Michel
Serres, the great philosopher of science, likes to use the experiment of
touching one’s own lips to point out how we are a subject and an object, a
knower and known, simultaneously. Try it! Touch your lips like you are trying
to quiet someone and feel first-hand how one moment you are in your finger,
feeling your lips, and then in the next you are in your lips, feeling your
finger! Feel yourself oscillate between the two positions effortlessly,
naturally. In this simple activity, where are “you”? You’re in two places at
once! How can this be? From a direct, first person experience, you are both the
feeling of a subject knowing and you are an object known. You are inside and
outside, self and no-self, emptiness and form at once with a gesture. Amazing!
I found a great new blog called Infinity Imagined with beautiful gifs and ideas you will love if you love space and science.
Michael Garfield's talk "Entertainment as Social Action" is by far my new favorite of his. And I can't believe it! He mentions my work on landscapes in track 5: "The Importance of Story and Metaphor"! Thank you Michael!
For anyone interested, here is a short introduction to Landscape Theology.
Landscape Theology
Glimmering Space (the murder site of Matthew Shepard), oil on wood, 24" x 24", 2017
Where are you from?
Landscapes play a prominent role in our lives and myth-histories, and yet they are rarely acknowledged as actors. Geographers tell us that the landscape is an inert stage where historical individuals act. However, the story I want to tell is how places are “agentic.” Landscapes enable, inspire and constrain our activities. We are literally moved by them, and landscape elements such as trees, rivers, mountains and fields attract us to their surfaces and they shape societies. For example, archaeologist Christopher Tilley (2004) argues that our prehistoric social identities were created, reproduced, and transformed by stone outcroppings. Rock forms were landmarks and social sites, pegs and attractors within our cognitive maps, and viewing rock art was an important process by which we could tap into ancestral powers at specific locations. It also helped us anchor identity in those powers and locations.
Landscapes fill our lives with time and space. People pilgrimage through them as a form of their religious and secular, everyday lives. Through time-space routines of movement through landscapes we know where we are in relation to familiar places and objects and “how to go on” in the world. We also use them to ‘place’ a memory.
Space is not homogenous; some spaces are “wiser” and more sacred than others. Theologian Belden Lane (2001) says sacred space is a “storied place” because certain locales come to be recognized as sacred through the stories told about them. Chthonic forces are also at work in the complex process of sacralization. Geological features inspire specific stories, and only then can the sacred place hold and transmit culture across time. This is one reason why anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) assures us that “wisdom sits in places.” Basso also found that many Apache believe they loose their minds and fall into darkness when they forget the ancestral names of specific stones and places in the landscape.
In 1836, Emerson declared “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.” Harvard Divinity School’s foremost Talmudic Scholar, Jon Levenson, makes a similar observation: “Geography is simply a visible form of theology.” Mircea Eliade is famous for pointing out the large, cosmic mountain that permeates many world religions as “axis mundi,” and we read in Judeo-Christian scripture again and again that “God is our rock.” Landscapes are situated inside people as people are situated inside landscapes. Feminist and semiotic Theologian, Sally McFague, puts it well: “the interior landscape is influenced by the exterior.”
The profound truth about religions isn’t just what Thomas Tweed says in his groundbreaking book, Crossing and Dwelling, that “religions begin and end in bodies.” Religions begin and end in landscapes. Bodies begin and end in landscapes. Landscapes, in a sense, begin and end in bodies and religions. Just think: religious disputes often center on landscapes, holy lands, promised lands, and the more basic conceptions of dwelling in one place and crossing over into another.
The geographical center of the Islamic faith is an enshrined black stone, the al-Ḥajar al-Aswad, atthe Kaaba or “Cube” in Mecca. The oldest known Buddhist temple in the world, just recently unearthed in Nepal, is organized around an ancient tree. Today, people travel from all over the world to visit waterfalls, caves, and trees in national parks, and the 2013 United States government shutdown highlighted how economically and culturally valuable these spaces truly are. Landmarks and rivers move people into specific locations.
A horizon becomes a metaphor for the limits of our knowledge. Land and sky become metaphors for the body and mind, and they affect how we experience both. Spinoza may have been onto something when he regarded human emotions such as love, hatred, envy, “and other agitations of the mind,” not as vices of human nature “but as properties pertaining to it in the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder, and such pertain to the nature of the atmosphere.” Theologian Beldan Lane: “There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within.” Sky mind, ocean mind, desert mind, landscape mind.
