Conversations between books Archives

Experience and Perception. Conversations between books.

I once read that perception is heavily influenced by your believe system. Your believe system is shaped by what you are born into or delegated by your culture. Your perception determines your type of experience. All experience is constructed by culture. I decided to compare two authors that addressed these topics in their own way, Aldous Huxley and John Dewey.

FROM MY READING LIST:
*Dewey, John. “Art as experience.” Perigee. 1980
*Huxley, Aldous, “The Doors of Perception. Heaven and Hell”, Flamingo Modern Classics. 1977.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE PERCEPTION AND EXPERIENCE?

John Dewey: “Perception is an act of the going-out of energy in order to receive, not a withholding of energy. To steep ourselves in a subject-matter we have first to plunge into it. When we are only passive to a scene, it overwhelms us and, for lack of answering activity, we do not perceive that which bears us down. We must summon energy and pitch it at a responsive key in order to take in. (Dewey pp53) Experience like breathing is a rhythm of intakings and outgivings. Their succession is punctuated and made a rhythm by the existence of intervals, periods in which one phase is ceasing and the other is inchoate and preparing.” (Dewey pp56)

Aldous Huxley: “Sensations, feelings and insight, fancies – all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experience, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes. Most island universes are sufficiently like one another to permit of inferential understanding or even of mutual empathy or ‘feeling into”. Thus remembering our own bereavements and humiliations, we can console with others in analogous circumstances, can put ourselves in their places. But in certain cases communication between universes is incomplete or even nonexistent.”(Huxley pp3)

WHERE IS THE MIND WHEN YOU HAVE AN EXPERIENCE?

JD:”..the only real existence is mind, that “the object does not exist unless it is known, that this is not separable from the knowing spirit.”[Croce] In ordinary perception, objects are taken as if they were external to mind. Therefore, awareness of objects of art and of natural beauty is not a case of perception, but of an intuition that knows objects as, themselves, states of mind.”

AH: “At ordinary times the eye concerns itself with such problems as Where?-How far? How situated in relation to what? In the altered experience (mescaline induced) the implied questions to which the eye responds are of another order. Place and distance cease to be of much interest. The mind does its perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance, relationships within a pattern.”(Huxley pp4).The mind was primarily concerned, not with measures and locations, but with being and meaning.”(Huxley pp6)The mind is its own place…”(Huxley pp3)

TOWARDS WHAT HIGHER GOAL DOES EXPERIENCE AND PERCEPTION LEAD US?

JD: “Experience is limited by all causes which interfere with perception of the relations between undergoing and doing. There may be interference because of excess on the side of doing or of excess on the side of receptivity, of undergoing. Unbalance on either side blurs the perception of relations and leaves the experience partial and distorted, with scant or false meaning.(Dewey, pp44). A man does something; he lifts, let us say, a stone. In consequence he undergoes, suffers, something: the weight, the strain, texture of the surface of the thing lifted. The properties thus undergone determine further doing. The stone is too heavy, or too angular… The process continues until a mutual adaptation of the self and the object emerges and that particular experience comes to a close. What is true of this simple instance is true, as to form, of every experience. The creature operating may be a thinker in his study and the environment with which he interacts may consist of ideas instead of a a stone. But interaction of the two constitutes the total experience that is had and the close which complete it is the institution of a felt harmony.” (Dewey, pp44)

AX:..” I have always found,” Blake wrote rather bitterly, “that Angels have the vanity to speak of themselves as the only wise. This they do with a confident insolence sprouting from systematic reasoning.” Systematic reasoning is something we could not as a species or as individuals possibly do without. But neither, if we are to remain same, can we possibly do without direct perception, the more unsystematic the better, of the inner and outer worlds into which we have been born. This given reality is an infinite which passes all understanding and yet admits of being directly and in some sort totally apprehended. It is a transcendence belonging to another order than the human, and yet it may be present to us as a felt immanence, an experience participation. To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness – to be aware of it and yet to remain in a condition to survive as an animal, to think and feel as a human being, to resort whenever expedient to systematic reasoning. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be.” (Huxley pp23-24)

WHEN DOES EXPERIENCE AND PERCEPTION BECOME VISIONARY FOR THE ARTIST?

JD:”The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production. The act of producing that is directed by intent to produce something that is enjoyed in the immediate experience of perceiving has qualities that a spontaneous or uncontrolled activity does not have. The artist embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works.(Dewey p48)An artist, in comparison with his fellows, is one who is not only especially gifted in powers of execution but in unusual sensitivity to the qualities of things.”(Dewey pp 49)

AX: “..the power to see things with my eyes shut…some require no transformation; they are visionaries all the time. The mental species to which Blake belonged is fairly widely distributed even in the urban-industrial societies of the present day. The poet-artist’s uniqueness does not consist in the fact that (to quote from his Descriptive Catalogue) he actually saw “those wonderful originals called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim.” It does not consist in the fact that “these wonderful originals seen in my visions were some of them one hundred feet in height…all containing mythological and recondite meaning.” It consists solely in his ability to render, in words or in line and color, some hint at least of a not excessively uncommon experience, The untalented visionary may perceive an inner reality no less tremendous, beautiful and significant that the world behold by Blake; but he lacks altogether the ability to express, in literary or plastic symbols, what he has seen.” (Huxley pp13-14)

Patti and Lewis speaking the gift. Conversations between books.

