D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• Three kinds of possible harmonious order. • The Zen tea ceremony, “saturated with meaning.” • Meaning as “connotative” or “denotative.” History of the word “meaning.” Atavistic meaning? • We think of meaning as verbal, but our experience of it is wordless. • The clumsiness of the symbol < >’. • Meaning and the Ultimate Cause. • Confusion of message or content with meaning. • Sensed, non-verbal meaning. A great soliloquy in two ways. • Meaning lies in the work’s being. • Architecture as “first of all a constructed object.” • James Watson and the “pretty” structure of DNA; Henri Poincaré on the “aesthetic” component in mathematical thinking. • Clarity and the courage of our convictions. • The multi-leveled resonance of the physical. • Improvisation and the “open” work. • Motivation in the arts: the “spiritual mission” of architecture. • Keeping the soul of the material alive. • Impermanence and renewal in Shintoism. • We can “read” the quality of the motive in the work. • History of the word “meaning.” • Einstein: the Mysterious, “the most beautiful thing.”

People do not see why a painter should concern himself with the laws of life; they do not understand that the laws of life realize themselves perhaps most clearly in art.….Art, though an end in itself…is the means through which we can know the universal and contemplate it in its plastic form.

[Piet Mondrian, quoted in Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art p 67]

Formalism…the notion that art is about nothing but itself. In the psychological investigations of art, this favored the conviction that all there is to know about perceptual phenomena is their stimulus characteristics and the structural principles that organize such material. Essential though such studies are for the analysis of perception in general, they make sense in their application only if their semantic function [i.e. function in a system of meaning] is made clear. Unless one understands what the artist is saying by means of his shapes and colors or musical sounds, there is no real point examining the formal conditions by which a picture or dance or sonata is held together.

[Rudolph Arnheim, To the Rescue of Art: Twenty-six Essays, p 183]

If you start to explain the "meaning" of music you are on the wrong path.…That is an extreme disservice to music.…Music can be useful, I repeat, only when it is taken for itself.…

…I need music for hygienic purposes, for the health of my soul. Without music in its best sense there is chaos.…Music probably attended the creation of the universe. LOGOS.

[Igor Stravinsky, The Musical Digest, September 1946. from http://www.filmmusicsociety.org/news_events/features/2003/101703.html, 7/23/13]

Architecture is built value: by looking at a building you know what the society values.

[Robert Campbell, lecture at the DeCordova Museum, Waltham MA, March 1995]

A great work of art is an individual instance of enlivened harmony, an amalgamation of fundamental order and an element or elements of disorder, in a whole that is profoundly reassuring and at the same time deeply intriguing and stimulating. The full achievement of this is rare enough in the works of human beings to seem almost miraculous when it occurs.

In Chapter Four, Symmetry and Concinnity, I discussed three possible enablers of harmony in works of art. Two are alternative kinds of fully harmonious and balanced order: the first is bilateral—or multilateral, or radial—symmetry, which would include the repetition of a single motif in a line or within a grid, or as a geometric group. The second is “occult” symmetry, an order radically less obvious and more difficult of achievement.[1] The third and rarest level of harmony is that of < >´, of what could, awkwardly but fairly accurately, be called a coherently enlivened harmony. As we saw in the last chapter, the fundamental necessity of this kind of vital harmony to the very existence of the natural world—in which an inherent potential disorder appears to be indispensable to the living order of natural systems—has begun to be accessible to scientific study only since the invention of the computer. However the creative role of the irregular may be as old as the universe. In 2010, Stephen Hawking stated in his book The Grand Design, that

[I]nflation predicts that the early universe is likely to be slightly nonuniform, corresponding to the small variations in the temperature that were observed in the CMRB [Cosmic Microwave Radiation Background]....[T]he irregularities in the early universe are important because if some regions had slightly higher density than others, the gravitational attractions of the extra density would slow the expansion of the region compared with its surroundings.

[Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design, p 139]

In the arts, even within a bilaterally symmetrical composition there will be parts which relate to one another in an occult order, as in the vertical proportions of a building which is bilaterally symmetrical in its horizontal arrangement. The greater the component of orderliness of one kind or another, the more monumental and stable we feel the work to be. The more unbalanced or disorderly, the more festive and exciting, or dangerous and offensive, it seems. Tolerance of chaos in a given work or its context may vary from viewer to viewer or listener to listener—and within the individual from one time to another. Such tolerance or intolerance for chaos is one aspect of what is called “taste.” I cannot identify the ingredient of disorder that is present in a great work, any more than I can begin to identify the infinitely complex structure or relationships enabling its “occult” harmony, beyond the most obvious level. Whether it be music, painting, or dance, I can only testify that such a coherent enlivening must occur if the work is to make the leap from well-balanced composition into art. Most of what we make is to some degree both orderly and disorderly, but only great art achieves a harmonious unity at once powerfully orderly and inspiringly lively. A useful example of the ever-ongoing human search for it, and of a deep understanding of what it is, is found in the Zen tea ceremony:

The bowls used for cha-no-yu [the tea ceremony] are normally dull-colored and roughly finished, often unglazed at the base, and on the sides the glaze has usually been allowed to run—an original fortunate mistake which has been seen to offer endless opportunities for the “controlled accident.” Specially favored are Korean rice bowls of the cheapest quality, a peasant ware of crude texture from which the tea masters have selected unintentional masterpieces of form….

