Stone Riley's Blog: Stone Riley's Shoebox - Posts Tagged "art"

I want an art teacher to review my book.

But why an art teacher? Why is that the ace qualification on my list? Because this book is outside the scope of things people are currently familiar with and very beautiful; pretty much the situation an art teacher faces constantly. Me recently for instance; for little children in our family, I am their first art teacher and I am currently introducing an 18 month old grandchild to the piano in his living room even though I do not play the instrument myself.

Thanks largely to advice from a flutist friend recently on a different problem, our little piano lessons are going well. We don't meet often, the flutist and I, but this was at the memorial service for a very beautiful person who had led a very beautiful life and I had read a poem that is in this book. After, at the meal, this fine musician let me know the poem had been beautiful. So I gave a copy of the book and ventured to ask for the advice which has proved useful.

You understand, I asked the advice on a different topic: my fledgling project to invent experimental music on harmonica. (Harmonica is actually, although not mechanically, a kind of flute.) With this profoundly personal motivation, I asked how to take my project farther, how to put the pieces of the music I have found together. The musician told me I ought to do this: compose a poem with it. And that has served us well, the child and I, in our piano lessons.

Why an art teacher? Because experimental art needs a teacher to explain it. In fact – quite perplexingly to me – nearly never has anyone dared write a review of my work, the one exception so far being a high school literature teacher friend for whose students I did a talk on Homer, after which she felt indebted. And her review taught me things about my work.

Our little piano lessons are doing like that talk on Homer did, like the funeral poem reading did, like the weekend art shows in the park (in the years when I was showing paintings) did and like the stage and museum work and all the rest has done whenever it was going well: You play duets.

You converse with people. You talk with people from your heart so they open theirs, and so the natural art of human beings makes a poem. That is how I learned to write and paint and all the rest. That is how a proper teacher works. That is how I hope you feel when you read the book and when you tell about it.

So perhaps you are an art teacher.

(C) 2017 by S.Riley

First let's admit that man-made climate change is preposterous.

If the idea is not preposterous then why don't any ancient books mention it? It is not mentioned in the Bible, nor the ancient Greek authors, nor the Norse sagas nor Aztec inscriptions, nor old Chinese scrolls so far as I have ever heard. All of that is a vast and varied catalog of human thoughts where the idea of man-made climate change apparently does not appear. Though I am not a scholar of science fiction, my impression is that it did not even appear in science fiction until it first became well known science. It looks like this possibility never crossed our minds before.

So let's agree it is preposterous even though we know that it is true, and let's admit this is a difficulty.

Next let's admit that for the great majority of Americans today, their personal experience has not yet produced solid evidence. Even if a storm or drought or wildfire has destroyed their livelihood or their home and people, let us admit that a typical American's personal experience does not so far logically add up to this enormous proposition of man-made climate change.

For contrast, consider an old American person who has carefully watched the weather for decades, maybe a wise old farmer, sailor or aviator. I am sure they have personally observed sufficient evidence over the length of their lifetime. Otherwise, most of us in our country are so insulated from Nature that our life experience has not yet been enough to clearly show the climate curve.

Now moving on, let us reluctantly admit that you and I – although we know man-made climate change is real and a pressing threat to humanity's survival – on those occasions when we find ourselves talking with a skeptic, we haven't got the slightest notion of how to be persuasive. We will likely wander off into a vague search for what to say.

One cause of that difficulty can be quite embarrassing. If the skeptic who we're talking with is well prepared, it quickly becomes obvious that we have not kept up with the flood of pertinent information. Do solar panels or fracked gas cost less in dollars now? Does the newest design of windmills still slaughter birds? Given the recent observations in Antarctica, how fast are the oceans rising? What about sun spots? In a conversation with a well prepared skeptic we're always wishing for some piece of information that we haven't got.

Another conversation stumbling block: there are many other apocalypses in America's imagination. So how should we reply when a skeptic mockingly compares climate change with the zombie apocalypse? More seriously, if your skeptic worries most about overpopulation and resource depletion leading to nuclear war, do we have some strategy for adding climate change to their urgent list? What if biblical Armageddon looms large in their thoughts? What if they expect a final race war to solve it all? What if they cherish faith that billionaires will swoop like superheroes to the planet's rescue?

