Matisse and the Bull

Bull-Leaping Fresco - Knossos, 1449 B.C.

"But of course, in human terms, the star of the show here is this red-skinned figure in the middle, the daredevil acrobat, the toreador himself.  And he's depicted mid-leap, his hair is fluttering in the air.  There is a tremendous sense of buoyancy, of joyful movement and life as he spins through the air.  It makes me think of works of art created thousands of years later by Matisse: his paper cutouts of acrobats.  They both share what you might call the audacity of simplicity." - Alastair Sooke, Treasure of Ancient Greece

It always seems to happen this way with me: some stray line, a single comparison, has me seizing on a train of thoughts which unspool themselves into a string of ideas that have existed in my head for a while but now suddenly demand to be written down.  Here it is the comparison Alastair casually makes, that of Matisse with this 2nd millennium B.C. fresco.  I've noticed throughout his films that he likes these comparisons of ancient and modern art, and he is repeatedly drawn to saying, "It looks so modern" as almost a form of praise.  Or if not quite praise, supreme surprise that there isn't something more manifestly awkward and ancient about them.  These statements, however, never quite sit right with me because I find myself struggling with what I believe is a subtle error being committed.

"Chinese Horse" - Lascaux Caves, 13,000-15,000 B.C.

Pre and Trans

I haven't read any of Ken Wilbur myself, but I've been introduced to the idea of what he calls the Pre/Trans Fallacy, or the mistaking of what comes from before a convention or stage of thought to one that comes after it and breaks or surpasses it.  That is, at first glance both the Pre and the Trans seem to flaunt the rules one has come to know, but they do so from very different perspectives and ultimately with profoundly different levels of sophistication.

When you look at the most ancient of art there is a striking gap between the way in which animals are rendered and the way humans are.  The caves of Lascaux are one of the most famous examples, where there are pieces such as the Chinese Horse which appear to be so unbelievably well-executed in their modeling and texture that one would think they're the product of a great civilization (hence the title) rather than an unnamed prehistoric artist.  At the dawn of human art it appeared we already had what centuries of artists later struggled to create.  Picasso was so stunned by this that he could only say, "We have learned nothing" in response to this early accomplishment.

But then we come to the people and they are... wanting.  Not just wanting, almost comical in their simplicity.  All the naturalism has vanished to be replaced by stick figures without depth or detail.  If it weren't for the evidence that these caves were produced over some time and by many different individuals it would lead one to think there was a master and his dim-witted apprentice each assigned to a different role in the tableau.

Furthermore, this is not an isolated incident in ancient art.  While Egyptian figures are far more advanced they are also incredibly unrealistic in their schematic structure, and once again compare this with the animals surrounding them.  In a scene from the tomb chapel of Nebamun (18th Dynasty), the pelage of the cat is rendered with the finest of care and the birds identifiable to the species.  The people, however, are misshapen, with bodies facing side, shoulders facing front, face at ninety degrees, and a flounder eye staring right at us, unnaturally lined and enlarged.  There is absolutely none of the naturalistic handling again to be found in the humans themselves.

My suspicion is that the reason the animals are detailed and the people schematic is because of the role of conceptualization.  That is, so much of human thought is built upon social schemas; it is an issue I touched on before, and here I believe it returns again.  In the human universe, one of the most basic demarcations is Human and Non-Human.  If something is a Human it calls forth an entire array of behaviors and expectations, and it is remarkable how often we fall back on such explanations for everything from ancient gods of causality to invoking "human" rights for animals in the current era.  Because this distinction is so important, though, what we are interested in is the categorization and not the details.  We need to know what is Human and to do that we are looking for signs.  Let us return to the Egyptian figure.

How is it that the Egyptian image of a person can be so broken and yet so compelling?  The answer lies in the fact that it neatly highlights all the most important points of human appearance.  First, we are bipeds, and this gives us a distinctive appearance as we move compared to most animals; therefore, you want to portray the legs striding.  Second, we are erect with our shoulders projecting upward and arms hanging down; again, rather uncommon, and much more obvious in the frontal pose than in profile.  Third, the human facial profile is once again distinctive; we lack a long snout, muzzle, or bill and instead present a relatively flat surface with a protruding brow, nose, and lips.  Finally, humans communicate with their eyes.  We can pinpoint where other humans are looking almost immediately and direct eye contact is the clearest sign of awareness and recognition that this is another Human.  Added together, then, what this figure represents is not so much a naturalistic view of a person but an amalgamation of all the most effective angles from which to identify that what one is seeing is a Human.  That it possesses little realism bothers us not at all.

