You can’t make a Hamlet without breaking a leg

 

 

 

by Richard Nilsen

When Adlai Stevenson ran for president in 1952, he was tagged with being an “egghead.” It was enough to sink him in the election. No one wanted an egghead in the White House.

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But neither did anyone actually ask what an “egghead” might possibly be. We throw around the term “intellectual” as if it were widely understood. But the term means something very specific.

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It doesn’t mean someone who is very smart. Many smart people are not in the least intellectual. (Nor should they be — we need smart people who can actually do and make things, too.)

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It doesn’t mean simply someone well-educated or with a string of letters after their name. After all, Ph.D. is often just an acronym for “Piled Higher and Deeper.” Dogged drudge-work will earn you a Ph.D. if you are willing to put in the hours. (This is not to disparage those Ph.D.s who are intellectual — intellectuals often earn advanced degrees, but the degree itself is no guarantee.)

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When I was growing up, those who were considered intellectual were often called “nerds.” It was not a compliment. But nerd-dom has changed over the years, and now, nerds are almost never intellectual. Their heads are buried in video games or comic books. Yes, they can program like demons, but how much do they actually think about what they’re doing? Being able to do things civilians cannot does not make you an intellectual.

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We tend to think of intellectuals as those who know a lot of stuff. But at its core, being intellectual is not about knowledge, but about questions. An intellectual constantly questions things.

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Now, we all have questions. It is basic to being a human. But intellectuals are different in this respect: We all have questions, but intellectuals have questions about the questions. They examine the validity of our assumptions.

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Through most of history, we learned about the world from our elders, and our elders learned from their elders. This was a fine system for eons. And even today, the model most people have of the world is the one handed to them and reflexively accepted. This is our Umwelt, the picture of reality held in our psyche against which we measure things. It is not a very sophisticated model, and one that is frequently proved wrong, or at least unexamined.

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Consider three meals a day, or 8 hours of sleep. Take patriotism or gender roles. These are our “categories of thought,” and while they have served us well enough, they are still basically habits rather than realities.

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Let me repeat, this has nothing to do with intelligence. There are very smart people who use these categories of thought to accomplish much. In fact, the world runs smoothly for long stretches entirely because these people tend to run things. They are not intellectuals. No matter how smart they are, they have not that peculiar bent of personality that we can name as intellectual. (There can be a problem, though. Consider a complete non-intellectual who arrogantly and stupidly thinks his narrow vision comprises the whole world and has his finger on the nuclear button. I shudder.)

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But they are the vast majority of the human population throughout the world and throughout history. Problems occur when one set of assumptions bump face to face with a different set. Wars may start, people may die. But, inside the smooth running society, these assumptions keep the wheels greased — even if those wheels include patriarchy, slavery or 30-year mortgages.

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There are those, however, who recognize the categories of thought as things to play with. These are the clever people. They take our expectations and turn them upside down — usually to make us laugh or entertain us, but also to make us vote a certain way, or to make us sign on to a new religion. When they entertain us, they give us pleasure; when they manipulate us, they generally foster misery. Either way, they don’t question the categories, but merely rejigger them to effect.

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I think, for instance, of Quentin Tarantino. Clever as hell, but not what I could call an intellectual. He takes the tropes and memes of culture, mainly old movies — and mainly old bad movies — and turns them sideways and upside down, then fills them with clever dialog and makes bright, shiny new films that we admire for their sheen. But he has neither negated those tropes, nor even questioned them, merely juggled them — a new version of the vaudeville plate spinner. His ideas have no more substance than the deaths of the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill — ducks in a shooting gallery. He is damned clever.

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Tarantino is not thinking outside the box: He is stacking boxes.

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Intellectuals, on the other hand, attempt to see the categories of thought and examine them, asking if they are truly solid, or mere habits of mind to be transcended. These are the people who think, as they say, “outside the box.” Indeed, for the rarest of them, there is no box at all: They see most clearly, with no filter. At least, that’s the attempt. It is so hard to do, most intellectuals really only achieve the creation of new habits to be accepted and followed by later populations. Still, they persist.

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My avatar for the intellectual is Albert Einstein, who inherited the categories of Isaac Newton, and jumped outside the box to see the bigger picture. From inside
Newton’s box, you could never unravel the riddle of photons. Of course, outside the box, we are now lost in a welter of quantum mechanics, and it will take a new Einstein to see past the walls of our new cosmic box.

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These intellectuals fill the ranks of many fields. If you want to compare an intellectual filmmaker with a clever one, then put side-by-side films by Tarantino and those by Ingmar Bergman. There are intellectual mathematicians who constantly question prime numbers, there are political scientists who question democracy, doctors who question research, novelists who question class and race, poets who question language, historians who question evidence. We once had Structuralists debunking the biographical interpretation of literature, followed by the Post-Structuralist who deconstructed them, and the current crop of intellectuals who are fed up with political readings of everything from Lewis Carroll to Jacqueline Susann.