The distinction of inside awareness from outside stimulus is only a convention. Merleau-Ponty describes the sky “out there”: “As I contemplate the blue of the sky I am not set over against it as a non-cosmic subject; I do not possess it in thought, or spread out toward it some idea of blue…I abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery, it thinks itself in me.” Landscapes and humans exchange ideas and change one another.
A vast, uncluttered place can operate on the human mind to give rise to a singularity of vision. There is healing power in mountain silence and desert indifference. Landscapes point out “what matters,” or what, as a material substrate for the meta-system of culture, remains. Like our genes, they are more permanent than we are, and thus the landscape becomes a symbol for the eternal (Eliade’s “eternal return”).
In our myths, the prophetic vision always occurs outside the city and in the landscape. Abraham leaves Ur and finds God (and Melchizedek!) in the landscape. Moses leaves the walls of Egypt and finds God in the desert; Buddha leaves his tribe and finds God under a tree; Mohammed leaves civilization and finds God in a cave; Joseph Smith leaves his organized religion and finds God in the forest; Carlos Castaneda leaves the modern city and finds God in the jungle. This could be because as we move into the wilderness, the lights of civilization recede and then disappear. The landscape of nature gets bigger, and the stars can speak to one of vast reaches of cosmic time; stones murmur information from deep time; rivers, winds and rains tell stories of ethereal, fleeting time where nothing lasts long enough to even exist. This transient quality of the landscape is reflected in the Japanese Buddhist ukiyo-e “floating world” pictures, which flatten sky, mountain and sea into patterns on semi-transparent rice-paper. These oriental visions are the mirror opposite of the solid, stone, eternal landscapes and deep spaces of occidental spirituality.
Vincent Van Gogh left his job as a preacher to study God more directly through “the language of nature.” In the final years of his life, Cezanne painted over sixty images of the same scene; a view over fields to Mont Saint-Victoire. Landscape painters explore ways in which humans and landscapes and history are involved with each other, intertwined, tied together, depend on each other. They also show how the lines between imagination and our material reality are blurring.
Now it is widely accepted within the humanities and sciences that subject and object, mind and matter, human and landscape co-constitute each other. The seemingly irretrievable Cartesian wedge between the material world and the human mind is finally being dissolved. The reciprocity of imagination and landscape, of mind/bodies and worlds, of art and life implies that mythic narratives are not merely poetic descriptions of a certain world, but material performances of one as well.
Words, ideas, and basic experiences are lifted from the objective world, and because they become the substantive base from which all our thoughts and mythic narratives appear, we can conclude there is a material landscape from which the mythic archetypes are formed. These archetypes do not have real, breathing, itching, leaking bodies, but they are always generated by bodies which are situated within material landscapes. Landscapes are also always situated inside bodies, and the way we experience the sky and the earth influences values we attribute to the above and the below, which relates to how we experience our mouths and anuses, which is projected onto stories about the sky and earth, and around the circle we go.
What is objective and universal may be called transpersonal, or ‘archetypal,’ in the Jungian sense; it is that more-than-human place we share with others, that “earthly ground of rock and soil that we share with the other animals and the plants” (Abram 1996: 281). Merleau-Ponty: “My body is made of the same flesh as the world.” Therefore, if we wish to look for the “real archetypes,” we may want to pay attention to landscapes and their elements.
The cultural and material power of landscapes serve as a reminder that there are geological conditions that make possible the rise of consciousness, language, myth, and a sense of the sacred. These landforms operate in conjunction with sociocultural dynamics such as class, gender, and sex to weave our stories, our lives, together.
Well, if ISIS and ebola are not enough, here is a killer that is staring you in the face RIGHT NOW! Harvard Medical School claims that blue light, the light emitted by your computer, disturbs your ability to sleep, and contributes to the causation of cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity. What you can do to keep these symptoms at bay: Use dim red lights for night lights. Red light has the least power to shift circadian rhythm and suppress melatonin. Avoid looking at bright screens beginning two to three hours before bed.
If you work a night shift or use a lot of electronic devices at night, consider wearing blue-blocking glasses. Expose yourself to lots of bright light during the day, which will boost your ability to sleep at night, as well as your mood and alertness during daylight. There is alsohttps://justgetflux.com/. After sunset it changes your monitor to a redder, more natural temperature.
