Does the Interdependent Web of Existence include Art and How?

 

The Seventh Principal of Unitarian-Universalism is: Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.

 

Well, since so many of us spend a good deal of our time enjoying the various arts, I thought it might be rewarding to examine how some of the  Fine Arts[1] fit into that interdependent web and how we relate to them and then try to draw some conclusions about how that connection affects our relationship to each other. 

 

We shall examine how we enter the worlds offered by some of the seven major arts, sometimes in a way never before possible in history, and how entering those worlds can support the UU belief in the interconnectedness of all life and enhance our common humanity.

 

It is my belief that this aesthetic[2] experience has changed in particular ways over the last century or so—indeed, is still changing—and in some ways reflects advancements in our scientific knowledge of the world and of the larger reality in which we find ourselves, and which physicists and cosmologists have described scientifically. I mean specifically, space, time and the space-time fabric of the Cosmos.

 

My belief is that the Interdependent Web of Existence does include art, and I hope today to explore at least one aspect of how.  Some people might suggest that this might be true for all art, and I certainly agree.   My plan, however, is to limit myself to the seven major arts, and with your kind indulgence talk as well about movies, which many universities are now including in their humanities and arts curriculum. I will then make some observations as to how we enter their worlds, and how entering there connects us to life itself and the rest of humanity[3].

 

I should make it clear that I am not here to define Art or talk about Art in general or Art appreciation or creation, but shall further limit the scope to the mode of existence of the major arts and the different ways we must conform to that mode in order to enter their respective worlds.  I will explore how we are interdependent and connected while there and how our interconnectedness may well be enhanced when we exit.

 

What I am about to share with you is really the result of a lifetime of study.  As usual, I look forward to learning even more about it when I hear your ideas during the talkback.

 

Let’s start by looking back for a moment.

 

Aristotle in his Poetics, and most philosophers and aestheticians since, have defined art in various ways.  Over many centuries a fairly broad—though by no means absolute—consensus has developed so that now most would suggest that there are seven fine arts: architecture, sculpture, painting; then there’s music and literature; and finally theater and dance to which we will add film.  This makes three groupings, actually, and one reason for the separate groupings is important for our discussion and is based in part on the mode of existence of each art form and the resultant requirements on our part to relate to each one.

 

Let’s begin with architecture, sculpture and painting.  These are obviously quite different in many ways, and these differences have been analyzed and argued about for centuries; but for my theme today, the most important aspect they have in common is that they are “spatial” arts. That is, the statue, for instance is out there in the park, and if you want to experience it aesthetically, you simply go to where it is and look at it or perhaps even touch it.  Likewise for architecture and painting—except for the touching of paintings, which you could, but which is very bad form and will not usually help you enter the world portrayed in the painting[4]. 

 

Literature and music on the other hand are referred to as “temporal” arts.  Which means that they exist as art only in time, not space; and for you to enter that world you must follow certain conventions, and your experience must evolve along a time-line.

 

As an example, I can hold up this book and say, this is a copy of The Neverending Story, by Michael Ende.  Do you see it?  Well, this is somewhat misleading, for what you see is not the story, but rather some pages with symbols on them, which if you can interpret—that is, read the language they are written in—you can enter that world and experience the story.  Holding the book in your hand, or placing it under your pillow at night, will not get you inside. The story exists then, really, only while someone is reading it. That is when it comes to life, and that mode of existence is therefore temporal[5].

 

In the same vein, if you are listening to a musical recording on your CD player, but you happen to be in a hurry to go somewhere, you cannot simply speed it up and be on you way.   Further, and perhaps obviously, if I hold up a piece of sheet music, and I say here is the music we performed earlier, those words are simply a convenience.  For the sheet of paper is not the music, it is rather a symbol or representation of the music[6].  .

 

I realize that not much of what I have said thus far is news to you, but I ask you to kindly bear with me as I remind you of these basic ideas which will help later.

 

Moving now to the last two major arts: theater and dance.  These, of course, have a mode of existence, are experienced, in both space and time, and so are usually referred to as spatio-temporal arts. We will get to film last.

 

Let’s go a little deeper now by examining theater.  Someone might argue that as far as the spatial aspect is concerned, the theater isn’t really all that different from sculpture: you simply have statues moving and talking.  Well, we need to remember that since the theatre usually presents a story, you will have to experience it in time, and the actors are moving in three-dimensional space so, the consensus is that this art form is clearly spatio-temporal, and it must be experienced on that basis.

