and do a post on “Poetry and Soil Erosion”? Possible, surely, but the result would probably too long to hold readers to the end....

Field corn drawings from 2012 stillness project

Well, what is happening in the countryside these days? Farmers who got in their field corn before the last few several days of drenching rain are undoubtedly happy. It’s bow season for deer; how is that working out in the rain? Visitors come Up North for fall color have surely been gratified by its beginning, despite the wet weather, and weather remains warm, so even annual flowers are still bright and lively. 

Ever in motion, ever complex, ever fascinating, the world brings us every day new joys and challenges, painful shocks and delightful surprises. Drawing and writing, we create a record of time that will never, in today’s specificity, return.

For Me (I Speak Only for Myself), Art and Theory Don't Mix

...Nothing is ever exhausted or definitely explored within the creative process. The same object engages us in endless variations day after day.

...We tend to flee from repetition with fear that it will absorb our spirits.

...Don’t be afraid to do the same thing repeatedly. The practice will reveal that creation pervades everything. ...Nothing can ever be repeated in an absolute sense. There are always nuances that go unnoticed when we see our lives as monotonous drudgery.

-Shaun McNiff, Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go

(Why bagels with this post? These were mindfully made and prayerfully eaten.)

I cannot imagine ever calling myself a Buddhist. Sitting za-zen is foreign to me, and “living in the moment,” as an ideal, runs counter to the way I see human nature (that most amorphous and malleable of existential concepts!), with consciousness providing a temporal gap between external stimuli and the response of this complex organism, the human being, in which choice and freedom can emerge, consciousness by its very nature permeated with memory and anticipation, remembering the past and imagining the future. And yet, un-Zen, skeptical, hyper-conscious philosopher that I am, the books on art that speak to me with the most meaningful voices are those written by artists, such as Frederick Franck and the author quoted above, who approach art as meditation, as a losing of subjectivity (self) in seeing objects and interacting with them wordlessly.

Is this surprising? Would it seem more natural for a philosopher to approach art analytically? Ah! Of all my graduate school philosophy courses, the ones that tortured me most were classes in aesthetics, and I can analyze the reasons for my discomfort, because I not only find reasons paradigmatically amenable to analysis—I find that reasoning, of all human activities, cries out most loudly to be analyzed, for it is usually in our thinking that we go astray.

(1) First of all, from the very beginning, analysis struck me as completely inappropriate in the realm of art, its vivisection—it always felt like that to me—treating something living as if it were something dead. The poem I had to analyze in high school French class was one I chose because I loved it. After taking it apart, line by line, word by word, I gained an interpretation but lost the poem. The same thing happened in graduate school to the poem in English I had to analyze for my first “Theory of Art” class. After that I didn’t want to analyze poems—particularly poems I loved. (Caveat: I realize this may say more about me than about literary analysis and that many people find their appreciation and love deepened rather than destroyed by close reading, as my own close reading of important fiction or philosophy texts adds to my enjoyment. So my rejection of analysis is not tout court, and perhaps my second reason for discomfort will shed light on why that is so, in an indirect way.)

(2) Another source of my reluctance to analyze art came from the nature of art theory, where each thinker in turn (as one studies the philosophers’ views of art in historical survey) put forward a thesis on what art is as if it were a unitary category! Worse, all of these theories made claims for the goal of art, as if there were only one. They took it for granted, that is, that all artists were aiming in the same direction, coming closer to the bull’s-eye or missing the mark according to their degree of talent and skill. Married to an artist and having had artist friends since adolescence, I simply could not accept this unstated premise on which every aesthetic theory was constructed. It was too tidy, too articulate, too finished to be true to any artist’s life and work. The very act of generalization, I still think, is more a demand of theory than of understanding art, which is not one activity but many, multiple in terms of media and in terms of those engaged. I am beginning to suspect that the same is true of interpretive theory, but I’ll leave that question aside for now.