SBTRKT, one of my favorite composers, just came out with a new album you can listen to for free here. Also, I sold a painting! "Flesh of the World" sold to composer Chuck Wild, creator of Liquid Mind and old friend of my parents. What an honor!
Some landscapes are celebrated as sacred
sites because of the stories that are told about them, whereas others are
marked as horrific sites of tragedy, humiliation, and cultural shame. To the
uninformed eye, both places look the same—expansive, hilly, idyllic—which
attests to the notion that every landscape is not just a physical place, but is
also what theologian Belden Lane calls a “storied place.”
For AmericanTragedy Sites, first I
research the historic place, and then I sketch, take photographs, and paint it.
I finish the composition in my studio by mixing the rendered landscape with a
totem of other symbols and nonobjective spaces.
Through the languages of realist landscape painting and
religious icon-painting, I aim to honor these shadowed lands as holy lands, and
to disturb conventional distinctions between what is sacred and what is
shameful.
I believe certain landscapes offer insight into how we
grapple with tragedy. Some sites of cultural shame are hidden away, avoided, or
“obliterated,” to use geographer Kenneth Foote’s term. These sorrow-filled
sites can get lost often by hiding in plain sight. For example, guests can pass
through the old Hyatt Hotel lobby in Kansas City, drink coffee and mingle, and
never know about the event that happened there in 1981—”the worst structural
disaster in American history!” There is no plaque, no memorial, no spot to lay
flowers or light candles. The historic event, then, is more easily
forgotten.
This intentional oversight or forgetting happens all the
time. If the memory attached to the site is too painful, or too shaming,
the culture will attempt to erase it by re-landscaping or by destroying
records. Salem, for example, kept no official record of the small hill where
nineteen victims of the witchcraft scare were executed, so today its exact
location is unknown. Likewise, the fence where Matthew Shepard was killed in
Laramie, Wyoming, was promptly removed and the street names were changed to
confuse tourists (“Out of sight, out of mind”). In both cases, the true
location of the historic event lives on only in hearsay.
But now we have GPS, and landscapes push back, and people
get behind them and lobby to have them preserved. The Minidoka Japanese
Internment Camp site in south central Idaho, a true national shame site, was
converted into farmland and torn down as quickly as it was constructed. But
activists got funding and rebuilt its barbed-wire fence and ominous watchtower,
two important communicators of the daily psychological experience of the
Japanese-Americans imprisoned there during WWII. A few other elements of the
Minidoka landscape remain: Fujitaro Kubota’s eerie rock garden, dusty
labyrinthian pathways, the scorching sun, rushing river, and desert indifference.
If for some reason the actual tragedy site is truly lost or
inaccessible, a culture will construct a miniature version, a memorial across
the street. In the case of Matthew Shepard’s memorial, it is a bench at the
university miles away. But there are also memorial gardens, parks, museums, and
trees! There are memorial trees, like the prayer tree in the center of the
killing fields of the Bear River Massacre site, probably the greatest forgotten
Indian massacre in American military history. “The first and the worst,”
and it’s also easily one of the most beautiful landscapes and memorials I have
ever seen. The place is woven into a wide river valley in the foothills of the
Rockies, swarming with wildlife, flowers, and hot springs (the Shoshoni vacationed
there every winter). The tree is somewhat hidden next to others behind the
official, unimpressive, monolithic memorial standing in a gravel parking lot
next to a trash can. The tree’s lower half is covered in freshly made dream
catchers, medicine bundles, stuffed animals, beaded necklaces, colored flags,
and gem stones. Buckets full of toys and chewing tobacco hang from branches
near the trunk.
Every January the surviving Shoshoni and others gather at
the tree, refresh the offerings, and pray that the Warm Dance will happen again
one day.
This painting won 2nd place in the River Market Regional Exhibition! Check out the online catalogue.
The head curator from the Nelson-Atkins museum of Art was the judge. I feel good.
"Titterington’s series of sky paintings are intended to
“bring the sky down, and to highlight the ever-present source of light and
weather. When we open our eyes, sky provides the space and the light for
seeing. Sky is openness or transparency itself, sheer luminosity. It is
nature’s most elusive realm, and it provides a great metaphor for the self. As
Rilke says, our inner lives are, for the most part, intensified skies.” "
