The four modes 

Since before dawn of human history man, through his senses has created  imagery of himself and the spirits that populated his world.  At a lost point in history wild troupes of humans began to wander barefoot out of the wilderness for the safety of  a community.After having partially abandoning the natural  world  they then had need then to bring a sense of order or to reconcile themselves to his ever new world. There at the genesis of culture as the challenges of an changing landscape grew in complexity abstract ideas
had need to develop.











Its a difficult thing to keep one's outlook on the world fresh as it was in youth. This is why we are drawn to imagery, words, sound, and motion. The four modes to which biology translates the outside world into our thoughts from our senses. In a previous post I noted how in art  there is little hope in capturing anything close to a simulacrum of an experience. Despite this being any artists abiding dream I still believe it to be true. It however may never have been the point of art in the first place. Could it be rather the exercise itself or the discovery of a new manner of seeing to which we are moved? Serendipity or a happy accident could this be from where original thought springs forth? There an all seeing subconscious that never sleeps and a biological system sifting through reams of input are combined to create a new "vision".

Göbekli Tepe

Our ancestors looked to these four modes as a means of bringing flesh to ideas that had no natural equivalence. weather it be the beating of a drum to capture a fleeting rhythm or a line to define the  edge of a real or an imaginary form. Even it today's world where serious discourse is dominated by scientific ideas there remains a desire to pull from the realm of perception something more. So perhaps the artist as modern day shaman can lead us out of the wilderness to a new landscape.










So in this spirit I have conducted a little experiment. Please forgive me however despite my intentions I suspect the following to be a bit pretentious.

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Ignore for the moment, the incessant call of the doomsday naysayers.

 I will admit that I do enjoy the role of the devil’s advocate. I do it so often that I do it without consciously thinking about it. It’s kind of a verbal exercise in which I make statements concerning things that are at the same time both factual and not entirely true. The goal of the exchange is to elicit a response an then perhaps  friendly debate.

 Last weak  as I was preparing to be away for several days, I had need to communicate some last minute instructions to my coworkers. After having written a fairly complex set of instruction to one particular coworker via email I asked if there were any questions I could answer before I go. In response Dana who sits beside me in the next cubicle posed a question. “What does it all mean?” To which I answered automatically, “To consume and to be in turn consumed”.  She responded with her usual sarcastic tone. “What about love?” I must admit I was uncharacteristically caught off guard.

 Days later while sitting in my beach chair by the Jersey shore my mind wandered back to this question. Gazing out along the black rock jetty I imaged a long ago time when life as we now know it began to flourish. Encrusted there upon a craggy spring-tide edge a rusting patina of bio-film held precariously. In those hard times had spontaneously arisen a fundament of a body.

                                              

              Roland Thaxter - Thaxter, R. Botanical Gazette 17(12):389-406 (1892

 Cells had differentiated perhaps by accident preserving resources in the process. Cells over generations continued to specialize in myriad experimental expression. In the process blind alleys and dead ends would be exposed and eliminated by natural selection. After a near infinity of trial and error a configuration akin to a system of tissues was achieved. A fruiting body  would then rise to perchance preserve its fragile survival until the hard times had passed. In Parallel we too must survive the rigors of this world. We however through the lenses of everyday life tend to be blind to the struggle.

               

 Animals have been documented by science to possess many amazing senses and abilities that far outpace our own. Our brains it would seem had needed to reorganize with nature selecting to replace or abandoning others deemed less valuable survival mechanisms. Through some chance genetic bottle neck the landscapes of our minds were altered. A race in tune with the well fare of its kind created a new way of life in which we could sense for the first time our essential oneness with others. 

                                                            

Valuable senses were lost in the process. Dull to the world around us we are surrounded instead by a ring of family bound by love. It was perhaps on the edge of a sea not unlike this one where our ancient ancestors were busily collecting crab and fish first felt these budding emotions. They in time would become so tightly bound to our new way of life that they became integral to it. It was then that to protect and care for each other went from a weakness to strength.

