When I was younger I was often the first among friends to be able to read the name of the oncoming bus as it wove in and out of traffic in the distance. Now I have coke bottle glasses for reading and design work, and other glasses for driving and distances.
Fair enough. I’m lucky to have survived the nuclear threat of the cold war, to get old enough to complain about my eyesight.
But my degradation is unequal. My left eye already needs a new prescription while my right eye is generally okay.
As I understand it the brain is crosswired so that the dominant right hand is hooked up with the logical and linguistic left side of the brain. We associate the left side and the brain’s right hemisphere with the creative, intuitive side.
After the first Gulf War I remember seeing a US Air Force General being interviewed about the conflict. He had an amazing face. If you held up a sheet of paper across the television screen to cover one side of his face or the other, it seemed he actually had two faces. The right side was composed, interested, confident. The left side looked horrified, his left eye widened as if in horror, the corner of his mouth twisted down in a grim frown, all the muscles registering a completely different message from the right side.
Are we divided in ourselves? Is my left eye choosing to see less of the world because it understands more? I never thought it would happen to me.
I trained in music rather than art. In school they had two programs that we referred to as ‘jazz and classical’ or ‘commercial and legit’. You can already imagine the digs that were traded. I was in the legit program, though it never really conferred that quality on me.
I was never a classical musician in spirit, and came to the whole thing through composition. One day in university I become a classroom pariah. During a debate on the topic ‘What Is Music?’, we generally agreed on the proposition that ‘Music is organized sound’. Where I stepped on the dead limb was my insistence on a certain subordinate clause: “… whether organized by humans or not”.
Eyes rolled impatiently, professor and student alike. And for some reason I just couldn’t let go of it. I went on and on about it.
The subset of their belief was if there was therefore no such thing as ‘music of the spheres’, could animals be capable of music? There was wobbly support for that idea, but is was demoted to moot point because the songs were supposedly instinctual rather than unique messages.
However the topic was tackled, humans had to be the only true musicians.
I focused a lot of energy on music with the goal of becoming a famous musician. I’m not sure what that was all about. I know I wanted to be able to express ideas in an insightful way and have people receive that communication. But I realized later it was the journey of being a musician that was more important than the goal of fame, money or influence, none of which I attained. I did get girls, mind you.
Photography in some of its forms is seen to select and record the world, rather than present a message. In the sense that we ‘compose’ a photograph by selecting a point of view, the medium can be considered ‘Art’. I wonder if my school friends would have accepted that dry leaves under an autumn tree is art without a selected point of view.
But there is an ineffable difference between a photograph and a work of art. I want my photography to move clearly over that line. For all our interest in capturing the human condition in its raw form, artists are pushed partly by the desire to live the life of creating art, and artworks are more byproducts than products.
Of course we need to focus on the product to make our communication known, to cross that line between the banal and extraordinary. But for the work to cross that line, we have to cross it ourselves.
An artist’s job is to create new software for people’s perceptions. They juxtapose, abstract, distill their subjects to cajole the minds of participants.
Like messages in bottles, art works are nestled in buildings, magazines, websites and text. Like booby-trapped toys they can silently explode a person’s subjective experience. There might be no outward signs that the event has occurred other than a shrug, but the nerve connections are forged.
There’s a lot of focus on the way artists get to this point - the tools, the training, the techniques and the treasure - so that others can follow. But that’s just part of the artist’s job specification.
For some reason the species produces these subversive agents, then suppresses them in the community, for reasons that go beyond interest in the artists themselves.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out in a 1962 lecture, rats who could press a bar to stimulate their pleasure centres with electrodes in their brain would do so 18,000 times a day. Those rats who could stimulate areas of their brains that mixed pain and pleasure in equal measure wouldn’t push the bar nearly as often, but they did always press it again.
I guess our species has a mix of fear and delight for art, and whatever the results, the artist has to supply the stimulus.