It feels strange to have hung my art there and I have been reflecting on why I began painting and writing poetry more seriously. I want to take some time to reflect on the process and what it has to do with my larger learning in philosophy, psychology, and psychotherapy. I have no doubt they are all connected, but it is unclear how.
I am uncomfortable with the word ‘art’ or the idea of identifying as an ‘artist’. Those words have peculiar connotations in modern philosophy. In the seventeenth century when Francis Bacon spoke of ‘the arts’ he meant something like the technical arts or what we call technology. Bacon dreamt of god-like mastery of the world through science and ‘the arts’. Indeed, a large part of what I resist in the notion of ‘art’ is an implication of control, mastery, or god-like power. Twentieth century philosophers make this legacy apparent: Camus speaks of the artist ‘giving the void its colors,’ while Sartre praises the god-like creativity of authentic human beings. Even Bob Ross says peculiar things like ‘On this canvas you have complete control, absolute freedom, you can move mountains.’ One of my best friends, a professional illustrator and designer once joked that artists are often ‘control freaks.’ She and I both prefer to talk about ‘making things’ or being ‘makers, rather than ‘art’ or ‘artists’.
I think that the peculiar masterful or theological character of the notion of ‘art’ has something to do with the modern orientation towards control, and something to do with the biblical notion of ‘creation’. Nowadays we praise ‘creativity’; I see children wearing shirts with the word ‘Creative’ displayed in colorful and exciting letters. I find it strange because creation is a fundamentally biblical notion: God creates, and God creates from nothing.
I feel much more clumsy, uncertain, and relatively out of control. I do not feel masterful in the things I make. I make because I am trying to learn, not because I am trying to master. Of course, I have gotten better at controlling certain types of paints, certain brushes, certain techniques. But technique is not of the essence of making things. Perhaps that is the simplest distinction I can make right now: Art is an ambiguous word that is not sufficiently distinguished from technique. I suppose ‘making’ is comparably ambiguous, but it is also broad in a way I like.
The big questions I want to try and unpack in this writing is, What, if any, is the difference between making and creating? Why am I so resistant to the notion of art and creativity, and associate them so readily with problems of control, mastery, and aspirations to god-hood? And how can I develop an account of making that is simultaneously sincere, ironic, clumsy, and human?
This thinking will follow several sets of distinctions:
1. Body, Language, Image
2. Creating and Making, Mastery and Irony
3. Opacity, Traces, Encountering
There is a story in all these words for me.
1. Body, Language, Image
I started painting and writing poetry more seriously while I was in graduate school to become a psychotherapist. I took a class called 'listening skills.' Once a week me, four students, and an instructor sat in a small room, probably 10x12. We were told that we would be splitting into pairs; one person would be the speaker, the other would be the listener. Our task was to speak and listen as carefully as possible. Listening carefully is surprisingly difficult, as is speaking carefully.
The question that arises is: how do you know when you have understood a person correctly, and how do you know when you have spoken carefully? We are using words in order to express or communicate experience. What is the relationship between words and experience? My mind melts under the weight of such a question.
The wager of the course, and one I am largely persuaded by, is that words and experience meet most intimately in the experience of the body. We know we have spoken carefully, in other words, when we feel it in a visceral way. Similarly, we know we have listened carefully when we can feel what a person is saying, and when we can reflect back to that person what we are hearing-feeling in a way that they recognize. If we reflect what someone has said in an inaccurate way the person will generally tell us, either explicitly or with their bodily presence.
The listening skills class was thus spent developing this embodied awareness while speaking and listening.
The class was built around Eugene Gendlin's notion of 'focusing'. Gendlin is a gifted philosopher who happened to get hooked up with Carl Rogers after writing a dissertation on language and embodiment. 'Focusing' is a process whereby one tries to track the way that different words relate to a bodily 'felt-sense' of a problem, situation, or experience. When I think of the fact that I am happy or unhappy at my job, a whole slew of bodily feelings come along. I feel my shoulder joints tighten, my hands feels restless, and my mind is flush with images. All of these various phenomena are the 'felt-sense' of a situation. In therapy, and in focusing, there is an effort to give voice to this 'felt-sense' of things.
There is a characteristic pattern of speech, reflection, and correction, that therapist and client go through. "It feels like I'm underwater." "Oh, underwater?" "Yeah, underwater, but its more like I'm trapped beneath some ice, and I'm trying to get out from under the ice." "You feel trapped under this water, like you are drowning below this ice." "Yeah, but that's not quite right, it's more like..." When we go through this pattern of correction and deepening of description, what are we checking the words against? How do we know that one image fits more than another image? Gendlin's wager is that we are checking the words against our 'felt-sense' of the whole situation. This all rhymes very well with Bessel van der Kolk's claim that visceral awareness is the beginning and core of emotional awareness. The body, as our intelligent organism, as the home of our lives, is more intelligent than we know, and if we can learn to listen to it, we will see how often it speaks.
Gendlin's work raises questions about the place of images in life and thinking. Why would it be that images intersect with the emotional-embodied life in this way? Why do so many of my clients effortlessly use metaphors to describe their situations? Why do we dream in images, scenes, that we know are connected to our daily lives? I recently read portions of Freud's dream book, and I am aware of the work of Lakoff and Johnson on the place of metaphors.