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Now, these three types of mind I have just outlined are not three discrete kinds of personality. They are points on a spectrum. On one end there are the common minds, on the other there are the intellectuals and in the middle are various shades of clever. I have made a chart (one of the popular tropes in our current culture, so frequent in board meetings) showing the relative numbers of each type and the range of the spectrum.

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It should be pointed out once again, that this is not a range from dumb to smart. There actually can be intellectuals who are not very bright, and there are ordinary people who can be very intelligent. It is not the level of brainpower we’re talking about, but the inclination to focus that power on one type of thinking or another.

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Further, societies cannot function if everyone questions everything all the time. There is little stability in intellectual thought. Yet, societies can fester if there are no intellectuals among its number. The proportions I have shown in my “Spectrum of Exthecation” are generally the right proportion for a functioning culture. (“Theca” is the Latin word for “box,” and so, “exthecation” is “outside the box.”)

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In a way, I think of the spectrum as running from truth assumers through truth users and on to truth seekers. Where do you fall?

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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something to say

by Richard Nilsen

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I was asked to come and speak to a writing class at a local community college. When you write for the daily newspaper, you get such invitations. I always tried to oblige.

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As I spoke to the students, who ranged in age from teens to retirees — that is the way it often is in two-year schools — it became clear that I wasn’t saying what the course teacher had wanted me to say.

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I wasn’t trying to undermine her curriculum, but it was obvious from her comments that she had hoped I would talk about writing outlines, topic sentences, supporting arguments and perorations, all the usual paraphernalia of learning how to put words in order so as not to embarrass yourself to your reader.

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But, I’m afraid I had something different in mind. In fact, I started out by laying out only one rule for good writing. And it had nothing to do with not ending a sentence with a preposition; nothing to do with making notes and organizing your thought; nothing to do with spell-check or grammar.

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“The most important requirement for good writing,” I told them, “is having something to say.”

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It is surprising how many people sit down in front of their computer keyboard and assume that writing is somehow a substitute for having something to say, as if fancy words would bamboozle your readers with flash and mist.

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You can read online the two-hour speech that Edward Everett gave on Nov. 19, 1863 at the dedication of the soldiers’ cemetery at Gettysburg, Pa. It is a 13,000-word behemoth of rhetoric and panegyric. It was carefully wrought, organized in just such a way as to make impressive points at calculated intervals, rising to climaxes, falling back and rising even higher. It was a masterpiece of construction; unfortunately, all that great scaffolding rather hid the edifice behind.

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“Standing beneath this serene sky, overlooking these broad fields now reposing from the labors of the waning year, the mighty Alleghenies  dimly towering before us, the graves of our brethren beneath our feet, it is with hesitation that I raise my poor voice to break the eloquent silence of God and Nature. But the duty to which you have called me must be performed; — grant me, I pray you, your indulgence and your sympathy.”

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There were references to Ancient Greece, the glory of war and the bravery of soldiers, and a good deal of mention of blue skies and rolling green fields.

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It was a memorable performance — at least, that is what people thought at the time, although almost no one remembers it now, except in dim contrast with the words Abraham Lincoln then spoke, with a ratio of words, compared with Everett, of 1-to-50. Lincoln’s words barely fill half a page of typescript.

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The difference: Lincoln has something to say.

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What is surprising is how few people actually have anything to say. Oh, they jabber on endlessly, but it is mostly prattle. And it is mostly rehash of what others have already said. Original thought is a rare commodity.

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What does it mean, having something to say? It can be the recounting of a meaningful experience, it can be a fresh insight, it can be an opinion.

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There is a lie that is a cliche (how often they are twins), that opinions are like (I’ll use the word “noses” here to be polite, but you know the familiar wording) noses: everyone has one. But this simply glosses over the fact that almost no one has a true opinion, but rather restates some glib bromide that has been heard from someone else. These are not opinions, they are bumper stickers; they are T-shirt slogans.

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A genuine opinion comes from deep experience, probing consideration and formulation of thought within a coherent world view. You can tell the difference easily: If you imagine a meme on Facebook printed in fancy text over a picture of a cat, it is not an opinion. If it a quote questionably ascribed to Mark Twain or Albert Einstein of Mahatma Gandhi, it is not an opinion. If it favors one political party or candidate over another, it is not an opinion. Sorry. Dittoheads are disallowed.

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But I am overplaying opinion. Having something to say is much greater than merely weighing options in a dilemma and reaching a conclusion. In many ways, having something to say is more compelling when it is not trying to persuade us of anything, but to convey to us the experience of something. Or telling us a story. Or discovering something you had not previously known and now feel compelled to share. The compulsion is the all.

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Writing is a compulsion. You have something to say; it needs to get out, get down on paper (the legacy version — now we get it down in bits on a laptop screen). Good writing is an overflowing, like a fountain. Questions of creating an outline, or fretting over sentences with prepositions as the ending of, simply don’t come into play.