 

However, that does not fully explain an essential difference between it and, say, sculpture. An additional fundamental difference is the proscenium arch that separates the audience from the action by what is sometimes called a “psychic distance”. For, in order to enter the world of the story being enacted on stage, traditionally you must observe certain conventions, the first of which is: stay off the stage. You must also agree not to interfere with the action; do not cross under the arch[7]. 

 

 

There is a psychological distance that must be maintained, and this stems from our agreeing to what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called: “a willing suspension of disbelief”.  Thus, you know intellectually that when someone is stabbed to death on stage that no one has really been stabbed, yet you can be moved by that “death”—if you play the game. You have to act as if it were real. The Germans have a term, als ob. [as if], that is also sometimes used by aestheticians, and in art dictionaries, even in English.   

 

Now, no proscenium arch separates you from the statue in the park. Someone might argue that the actors are talking statues, but unlike a statue that you can perhaps touch, you cannot touch the characters. 

 

In effect, to bring home this point, during a presentation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, if you were to leave the audience, enter on stage and touch him or interact with him, at that moment Hamlet would dissolve and the actor would emerge.  The disbelief of the entire audience would no longer be suspended, and the illusion and its emotional and aesthetic impact would cease, and you would be declared a bonafide Philistine.

 

So, if everyone suspends their disbelief, here we have a make-believe world that moves us just as deeply and emotionally as real world tragedies might: but only if we enter it on its terms, such that even if the stage were virtually devoid of scenery or props or special effects we can still follow the advice of the Chorus as it opens Shakespeare’s “Henry V”: Shakespeare clearly lays the ground work for the theme I am trying to develop.

 

CHORUS:

. . . And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work. . .

[this is the als ob, as if, idea; today we might say “imagination”.]

 

. . .

Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth;

For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times,

Turning th' accomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass. . .

  [Shakespeare, Henry V, ActI]

 

Since we will be talking more later about the space-time fabric of the Cosmos, and the quantum physics realities that are filtering down into our consciousnesses and into our art, I would like to repeat two of the lines just quoted:

 

          For ‘t is your thoughts that now must deck our kings,

          Carry them here and there, jumping o’er times

          Turning th’accomplishmet of many years

          Into an hour-glass. . .

 

Clearly, all this jumping from here to there and back and compressing of years into an hour occurs in our mind, but it really happens there in it, and it moves us.

 

As we shall see, it is the psychological distance from the action  that enables us to enter into that world, that connects us to it, and also, I believe, to each other.  Each member of the audience, for instance, knows that other people are there, but as each one opens his/her mind to the action, the others are left behind somewhat.  However, if there is laughter or applause and so forth, the individual members come together and this joining can enhance the aesthetic enjoyment[8].

 

This is true, I believe, for all the major arts.  When you are alone reading a novel or listening to music in you room, is there not a certain joy and solace in the knowledge that thousands of others have also entered those worlds and you have a common bond with them? On occasion, do you not enjoy discussing that world with others?  This phenomenon, if true, speaks to the larger, universal dimension of art. 

 

As the Rev. Barbara Child said last week, and I couldn’t agree more: “Those people who say, ‘you can’t know what something is like unless it has happened to you,’ are wrong.” This is true across the board.  I submit to you that you don’t’ have to have been a slave, for instance, to know what it is like: anybody who experienced the story, Roots, and other such stories knows perfectly well what it was like. Likewise for any other such experience that art can bring to life for us and move us and enrich our psyche, expand our memory banks and deepen our well of understanding and empathy. 

 

When people say, “You had to be there,” they may well be right.  But that is what the artist is for, to recreate the event in such a way that we can be there.

 

Those who say you can’t know what it was like to live under apartheid unless you lived it are denying the validity of the aesthetic experience. Of course if a person has lived in a cave eating peanuts staring at the wall all his life, and has never had an aesthetic experience that carried him/her beyond his own individual experiences, then he/she may not know what any suffering, etc. is like. Ok, he or she won’t know what anything is like that they have not experienced directly.  But, people who have seen Kurt Weil’s play, “Lost in the Stars” or read Alan Paton’s book (Cry, the Beloved Country) on which it is based have experienced apartheid, been loved to shed real tears and identified with its victims[9].   This can be true of all experience: be it being a slave, being poor, being discriminated against, being a victim of injustice or suffering unrequited love, losing a loved one, and on and on. It doesn’t matter when or where the action occurs, even if a thousand years ago in Tibet.   The emotions respond because we are interdependent and universally connected. Those who have had a deeply moving vicarious experience do “know” what the actual experience is like.