"Birdman" - Lascaux

I suspect that this is what is happening in the caves as well, except without the refinement of a great civilization's art style.  The animals are largely drawn as they appear [1], which in the process of transcribing the effects of curvature and light cause us to be surprised by the liveliness that they evoke.  But when a Human appears it seems halfway a placeholder, a comment that seems to say, "A Human Belongs Here."  These artists knew basically what form our species has but they have not yet become aware of their own feedforward, so to say.  The result is an awkward scratching that represents an as-yet unrefined conceptualization of what a Human is.

Nadia and Leonardo

Years ago in a book called Mapping the Mind I ran across an interesting story about a child idiot savant named Nadia.  She had an IQ of between 60 and 70 and exhibited severe autistic symptoms by age five.  Yet she also had surpassing artistic ability and was able to draw objects and scenes around her with uncanny accuracy.  The picture above is a comparison of her drawing of a horse (A) to one done by Leonardo da Vinci (B), accompanied in the book by the remark that her pictures were good enough to be hung in any art gallery.  Mapping the Mind was published in 2010 and the story had been around for some time before that so the question remains: why haven't we heard anything more about Nadia in the art world?  I believe the answer here is the same as above.

"This is not a brain."

Despite what we consider an incredible demonstration of skill, I suspect what is happening above is a profound deficiency in conceptualization.  Nadia likely has normal, or perhaps somewhat above normal, motor coordination and visual acuity.  If she didn't she couldn't reproduce things on paper so well.  But what she cannot do is decide what is important.  Normally when we look at something, we figure out what it is, and having done that we're satisfied; we just need to know what its place is in our mental model, and therefore how it relates to other things in the world.  The precise details can be dispensed with as a waste of processing power.  Or, rather, consciousness can dispense with them as it re-represents the functioning of lower systems.  Just like how fear is not precisely the output of the amygdala, our experience of vision is not precisely the output of our visual cortex.  We all have that experience now and then when we realize that we have been easily navigating and reacting to a situation which we hardly bothered to pay attention to.  If we think the details are important we'll attend to them but otherwise we'll let other systems handle it.  And while this may seem dubious evidence for multiple systems, the existence of blindsight, where people are unable to consciously see are nonetheless able to utilize visual information, should give one pause [2].  There is more than one representation of the world in our brain, and therefore more than one form of "seeing" - what we are able to verbally report on is only a single highly-rarified piece of it.

Which brings us to Leonardo.  Leonardo was a genius.  Not just any genius, but a genius among geniuses, so much so that half a millennium later he remains a household name.  His capacity for conceptualization had to be far beyond that of the average person's, investigating as he did art, mathematics, and the natural sciences with almost equal skill.  So what does it tell us that untrained Nadia appears to be able to do what Leonardo had to work his life to accomplish?  That conceptualization is a hindrance and that simpleton art represents the apex of human achievement?  Hardly.

The problem with Nadia, and with the Lascaux Caves, is that to the extent they are non-conceptual they are also non-generalizable.  In evolutionary terms, the point of conceptualization is to organize the world into meaningful patterns.  What is happening today can teach us about what will happen tomorrow only if we are able to group tomorrow into objects and events the same way as we do today; otherwise nothing is the same and we are continually lost.  The most basic nervous systems can learn to associate events, and the machinery present in organisms we usually regard as automatons, such as insects, are capable of remarkably advanced feats of generalization.  When it comes to humans, we have elevated this skill to a level unseen elsewhere on this planet; we don't just conceptualize to tomorrow, but everywhere in the universe and at all times past and future.  We are pattern-finders par excellence, and to do this we are unnaturally obsessed with what it is that makes up a thing and its qualities.  For if we can locate what is essential about something we can find that essential nature in other things, and therefore predict or even control them.

But what has Nadia drawn?  She has drawn a horse in full gallop... but she has not drawn her ideas of swiftness or strength or beauty.  All she has done is portray a particular horse at a particular moment with high fidelity and no archetypal insight [3].  If there is any power in it, that power lies in us, the viewers, who do see in her image the traits that we associate might associate with such an animal.  By comparison, Leonardo may have struggled to come to that same level of realism, but his gift was to be able to find in it an inner life without sacrificing exacting anatomy (he loathed Michelangelo's muscly, ill-proportioned humans).  He knew what every tendon and muscle did in that creature.  Such an artist doesn't just draw horses but expresses in the process his staggeringly powerful vision that the world possesses a rational, reasonable order which the mind can grasp, and that having done so all things will be seen in their proper proportion [4].