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When you have something to say, the order with which it spills out onto the page will almost certainly be the most effective order. Yes, you can arrange ideas rhetorically, and certainly, if you are not a natural writer, you may be helped by a course in creative writing. But writers are born, not made. Some people have a talent for mathematics, some for music, some for sports. You can teach people the rote version of any of these, but those with the inbred talent will find the best expression for any of these fields. I know that no matter how much I study trigonometry, I will never be a mathematician. I may get the gist, but never the pith.

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I suppose you can teach enough rudiments to non-writers so they will not humiliate themselves when they are required to write something down, but you cannot make them writers. And I suppose you can take a raw, unformed writer and make him or her aware of things they hadn’t considered and help them develop their natural ability, but you cannot take a lump and turn it into a gem.

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But even talented writers have to have something to say, or they are just spinning their wheels.

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Something to say requires a life paying attention, a life with an open chest, willing to soak things in. This is filling the well so it may be drawn on later. In the old days, writers like Thomas Wolfe or Ernest Hemingway sought out adventures, signing on to merchant ships; or taking cross-country road trips, like Jack Kerouac; or shooting lions; or stabbing a wife, like Norman Mailer; or leaving America and living out of trash bins in Paris like Henry Miller; in order to gain material for books. Not so much for autobiography, as for the sheer volume of experience that could inform their prose.

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The larger you are on the inside, the more pressure for the accumulated steam to escape in words, precious words, delicious words, excited words, needful words.

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This is having something to say.

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Like so much else, this is something I learned from my wife, who taught art for so many years to first-, second-, and third-graders. Too many art teachers spent their classes with the color wheel, or with masterworks of art history, or — much, much worse — project art, such as outlining your hand to make Thanksgiving turkeys, or with golden-macaroni Parthenons.

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But what my wife did was bring live animals to class and let the children play with them for 20 minutes or a half hour, asking them to sit quiet and observe the bunny or the hermit crab or the turtle; to feel their fur or carapace; to look them in the eye; even to talk to them. She might have them sit in a circle on the floor and put the rabbit in the middle of them and ask them to sit still and try to draw the bunny to them.

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Children respond to the animals so strongly that all you have to do is put a piece of paper in front of them after their exposure to the beasts, and give them some paint and brush, and they will be mad to paint their response to the experience. You cannot stop them from making masterpieces. You do not teach them technique, you fill their insides with something real, and they transmute it into utter expressivity. It is a miraculous thing to see.

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Educator Viktor Lowenfeld said that given sufficient motivation by experience, the children will find their “adequate means of expression.”

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It is the same with writing. You don’t need topic sentences (I snooze at the prospect), you need content. You need enough life in you that you become a conduit for it. It is written because it needs to be written.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

Tree of Knowledge

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 by Richard Nilsen

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The more I learn, the less I know.

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This is common to most of us. Because knowledge grows arithmetically, but our awareness of how much we don’t yet know in any given field grows exponentially.

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The great E.O. Wilson without doubt knows more about ants than anyone else on the planet, but I would wager that he would tell you that if you put all his knowledge on one side of a balance scale, and all he doesn’t know on the other, that side would drop the weighing pan to the table, leaving his knowledge high and dry and swinging quietly in the air. He is more aware now than ever of just how much there is still to learn about ants.

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Fifty years ago, when I was taking college courses in everything I could think of, my ambition in life was to know everything. Literally. I wanted to absorb all that was known in this existence. There may have been a slight awareness of irony in this, but the ambition was essentially sincere. I plunged into ancient Greek, into astronomy, into Shakespeare, into mythology, into symbolic logic — and that was just my first semester; I had to get special permission for the extra credit hours. And in my leisure time, I read poetry, physics, political science and Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception.

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Needless to say, I couldn’t keep this pace going after the second semester. There was beer, combustible pharmaceuticals and a newly invigorated interest in the exciting volatility of female physiology. Still, I continued to take as wide a variety of courses I could get away with and still meet my requirements for the core curriculum. But it was after my degree that my real education began. In school, I read what was required of me, after, I read entirely what my curiosity ignited in me. I soaked up everything I could, but the more I took in, the faster the horizon of my knowledge sped away from me.