 

What’s more, medical science knows that the mind does not distinguish deep down between imagined and real experiences.  Imagined fears can raise your blood pressure just like real ones. For our personalities, aesthetic experiences can be real and possibly life-changing, just like real-life experiences[10].

 

You may not all agree with those ideas, but let me ask you this:  is there anyone here or anyone you know who did not get a warm feeling inside when he/she first learned of and saw the Lascaux Paintings, which were discovered in 1946?  As you will recall, some boys were playing out in the countryside in the South of France and fell into a cave where 25,000-year-old murals were discovered.  Nobody even suspected that those paintings were there or, further, that the people of that pre-historical period were even interested in or capable of such art. I believe that for most of us, their art, in an almost magical way, seems to join us to them.

 

Returning to our topic and recapitulating, for the seven major arts, the division into spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal has been accepted for a long, long time.  But, the space-time relationship has changed, indeed seriously over the last hundred years, and drastically lately.  I believe these changes started centuries ago, subtly.  I have chosen but a few examples of this development from the past, and I am sure you can think of many others.

 

An example of early change, of course, was perspective in painting.  When perspective was introduced we have the illusion of three dimensional space.  Now this was done by a series of tricks, really. If, for instance, you show railroad tracks disappearing into the distance, you drew them coming together. In the real world, obviously, they remain parallel. So, curiously, by accepting this “trick,” this “falsity,” the mind is able to enter that world and experience it as if it were real.  This is another example of the suspension of disbelief.  By now, however, we moderns are  so used to perspective that it seems as natural as nature itself. At first, however, it did not go unquestioned.

 

I remind you, by way of only one illustration, that El Greco (1541-1614), got in trouble with the Spanish Inquisition because of these tricks—which the Church tended at first to consider somewhat against nature—but by clever diplomacy and brilliant arguments El Greco saved his skin.

 

Also, though it was never really a “movement,” even some early Renaissance artists played around with the space inside the painting in very interesting ways, to invite the viewer even deeper into the artificial world of the painting to make it seem even more “real.”  To take just one example: I’m sure most of you are familiar with a Jan Van Eyck painting of Giovanni Arnolfini and his Wife (1434)[11].  [I have some copies this and the other paintings I will mention that you can look at later if you wish to refresh your memory.]

 

In this painting Arnolfini is on the left, his wife on the right and they are holding hands.  Behind them on the wall of the bedroom is a small convex mirror, which of course reflects the entire scene in miniature, from behind. In the mirror you can see the backs of the figures in the foreground,  plus (strangely) two people who are not in the painting because they are apparently standing in the doorway of the bedroom: the artist (self-portrait) and someone standing next to him. So you have a painting in a painting, showing something outside the expected framework of the scene. Now, one will imagine, and Van Eyck fully intended that we do so, that in contemplating the painting in the painting, we begin to wonder exactly “where” we are in this spatial relationship. For, if the artist is standing in the doorway surveying the scene, where are we? Is he standing beside us?  Or course, we’re not really there in space at all, we are there in our mind. So, you see, the illusion of space begins to border on the infinite.  The French call this technique “en abime” meaning into the abyss, over and over, forever. 

 

Let’s recall “Hamlet”, some two-hundred years later: “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the King,” he says. Thus we have a play within a play, and we’re watching both at the same time.  How is this possible?  Obviously, the play within the play is just “pretend” –even to the actors in the main play, and the main play we’re watching is to be considered als ob, as real.  But where are we, really?  Well, isn’t  the play within the play really like the convex mirror? Doesn’t it show what’s behind the action psychologically?   In any case, we are asked to suspend our disbelief on two different levels.  The miracle of this very complex, psychological, space-time relationship is that it works.

 

Making a quantum leap now to the end of the 19^th and beginning of the 20^th centuries, we know that this was a time of great scientific advancements and tremendous experimentation in art. The list is immense: impressionism, expressionism, cubism, Dadaism, surrealism and many, many others.