The Acrobats - Henri Matisse, 1952

Sketches

If you want to draw more accurately, turn the object you are sketching upside down.  Just try it some time.  It's amazing how just this small manipulation fools the brain; it stops immediately seeing the object as its previous classification and is forced to attend to it in detail.  The result is a drawing that often is better than what you could have produced if you had tried to draw from concept.

Riace Bronzes - 460-450BC

Returning to the top, then, while I see Alistair's comparison as an interesting one, I can't help but feel there is lost in it an understanding.  Visual accuracy is actually our birthright, as it were.  The painter of that Minoan fresco was a skilled artist of his time not because he was able to take a complex idea and distil it into a single image.  It's that he was, near the dawn of it all, able to reach up from just portraying the world and imbue his image with the flow and exhilaration leaping over a bull represents.  That it took another thousand years before the Greeks were able to produce art that captured essence without abandoning realism remains one of their crowning achievements, and it is to them that Leonardo owes his dream.

This is where Matisse was coming from.  Like all of us in the modern world he had a head stuffed full of concepts, of what things were, what they should be, and how they should be portrayed.  The accomplishment of he and many other artists in this era was to break through those conceptions and, in his case, demonstrate that it took but a few curves and colors to reproduce the essence in a way we thought only possible in detailed realism.  The horse was no longer a horse, but could it still be swift and powerful and beautiful?  I fear, though, that people are apt to confuse the two, worshipping the Pre as pure and natural when they should be respecting the Trans for its mature reflection on what the unencumbered saw but had not yet begun to understand.  

Footnotes:

Two reindeer - Font de Gaume, 17,000 B.C.

[1] I don't have have space in the essay to touch on this, but while the cave paintings have mastered certain effects they do also struggle with some portions of the organism.  Looking at the paintings you will notice that there are two sections in many of the animals which are treated in a strange way: the legs and the head.  This falls neatly into the discussion on human anatomy.  The artist knows they have four legs but frequently gets the proportions wrong trying to express this.  Similarly the head is one of the most distinctive parts of an animal, where the artist knows how a horse head looks versus that of a bison and so already goes in with a thought of a conical structure that interferes with detailing it as it truly is.  But the crowning "error" are the horns: in all the paintings the horns are never shown in profile.  Instead they are often like the Egyptian shoulders: seen from the front, because that spread is what is most distinctive.  And even if not a fully frontal view they nonetheless tend to fail the angles of the rest of the organism as the artist strives to represent this most defining visual aspect of the animal.

There is also a distinct schematism to the birds in the Nebamun painting as well: while the free-flying ones are rendered carefully, those in hand are given the standard Egyptian treatment of representing multiples.  They all adopt an identical pose and are stacked by a precise amount, such that we can clearly differentiate how many there are but in the process forcing them into the same stiff uniformity that stands out from the handling of the rest of the natural scene.

[2] A related demonstration of this is the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion.  Out of context it is interesting but not hard to convince yourself the lines are the same length.  In a given context the effect is amplified and it is hard to conceive that the two central lines are the same length.  But here's the kicker: try to "pick up" the lines length-wise with your fingers and you'll notice that despite their apparent differences your body knows exactly how far apart to grip.  What is going on?

Again, I suspect this has to do with conceptualization.  The portion of the brain that is in charge of navigating the world isn't trying to extract anything to do with relative size from the image.  It just wants to not bump into things, the same way that insects have specialized "looming" circuits that react whenever an object (i.e. a bird or other predator) appears to get bigger in their field of view.  However, our conscious experience of the situation is to try and figure out relationships and tendencies.  The arrow heads on the lines in isolation hint to us something about what is happening, perhaps movement, stretching, or location.  And when placed into the "three dimensional" setting that our visual systems are always dealing with, the context is so staggeringly important that it dominates our perception of length.  Yet underneath it all there is still the basic motor functions which are less concerned with this and continue to do their job.

[3] It makes me wonder: all these recountings of Nadia emphasize that she could draw the world around her but never note her ability to compose a scene she had not already observed.  It makes me wonder whether she could or if her imagination was purely limited to literal experience.