I am interested in the idea that the image is a kind of intermediary between the world of the body and the world of articulate speech. I believe this is how Dr. Krycka at SU spoke of it: focusing relies on the murky space between the pre-symbolic body and the more purely symbolic world of language. The image is the original form of language. But the image is an extrapolation from the experience of the visual field.
The conclusion I want to draw from all this is that the world is already a type of language or logos or meaning... The world is a wild logos and our bodies are our most intimate place of interfacing between us and that wild logos. Dr. Risser at SU said he talked to Gendlin about how 'if the bodily felt-sense is capable of being rendered in language then it must already be languaged in some sense.' For if the body were somehow radically other than language, if language were mere symbol, imposed upon the world, then language would have no way to make contact with the body.
The experience of focusing, the experience of the image as interfacing intimately with the body, seems to be evidence of the fundamental or primordial status of language. The world is language. Our bodies are the language of the world speaking itself.
But why would we have to interface with images in a self-conscious way? Why do certain images reveal portions of reality better than others?
One thing I want to insist on is that the point of engagement with images as they meet embodied felt-sense is not to interpret the images. The images are to be communed with. The power of the dream is to be felt. It isn't important to unpack, analyze, interpret the dream or the image. It is important to dwell with, commune with, indulge the image or the dream. Feel what the image says.
All this is relevant to me because I have been busy making images... like this one:
As I read Plato, for example, all his images seem to beg to be interpreted, wondered about. But the analysis of the image will always fail, and at some point there is only the pregnant suggestions of the images. The image needs to have the status of self-sufficient-pregnant-being, and implication, or suggestion of analysis.
Enough of this. I make images because images are somehow in-between the-body-as-language and speech-as-language. This could be made to sound boring by saying that all thought is metaphorical or some other platitude. But something very mysterious and peculiar is going on with the status of images. The image gives us access to ourselves as the speech of the world that is capable of knowing itself as the speech of the world.
This, somehow, leads me to the problem of art, mastery, and irony.
2. Creating and Making, Mastery and Irony
When I make images that give rise to my philosophical questions I am limited by in my technical ability and in my ability to know what it is I'm saying. I am limited by technique and implication. What I've said above implies that the images I make will always say more than I realize I'm saying. In that way I do not feel in control of the images, and I do need to analyze the images.
Yet why is it that the notion of art has so much of a connection to divinity? What is up with the idea of the muses? The idea of creation and creativity? What is up with the existentialists replacing the philosopher with the artist and praising the god-like power of art? Why, in short, is art spoken of as a form of mastery? and what else could we be?
I have explicated in another post my questions about the relationship between art and mastery. I don't care to do that now. But what I would like to juxtapose is an ironic account of making, in a very specific sense of the word irony.
Irony is about sincerity.
Jonathan Lear has a wonderful book I have not yet finished called A Case for Irony. In a series of lectures he lays out a vision of irony in which it is no longer synonymous with insincerity, obfuscation, and distance, but rather with sincerity, seriousness, and the pursuit of truth. His major models for this kind of irony are Kierkegaard and Socrates. And Kierkegaard, of course, read the shit out of Plato and had much admiration for Socrates.
The core of irony, Lear claims, is a kind of erotic uncanniness. It is an experience, or an attitude, in which we long for something after we realize that we do not know something we thought we knew. Let's look at these two words, beginning with uncanny.
The uncanny (Unheimlich) is an unsettling experience in which the normally familiar becomes extremely unfamiliar in an unsettling way. We are sitting on the bus, on our way to work, and suddenly it becomes radically strange that we are all here, in this place, going to our fucking jobs, to make this money, that we need in order to pay rent and buy food to nourish our poor bodies. All of these things (places, jobs, money, rent, food, bodies) are so ordinary. But when we stop and look at them we don't really know how any of it works... the uncanny rises up to greet us when the world presents itself in its constant unfamiliarity.
If we were simply to be struck with the strangeness of things, the perhaps ungroundedness of things, we would arrive at a spurious or derivative form of irony, one in which we are tempted to say 'well I guess there is no such thing as truth, no reason any of this is like this.' If that were the case, we would be free to present and act however we want. We wouldn't know how to take ourselves seriously, and we wouldn't ask anyone to take us seriously. We would be ironic like the worst kind of hipster: is the torn band t-shirt and the mustache and the mullet cool because it's so uncool? Or has it somehow broken through to being so uncool that it is actually cool?
Whence sincerity in this form of the uncanny? Whence the ground for wanting and believing in the truth?
Eroticism, or eros, is necessary to transform the experience of uncanniness into the experience of irony (as sincerity). Socrates is the most erotic of philosophers. He wants nothing more than to know the truth of the unchanging things. He spends his days in constant serious, albeit playful, pursuit of the truth of things. He longs to know. Philosophy, as the love of wisdom, is driven chiefly by desire, desire culled originally from the experience of desire for the body and soul of the beloved. When the familiar becomes unfamiliar, as it often does in Socrates' dazzling dialectics, we do not throw up our hands; we look further afield, we continue to long and to wonder what these things really are. With the addition of erotic longing for truth the experience of the uncanny becomes a fertile breeding ground for the emergence of the ironic longing that is constitutive of Socrates' being.
