The Art of Seeing

It's time to leave the studio.

When I first arrived, I have given an empty space for contemplation, and it was an aesthetic gesture. Now it has been occupied by another. I've taken in a young girl who found herself pregnant, kicked out off campus and with no place to stay. Now that space is considered "her part of the room," a cluttered mess with mis-matched colors littered here and there in forms of candy wrapper, towel, coins, single sneaker. I've wondered what to do with it. Perhaps much like the refined Parisian art critics shocked at Monet, I've felt violated, thinking is this worth anything?

It's hard not to pass judgment when viewing something so utterly different from one's own paradigm. I think that life itself produces art, as we leave traces of our life, those are personal signatures bearing witness to the inner life. For me, space and cleanliness comprise a special significance; for my roommate, it could not be further from the truth. Mine is the lean life: hand-washed, hand-cut, and hand-cooked vegetables. She consumes pizza on the weekly basis with frozen chicken pot-pie and red powder flavored water. Thus the two's aesthetic clash, and is one truly better than the other? I honestly do not agree with her lifestyle, with the way she is "painting" the canvas of her living space, and yet I'm growing to understand that she is allowed the choice. 

When I visited the Frank Lloyd Wright architectures at Florida Southern, I thought that at some point, some people must have been scandalized. Who has ever seen a chapel with red iron-work like a massive "bicycle in the sky"? Yet I walked along the Esplanade connecting the buildings carefully, appreciating the design, the choices that were manifested on stones, shadows. For Wright, such a space was what he would have hoped for, and the inner vision he held even before the campus had been built--cannot be taken away from him. 

Likewise, when I spoke of Calculus, of Geometry, especially vectors, perhaps I had not been explicit enough in pointing out God himself to be the mathematical architect of our universe. He, too, envisioned a space that would be filled with lines, arches, and still space sandwiched in between. I'm learning to respect that. At nights, when I leave the library to go home, I'd routinely pause at the lake and see the natural blackness cut with swaths of artificial light. It is both the artwork of God and man. Thus I have filled notebooks with haiku in English, recording the water images that I had not been trained to capture with paintbrush but with pen. Haiku is long-standing Japanese tradition whose masters include many painters; English is the language of Emily Bronte whose eyes dwelt upon bleak moors. I understand that I will, for a long time, be developing an aesthetic in hopes of marrying East and West. Art in my life now is merely having conversation with all that has been past, the places and people I encounter now, and whatever dreams may bring of the yet unseen. 

Art and Madness

Genetics?


On the Yale panel, psychology professor Carson postulates a strong biological correlation between art and mental disorder.  She defines latent inhibition as "a cognitive mechanism that allows people to filter out irrelevant stimulants" implying that ones operating on less latent inhibition allows for higher levels of psychotic inclinations.  Creative people, then, who  do take advantage of reduced LI 

"access a large amount of sensory and internally-generated stimuli, but their high IQ would allow the person to process this additional information without being overwhelmed [...or] their relatively high intelligence keeps them from exhibiting psychopathologic behavior."

I want to unpack the statement above a bit in two parts, via experience and autobiographical accounts of recognized artists. Regarding creativity's high tendency toward reduced latent inhibition, there's not much debate. Poets, prophets, painters are visionaries--they look, with eyes wide open and sensitivity ultra-sharp in surveying the surrounding world. As a writer, I personally experience sensory overload on a nearly moment-to-moment basis: the lake, fuchsia  blooms, arched eyebrow, rice cake, curvature of font... Artists, in the very act of seeing, penetrate physical reality deep into its metaphysical undergirding. And such a lifestyle is certainly aware of unconsciousness and consciousness's integral relation. 


As to the effect of this practice, I must admit to a degree of insanity. It is easy to be overwhelmed and even the highest intelligence cannot act as completely perfect defense against losing itself. Whitman himself advised an occasional "barbaric yalp" and Aristotle's "catharsis" hardly meant shedding a few sympathetic teardrops. Sometimes seemingly psychopathological behavior is in actuality freeing. The tension many artists experience (Van Gogh, Caravaggio, El Greco, Munch to name a few) betrays an inability to reconcile with internalized suffering that, whether individual or vicarious, demands compassion. 


As for being a female writer (inheriting the legacy of Plath and Woolf), women tend to be emotional creatures in general and more in touch with the nature of aesthetics. Neither is it difficult to imagine the duality of pressure upon creative workers to maintain originality that caters to the consumers of that very originality. Writers, artists demand "true voice" yet even that world involves rules in which what is genuinely polished may at times fail to conform to expectations. Such tragedy, or rather irrational fear of tragedy, beset the artist for when inspiration has drained itself, the first to detect such emptiness can be no other than the artist himself. Dr. Cotton has always told me, in midst of battling melancholy and insomnia, that "you must not let the dark overwhelm you completely; learn to bridle the darkness, to surf it." The strength to accomplish such an ordeal perhaps lies not in intellectual energies alone. Where there is madness, the ground is most fertile for grace's infusion.