[4] This last comment is inspired by Kenneth Clark:

"But the Renaissance added to this [mathematical] tradition of design all sorts of philosophical notions, including the idea that these forms must be applicable to the human body.  That each, so to say, guaranteed the perfection of the other.  There are dozens of drawings and engravings to demonstrate this proposition, of which the most famous is by Leonardo da Vinci.  Mathematically I'm afraid it's really a cheat but aesthetically it has some meaning because the symmetry of the human body and the relation of one part of it to another do influence our sense of normal proportion.  And philosophically it contains the germ of an idea which might save us, if we could really believe it, that through proportion we can reconcile the two parts of our being - the physical and the intellectual."

It is a quote which has stuck with me for some time, as a dream that we once deeply believed but have now come to despair of.  Leonardo, too, seemed to run into limitations.  It seems that when rationality runs to its end and does not have anything greater than itself to believe in it becomes lost.  Leonardo begins to hint in his paintings that there is something unknown, and perhaps deeply disturbing, located just outside his paintings with how his figures point and smirk.  Inside this framed world there is order, outside of it there is...?  Well, in the end Leonardo drew pictures of cascading water, destroying everything in mindless, formless chaos that swept away the human pretension to know anything.

Powers of Metaphor

 

"Four electrons make up the outer shell of the carbon itself.  They appear in quantum motion as a swarm of shimmering points.  At ten to the minus ten meters, one angstrom, we find ourselves right among those outer electrons.  Now we come upon the two inner electrons held in a tighter swarm.  As we draw toward the atom's attracting center we enter upon the vast inner space.  At last the carbon nucleus.  So massive and so small.  This carbon nucleus is made up of six protons and six neutrons.  We are in the domain of universal modules.  There are protons and neutrons in every nucleus, electrons in every atom, atoms bonded in every molecule out to the farthest galaxy.  As a single proton fills our scene we reach the edge of our present understanding." - Charles Eames, Powers of Ten (1977)

"'The universe is not only queerer than we suppose but queerer than we can suppose.'  Which reminds us that the universe so vividly described in the Book of Revelation is queer enough; but with the help of symbols not beyond description.  Whereas our universe cannot even be stated symbolically... [Artists] have always responded instinctively to latent assumptions about the shape of the universe.  The incomprehensibility of our new cosmos seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of modern art." - Kenneth Clark, Civilisation (book)

I am always on the lookout for good metaphors.  More precisely, good scientific metaphors.  By and large, science has failed to fuel the artistic imagination beyond a few spare images taken from space and of space.  The problem with so many comparisons that I have come up with is that they themselves are already arcane to the average person.  Take, for instance, two homemade metaphors that I've become rather fond of but which require explanation in themselves.

Oxidative metabolism - Panov et al. (2014)

The first is that of oxidative metabolism and capitalism.  Oxidative metabolism is the process by which complex molecules are broken down and some of the energy in their bonds converted into the modular chemical form of adenosine triphosphate (ATP).  It is a process present in the vast majority of multicellular organisms and is required for their functioning, yielding as it does approximately sixteen times as much energy as glycolysis alone.  Yet it has crucial downsides: in the process of splitting oxygen to use as a final acceptor for electrons it produces what are known as free radicals, or highly-reactive oxygen species that will cause damage to any nearby molecules, including DNA.  One of the primary theories of aging involves accumulated cellular damage as a result of this process.  There is no way to stop it entirely, but we do defend ourselves various antioxidant materials to help ameliorate the worst of it.

Right now capitalism's name is mud within many circles, identified as it is with rapacious greed and exploitation of natural resources.  However, so far as I can see, our entire civilization yet depends on it to also fuel are greater intellectual and moral endeavors.  In the last few decades it has managed to, almost against its will, lift a billion people out of poverty throughout China.  We just don't like the side effects.  This has led many people to suggest that it be replaced entirely, although with what I have no idea.  The parallel here is clear: I do believe corrective measures must be taken or else we will be thoroughly harmed by the byproducts, but to suggest that it be simply excised will result in extinction.

Kanai Glacier - US
National Park Service

The second is that of post-glacial succession and cultural accumulation.  Glaciers are one of the most ecologically devastating events, as unlike fires or floods they not only affect the topsoil but grind the surface layers down to the underlying bedrock.  This removes not only the life that was there but also the accumulated nutrients and structured soil.  After a glacier has retreated it takes an exceedingly long time for a complex ecosystem like a forest to reestablish.  The area must go through stages of first colonization by hardy species such as lichens and mosses, which along with the roots of some of the first plants begin to break down the exposed rock and release its nutrients.  Given thousands of years the combination of decomposed rock and organic detritus become full soil horizons with a complex structure that are capable of supporting large trees.