I closed “The Gift”, its cover a soft cream with a pinkish heart confirming its romantic words, pressed as dried flowers between the pages. The esoteric view of the artist always leaves me a bit uncomfortable. My eye catches the glossy black book sitting on my nightstand. On it ‘bad girl’ Patti Smith mischievously peers from a black and white photo. Mmmm maybe I need to ask her?

FROM MY READING LIST:
*Hyde, Lewis. “The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World”Vintage. 2007
*Smith, Patti, “Just Kids”, HarperCollins Publishers. 2010.

HOW DOES THE ARTIST BECOME?

Lewis Hyde: “Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say that most artists converted to art by art itself. The future artist finds himself or herself moved by a work of art, and, through that experience, comes to labor in the service of art until he can profess his own gifts….We come to painting, to poetry, to the stage, hoping to revive the soul. And any artist whose work touches us earns our gratitude.” (Hyde, pp59)

Patti Smith: As a child..” I drew comfort from my books. Oddly enough, it was Louisa May Alcott who provided me with a positive view of my female destiny. Jo, the tomboy of the four March sisters in Little Women, writes to help support her family, struggling to make ends meet during the Civil War. She fills page after page with her rebellious scrawl, later published in the literary pages of the local newspaper. She gave me the courage of a new goal, and soon I was crafting little stories and spinning long yarns for my brother and sister. From that time on, I cherished the idea that one day I would write a book.” (Smith, pp10-11)

WHAT COMPELS THE ARTIST TO CREATE?

Lewis Hyde: “Having accepted what has been given to him[the artist]- either in the sense of inspiration or in the sense of talent – the artist often feels compelled, feels the desire to make the work and offer it to an audience. The gift must stay in motion. “Publish or perish” is an internal demand of the creative spirit, one that we learn from the fit itself, not from any school or church.(Hyde, pp188) “Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz speaks of his “inner certainty”as a young writer “that a shining point exists where all lines intersect . . . This certainty as also involved my relationship to that point, ” he tell us. ” I felt very strongly that nothing depended on my will, that everything I might accomplish in life would not be by my own efforts but given as a fight.” (Hyde, pp 186) Art as a way of life: Not any self-control or self-limitation for the sake of specific ends, but rather a carefree letting go of oneself; not caution, but rather a wise blindness; not working to acquire silent, slowly increasing possessions, but rather a continuous squandering of all perishable values.(Hyde pp 194)

Patti Smith: ” … I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one’s work caged in art’s great zoos- the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?…Why commit to art? For self-realization, or for itself? It seemed indulgent to add to the glut unless one offered illumination…I understood what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the wave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life charged.” (Smith, pp650)

WHAT DELIBERATE PRACTICE DOES AN ARTIST NEED?

LH: “Once a gift has stirred within us it is up to us to develop it. There is a reciprocal labor in the maturation of a talent. The gift will continue to discharge its energy so long as we attend to it in return. (Hyde, pp 62)For the slow labor if realizing a potential gift the artist must retreat to those Bohemias, halfway between the slums and the library, where life is not counted by the clock and where the talented may be sure they will be ignored until that time, if it ever comes, when their gifts are viable enough to be set free and survive in the world.(Hyde, pp 67)The fruit of the creative spirit is the work of art itself, and if there is a first-fruits ritual for artists, is must either be the willing “waste” of art (in which one is happy to labor all day with no hope of production, nothing to sell, nothing to show off, just fish throw back into the sea as soon as they are caught) or else, when there is a product, it must be this thing we have already seen, the dedication for the work back toward its origins.(Hyde,pp192)

PS: “One cannot imagine the mutual happiness we[with Robert Mapplethorpe] felt when we sat and drew together. We would get lost for hours. His ability to concentrate for long periods infected me, and I learned by his example, workings side by side.(Smith pp57) We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed…Sometimes I would awaken and find him working in the dim light of votive candles. Adding touches to a drawing, turning the work this way and that, he would examine it from every angle.” (Smith pp60-1)

WHAT IS THE PITFALLS FOR AN ARTIST TO AVOID?

LH:”A gift can also move out of a desire of some oppressed part of the soul to come to power. In politics affection and generosity usually lose their autonomy and become the servants of power. Also warns when this power is not received a bitterness can set it. Bitterness is the biggest danger to an artist.(Hyde,pp314)The artist who hopes to market work that is the realization of his gifts cannot begin with the market.He must create for himself that gift-sphere in which the work is made, and only when he knows the work to be the faithful realization of his gift should he turn to see if it has currency in that other economy. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not.”(Hyde,pp360)

PS: “The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It’s the artist’s responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation. I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our handmade world, saying, “I choose Earth.”(Smith, pp256)

FINAL THOUGHTS?

LH:”We are sojourners with our gifts, not their owners even our creations do not belong to us.”(Hyde,pp 364)

PS:”I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it.” (Smith pp69)

I like the idea that Patti Smith can step out of the cerebral muse world and back into reality. I bet she can smoothly dance between these two worlds, giving and receiving the gift at the same time.