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by Unknown artist, oil on canvas, feigned oval, circa 1629

It bugged me. When poet John Milton was that age, he took six years off after getting his degree from Cambridge University and read everything that have ever been written up to that time — at least everything he had knowledge of.
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I doubt he read Chinese, but he did read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and even Old English, and while there were surely myriad books he was simply unaware of, other than those, he managed to read everything as far as he knew, that had ever been written. Everything.
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By 1967, that was no longer possible for me. By then, even scientists could no longer even read everything just in their own field. There was too much. Now, it is even worse. Words are being written faster than they can be read, faster than they can be cataloged, faster than voice-recognition software can translate them. We are buried under a vast refuse pile of publication and the gulls swarm, circling overhead, squawking.
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One then makes a choice — do you dive deeper into a single field, and learn all you can about ants, or about the use of the ablative case in late Roman literature, or perhaps the transfer of spin in subatomic particles, or do you attempt to skim the surface of it all and gather bits of flotsam from every field.
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As for me, I didn’t really have a choice. I have become less interested in any single particular, and more interested in the way all these particulars relate to each other. I made a distinction between what I called the “tree of knowledge” and, on the other hand, “fact confetti.”
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We all know fact confetti. In high school, we had to learn dates: 44 BC, AD 1066, 1492, 1588, 1776, 1848, 1914 — but they too often remained discrete bits of factoid unrelated to each other, except by needing to know them for tests. The snow of confetti piled up: subtrahend, pluperfect, atomic number, Bonaparte, establishment clause, hypotenuse, bicameral, manifest destiny, cosine, topic sentence, supply and demand, and something about my aunt and her pencil. It was a blizzard.

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Against this fact confetti, I set the tree of knowledge. In this view of learning, all the branches of human knowledge are connected, and you follow one limb out to its extension without ever losing track of the limb that balances it on the other side of the tree. It is the ultimate effect of trying to hold on to as wide an understanding as possible. You cannot know every fact, but you can grasp the structure on which all the facts are leaves.

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If you have a sense of the Renaissance giving in to the Baroque and to the Neoclassical and Romanticism, then you not only understand the history of painting, but also that of political philosophy, literature and even typography. The Bodoni typeface simply has to appear when it did. And by the flow from one era to the next, you can follow the pendulum as it swings from a kind of classicism to a kind of Baroque, or Romantic outlook, which governs all. Thus, 1492 isn’t merely Columbus, but also the Expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Iberia, the pivot into a world of nation-state, a growing urbanism, a gradual reawakening of European globalism. The years that soon followed, Erasmus wrote his In Praise of Folly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince, and Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible was published. It is all tied together.

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If you understand the forces of the Reformation and its Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, you can understand the difference between the paintings of Rembrandt and Rubens. You will not place them in the wrong century. It is all of a piece. Know the tree and even if you forget a detail, you can follow the branch out and rediscover what you didn’t know you remembered. It is not fact confetti, but a single glorious growth from rootstock to leaf tip.

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The truth is, that we need a framework for our knowledge; anything else is merely fact confetti. We enter that calculus class and hear a blizzard of terminology:  derivatives, tangents, quotients, functions, integrals, vectors. We might as well be studying Aeolian Greek. An overview would be helpful, so we would know where to hang these definitional tree ornaments.

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Scene at base of trumeau, south portal, west facade Notre Dame de Paris: Eve eats of the forbidden fruit and hands apple to Adam, while serpent is seen as part woman.

Clearly, the frontiers of knowledge are expanded by the first choice, by those who dare to pick apart the minutiae, get their Piled-Higher-and-Deeper and condemn themselves to a life in which the only people they can talk to are others who share the same fragments of existence. But a problem occurs when such profoundly learned people venture outside their own spheres. What can an entomologist have to say about the ablative case? Or a Dante scholar say about differential calculus?

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And it is the breadth of knowledge, not its depth that makes the tree of knowledge. We depend on specialists to add new growth to the tree, but it is important for at least some of us to focus on the whole and not the part.

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Obviously, the specialists cannot, and don’t need to. But someone does. Someone has to see the forest and not the trees, or the trees and not just one leaf or another. That is for those of us who have taken the second choice. Those whose curiosities cannot settle, who hover over every thought, every field, and wish not to write a peer-reviewed paper, but, like Denis Diderot, write an entire encyclopedia.

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In other words, not to know everything, as I once wished, but at least to see the shadow of everything and try to hold it in the mind even as the horizon stretches away from us.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

Everything you know is wrong

 

by Richard Nilsen

In 1974, the surrealist comedy team, Firesign Theater, released an album titled, Everything You Know is Wrong. Surprisingly, they were right.

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Take China, for instance. We have been told that China is 3,000 years old, or 5,000 — take your number — as if the entity we today call China were unchanging in all that time. But in reality, the national identity of China has changed constantly.

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Looked at more closely, the history of China is one of various dynasties, varied national borders, conglomerations of multiple nations coalescing and dividing and joining again and absorbing territory from its edges, being invaded and ruled by non-Chinese emperors, and reasserting its Han ethnic identity, despite the large numbers of non-Han peoples now circumscribed by its current borders. China has not been static over those millennia. It has been a bubbling cauldron of instability and change.

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.You only have to look at the varied maps over time to see that what we tend to call China moves around the map of the Asian continent almost as much as Poland has moved around the map of Europe.

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If we thought about Europe the same way we tend to think about China, then there is no reason we shouldn’t say that France is 30,000 years old, because the cave paintings of Lascaux and Chauvet are that old, and the kind of naturalistic drawing evidenced in those caves is characteristic of European art as we tend to think of it.

