BEAR T.IA MART.
The Meaning in Life.
Meaning. What is meaning? What does it mean to mean something? To possess meaning? If you really think about it, meaning is quite difficult to pin down. It is a ghost that walks among us and deceives us with its’ casual proximity. There are several reasons why it is so hard to isolate.
For one, who is given the power to determine meaning?
A traditional understanding says, “If I am an author or composer and write a story or a song, it must “mean” what I intended for it to mean.” But, is the meaning truly in my intention or in the mind of the reader? Or, is it independent of both of us and exist only in the work itself? If my reader and I disagree on the meaning, who is correct? How do we reconcile objective intention and subjective response?
How could we both read the same thing and get a different meaning out of it? How could we watch the same film or listening to the same song and take something radically different away from it?
In a word, PERSPECTIVE.
As human beings, we are collections of experiences. Those experiences together to create a point of view. That point of view is personal. It is OUR truth. OUR experience. And it is very difficult to transcend.
Einstein had a famous analogy he would use to help people understand the concept of the theory of relativity. If you have a man sitting on a jet plane flipping a quarter in his hands, he will see that quarter rise and fall in a vertical line before him.
Lets say you have woman standing on the ground looking up at the man in the jet flipping his quarter. She would need to have some pretty amazing eyesight but lets assume she is a superhero of sorts. Well, if you think about it, anyone who can survive the process of giving birth is in fact a superhero of sorts. So, the woman is looking up at the man in the jet flipping his coin straight up and down and what does she see? A straight vertical line?
No.
Because the jet is moving at 650 miles per hour, she sees the quarter moving through space in an arc.
So who is correct?
They both are. From their points of view, they are both seeing the same cause resulting in different effects.
If we concede that our own point of view has limitations, we should find encouragement and life in other points of view! But if we take our experience as Truth, we would find ourselves living in a very small box.
How then do we transcend the limitations of our own perspective without discounting its importance to our experience and out understanding of the world?
By the way, I use “understanding” as different than “knowledge” in the same way that the Book of Proverbs does. For example, I could recite the entire alphabet, and that would show my knowledge. But that knowledge by itself does not give me the ability to arrange those letters into words and those words into sentences and those sentences into poetry or a story. That requires understanding.
So how do we transcend our own perspective?
Communication.
Communication is expression with the intent of transferring meaning.
When I was fifteen I went on a trip to smuggle Bibles into communist China. The way we did it was to pack them on our bodies and cross the boarder from Honk Kong into Shenzhen. We had to be very careful not to be seen with any other member of the group because if one of us was caught then it would inevitably jeopardize anyone we were associated with and risk the confiscation of our entire load. So we made a plan to split up and cross the boarder separately and meet at a specific location on the other side. I was the youngest member of the team by ten years and I didn’t really think through all the details of this plan as comprehensively as I should have. So, once I was on the other side and alone, I realized that I had no idea where I was going.
In that unique moment, I was surrounded by people and yet I was completely alone. I was surrounded by signs loaded with information that I could not absorb. I was swimming in meaning that I could touch. The simplest communication was impossible. Imagine that for a moment.
If you have meaning and you want to transfer it to me, then we need a system to transfer it through. We need a bridge. That bridge takes its form in language, symbol, numbers, art and music. Written, spoken, thought, forged and sung.
We imbue sounds and little squiggly lines on paper with meaning and through our collective agreement, we establish the basic system to communicate and transfer meaning back and forth.
But meaning doesn’t just exist in one plane or, on one surface layer. Oh no, the light really comes on when you realize that meaning exists in many layers. And the stacking of those layers of meaning results in entire new dimensions of meaning. Let me show you what I mean.
A line and a circle. In your mind, place the two dimensional line inside of the two dimensional circle. Now, still in your mind, imagine that line spinning in all directions.
Together they become a sphere. A new dimension is created by their interaction and combination. A new dimension emerges.
In 1979 Douglas Hoftstadter wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book called Godel, Escher, and Bach; an Eternal Golden Braid.
It was a very long book and in fact I have been trying to finish it for over ten years. You should win a Pulitzer for reading this book much less writing it. In it, Hofstadter was laying the foundations for artificial intelligence. In my reading, I was struck by a concept he called Contracrostapunctus. This is a study in the layers of meaning. I want to show you what I mean. This famous print by Gilbert is appropriately titled, “All Is Vanity.”