 

It was also a time when we began to realize that the world of Art is the real global village.  Oriental, influences, for example, on late 19^th and early 20^th Century art movements were enormous, and continue to the point where today we have a veritable cross-pollinization of cultures that is expanding exponentially.[12]

 

It is often said that great artists sometimes anticipate new developments in knowledge. I believe that was happening in Art then with respect to Einstein and the other great thinkers who helped us understand Relativity and the space-time fabric of the cosmos.

 

An underling current of the times was simultaneity of perspective and movement.   At one level we had the zoetrope, which as you will recall was a wheel-like device lit from within.  As you spun an outer wheel, a static image in various positions appeared to move. People were fascinated.  Of course movies were new and coming along as well.

 

Then, in 1913, a bomb went off at the Armory in Philadelphia.  Marcel DuChamp presented his painting: Nude Descending a Staircase.  What is this but the attempt to show movement in a static portrait? It didn’t really work, for you can’t really see the nude. DuChamp wasn’t the only one doing such experiments by any means[13].  The general public was either indifferent, outraged, or basically considered the whole effort a lot of nonsense.

 

In the last century we were at a major crossroads, I believe, artists were anticipating the new knowledge learning that the fabric of our universe is not space nor time but space-time.    We are part of the space-time fabric of the cosmos and are interdependent with it.

 

From my perspective, which I hope you will share, such experiments expressed in part the desire to push the spatial art of painting to the limit and include temporality (movement) in it: in effect a  new spatio-temporal art. If true, that desire has been fulfilled by movies, in spades.

 

But before turning to cinema, I should point out that there are myriad examples of this breakdown in the classic conventions of spatial and temporal arts and their normal psychic distance.  I am sure you can think of many examples; I will give just one from the theatre: “Hair”.  Early audiences to this play were given what amounted to a psychological punch on the jaw when during the play a boisterous woman in the audience starts yelling wildly at the performers saying things like: This is 1968, sonny, not 1948.  Well, of course, we soon figure out that she is part of the cast.  Now what about the proscenium arch?

 

This technique created a quantum leap in audience sophistication, adaptability, and expanded their suspension of disbelief exponentially in all directions.  We are no longer surprised by such tactics, but they can still be effective[14].

 

Turning now to cinema.  In the early days, many pundits said that movies had no real future: Who would want to sit in a darkened room and watch two-dimensional images flash by on a screen?

 

Indeed, early films were basically filmed theater.  Typically, the camera was sitting, stationary on a tri-pod, and performers would move into view, “on stage,” and move off when done.  To a modern audience these techniques look crude, primitive, and almost childish. The evolution of film technique makes for very interesting reading. Always done for dramatic effect, to make the action more interesting and so forth, but also to bring us deeper into that world. 

 

I believe many of these techniques involve, in essence, space-time manipulation, which we now know are interdependent, not separate.  Let’s take a simple example of an early film innovation: the cut: You have a damsel tied to the railroad tracks.  The train is coming.  The cowboy is riding to the rescue.  When the first director did what we now call a “cut” from the girl to the oncoming train and then another to the cowboy riding to the rescue, producers and other pundits were convinced that the audience would not be able to follow such chopped up action.  How would they know that the train was coming towards the girl and was on the same track? How would they know that the cowboy was riding towards the girl and not the other way.

 

Well, obviously, the directors persisted and just as Shakespeare had said: they worked on our imaginary forces, and we put it together in our minds; and the dramatic tension was created in us. Well, we’ve come a long way. Indeed, the illusion is so real that many people are simply unaware psychically that, though movies are spatio-temporal they are only two dimensions, not three. The flat, two-dimensional space “seems” three dimensional.[15]

 

Now, just imagine today a child in a movie theater, when someone is about to be attacked from the shadows, who shouts, “Watch out!” and adults think he doesn’t understand that it’s just a movie, or maybe they explain that the characters in the film cannot hear him.  Of course, the child knows those things intellectually, but he has entered that world so completely that he reacts emotionally without the usual rational control factor.  He has gone from suspension of disbelief almost to belief—in his mind.  Of course, unlike actors on a stage, the characters in the film really can’t hear him.

Though, even here, there have been some interesting experiments.