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So, why do we think of China as an unchanging entity, but recognize France as having emerged from Roman Gaul and the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne, and becoming France only slowly?

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Clearly, there is a bias somewhere here, a view that we have a more detailed understanding of what is closer to us, and a dim and uncertain view of what is “other” and foreign. “They” are unchanging, while we constantly evolve.

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But I don’t mean to be writing about China, but about what we consider knowledge. What we know is almost always wrong, or, if not wrong, always more complicated than we allow.

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I think of Cliff Clavin, the mailman on the TV show, Cheers, who was a nattering fountain of facts. “It’s a little known fact that smartest animal is a pig. Scientists say if pigs had thumbs and a language, they could be trained to do simple manual labor.”

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Clavinisms include a good deal of what we hear as “fact” on the internet, when we read “Top 5 Countries with the Most Fatalities on Everest” or “Top 5 Countries with the Most Women in Parliament.” They make up all the “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” cartoons (“An 8-year-old Ohio boy taught himself to drive by watching YouTube, and
he drove to McDonald’s for a cheeseburger with his little sister on April 9, 2017. He didn’t commit any traffic violations!”), and the basis of many frightening schoolyard myths that little boys impress each other with (“If you stab yourself with a pencil, you get lead poisoning.”)

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Needless to say, most such Clavinisms are either demonstrably false, or self-contradictory (the Ohio boy did commit a traffic violation: He drove without a license), or — more often — missing contextual complexity.

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And it is this complexity that usually stumps us. Almost any fact, taken individually, is refutable with enough context, because the world is not made up of discrete bits, but of a web of interrelations, and every bit complicates every other bit.

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It is why we can argue interminably over the cause of the Civil War or whether behavior is learned or innate. How many of each animal did Noah take on the Ark? Depends on which verses of the Bible you consult.

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Facts are the defense of the young. When we are so young that we still know everything, we can assert with confidence that marijuana is not addictive, or that abortion is murder. When we enter college, we are all Cliff Clavins. It takes a lifetime of being humbled before the complexity of the world that we come to understand how little we actually know.

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I remember well when I knew everything. I knew that war was unnecessary, that the maturity of my elders was equal parts exhaustion and cowardice, that evil in the world was merely a product of ignorance. Later, after drinking too shallowly of the Pierian Spring in college classes, I knew that everything was relative, and that there was no such thing as universal truth. I have recently been face to face with the fact that there is at least one universal truth, expressed in Brahms’ German Requiem: “Herr, lehre doch mich, dass ein Ende mit mir haben muss.”

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Recently, my wife would complain when she asked a question and I answered, as I increasingly did in later years, “I really don’t know,” or “I’m not sure,” and she would say, “You used to be able to answer all my questions. Why can’t you do that anymore?” The reason is that all the answers have become muddied. There is too much husk and not enough seed. How can you answer a question such as “Why did Napoleon fail in Russia?” without beginning with the Greeks and Scythians 2,500 years earlier? It is all connected. Each answer requires a book, and even the book is only a summation. “I don’t know” can also mean “I don’t know how to give an answer that doesn’t distort the case by oversimplifying.” And, “I don’t know because while I have the surface information, I don’t know the background well enough to explain it.”

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It can be easier to accept the Clavinism: The Romans had a room where, after eating too much, they would go to vomit (a “vomitorium” was really the exit portal of a sports stadium); Einstein failed math in school (no, he didn’t); Napoleon was short (he was average height for his time); we only use 10 percent of our brains (perhaps true for certain politicians, but not for the rest of us).

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Such factoids give us the illusion of knowledge. But, even when they are superficially true, they miss the swirling, gurgling complexity of the real world, the interrelatedness of history, the unknowability of parts of the cosmos.

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This is not a plea to surrender to ignorance, but rather a call to embrace humility. The ability to recognize that you don’t know isn’t an end, but a beginning: It is the prod to learn more. I am now 69 and I feel like I am barely turning the first page of a book.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard and his wife moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

The Windows of Perception

by Richard Nilsen

I think often of the rose window at Chartres cathedral in France. There are three such windows, but the one at the north corner of the building is the one that rivets my attention each time I visit.

Rose windows are common in the cathedrals of northern France, and come in many styles. Chartres has two styles: The oldest window, on the front of the church, is mostly stonework, with only a small percentage of glass. But the two rose windows in the transepts (the north and south “els” of the standard Gothic church, forming the crosspiece to the crucifix floorplan most such churches use) are in a later, more elaborate and vitreous style and are lacy with tracery, letting in the colored light that is the raison d’etre of Gothic architecture.

Yet, it is the north window that moves me, in part because it moves, itself. This is an illusion, of course, but its designer was one of the geniuses of his age, able to create that illusion with static stone and glass. Each of these two roses are built of circles of circles, building from a central core, and radiating out, like choirs of angels surrounding Providence. But in the north window, the panels dance.