Every appurtenance of the cha-no-yu has been selected in accordance with canons of taste over which the most sensitive men in Japan have brooded for centuries. Though the choice is usually intuitive, careful measurement of the objects reveals interesting and unexpected proportions—works of spontaneous geometry as remarkable as the spiral shell of the nautilus or the structure of the snow crystal.

[Alan Watts, The Way of Zen p 192]

[The great tea master] Rikiu was watching his son Soan as he swept and watered the garden path. “Not clean enough”, said Rikiu.…after a weary hour the son turned to Rikiu: “Father, there is nothing more to be done. The steps have been washed for the third time, the stone lanterns and the trees are well sprinkled with water, moss and lichens are shining with a fresh verdure: not a twig, not a leaf have I left on the ground.” “Young fool,” chided the tea master, “that is not the way a garden path should be swept.” Saying this, Rikiu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikiu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also.

[Okakura Kakuzo, The Book of Tea, pp 64-65]

For both tea master and guests the experience of the tea ceremony is saturated with meaning —with a feeling that there is some kind of transcendent significance in their activity. They say that the experience is that of being in harmony with the underlying rhythms of Nature itself. But as soon as it is thus described, the reality is absorbed and disappears into the dry words; we read it and remember that we have heard this before; we get no memory of the thing, the experience. The experience can only be remembered or imagined if it is remembered or imagined as unique to that moment, mysterious, un-nameable, and at the same time somehow fresh, alive. The demeanor and movements of tea master and guests are ordered by an established underlying form, but at the same time they are spontaneous, relaxed, and unpretentious. The ceremony is evanescent, but repeated again and again and unique each time, as is a great work of music, or dance, or theatre. Since anyone can take part, it is a powerfully unitive cultural force. The eminent quantum physicist David Bohm has proposed that the universe must be fundamentally indivisible, a “flowing wholeness” in which the observer cannot be essentially separated from the observed.[2]

Meaning and intention are thus seen to be inseparably related, as two sides or aspects of one activity. In actuality, they have no distinct existence, but for the sake of description we distinguish them (as we have done with soma [body, the physical] and significance, and with the subtle and the manifest). Meaning unfolds into intention, and intention into action, which however, has significance, so that there is in general a circular loop of flow.

[David Bohm, “Soma-Significance and the Activity of Meaning,” p 8]

“Flowing wholeness” would be remarkably apt as a description of the full experience of the tea ceremony, of dancing with the perfect partner, of being in love, or of walking into a great cathedral or a living forest. Such experiences appear to us to be at the same time deeply meaningful, and meaningful in some profoundly unnameable way.

“Meaning” in art is necessarily multi-layered, and can generate discussions within discussions of form and content, message and medium. Meaning in general is commonly defined as being of two kinds: Denotative meaning signifies the character of the phenomenon under consideration, its qualities, the proportions, relationships and hierarchies among its parts. It is the meaning of the thing in itself, and therefore the deepest meaning of art. The thing means by simply being. Connotative meaning, on the other hand, is meaning provided by associative values and symbolic content. This kind of meaning is subject to personal and cultural interpretation, and can change with time; it implies, suggests, refers to.[3] It is the “meaning” demanded by Rudolf Arnheim in the quotation above. Arthur Danto even claimed that a thing can have meaning simply because of what has been said about it.[4]

The history of the word “meaning” is relevant here. It comes from the late Middle English verbal noun maenan, which grew from the same Indo-European root as did the word “mind.” Here again, our prejudice in favor of the verbal, and our ever-greater reliance on it for information, have resulted in a curtailment of our appreciation of the activities of the non-verbal mind, although it is the insightful mind, the creative mind. By now we have arrived at a distinction between the maker’s intention, or motive, and the meaning of the work, that meaning being a matter for interpretation in words. Our centuries-old prejudice against the non-verbal mind is however beginning to be put into question by neuroscientific research, as we will see later on.

In a strongly felt account of a visit to Auschwitz with his wife, Leslie Epstein remembers a tour of Europe forty years earlier, when he was fresh from art history courses at Yale. He was avidly interested then in “the imagery of Christendom.” But by the time of the recent trip, his research on the Jewish Holocaust and his embrace of his own Jewish identity have entirely changed his experience of Christian art.