With all of this said, it should be clear why Lear says that irony expresses itself most characteristically in tautology. Kierkegaard asks, 'In Christendom are there any Christians?'. Socrates asks, 'Among the philosophers are there any philosophers?'. I ask, 'Among all the therapists are there any therapists?' In each case these words (Christians, philosophers, therapists) appear in two distinct senses. The first use of the word points toward the social role and all of its incumbent attitudes and practices. The second use points towards the ideal or real form of the word. In tautological questions such as these we open up a gap between the supposed or socially sanctioned existence of a phenomena, and we begin to wonder about what really makes the thing we are after.
I work as a therapist. A therapist ought to be a healing person. This is what it means to be a therapist: to be a force for healing in the lives of others. There are many people, however, who have occupied the social role of therapist and may not have taken themselves as healing persons very seriously (although I'm sure most do). Getting a degree and a license, we all know, is not sufficient to making one a therapist, just as going to church every Sunday does not make one a Christian, nor does getting a philosophy degree make one a philosopher.
What do we really mean by these god damn words that we use all the damn time? Do we have any idea what we mean when we say that we want to be a good person, a philosopher, a therapist, a friend, a lover, a human being? What do these words mean?
The experience of irony is the experience of knowing that we do not know what these words really mean. Irony means continually encountering the familiar as unfamiliar, and continuing to move towards it in a desire to understand what it really means.
I love Lear's account of irony. Irony is erotic uncanniness: it is longing for the truth of a thing after running over and over into the unfamiliarity of the socially sanctioned, defined, 'known' things.
I regard my experience of making art as one of ironic making of images in an attempt to feed my larger ironic process of attempting to understand. Among the artists, are there any artists? Of course there are, and it isn't my job to tell someone they aren't an artist. But what does it mean to be an artist? Does it mean to make things, artifacts? Does it mean to be technically skilled? What does it mean? It has something to do with artifacts, with technique, no doubt. But doesn't it mean more?
When I make images, paintings, poems, I do not know what I am making. I am surprised by what I make. Like Flannery O'Connor and E.M. Forster said, 'I don't know what I think until I see what I write.' I don't know what I think, what I'm after, until I see what I make. In this way my process of making objects is ironic in the sense described above: it is about continually trying to encounter the unfamiliar in an attempt to continually long for the truth of things.
What am I trying to understand when I make images like this and I write poems on top of them?
I am not trying to be in control. I am not trying to master anything (unless the term mastery is used very carefully). I'm not trying to be creative. I'm trying to understand, and to support myself in my longing to understand.
Thus the image of ironic making that I am offering is in contradistinction to an image of making or creation that is masterful or god-like. I thought about a lot of this while reading Genesis recently. The God of Genesis is so Ungodlike: he's absolutely clueless about what he is doing. 'Oh, I really fucked up making these people, I'm going to drown them all'. He is described as being sorrowful and regretful about what he has done. God in the bible has no idea what he is doing when he makes us. His makings immediately get out of hand for him.
How could it be otherwise? How could what we make ever be anything that we know entirely? Don't our makings always get away from us, reveal more to us than we knew? Then how could an account of making possibly be about control or mastery? Or am I just so poisoned by my encounters with existentialism? I suspect this is the case. Other people must have more moderate accounts of making that aren't about power, mastery, or control.
But then there is the supposed modern maxim: we only know what we can make. Thus mathematics as a privileged form of knowledge, as some believe it to be a human construction. Thus the power of social constructionist views (to which I am largely sympathetic).
What is the relationship between knowing and making anyways?
I transition to a hasty conclusion, for I grow weary of this writing.
3. Opacity, Traces, Encounter
I am deeply opaque to myself. I become most tranparent to myself in retrospect. It is not until I have seen what I have done that I say, 'oh, now I see what I was up to.'
Why did I get reiki trained as a teenager? Why did I study military history as an undergraduate? Why did I dive headlong into self-imposed scholarship? Why did I spend so many years making coffee? Why was I so afraid of graduate school? Why am I working in the job I work in now?
All of these things have been attempts to heal, to grow, to learn the things I needed to learn.
Kierkegaard was onto something when he said, to paraphrase, 'life has to be lived forward, but it can only be understood backwards'. Irony has something to do with this, but as of now I am not sure what.
Making objects gives me the opportunity to encounter traces of myself in the world. Collingwood: 'If I want to see what kind of person I am, I need to go out into the world and do things. Only once I have done those things will I be able to examine the traces of my activity and say "aha, this is the kind of person I am".'
This, I hope and think, is what I am up to with my making of objects, whether it be paintings, poems, or the thousands of pages of writing I have and will produce. I am looking to know what I am, what kind of person I am. I am studying those traces. I am leaving those traces. I am studying those traces.
I encounter myself, I see what I am, and I long to know more.
I've said enough. I've done enough. I will study this writing in the coming days, and encounter these traces too.
