Sometimes when I am reading, I come across a sentence or phrase that stops me in my tracks. I forget what I have been reading about previously and am unable to continue. The phrase repeats over and over in my head and with each repetition a different shade of meaning arises.
It happened when I heard Amy Macauley performing her long poem ‘Oedipa’ when she came to the line “the truth only exists in extraordinary circumstances”. And most recently when I read “Identity is a walled concept”……a statement by writer Ben Okri in an article about cultural appropriation.
I have been working on a large painting about the Amy ‘quote’ on and off for two years – it is proving difficult to paint, almost certainly I am waiting for ‘extraordinary circumstances’. Ben Okri’s statement is still whirring around waiting for an outlet, perhaps an exhibition. Identity – that we all think we pursue to discover, fight to protect, that we feel in different ways – ultimately a prison, an obstacle rather than a home, something Dante and Buddhist dharma hunters aim to burst through.
As artists and writers we are often encouraged to ‘find your voice’, a core strand of your work that links to who you are……and if it flows out from a ‘walled concept’ deep inside us, should we be aiming to get beyond it?
Richard Sharland 17th June
These thoughts have been running through my brain all day. Thank you for mentioning Ben Okri’s writings and talks. I am reminded to look beyond what I believe I know and to investigate where my ideas have come from. He describes “not a virus of fear but a virus of light” (that’s so lovely!) and talks of the necessity of revolution .. meaning the constant questioning of our own “secret stories”.
Si jeunesse savait, si veillesse pouvait. As I age I know that the main dangers that I face are laziness, tiredness and atrophy of mind and spirit. I notice, however, that atrophy of mind and spirit can happen across society, no matter what the age of the person. Lack of curiosity is surely a dangerous thing, in life and in art, which can make so much difference to the way in which public opinion feeds political decisions and future lives.
Curiosity killed the cat surprisingly for me means the opposite to what I was always led to believe. We are actually being encouraged to be curious, especially when it comes to learning new skills and ideas. Being led to believe things and then doing so without question is an odd way to proceed in a life time that, as you get older, turns out to be so brief for most people. Perhaps then using what you believe you know, interrogating it without fear and finding a way to share and to listen is a way forward? A rich interaction between writers and artists of all types is of huge importance and I think that the community of Terre Verte is exactly what we need just now.
Thanks both for an interesting thread. I find it leaves me with something of an internal conflict/ tension, however. For, whist it is clearly good to get beyond the internal walls to our thinking and constant questioning of our secret stories must be important, we live in a world of unprecedented change where we are all rushing headlong into a world where AI, social media and short attention spans are driving us. The political and technocratic demand for constant ‘innovation’ is often simply a mask for cost-cutting, de-humanising and channelling us as consumers or units in society.
I find the concept of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ helpful in many spheres and I wonder whether the greatest innovation in some areas is resisting change and valuing established way of doing things with the skills and values they bring with them. For example, I can’t remember a world without plastics or supermarkets or aeroplanes and my children can no longer remember post offices not tucked away at the back of supermarkets, turning up and buying a train ticket on the day or not having a mobile phone. But this raises for me complex issues as to what is ‘better’ and what is a step backwards in the growth of our society. So we must constantly explore and challenge and then take our own decisions about whether we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater…
I haven’t come across ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ before, but, if I understand it correctly, it has always been around as part of life and evolution……it is just that human evolution has been accelerating, we think faster than any evolution before. But bacteria can mutate, change their shape colour gender reproduction structure with amazing alacrity…….as Covid has been showing us. Aren’t the scientists battling to keep us ahead of Covid dealing with a very rapid version of ‘shifting baseline syndrome’?
Stewart Brand addresses this issue of what shifts and what stays the same, of the different arcs and timescales of change in his lovely book The Clock Of The Long Now…….your post made me take it down and dip in again, especially to the chapter entitled Ending The Digital Dark Age. It was published in 1999, which seems several baseline shifts ago, but probed carefully the issues of time and responsibility. I wonder what the Long Now Foundation are up to now?