DAY FORTY NINE

"Love me with your head and heart", as John Martyn once said.

Had the relevant science been more advanced at the time he might have said 'love me with your head, heart, intestines, or any one of the other fifty (I think that's the number, from memory) putative types of intelligence which govern our minds and bodies'. See what I did there? Immediately reduced the matter back to a question of minds and bodies when in fact it is so much more involved than that.
 
Is making and creativity a matter of head or heart for you. The answer for me and I suspect many people is sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both, sometimes neither so far as a name can be given to it.
 
This head and heart business is the basic dualism which has held sway over much of western thinking for milennia. Or at least since Francis Bacon had something to say about it, and definitely since Descartes stuck his oar in. Indeed it is sometimes called Cartesian dualism, which I used to think had something to do with drawing coordinates on graphs. He was a busy man. As the picture says, philosopher and mathematician.

Anyway...the distinction has been a bit of a curse I think, especially for those who choose a path which takes in arts, creativity, crafts, making. 
 
The dualism which infects societies constantly aims at drawing up false distinctions, and fueled by a certain Gradgridian technocratic view, tries to elevate one over the other, to establish a heirarchy of value. It aims at a value system and a polity where facts (but only 'hard' ones), numbers, data, evidence, 'science', counts and the unpredictable, bespoke, un-simple, personal, sometimes inchoate creations of arts and crafts doesn't. Or at least not so much. To the most Spartan proponents of this view arts and crafts barely have any value at all apart perhaps for children, the elderly/retired and the infirm. What hollow echoing caverns their souls must be. I suspect  they would offer long runs and cold showers as the ideal answer to most questions.

But I offer similar short shrift to those on the other side of the argument who would reject all facts or empirical data in favour of (self) expression or identity, or some elevated notion about the purity or sancitity of art, (should that be Art?). I'm not sure there are any Spartans or purists on this side of the debate, however, not anymore. There's hardly a corner of our lives which hasn't been infiltrated and traduced by the market and 'market forces' in the past forty years making it hard for purists on the arts side.
 
Not wanting to fudge or oversimplify the issue (though I massively am) the fact is that both sides of this coin have been needed and have contributed to the ongoing survival and development of us humans, and given us far more to celebrate than facts alone ever could. To take a purist view of either side is rather like putting out the fire and pulling down the house which has been warming and protecting you, because you are no longer feeling the cold and wind. Just because you have no immediate need of something doesn't mean it isn't contributing to the quality of your life in some fundamental way.
 
I don't have time to go into it now but some fantastic artistic work has been created by artists applying strict scientific rules and principles - an almost algorithmic approach. By the same token many scientists have attributed breakthroughs in understanding as a result of unconscious, sub-conscious processes leading to imaginative leaps in thinking, not the plodding placing of one data brick upon another.

Onwards...even-handedly.



Picture credit: Romainbehar, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
DAY FIFTY SIX Do you prefer to open the door and let people make their own mind up about entering, or do you grab them by the hand take them through and show them around each piece of furntiture?   Not sure one should ever start a post with a metaphor, especially one for which the inferences haven't been properly thought through yet. But I shall live dangerously.    I've been lurking around a small corner of social media of late, one occupied mainly by creative types working in a wide range of media. Ninety percent of the postings are people showing pictures of their work, or simply pictures which are their work. I've noticed that some - I would say a majority - like to give chapter and verse about their making: size, materials, what it's about, when it was made, why it was made, struggles they had with it, lessons learned from it, what they would do differently next time, and so forth. Is it wrong of me to say I really don't care to know all that and prefer to jus...
Read more
Image
DAY FIFTY FOUR Do your creative and making efforts have to be wholly original?   In asking this I'm not talking about working from patterns or plans - though for some reason I've always had a problem with people who work from woodworking plans - I'm talking about working from kits, or any other medium where the job has already been started for you. One of my most cherished mementos is a painting of a labrador made by my youngest son when he was about eight years old from a paint by numbers kit. He was very into them at the time. I also have a collection of Airfix models my children made. I can remember my nieces making embroidered samplers from kits. There are 'starter kits' of various kinds in my local hobbyist shop, many of them seemingly involving balsa wood. My mother loves doing jigsaws, which is a form of kit, I suppose.  I had a cousin who was a model train enthusiast and built whole towns with stations and sidings and heaven knows what else, all of it from k...
Read more
Image
DAY FIFTY SEVEN  Why do we own the things we do?   I woke to automated emails from my library saying that a number of the seventeen books I have on loan are about to become overdue. Handily, unlike in years past it only takes a few groggy presses on my phone and they are renewed. This is a double-edged boon. Without physically going to the library how will I pick up another seventeen books which I am almost certain not to read. This has been a life-long habit with me. Of course some of the many thousands of books I must have borrowed will have been read, but many many more will not have been. Same goes for the books I have bought and which now ornament my shelves. The big question is this: Why do I need a constantly replenished supply of borrowed books not to read when I have my own collection of books not to read?  There is, inevitably, a Japanese word for the buying of books one doesn't read: Tsundoku. It originated in a satirical sense so I understand but is now used ...
Read more