It may be hard to see this in a reproduction, like the one here, but there is a ring of squares and diamond-shapes that form one of the rings, and it is nearly impossible to see these alternating squares and diamonds as anything but tumbling shapes, dancing around the center.

The north rose window of Chartres cathedral is — I have said many times — the single most beautiful human-created entity I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a gob-lot of iconic art works. It brings me to tears each time I am in its presence, and I feel the need to return to it, a feeling very kin to love.

I know a lot of hoo-haw gets ascribed to art. People make great claims for art, only some of which can be supported. But I believe, from my own experience, that art can make you more sensitive to the world around you, to prompt you to see again those things you have become inured to through over-exposure and turned to the ash of everyday-ness. As I have also said, every bush is the burning bush, we just can no longer see it. When you open those gates in your chest, and let the world in, it becomes intensely beautiful and makes you understand, as William Blake wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”

I do not know how long this effect can last after you accept a profound work of art, perhaps it can change you permanently, perhaps it is itself an illusion and perhaps it slowly fades, like an after-image of a flashbulb.

On my last visit to Chartres, it was a gloomy sort of day, without much light, and Chartres, at the best of times, is a dark cathedral. Darker than most we have visited. 

Too dark for interior photos that day, so I spent about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, photographing the outside, alternating with sitting inside and meditating on the north Rose Window. I say again, it is the single most beautiful production of humankind I know. It never fails to move me deeply.

Then outside for more sculpture, then back inside for more Rose Window.

When I finally gave up and headed back down the hill toward the hotel, I came across a couple of kids — a boy and a girl about 9 or 10 years old — and they were throwing stones at pigeons.

I wish I could have picked up some stones and thrown at them and asked them, “How do you like being thrown at?” But my French was not up to it. So I stood there with my hands on my hips looking stern and adult and tried to shame them into stopping. Either I succeeded, or they got bored with hitting pigeons, and they stopped and left.

I have no love of pigeons, but I don’t think they deserve to be stoned. I was feeling a sudden rush of St. Francis of Asissi, and also feeling a little full of myself for being and “atheist christian,” but a block on, I came across the Pont St. Thomas over the Eure River, just past an ancient church and over a weir in the river and stopped to watch the water, when I noticed a spider web on the bank, stretched out to the bridge. It was dewy with condensation and a small spider sat in the middle, like the center pane in the rose.

Just then, the reflection of a bird shot past on the water’s surface and I looked up to see a swallow or martin flash past. When I looked back down, a cloud of gnats swarmed over the river and at the end of the bridge, a cat walked by. All to the tune of crickets and the chirp of sparrows. The entire world was animated. I felt like I was instantly open-chested to the world of nature and animals. It was a crest like a wave that came over me, and then the world returned to normal and I went back to the hotel.

Footnote: These words are only tangentially related to the question of animal rights, but readers may be interested in reading a piece I wrote years ago about the “Catch-22 of Animal Rights,” which can you can reach with this link:https://richardnilsen.com/2014/05/19/the-catch-22-of-animal-rights/

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard and his wife moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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A New Romanticism

by Richard Nilsen

Nothing gets quite so romanticized as Romanticism. It all seems so — well — romantic. We get all fuzzy inside and think pretty thoughts. Romanticism means emotional music, beautiful paintings, expansive novels, and poetry of deep feeling.

Or so we think, forgetting that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called Romanticism a “disease.”

The surface of Romanticism may be attractive, but its larger implications are more complex. We should look deeper into what we mean by “Romanticism.”

Initially, it is a movement in art and literature from the end of the 18th century to the middle or latter years of the 19th century. It responded to the rationalism of the Age of Reason with a robust faith in emotion, intuition and all things natural. We now tend to think of Romanticism as a welcome relief from the artificiality of the aristocratic past and a plunge into the freedom of unbuttoned democracy. We read our Shelley and Keats, we listen to our Chopin and Berlioz and revel in the color of Turner and Delacroix. Romanticism was the ease of breathing after we have unlaced our corset or undone our necktie.

Yet, there is something adolescent about Romanticism, something not quite adult. It is too concerned with the self and not enough with the community. There is at heart a great deal of wish fulfillment in it, and a soft pulpy core of nostalgia and worse, an unapologetic grandiosity. One cannot help think of Wagner and his Ring cycle explaining the world to his acolytes. Music of the Future, indeed.

I’m not writing to compose a philippic against a century of great art, but to consider the wider meanings of what we narrowly define as Romanticism.

Most importantly, one has to understand the pendulum swing from the various historical classicisms to the various historical romanticisms. Romanticism didn’t burst fully grown from the head of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, but rather recurs through history predictably. One age’s thoughtfulness is the next generation’s tired old pusillanimity. Then, that generation’s expansiveness is followed by the next and its judiciousness.

