Monday, November 16, 2015

Literalists, Figuratists, and Terrorists

I don't know how far I can pursue this thought, which has been percolating in my mind for years. Suddenly I see it as connected to religiously inspired terrorism, but I don't know whether I can articulate the connection.
In my years of association with religious people, I have come to see them as being of two kinds: the literalists, who believe in the absolute truth of their religious creeds, and the figuratists (of which I am one, if I can call my self religious at all), who understand that their religious observance is metaphorical and stands for an ineffable spiritual truth (which is shared with other spiritual traditions).
Literalists believe, for example, that God revealed himself at Mount Sinai and gave the Torah to the Israelites, just as the event is described in the Bible. Religious people of the second type might say, "something must have happened at Mount Sinai," or that the story is a myth -- not a "mere" myth, but a powerful, formative myth. For figuratists, the historical truth, if it is ever discovered, is of little relevance. It doesn't matter whether the exodus from Egypt actually occurred. What matters is that this is the way the JeWe see wish people understands itself, and the way Christianity subsequently used the story of the Exodus, and its use in literature, drama, painting, and so on.
There is no common language between the first and second kind of religious people. The figuratists understand religion as a collective work of art, created by communities over centuries. Thus, since religions are works of art, their inner ideational structure (one can't use the word "logic" here) is the associative, creative, mysterious structure of dreams. Religions, for us, are systems of symbols, and symbols are not real the way nature, for example, is real.
The literalists live in the dream world of religion, and it is more real to them than what we figuratists call "objective reality." And this is the meaning of the violence of religious extremists, not a rational meaning, but an expressive meaning. They do not draw any distinction between what we figuratists call symbols and empirical reality. Everything is symbolic.
We figuratists are mystified by religiously inspired violence, because it doesn't serve any discernible rational purpose. It is not calculated and political, like the Russian encroachment on the Ukraine. Nor is it what a figuratist would call symbolic, in that for the literalists, everything is symbolic, which means that nothing is symbolic in contradistinction to what is not symbolic.
We figuratists see the killing of innocent people, whether they happen to be standing next to a terrorist when he is assassinated by a drone, or whether they are attending a concert in Paris, as an act of unspeakable cruelty. For the literalist, we are all actors in a cosmic drama, and our lives and deaths are part of the plot. Killing people off is hardly different from getting rid of a character in a TV series.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

Creativity and Dreams

In real life this painting, "Family of Saltimbanques," by Picasso, done in 1905, is huge. On my last visit to the National Gallery in Washington, DC, I stood before it for a long time, and now, too, when I see it in miniature, on the display of my computer, I can barely take my eyes off it, though I want to write something about it.
The painting has been on my mind because I might be giving a paper on "Translating Creativity," if my proposal is approved, at an upcoming professional convention, so I've been wondering how one recognizes creativity in the first place. To me, this painting is a, so extreme, indeed, that comment seems superfluousn extreme demonstration of artistic creativity, from which one can learn almost everything one needs to know about it.
We are most creative in our dreams, and this painting has a dreamlike quality: six figures are placed in a non-landscape, A fat middle-aged man in a reddish costume looks at a tall young man, dressed in a harlequin costume, who stands with his left hand behind his back and looks away from the man in red. A young girl in a ballet costume stands at the younger man's right, looking down and away from him. A boy, wearing only a bathing suit, approaches, carrying a barrel on his shoulder. He is almost in the center of the painting, but stands a bit behind the fat man. Another boy, younger, wearing a turquoise jacket, open at the neck, stands in a kind of dancer's pose, and, in the lower right corner of the painting, looking away from the five other people, sits a young woman in straw hat, whose gaze is also turned away from ours.
Who are these people? What is the connection between them? How did they get there? What are they doing? Where are they going? The painting only raises questions. Yet, despite all the unexplained things, Picasso used items of visual vocabulary that ordinarily mean something to us: costumes, poses, facial expressions, recognizable objects (a basket of flowers, a jug, a cask), a kind of landscape. These figures probably had personal meaning for Picasso, and they are meant to have personal meaning for the spectator as well, personally meaning that Picasso didn't state explicitly (that's part of what's dreamlike about the painting): parents and children (perhaps), youth and maturity, the impossibility of communication among people in their own worlds? We are invited to project our own issues on these figures.
Picasso was well-versed in the history of painting, and he must have thought, for example, of Watteau, whose painting of these "Italian comedians" is nearly as mysterious as Picasso's painting. What is the meaning of the statue behind the figures in the upper right of the painting? Why are these five actors standing where they are? (Five, because the face of a black man peers out between the left shoulder of the Pierrot figure and the musician who is bending over).
Watteau's comedians are dressed in recognizable costumes, like Picasso's saltimbanques. The dream is not entirely incoherent, the way some of my dreams are, but the choice of the figures, their pose, their situation all obey a dream-logic.
Dreams are notoriously difficult to remember, which may be why we need art: to evoke our dreams, or even to replace them.
As I meditate on these paintings and write about them, the city of Paris is reeling from cruel terrorist attacks that have left more than a hundred people dead, well-planned attacks that are, in their way, also a demonstration of creativity, also the acting out of a dream-logic.
I'm not sure what to do with that idea.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Some Thoughts about Hunger and a Fat Dentist


Understanding hunger is important to a lot of people in the developed world, because we believe we are too fat. If only we could be less hungry, we would eat less food, and we wouldn't be so fat.
I'm not thinking about Hunger with a capital 'H,' the hunger of people who don't have enough food at all. I have never experienced that kind of hunger, and I pray that I never well.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels on Yom Kippur.
I'm also not thinking about the hunger one feels for emotional reasons, or just the simple pleasure of eating something sweet or salty, a brownie or some potato chips.
I'm thinking of the hunger that well-fed people feel at the hour when they ordinarily eat.
That hunger, as I experience it, is a kind of discomfort, not more acute than, let's say, having tired feet at a museum, and a lot less acute than a bad headache. But it's real discomfort.
That kind of hunger is different from other types of discomfort, because it's so easy to get rid of it. You don't have to take an analgesic. You don't have to sit down and take off your shoes. All you have to do is eat something.
I get very hungry before mealtimes and especially when, for some reason, I am
eating later than usual - much more hungry than a lot of people I know (like my wife).

Years ago, when I attended some meditation retreats, I was taught how to deal with discomfort while meditating. Instead of saying to yourself, "My back really hurts," you're supposed to think, "I have a sensation in my lower back," without classifying it as pain, and thus as something to avert. You're supposed to give the sensation your attention, to locate it, to feel it - and then, as happens in meditation, your mind will wander, you call your attention back to your breathing, and the sensation in your back no longer distracts you.
Can one do the same thing with hunger? It's seven o'clock, say, and you ordinarily eat at seven, but tonight you're going out and you won't be eating till nine. Your abdomen is telling you to put some food inside yourself.
You have several options: you can give in and eat something, you can hold out, not eat, and become grouchy, or you can examine the message your abdomen is sending you: Where is the discomfort situated? How acute is it? What other sensations are connected with it? Usually I eat something.
In our society, while we are constantly being bombarded with advertisements for highly caloric, unhealthy foods, nevertheless being overweight tends to be regarded as a moral failing. When I was a child, my mother routinely referred to our dentist with the almost Homeric epithet of "that fat pig," as in, "I have an appointment with [name withheld, even though my mother and the dentist are long deceased] today, that fat pig."
Fat or not fat, he was a great dentist.