There we've reached the hardest problem: political deadlock. In America right now, the faiths in (1.) Biblical Armageddon, (2.) Total race war, and (3.) The virtuous triumph of greed, are very active political forces. These three old fantasies rise from deep in America's long choosing to be either fascist or free. Currently they are spun into the warp and weft of our urgent struggle between totalitarian capitalism and democratic socialism. And those three fantasies weave a fabric of illusion that resists our demand for America to face reality.

But now, since I'm saying it is good to face reality, then what about the other hardest problem? The one that you and I don't like to talk about: there is a very hard truth that deeply motivates a lot of climate skepticism, a piece of reality which we climate realists almost never mention: the lonely grief of losing Earth.

Many climate skeptics feel we are accusing them of murdering Mother Nature and they deny the charge with any arguments that come to hand. Meanwhile, we realists often react to our growing personal sensation of horrid anguish – and our own personal portion of the guilt – by displacing desperate anger onto our opponents. And overall, America is so divorced from Nature, so unfamiliar with instinctive human pagan animism, that we have no words of our own to talk about this spiritual agony.

What else should I say? Now that some disconcerting difficulties have been listed, what proposals do I offer?

A first suggestion is quite easy: we do not need to convince people that man-made climate change is real. That is not necessary. Let me repeat: it is not necessary for you or I to convince anyone that man-made climate change is real.

Instead, you and I should do this: first study what changes in America the experts on our side are now proposing as response to climate change. Then, do our best to persuade people that those changes will help with America's other urgent problems too.

Check back with the difficulties listed above and you'll see that this conversational gambit would help with several of them. It will also be easy for us to do because it's true. A host of lovely and practical improvements in our country are now being proposed as serious response to climate change, everything from just really practicing democracy wherever we can, to eating good food and being neighborly. We will even be getting with our team when we use the conversational tactic of emphasizing this, because many experts on our side are already using it.

Then what about the flood of climate change factual information, the fact that you and I cannot possibly keep up with it in its huge complexity, and the humiliating way a well prepared skeptic can run rings around us in conversation by using lies and misdirections that are simpler? Is there some way to bandage this embarrassment?

A conversation with my dear father forty years ago – he being then a wise old farmer and aviator – has given me a very simple proof of the reality of man-made climate change. This is not to say it convinces well prepared skeptics, but so far I have found that it has always made them feel a hole has been punched in their carefully polished armor of falsehoods. It is true and it is obviously true and it works like a straightforward end run around their line.

All you say is this: “Ever since modern industry first began – for the last few hundred years – our society has been pumping vast amounts of smoke into the air, and doing so at a constantly increasing pace. Now the idea that ALL THAT SMOKE has somehow NOT changed the weather is ridiculous.” Say that clearly, enunciating clearly, and at least you'll see them stop and catch their breath and suddenly dodge.

Now it's time to bring this little essay to a close. I will undoubtedly find more to say in other places about these perplexing difficulties that I've listed here but at this time I am seeing just one of the items above that must be the subject of this essay's closing paragraph.

The bewildering and increasing spiritual agony of losing Earth: what shall we do with this? This is a subject for the arts. This is a hard problem requiring multiple leaps of deep awareness, exactly the kind of problem of cognition that has forced our species to evolve the ability of doing art. Me, so far I am composing a one-act play, perhaps including music, to explore this foggy ground. I've also written here and there about it, and read a bit of that material with an audience. I hope you will accept this challenge in whatever work you do.

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It's sometimes said that song precedes the other forms of human speech. According to this idea, the first words spoken by our little babies, and probably the proto-speech of our early ancestors, can best be understood as song. For me this has always seemed like an interesting and worthwhile proposal but two experiences recently have made me want to make a case for poetry instead.

Three weeks ago I was standing on a hillside with a little child, a grandson just then coming into speech, hardly taller than my knee, when he looked down to the hillside's foot and saw his mother was arriving home. Everyone knows she is an excellent mother but this was the first moment when I understood she is a great hero to the boy.

I understood this by a poem that his heart gave to his lips, the one word “mommie” repeated several times, all with a consistent two-beat rhythm, rising out of whispered awe into heroic timbre, with the classic gesture of the speaker's arms rising and opening toward her.

“mom-mie … mom-mie … Mom-Mie … MOM-MIE”

This was not the hill above Ithaca and not the battered ship of Odysseus blown into port below at home at last. Instead this was a city lot behind their house and the good woman was emerging from her car just then driven in beside the house, arriving from her day at work.

