To “wake to the echo”
“Symbolism, whether it be that of Ezekiel or the Apocalypse, of Dante or of Blake, necessarily deals with truths too universal be comprehended in a literal formula and confounds the commentator by it’s infinite application.” –
The Prophetic Books of William Blake, Jerusalem, Edited by E.R.D. MacLagan and A.G.B. Russell, London 1904.
“The essence of the beautiful is unity in variety.” — Felix Mendelssohn
Occasionally after long periods of reading you come across items that make you believe there is indeed a “unity within the variety”. That’s what I found when I read the works of Thomas Insel and a team of researchers from the Swedish National Institute of Psychosocial Factors and Health.
Dr. Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, says one of the “inconvenient truths of mental illness is that the mental health of the nation may have declined in the past 20 years.” At the same time researchers from the National Institute of Psychosocial Factors and Health, in Stockholm, Sweden report that “works of art are a possible modality for improving our well-being”. The researchers went on to report;
“a significant improvement of the positive mood parameters happiness, peacefulness, satisfaction and calmness and the negative parameters low-spirited, unhappy and sad. Systolic blood pressure decreased and an improvement was seen in the subjects’ medical health status.”
While it’s disappointing that our mental health may be declining it’s encouraging we may be able to improve it by sharing more works of art and beauty.
We just need to ensure we do indeed share art and beauty and not share imposters because what we consider to be beautiful has certainly changed over time.
The classical conception of beauty treats it as a matter of instantiating definite proportions or relations among parts. Aristotle says in the Poetics that “to be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must … present a certain order in its arrangement of parts” (Aristotle, volume 2, 2322 [1450b34]). And in the Metaphysics: “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree” (Aristotle, volume 2 1705 [1078a36]). This Aristotelian view of beauty is often boiled down to a mathematical formula, like the golden section.
As an example the sculpture known as ‘The Canon,’ by Polykleitos” from the fourth century, was held up as a model of harmonious proportion to be emulated by students and masters alike
Since the fourth century ideas regarding beauty have evolved to romantic paintings, like Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’s “After School” in 1841,
and more recently Linda Woods 2015 abstract “Sand and Saltwater”.
In addition to sculpture and painting beauty can be shared with poetry, whose lyrics and rhyme sooth, calm and provide abundant joy. They can be tragic pieces like Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
“I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
Or like the mysticism in William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
Perhaps the best explanation of what it means to share art and beautiful things was best described by physicist, poet and William Blake scholar, Jacob Bronowski when he wrote,
“The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work.
In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else’s work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again…the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.”
The gifts of art we give to others not only allow others to recreate the discovery an artist made, they also evoke emotions and feelings “so lives can thrive and as necessary endure”.
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Notes:
1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-mental-health-declining-in-the-u-s/
Originally published at neutec.wordpress.com on July 8, 2018.