(3) What was my third reason? It seems to have slipped around the corner while I was looking at something else, but I think it was that theories of art, with the refreshing exception of John Dewey’s pragmatism, began with finished products. Here is this statue, this poem, this symphony, etc., the philosophers would say, and then they would ask what all had in common, because if all are art, they must share something (whatever lacked that something would not fit the category ‘art’), and the answer to that first question set the stage for the claim that the artist had aimed at creating that very whatever-it-was in the object. Again, too neat and tidy, my heart would protest unhappily. (This stuff really made me miserable. I’m not kidding.)

The poems I wrote for many years of my life were certainly not a process of envisioning an endpoint and then working toward it. More often a poem began for me with a single phrase scribbled on a paper napkin or the back of an envelope. More phrases would follow. Somehow they would come together, awkwardly stitched at first, then some of the threads ripped out, pieces discarded and reworked, finally groomed and stroked until the poem itself told me it was done. And as my mind held no image of finished work beforehand, neither was there a purpose given in advance. Why did I write a poem? Not “in order to” achieve something else and certainly not for some large, general purpose. (Of course, the philosophers can say here that the artists don’t need to be conscious of their own reasons. Copout! With an assumption like this, no disconfirming evidence is even conceivable, and the theorist gets a blank check to spend.) No, I began my poem because the phrase whispered in my ear and begged to be written down, as if it were saying, in the words of the song, “Take all of me. Why not take all of me? Can’t you see I’m no good without you?” Except that there was no you or me, no consciousness of self or other.

(4) That’s it! That last sentence there brings back to me the reason I had thought to give as my third and will now call my fourth, and that will bring me back, miraculously, to where I began. (I swear I did not plan this out beforehand! Do you believe me?) This last reason has to do with the spiritual nature of art. That is how I see it, how I feel it. A chain of reasons is an intellectual construct, the most appropriate subject for analysis. Analyzing historical events, too, whether in our own lives (as problems in ethics) or globally, across the ages, can teach us a lot, helping us make decisions for the future, and there are many situations where the question “Why?” is important. At other times, however, no question can be more wrong or less to the point. I think spiritual journeys are very rarely a search for something, e.g., a Holy Grail. More often they are more a journey away from the known and into the unknown. Direct artistic engagement, however small or amateurish, takes one on this kind of spiritual journey. (Important question: am I guilty here of generalization, and if so, is it any different from the generalizations of analysis?) John Dewey’s great contribution to aesthetic theory was the realization that activity is central to the making of art. That is, he focused on the making, rather than on the product, and at that point in my graduate class (the professor’s capstone, which told me that he too found Dewey’s picture more satisfying than those of his predecessors) I breathed a big sigh of relief. Still, as I recall, even Dewey proposed a (single) purpose, arguing that art was essentially a problem-solving activity.

Well, it doesn’t matter. Scientists don’t pay much attention to what philosophers say about science, and artists probably pay even less attention to what philosophers say about art, and that’s fine. To each his own. But artists and philosophers may have more in common than they realize. Most philosophers like to think they are uncovering hidden structures, as do scientists, but my own feeling is that philosophy, like art, is as much creation as exploration and just as individual to every practitioner. The difference is that the philosophers, engaging in intellectual activity, bring consciousness to the fore, while the artists, spiritual practitioners, must leave consciousness off to the side somewhere or stay stuck and not get anywhere.

Today’s post has been a very analytical presentation of my thinking on the subject of art, and all of this will go back in the box when I pick up a pencil and a pad of paper to draw, even when I walk out the door into the sunlight, into the waiting world of water and fish, birds and green plants. I will want to be there, not stuck in my head.

Years ago, when David and I were first living together, I used to try to stay quiet when he was working, even avoiding the room where he stood in front of his easel. Then one day he said, “You’re not bothering me. You can talk to me while I’m working. I’m painting, not thinking.”

I don’t advise interrupting a working novelist or a composer or a poet with conversation, and some painters do prefer solitude. I include this anecdote merely as a hint to how thinking interferes with “doing art,” just as it interferes with meditation. This truth extends beyond the visual arts. Even in writing one must make choices with every word without thinking about making choices with every word. To find something new, it is important to become lost.

Now, out into the world!