But our local city is an ancient landscape of steep hills beside a long deep water valley. This was one of countless lots where a little child must truly struggle climbing up to their back fence where he and I were standing. And our high perspective, with our location shaded by a big green summer tree but with the lady lit brightly in the sunny afternoon below, made her look quite far away. And the child's dramatic gesture even gave a small aesthetic revelation, reminding me that this universal reaching signal by a baby is also our classic human reaching toward a savior god.

So to my astonished eyes and ears this primordial moment was revealed to be a perfect poetic recitation. It's true his broad melodrama style is out of fashion now but an actor in Shakespeare's or Sophocles' company would have been glad to have it on their stage. Of course, for them the fine art in it would have been to struggle through the entangling confusions of adult life then finally arrive at the vivid perspective of the child. But still, I am not here to grade the child's artistic achievement, only to propose that his behavior was poetry instead of song.

The difference between poetry and song is melody. And we may be accustomed to feeling that it is melody which can lift your heart or dash your hopes to dust within the time a few breaths take. But in that moment there my windows of perception were flung open, and ancient epics were summoned into view, by my grandchild calling to his mother with deep emotion and with a multi-layered rhythm but without melody.

The other recent happening was last Saturday, in a different setting, with a girl who looked about five years old. In this new moment I was watching the child's reactions while I improvised an experimental couplet. In general it was a sort of thing that I do now and then, trying to understand childhood thinking by saying something with the Childthink point of view, hoping for a bit of candid and informative chat. But this moment was a big step up, my first such attempt with a Childthink poem.

And I was on the spot, pointed at and asked for an instantaneous free sample poem by the impatient performer on a tiny stage at an audience participation intergenerational literature performance, in a small tent at a festival, where I had found myself among the front row audience along with my front row neighbor there, this unknown little girl. She had riveted my attention. The child was thinking very energetically, showing a remarkably active alert acuity for the performer's storytelling work.

So when I was suddenly pointed at to speak in this audience participation show, and told to speak a poem – which I felt as a proper challenge from my fellow performing artist on the stage – my curiosity demanded that I take a chance. The child was such an active thinker and so conscious in the moment. If I could instantly roll out perhaps a couplet that had the Childthink point of view and was seriously artistic, her reactions might confirm or deny my recent suspicion that infant humans know profound poetry.

So the couplet that came to me to recite last Saturday in the front row of this audience participation intergenerational thing was this:

“I went OUT to WALK be-SIDE the SHORE // the wind came and said “FOR-EV-ER MORE”

You understand that my occasional habit of talking to children in a Childthink mode, hoping to purchase some candid conversation, demands profundity. It's no good being stupid or inane. You must offer something interesting. You're bartering for an honest chat with someone who is rightly suspicious of your adult thinking. Not only are your kind of people habitually manipulative, but also adult humans even have a different set of instincts than a child. Or at least I think so.

I am a Darwinist. Darwinism says there was a natural way of human life, a stable way our ancestors lived on Earth for a quarter million years or so until the last few thousand years when we took up civilization. Any animal's mind is grown from the universal consciousness of energy and matter, given shape – that is to say, given the abilities and voices we call instincts – by each individual's chemical heritage from their parents, a heritage selected over many generations by the opportunities and requirements of the way their species lives. This enormous process of evolution on our Earth is fantastically creative so of course the instincts it has given human beings are richly complex and useful adaptations for our ancestral way of life in that quarter million years.

During the sixteen decades since Charles Darwin's books began appearing – thus sparking our development of this huge theory – much research in many fields has coalesced into it. Thus the Darwinist theory has become very useful for our understanding of life on Earth, including our understanding of ourselves. In particular, many lines of study have clarified that quarter million years or so when a stable way of human life shaped the instincts that we find in our minds today. It has now reached a point where a serious and careful amateur can be well enough informed to make credible speculations about our instincts.

So, one speculation I am offering is this: adults and pre-puberty children have different sets of instincts. (For an example showing this is possible, simply look at the different behaviors of a caterpillar and butterfly.) To picture how this happened for us, to picture our ancient way of human life, imagine a kind of camping trip that never ends. You and I live with a small family band who move from time to time around a territory, seeking limited resources that Nature makes available here and there. And sometimes we must push on to somewhere else.

It is true that in this setting people of all ages live together but adults and children face different filtering by evolutionary processes. Adults evolve mainly to create and nurture children while young children evolve mainly to personally survive and grow. So says my proposal. And if there is truth in this, the processes of evolution have given us different tool kits for thought and action during those different parts of our lives.