The classicism of Pericles’ Athens is followed by the energy of Hellenism. The dour stonework of the Romanesque is broken open by the lacy streams of light of the Gothic. The formality of Renaissance painting is blown away by the extravagance of the Baroque. Haydn is thrown overboard for Liszt, and later the tired sentimentality of the Victorians (the last gasping breaths of Romanticism) is replaced by the irony of Modernism. This is almost the respiration of cultural time; breathe in, breathe out. You could call it “cultural yoga.”

We tend to label the serene and balanced cultures as classical and the expansive and teetering ones as romantic. The labels are not important. Nietzsche called them Apollonian and Dionysian. William Blake personified them in his poems as thought and energy.

We are however misled if we simplify the two impulses as merely rationality vs. emotion. The twin poles of culture are much more than that.

Classicism tends to engage with society, the interactions of humans, the ascendency of laws instituted by men (and it is men who have instituted most of them and continue to do so — just look at Congress). Romanticism, of whatever era it reveals itself, engages with the cosmos, with history, with those things larger than mere human institutions, with Nature, with a capital “N.” Romanticism distrusts anything invented by humans alone, and surrenders to those forces mortals cannot control.

These oppositions concern whether the artist is concerned with man as a social being, an individual set in a welter of humanity — or whether he is concerned with the individual against the background of nature or the cosmos.

In the 18th Century, for instance, Alexander Pope wrote that “The proper study of mankind is man.” The novel, which investigates human activity in its social setting, came from the same century. Fielding and Defoe come from that century.

The succeeding century is concerned more with man in nature, or man in his loneliness, or fighting the gods and elements. One thinks of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound or Byron’s Manfred.

There are many more polarities to these movements in art and culture. One side privileges clarity, the other complexity. Just compare a Renaissance painting with a Baroque one. The classical Renaissance tends to line its subjects up across the canvas in a line, while the Baroque wants to draw us in to the depth of the painting from near to far. Renaissance paintings like to light things up evenly, so all corners can be seen clearly. The Baroque loves the great patches of light and dark, obscuring outlines and generally muddying up the works.

 

Look at this Last Supper by Andrea del Castagno. See how clear it all is. But the Baroque painter Tintoretto had a different vision of the same biblical event. It is writhing, twisting out into deep space, with deep shadows and obscure happenings. The Renaissance liked stability and clarity; the Baroque, motion and confusion.

One side values unity, the other, diversity. One side values irony, the other sincerity. One side looks at the past with a skeptical eye, the other with nostalgia. One side sees the present as the happy result of progress, the other sees the present as a decline from a more natural and happier past. One side unabashedly embraces internationalism, the other, ethnic identity and nationalism. If this sounds familiar, think red and blue states.

One of the big shifts is between what I call “ethos” and “ego.”

That is, art that is meant to embody the beliefs of an age, thoughts and emotions that everyone is believed to share — or art that is the personal expression of the individual making it.

We have so long taken it for granted that an artist is supposed to “express himself,” that we forget it has not always been so. Did Homer express his inner feelings in the Iliad? Or are those emotions described the emotions he expected everyone would understand and share? He tells of what Achilles is feeling, or Ajax or Hector or Priam — and they are deep and profound emotions — but they give no clue to what Homer was feeling.

In music, Haydn’s symphonies were written about as being powerfully emotional. Nowadays, we think of Haydn as a rather cerebral composer. If we want emotion, we go to Beethoven or Schubert. You cannot listen to Schubert’s string quintet and not believe it expresses the deepest emotions that its composer was suffering at the time. It is his emotion. We may share it, but it is his.

The history of art pulsates with the shift from nationalistic to international styles, from that which is specific to an ethnic or identity group, and that which seeks to transcends those limitations.

In music, Bach imitated the national styles in his English and French suites and his Italian Concerto. The styles are distinct and identifiable.

But the Galant and Classical styles that replaced it vary little from country to country. Perhaps the Italian is a little lighter and the German a little more complex, but you can’t get simpler or more direct than Mozart.

Nationalism reasserted itself in the next century, so that you have whole schools of Czech music, French, Russian. In the early 20th Century, internationalism took charge once more and for a while, everybody was writing like Stravinsky.

The main architectural style of the first half of this century is even called “The International Style.” That style is now so passé as to be the butt of jokes.

The classical era values rationality and clear thinking, while its mirror image values irrationality and chaos.

You’re ahead of me if you have recognized that much of what I am calling Romanticism is playing out in the world and in the White House as a new Romantic age. Nationalism is reasserting its ugly head in Brexit, in Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin — and in Donald Trump.

The mistrust or outright disbelief in science is a recasting of Rousseau. Stephen Colbert invented the term “truthiness,” and nothing could be a better litmus test of Romanticism: The individual should be the arbiter of truth; if it feels true, we line up and salute. In a classical age, the judgments of society are taken as a prime value. Certainly, there are those who resist, but by and large, the consensus view is adopted.

As we enter a new Romantic age around the world, one of dissociation, confusion and realignment, we need to recognize the darker side of Romanticism and not merely its decorative accoutrements.