It is showing you multiple layers of meaning. One way of looking at this will show you a woman looking in her vanity mirror. Another way of looking at this same image will show you a skull. A third way is to look at what these two images and the title reveal conceptually when tied together in one image like this. It is telling us that we are mortal. We are fragile and all is ultimately vanity. There is nothing we can do to escape this end.
In Russia during the last half of the nineteenth century there was an upheaval in all aspects of the arts. Wassily Kandinsky was inventing abstract art by painting his impression of music and freeing painting itself from its marriage to the object.
Alexander Scriabin was inventing a light and color organ to create the first proper light show for a musical performance during his symphony “Prometheus; A Poem of Fire.” He even created a written version of a scale or “notes” on this new kind of “instrument.”
Each in their own way were building synergy within the arts and expanding the frontiers of artistic expression.
Anton Chekhov and Konstantine Stanislovsky were rewriting the rules of literature and theater. Chekhov had written a play called “The Seagull” and it had performed terribly by a well-established theater company in Moscow. The performance had missed the mark because the director had missed the point of the play. You see, Chekhov had crafted a world of beautiful complexity through relationships where what was spoken was rarely what was meant. His characters were built through subtext. Sarcasm, wit, and clever plays on the meaning of words were the tools that Chekhov used to bring these characters to life. And the meaning was only clear when you stood back from the obvious and saw the exchange from a different perspective.
Chekhov had employed a deeper layer of meaning in his story and everyone who saw the play opening night realized that it didn’t work. One realized why. That man was Konstantine Stanislovsky. He left that experience a changed man, his eyes opened by the power of what he saw and what everyone had somehow missed.
He went home and began working on a whole new approach to acting. He called it “method” acting because realistic portrayal of a complex character required a new level of commitment and there would have to be a method developed to serve as a bridge for actors to cross in order to gain admittance into the world of the character they were to inhabit and become. Method acting is the foundation for almost all film, television, and theater acting still today.
You have heard the expression “ a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.”
This is one of the great mysteries of existence. It is ultimately the result of patterns. Of design. Of intention.
My primary occupation is a musician. When I create music my tools are pitches, or frequencies of sound forged by striking, plucking, strumming, and singing. I take the raw pitch and shape it to fit my intention within the context of a specific expression. I work patiently to place tones into patterns of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Timbre (which is a tone’s color or texture) and dynamic (which is a tone’s loudness or softness) and lyric each add definition and new dimensions to the shape of the music. You can take music and reduce it down to any of those parts yet the music doesn’t live in any of those parts by itself. Yet, HOW you sculpt them together is what creates the magic of a musical experience.
In painting, a similar variation of the same types of tools appears. Color, shading, lines, form and perspective are what bring to life the great works of visual art. But that art cannot be reduced to any one of these things without altering or even destroying the MEANING of the whole.
Art is what emerges out of the details of the created structure.
Meaning is what emerges out of the created expression.
The whole of the art IS the meaning and it emerges out of the patterns we create with our intention, our effort, our work, our choices and our applied skill.
The purpose is to convey meaning. To convey Truth. To transfer our perspective through a new language, a new media, and a new form. To take the listener, the observer and the participant across the bridge that WE built to show them the world or a moment through our lens.
How you prepare the ingredients is what gives life to the meal. How you paint those sounds upon the canvas of silence and how you touch the white emptiness with your brush is what brings art to life and give it meaning. How you arrange the words will create the story. You must breath life into the work with your intention.
This brings us to the greatest work of art and meaning.
You.
Your body, made up of cells and bone and tissue and organs all working together to give rise to a symphony of form. Your mind, emerging out of a vast ocean of interconnected neurons all communicating in patterns so complex that they make the stars pale in comparison, gives glorious rise to the one and only You. The unique being and perspective of You. Your emotions add another dimension and your spirit is the art that emerges from your form.
The greatest art that I can create will only humbly serve to remind you of the art that you already are. The river of human history flows inevitably through you and the shape your story takes will forever alter the shape of history. So to each and every one of you my challenge is to shift your perspective to illuminate the meaning of your own significance. You bring the meaning of life into existence with your actions, your attitudes, and your decisions. That is the great responsibility.
BEAR T.IA MART.
BE ART. I AM ART.
You are art. So BE ART.