I see the efforts of the Twentieth Century as something like a cultural glacier.  We became disillusioned with everything that came before, believing nothing on faith, and so in a frenzy of deconstructive activity tore through our entire cultural heritage in an attempt to find the bottom of it all.  I believe this was necessary and do not bemoan it, but nonetheless I do believe the effect of this project was to also remove all the interwoven meanings, relationships, and ideas that nourish a civilization.  Since WW2 there has been precious little art that feels remotely important or timeless; instead it is, as one book I read once put it, exceedingly self-aware of its own arbitrariness and transience.  I believe it will be some time again before we are able to produce the cultural and spiritual loam required to grow large trees.

Now, as proud as I am of these two metaphors, the fact that they require paragraphs of explanation and likely strike most readers as utterly unintuitive means that they fail as tools of popular education.  That's the problem, really: science is the means by which we assess how the world is, but it has so far exceeded the default human perspective that to simply grasp it is a task, let alone use it to in turn interpret our experience once again.

However, when I woke up this morning I was thinking again on an issue of spirituality.  The sense I have, the metaphor that is most evocative to me, is that it feels like there are somehow layers to experience in traveling inward.  First we have our everyday experience, and it is a cluttered, frenzied sphere of activity.  It demands continual attention and yet also seems to have that quality of noise, an irregular sound that we want to find a pattern in but until we do it is vaguely irritating.

Underneath this one finds a strange ill-defined silence and depending on disposition it can mean many things.  If of a rational bent of mind, which is most of us, this space is completely terrifying.  It is the coming apart of all the conceptions, the realization that all that fuzz that you had been trying to sift through has no logical basis.  That the whole edifice of one's mind, the structure of it and the experience, floats like a castle in the sky and underneath it there was only a deep abyss waiting for it to realize it is impossible for it to defy gravity like that and fall.  But I also think that there is another way to appreciate this space, and it comes about in certain spiritual practices.  That, yes, everything has been stripped away and there is a sort of fundamental disorientation... but there is also a longed-for silence.  After we're done panicking (if we ever finish panicking) we realize that the noise is gone.

Then, at long last, somehow in the center of this infinite non-space, there is... something.  Don't ask me to define it because that is absurd; the only reason we're here is because we've found ourselves in a place where definitions have failed.  Instead I will simply quote what I wrote years ago for the conclusion of my Gnosis:

This is where the seeker's path leads
Beauty and compassion and divinity
Yet escaping these
For they are words
And are given rest
Before the holy

For now I pass by such things and return to the metaphor.  Without a metaphor, without a structure with which to somehow organize an event, it has a way of fading from most of our minds.  We often don't even know it has happened because it is so outside our regular experience that it blurs without conceptual aid.  Perhaps the Zen monks might disagree with me, but I think that a healthy religion requires these supports.  Which returns us to Powers of Ten.

As I said thinking this morning on this progression, I had this section of the film come back to me.  It is rather appropriate, for while I said that little art had been inspired by science, Powers of Ten is an exception.  While it is strictly educational, it has nonetheless captured in its simple progression of images a sense of scale, of staggering difference throughout the world, and, in just a small piece, its mystery too.  The words at the end, the sudden stumbling into describing the nucleus as, "So massive and so small" is almost a perfect religious paradox.  I think Charles and Ray Eames really did feel something there, and though it need be expressed through a scientific lens nonetheless conveys their own awe at the depths of the world.  It's the sort of skill that made Sagan such a figure; it wasn't his mastery of all science but the dimension to which he appreciated the world, and how science managed to fit into it in a way it fails to do so for so many people.

So I find myself thinking that the above portion of the film is perhaps one of those metaphors I have been searching for.  Unlike my attempts, the image of the atom is much more universal, and any human shown this film will forever have a visualization (albeit of the unvisualizable) of what this means.  And in its treatment, there is that same sort of breathless anticipation.  We have passed down through layers upon layers of the world, through our concept of the man, of his hand, of his cells, of his molecules, and now we are... where?  We have penetrated that last layer of electronic noise and there is simply nothing.  Is that it?  Is it just a vast nothingness underneath it all?  Was everything we just passed through an illusion?  There's a strange sound in the void that somehow emphasizes the space, a sort of breathing that replaces the cosmic Om yet nonetheless performs the same role of letting us know we are inside somehow.  

We wait.

We wait.

And then the nucleus comes into view, and it is what we were searching for.  We are in the realm of universals, and what we have stumbled upon is neither large nor small.  It is present here at the finest of scales and yet is self-same with that which creates the most unimaginably vast galaxies.  There was something underneath and it somehow united it all.