 

Take for example, The Neverending Story. This charming novel, published in 1980, presents a child, Bastien, who starts reading a storybook and by a simple but clever device actually enters into the action.  The first level of space-time, ours reading the story, is written in red, whereas, once Bastien begins reading the Neverending story, the text is in green.  Thus each time the text changes color we know where we are. This book was made into a film that works very well, though it was never a raving success.  In any event, an audience from say two hundred years ago or before would have been totally lost by this device.

 

Think of hearing Santa’s bell in Polar Express.  By hearing that bell, you can enter the world more fully and more deeply.  Another point, about interdependence and interconnectedness, in Polar Express, the latest digital techniques of “motion capture”  were used—not to make the characters more real in an everyday sense, but to make them more like the paintings in the original story.  The director wanted to capture that “reality,” which is, of course, a fairytale.  Some might say, it’s silly to believe that make-believe is just as real as or perhaps more real than real.

 

Well, my answer to that would start with two questions:  who is more real in our psyche today: Miguel de Cervantes or The Man of La Mancha,

Don Quixote?  Who is more vivid in our mind’s eye, Mary Shelly, or Frankenstein? Who inspired the beautiful music by Andrew Lloyd Webber, Gaston Leroux or The Phantom of the Opera.

 

In thinking of the interdependence of these characters and us, I am reminded of William Blake’s (1757-1827)words:

The Sun's Light when he unfolds it
Depends on the Organ that beholds it

Blake was a poet and a painter, and this is one of his great themes: we create our world in the seeing (reading) of it, and re-create it when we learn to see it in a new way. So we shake the scales from our eyes, and look again, and again... and again anew.

The power of the mind to create realities is evident in many films, the Matrix series, for example, where the main character is actually in a chair in a laboratory with his brain wired and his dreams become the reality we see as he fights the bad guys.  I’m sure you can think of many other examples.

 

I believe, however, that this type of interconnectedness and time-space melding is occurring all over the place, not just in science fiction, and is being accepted by audiences who may never even have heard of quantum mechanics or the space-time fabric.[16] 

 

Take, for example the recent film “DeLovely.” Anybody who comes to this film thinking of Aristotle’s rule of three unities: time, place and action, will be totally at sea.   Here we have time and space telescoped and convoluted upon itself over itself and around itself.   The movie opens with a very old Cole Porter getting ready to leave his studio with a guy named Gabe.  Well, it turns out that Gabe is actually the Angel Gabriel, and the two hour movie is a retrospective of Cole’s entire life, that actually takes place in the fifteen seconds or so of his demise when, as they say, you life flashes before you (think of Shakespeare’s hour-glass). 

 

The first flashback shows a woman singing one of Cole’s songs, and Cole hollers out some advice—like the kid in a movie.  Gabe explains that they can’t hear him; he’s not really in contact with that world, he can only watch it like a movie.  So, we accept this premise and enjoy the film.  Then, lo and behold, near the end, a somewhat younger Cole in a flashback sequence is so happy with a performance of one of his songs that he leaps up and throws his crutches into the air.  Where do they go?  Right into the arms of the dying Cole, sometime apparently during his last 15 seconds.  Those crutches not only violated the rules by bridging the proscenium arch, but moved to a different time dimension all together—just like an electron making a quantum jump to another valence band in a molecule. This is all very effective drama.  But, I hope we all realize that nobody two hundred years ago would have had a clue as to what was happening.  We do, even if we never heard of quantum mechanics.  Our art is teaching us about the real nature of our Cosmos and our interdependence with everything in it.

 

This is all new, but where does it leave us in the space-time fabric? Some nice possible answers can be found in a recent film: “What the Bleep Do We Know?,” which I highly recommend.

 

But on an even deeper level, we could take our cue from the song I sang earlier and ask:   Has God forgot his promise and gone away? Or, as some might ask: Was He ever even there in the first place?  I do not know. But with respect to the stars, what I do know is what science has taught us and what the late Carl Sagan used to say: we are all made of star stuff.  Thus we and all life are totally interdependent and interconnected[17].  We may well be “lost out here in the stars,” but we’re lost together, we have each other.  Finally, our interdependence is enhanced and we can come ever closer together and know each other more fully and more deeply through the magic of art.

 

Thank you.                    

 

Given at NCUU, Lecanto FL, 10 Apr 05

--Joe Wetzel