So there you can see the fuel of my burning curiosity to strike up candid conversations with these aliens in our bosom, our young children. I delight in teaching children well so I want to know what life is like for them, beyond my accustomed limited perspective.

“I went OUT to WALK be-SIDE the SHORE // the wind came and said “FOR-EV-ER MORE”

During the long minute when I first heard my fellow artist on the stage issue a bardic challenge, then decided I must accept it, then held up my open hands and cast my eyes back in my head to beg for patience, then crafted up a list of the couplet's technical requirements, then felt the grinding of the mill come up to speed, then felt the couplet's arrival, then opened my mouth to speak, I was sweating bullets. I have been embarrassed in live performance art more than once before and I dread it.

One thing had been certain in the instant when I framed my technical requirement list. The couplet must breathe the heartbeat rhythm, the one-beat “da‑DUM‑da‑DUM” that appeared in its first line so clearly. This was the tip top requirement on my list. If you want profundity and want it quickly then you must have beauty strong enough to compel the mind's participation. Yes, I know that first line is ugly and dead boring if you are adult. If you are adult the hollow “da‑DUM‑da‑DUM” monotony of that first line absolutely needs a pull and twist perhaps an inch before its end.

But here's a thing you've seen in children of your acquaintance. They can take peculiar comfort and delight in endlessly reciting the alphabet or endlessly counting numbers or endlessly repeating some simple lyric, or such as that, in that unbroken heartbeat rhythm, and the longer it goes on the better. Me thinking as a Darwinist, I guess this peculiarity arises in a child's instinctive deep commitment to personal survival. I guess the one-beat is so powerfully beautiful to us at that age because it opens our consciousness of the heartbeat in our chest, reassuring proof that we are alive and calm.

I felt sure that for the couplet to succeed it must have the one-beat as its pervading state of consciousness, its mathematic. So I wrote that requirement first on my mental list submitted to the magic mill and then was not surprised to hear the first line's “da‑DUM‑da‑DUM” rhythm coming from my lips. But then the second line's surprising transformation of the beat seemed marvelously ingenious.

“I went OUT to WALK be-SIDE the SHORE // the wind came and said “FOR-EV-ER MORE”

That flip into a 4:1 beat, if we may call it that, looks very odd. But the human ear can hear more varieties of rhythm than poets ever use, many more. After all, our sense of hearing probably evolved to interpret birdsong, in a broad landscape with a multitude of birds all prone to bursts of noise. Their cries and occasional cacophonies would offer a treasure of information on what was happening out of our sight. So says a leading theory on the evolution of our hearing that I find vividly convincing.

I think the birdsong proposal very well explains our ability and eagerness to hear coherent signals in an immense variety of overlaying sounds. Finding a rhythm would be the way to pick a single bird or pack of birds out of the distance or the din so we might guess what they are saying to each other. Furthermore, it very well explains the compelling visual imaginings we can experience from hearing rhythms, imaginings that can compel us with the strength of instinct toward various actions or emotional desires to take action. In the setting of our old ancestors' lives, believing a mental picture that arises in our ears from birdsong might often let our family escape a predator or eat instead of starving.

For one thing, I guess the couplet's second line symmetrically fulfills the rhythm of the first, not breaking but enhancing the first, perhaps turning it inside out in our mental sensation of the mathematic, making what the computations in the human ear decide to be a symmetrically completed bird call signal. Both lines have the same count of syllables, and the same counts of hard and soft, although reversed, but the complete rearranging of count and stress demands attention, offering perhaps a visual thought that something has definitely changed in our imagined situation.

And certainly there is something strong changing in our sensation of the mathematics – by which I mean our pervading sense of consciousness – when we hit the second line. I feel like it is our understanding of the geometry of space around us that suddenly strongly changes and I feel this compellingly coincides with the imagined mystical experience offered in that same mental instant by the couplet's storytelling words.

With the first line, in my mental eye I saw us walking step by step through some close space, like a forest path or a path between big rocks or through concealing head-high seaside grasses, aware of step by step. Then a syllable that should be stressed has slipped away. Suddenly there is a kind of mathematic cubing of the rhythm and immediately a mention of the seaside wind suddenly leads me to look and see the sky above and the panorama ahead of us have rushed away into infinity. Then inside this echoing space, in the vast hollow cawing of the seagulls, the penetrating wind comes telling me an awesome intimation that infinity is in me and in everything.