In the breadth of time on Earth in which life has existed what we think of as purely human emotions are relative newcomers. In comparison within the billions of years prior to the advent of our line life’s only goal was survival.  The first order of life did so by, consuming the abundant chemical and solar energies that were so readily available. As competition grew fierce an arms race was triggered in which it was far more economical to let someone else do their work of collecting energy for them. This way of life persisted as the primary mode of existence onward up until the end of the last ice age.

If you imagine these ephemeral ideas such as the emotion of love as being creations of the sentient mind or recognized from the primordial wellspring, either way these notions are new to us. So why then do we insist on placing them squarely at the top of our existential spectrum? It is I think not merely the fact that this is a human-centric world. Can it be that simple that the desire to love and be loved merely a mechanism through which we by extension increase our genetic survivability? By recognizing the essential oneness with those of our kind we have gained a powerful tool that allows us to more easily able to share and exploit common resources. Enhanced over millennia there traits have been ingrained into every aspect of culture. When all is said and done the equation To consume and to be in turn consumed, still rings true. It is also true however that Together we survive and alone we perish.

When looking out upon the roiling sea I am reminded of when in my days of youth how complex it all seemed. Through the eyes of a young artist I was obsessed with trying to capture in graphic form what I was experiencing. With my limited abilities I could not achieve anything approaching a facsimile of experience. It would take me a few years of trying before I realized that such a feat was unachievable. 

Our experience of the natural world through our senses has been altered to where we can only reference it through abstract patterns. We must infer meaning of imagery through the sieve of the mental and cultural images we have already created. This is the nature of Art and this is why it is so important to us. It is our nature then to weave from these emotions a landscape of connections.  Despite the incessant call of the doomsday naysayers there is one unavoidable fact. Never before in all of the history of our species have we lived in an age of such abundance. Take a moment now and again take note of it.

Where did the time go?

My father always said that time was slipping away from him. This prediction was a forgone conclusion that was as true for him, as it is for all the rest of us. He was not talking about life’s inevitable end, but of the experience it self. I’m now middle aged and I’m beginning to understand what he was on about. What he meant was, as the length of his Days, Weeks, Months and years passed him by in comparison to the full measured length of his life, these segments became shorter and shorter. This type of experiential perspective can only be attained along the way in the fullness of life’s journey. I’m not convinced yet that this is a common experience shared among all people. But I too have watched summers float on seemingly like ages onto themselves. In comparison they now have been reduced to the twelve calendar weeks that mark their passing like a gym teachers stopwatch. Taking this thought further I would ask, would living five hundred or a thousand years further skew this perspective? And would then those punctuations on our calendars then become meaningless?
If space and time are inextricably linked as is described in modern cosmology and space is expanding at an ever-increasing rate then is time also expanding? We can easily measure the three dimensions in which we live. We are all familiar with how this works. Time however to our current understanding is a linear construction moving forever forward in one direction. If space-time is in fact one entity, then should we not be able to measure some manifestation of this expansion in time? Currently, time can only be measured in the same manner in which it always has been. If however due to some human sensory limitations we can only experience time in this one way then we may never know.
For the sake of argument I’ve begun to image time as sphere expanding outward in all directions from the big bang onward. Contained in the surface of this theoretical sphere are the infinite points representing infinite lines of temporal movement. And there within the volume of the sphere are held frozen each elapsed moment from the beginning onward. Assuming we are on the leading edge of this growing sphere the future has not yet been created. It however would be equally possible then that we exist now in someone else’s past. If these things were found to be true, it would prove what many throughout time had suspected, that time like any other dimension can be traversed. Perhaps scenarios like these have already taken place in places where the fabric of time may be worn thinner than in others, allowing for some a kind of extra sensory perception to occur. My hope is that if these moments are there frozen than we one day could float there for a while and bask in a golden moment. Or maybe even just hold it still for a while as we experience it again. If you future people happen to be reading this obscure little blog and this question were answered would you please let us know? I expect a knock on my door right about now.