To really see a seed, you have to
make yourself vulnerable to the notion that maybe we biological entities are
only notes on a sheet of music, and what's really important is the music, not
the notes -- that the Creator rejoices less in us carriers of information, than
in the information itself. After all, the Creator worked on us for only a few
years, but the information held in any seed represents the crystallized results
of experiments in life conducted during more eons than we can know.
To really see a seed, you must
close your eyes and imagine a music in which the whole Earth is a single note
in a vast melody that goes on and on.
Then, you get up and go look at
your turnip patch and see all those little green plants with their solar panels
directed toward the sun, and what can you do but laugh with delight?
****
ON SEEING LIKE A CAVEMAN
This week I've been reading a
collection of essays entitled "Vision and Design" by British art
historian Roger Fry. Fry's main period of influence was between the two world
wars, so his work is a bit dated but still it's a pleasure to experience his
clear and incisive thinking.
Fry addresses a question in art
I've often wondered about. The 14,000-year-old drawings of animal forms on the
walls of Spain's Altamira Cave and other caves are vividly alive
and invested with dynamic tension. They convey the feeling the artists must
have experienced when seeing those things in real life. So, why does so much
art of later times show very little of that vitality? Remember those Byzantine
works so painfully stiff, so choked with ostentation, and void of feeling other
than desiccated, formalized religious sentiment.
Granted that religious fanatics
being in control of the government were responsible for the Byzantine aridness
but, still, just how could humanity's artistic impulse have withered so
dramatically after such an auspicious beginning as is on display in Altamira Cave?
I interpret Fry as
arguing that Paleolithic artists saw images and portrayed them with an
immediacy and intensity that became unavailable to Neolithic people (people
like us) simply because our greater mental capacity made it hard for us to see
images without immediately analyzing them. Once the analytical process
interposes between what the artist sees and the artist's portrayal of that
thing, the thread of immediacy that enlivens any work of art is severed. It's
revealing that when a modern child first tries to draw a human body, probably
the child sketches a head and hands, but leaves the torso reduced to a single
line. That's