Nor was I the only one to gain a startling and interesting experience as the couplet's words rolled from my lips. I was speaking directly to my neighbor little girl with the kind of clear enunciation that instinctively denotes a poem and she had closed her eyes to better see whatever mental pictures might arise.

“I went OUT to WALK be-SIDE the SHORE // the wind came and said “FOR-EV-ER MORE”

While I watched, the good child's face showed gestures quite in time with the imaginary sensations I was feeling. First there were the small movements of her eyes behind her lids that seemed to fit the walking I imagined. Then there was a stress of indecision with the morphed rhythm. Then after the speaking stopped, during the instants while I felt my computations going, her face was stilled into a kind of interested waiting. Then – an instant after my own astonishment to see the imaginary sky and horizon have receded, and to feel infinity in the wind of seagull cries – I saw an impact of shock and then a smile of aesthetic pleasure on the little girl's face.

Later, at the festival's open air lunch, her mother and I had a nice chat. The lady revealed that she often reads poems to the children. It occurs to me, thinking as a Darwinist, that the lady's very excellent household custom recreates something in the ancient human way of life. I can easily picture our ancestors at their work or leisure, now and then, often for the children's pleasure, rolling out speech in complex artistic form. In any case, I'm sure that hearing poetry at home awoke and nurtured this child's natural ability to experience it so well.

I should mention how the seaside came into the couplet. It was the second thing on the list of required features that I submitted to the magic mill. Obviously I hoped we would work up to some punchy intimation of Infinity, of course, and I needed an intimation of Infinity that is commonly available to young children. My wife's passionate recollections of her childhood by the sea leaped into mind. There followed my own family's infrequent visits to the shore, and the fearful sense of alien danger I felt there, and the time much later as an adult when that fear was calmed. So this was obviously a good idea. I added “seaside visit” to the list and it emerged as the little poem's story track.

So now I should mention story, what it is. As we humans have a sense of rhythm, so we have a rich, complex and useful sense of story, which was running in my mind simultaneously with the rhythm. It seems certain that story has a strong evolutionary value because it is just as powerfully linked with its own modes of comprehension and emotion as are the senses of rhythm, touch, smell, vision and all the rest.

Perhaps story's best value might be resolving life's confusions. We hear there was a person; we hear the person did something; we hear something happened in response; and we become in some way positioned or even satisfied with these imagined facts. This story sense contains practical lists of characters – humans, plants, animals, animate forces – with their possible interactions together and with suggestions of how we should therefore feel or act.

But in this couplet's little story one of the characters is Infinity – or Spirit or God or Ghost or whatever you would name it – and in the moment of the story we feel this is a genuine character, one our story instinct recognizes, one who can even speak to us. What is that about? Why has evolution given us that?

I guess we humans have this story character “Infinity” (or Spirit or God or Ghost etc.) because story – a mode of comprehension and emotion where you pretend – is a good place for us to exercise our valuable psychic senses. Pretending is a big help when you want to mentally step from ordinary physics – where cosmic consciousness, telepathy, precognition and the rest are ridiculously impossible – into quantum physics where they are ordinary, useful and valuable abilities of the human mind.

In other words, I am guessing that “Infinity” (by whatever name) is on our instinctive list of story characters while our list of available interactions with the character includes “intimations of infinity”. Also cosmic consciousness, telepathy, precognition and the rest are on that list of available interactions. My personal sensations do seem to fit this scheme.

But also personal experience has convinced me that once we get into our scenes of pretended mysticism we can then stop pretending. This seems to put me firmly in the camp of believers who believe that direct unnamed experience of the Infinite Divine is more realistic than all our holy stories. And I feel sure that one path into that unnamed experience, for me, is through loving children. And a way of loving children is by using stories.

There are other curious subjects that I have discovered here but will not explore. What are beauty and aesthetic pleasure from a Darwinist view? What is the creative “magic mill” that I experience? What is melody? What is that desperate “bardic” competition thing among performing artists? Maybe some other time and place.

But I will try to complete the story track of this essay with a final incident. I had lain a couple of books – my novel and my big compendium of pictures, poetry and stories – on the festival's free giveaway sharing table. (Dark of Light) (Tales of Men and Women) After the nice outdoor lunch, when the good lady and her husband and their kids were packing up their shoulder bags, I noticed that my books were now among their gear.