We will have to accept some of those adages propounded in William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell:  “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” And, “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.”

As income inequality becomes the goal rather than the problem, we must remember that,  “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”

The first time America entered a Romantic age, in the 19th century, it elected Andrew Jackson, arguably the most divisive president (outside the Civil War) before Donald Trump, and certainly the most cock-sure of himself and the truthiness he felt in his gut. Facts be damned. For many of us, Trump feels like the reincarnation of Jackson, and this era feels like the reemergence of a Romantic temperament, and we may need to rethink just how warm and cuddly that truly is.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard and his wife moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.

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Pecking

 

by Richard Nilsen

I sit across the table from my brother at the seafood restaurant in Virginia and he doodles on a napkin with a Sharpie.

My brother is an artist — primarily a printmaker, but more recently a painter. And while he isn’t terribly prolific, he is constantly drawing. His mind is always coming up with visual ideas and he jots them down. Most never go anywhere, but he just cannot stop himself from playing. It is his way of processing experience: What he sees he transforms.

It reminds me of the photographer Lee Friedlander, who describes his addiction to making photographs as “pecking.” Like a hen darting at cracked corn on the ground, he clicks his camera — peck, peck, peck. Some of the results of his pecking turn into finished photographs he displays in galleries and publishes in books. But there is an improvisatory quality to his work that comes — like a jazz musician woodshedding — from constantly working his instrument.

Among the images caught by pecking, Friedlander will periodically find something he hadn’t considered before, and thus his body of work takes a new direction, constantly refreshing his art.

In part, the importance of this kind of sketching is that it is not art — or rather, not meant as art. It is more the flexing of an esthetic muscle. One can become intellectually paralyzed if all you aim at is writing deathless prose, or painting the museum masterpiece, or composing the next Eroica. Not everything needs to be The Brothers Karamazov. There is great value in just pecking. It keeps your senses alive.

My wife and I just spent a week visiting her brother, who is also an artist, a very accomplished artist who regularly sells his paintings to clients both private and corporate.

But while we were there, I spent a portion of my time doodling — pecking — with my tiny point-and-shoot digital camera. We would sit on their patio talking about the things one yammers on about with one’s relations — old times, where former acquaintances have gone, the horror of the recent election, the joys of fishing — and I would distractedly point my camera around me at the things one seldom notices.

I wasn’t thinking of making art. I barely paid attention to what I was doing with the camera, but I pecked. The result is a kind of notebook of the things we lived among, seen in some different way, so as to lift them from their context, to suck them out of the everydayness they languish in.

 It reminded me of an assignment I used to give my photography students, some 35 years ago, when I taught the subject at the same school where my brother still teaches. “Make a photograph of something so I cannot tell what it is.” I made sure they understood I didn’t mean to make it out of focus or poorly run through the darkroom, but to find something we see everyday, but pay so little attention to, that when faced with its presence, we might be baffled until that moment when, the proud student, having fooled us all, tells us what we’re looking at and we all let out a gasp of breath and say, “Of course, now I see it.”

These pecked pictures are mostly details. They are not the grand view or the concatenated whole, but the tiny bits out of which the larger scene is built. Most of us pay attention only to the whole, when we pay attention at all; for most Americans — maybe most humans anywhere — only use their eyes for useful things. They see the road they drive on, the cloud that tells them it will rain, the house, the car, closet. But every house has a door, and every door a door-handle; every car has tires and every tire a tread and each tread is made up of an intricate series of rubber squiggles and dents. Attention must be paid.

Paying attention to the details means being able to see the whole more acutely, more vividly. The generalized view is the unconsidered view. When you see a house, you are seeing an “it.” When you notice the details, they provide the character of the house and it warms, has personality and becomes a Buberesque “thou.” The “thou” is a different way of addressing the world and one that makes not only the world more alive, but the seer also.

(It doesn’t hurt that isolating detail makes it more necessary to create a design. You can make a photo of a house and just plop it in the middle of the frame and we can all say, “Yes, that’s a house,” and let the naming of it be the end-all. But if you find the tiny bits, they have to organize them in the frame to make something interesting enough to warrant looking at.)

Sectioning out a detail not only makes you look more closely, but forces your viewer to look more closely, too. Puzzling out what he sees without the plethora of context makes him hone in on its shape, color, and texture. It is a forced look, not a casual one.

So, when I gave my students that assignment, it wasn’t just to be clever, but to make them pay attention to the minutiae that are the bricks of the visual world they inhabit. And paying attention is a form of reverence.

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Richard Nilsen inspired many ideas and memories at the salons he presented through the years when he was an arts critic and movie, travel, and features writer at The Arizona Republic.   A few years ago, Richard and his wife moved to North Carolina.   We want to continue our connection with Richard and have asked him to be a regular contributor to the Spirit of the Senses Journal.   We asked Richard to write short essays that were inspired by the salons.