[On the earlier trip] I remember spending an entire day at the Cathedral of St. Stephen [in Vienna], admiring everything from the scales of its rooftop…to, in the catacombs, the criss-crossed bones of citizens and saints.

Now [we] took the elevator up that same steeple, picked out the Ferris wheel above the far-off Prater, and hurried back out the door. I am no longer subject to crucifixations: I can bear neither the beheaded Baptist nor the kneeling St. Denis under the axe. Yale had failed to teach us upon whose heads those streams of blood were flowing or those last judgements made. I am uneasy about imposing moral categories on works of art…but there is no escaping the knowledge of whose necks, figuratively or otherwise, lie beneath the heel of St. George.

[Leslie Epstein, “Pictures at an Extermination,” Harper’s Magazine Sept. 2000 p 56]

Mr. Epstein’s “personal and cultural interpretation” of Christian art, of its connotative meaning as he now perceives it, has made any experience of such works painful; for him, their denotative meaning is virtually unavailable.

I experience a third kind of meaning, which could be called atavistic meaning—that is, meaning which we feel deeply through some kind of collective species or even animal memory. It is the meaning of a wood fire indoors or out, or of a place where we are sheltered at the edge of a wide field of view, or of a sudden sight of sweet clear blue sky overhead as we stand in an urban parking lot. It is the meaning of a diagonal as opposed to a vertical line, of the color yellow or of the color orange, of darkness or of light, of fine technical finish or of a crudity of execution. There is much research to support a claim for the potency of this kind of meaning.[5] In one example, shown on PBS television, a musician travelled around the world with a series of carefully selected recorded musical phrases, and found that people from London stockbrokers to Australian bushmen described the emotions evoked in them by the musical fragments in very much the same terms. Despite the marked differences between Chinese music and our own, the rapt faces of the Chinese audience seen in a video of a 1986 performance by Luciano Pavarotti in La Boheme, in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, demonstrate that same commonality of human emotion in response to the music, to its experienced meaning.[6]

What do we “mean” by “meaning”? The dictionary says that something carries meaning when it has an assigned function in a language or system of signs; when it does, it is “significant.”[7] Our conscious language is predominantly verbal. Words are the symbols we use to indicate and attempt to describe the elements of our experience; it is not surprising that we associate meaning with the verbal. But we say that a massing of dark clouds in the sky, the rumble of distant thunder, a certain quality and scent in the air, mean that a thunderstorm is coming. Our remote ancestors may have believed that the thunder meant that the gods were angry. Now we understand the atmospheric reasons for a thunderstorm, and do not ascribe any mythic significance to it. But great art, or a deep forest on a sunny morning, or the brilliant pattern on the carapace of a particular beetle, may suddenly give us that sense of profound meaning which somehow connects us to a universe from which we have been feeling estranged, alienated for days, weeks, months— in fact a thunderstorm can still bring us to our senses in this way. So again, what do we “mean” by “meaning?”

I believe our sense that something is profoundly meaningful is a perception that that thing—work of Nature, human work—is somehow a revelation of a fundamental reality. It “speaks” to us of such a reality. We sense such meaning when we experience < >´; it reminds us of, and reconnects us with, the unfathomable source which is also < >´.

The symbol < >´ inevitably relates to the reality which it represents in an even more clumsy and potentially misleading way than that in which a stick figure relates to a living human being; it can soon become irritating. (For the reader, this may have happened several chapters ago; it has happened to me as I write.) But what are we to do? The more essential the phenomenon, the more difficult it is to name it satisfactorily. In the East, that which I am calling “the source of < >´, which is itself < >´,” is sometimes called Nothingness, Emptiness, the Void, the Potential.

Space is not a homogeneous, empty medium extending to infinity; it is the inconceivable plenitude of existence, with all its infinite possibilities. The Zen painter therefore has no horror vacui, for him the Void is worthy of the highest veneration; it is the most living thing of all, so overflowing with life that it need not assume shape or form, and, in order to become manifest, particularize itself in the endless cycle of change. Space is not the skin lying around things, but their core, their deepest essence, the reason for their being. The magic of the Void is expressed in these paintings, bewitching the eye, summoning a mood of reverence.

[Eugen Herrigel, The Method of Zen, p 70]

Clearly, it is related to that which we in the West call “God,” which Empedocles’ represented as “a circle of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.”[8] To say that anything has deep and fundamental meaning for us is to say that in some incomprehensible way it makes us aware of the continuing existence, the presence, of whatever it is we call “God,” or of whatever it is that we think of as Ultimate Cause, as Absolute. And this awareness “moves” us.[9]

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In contemporary Western culture, obsessed with analysis and explanation, meaning is habitually confused with content or message. We are told that Beethoven’s “Pastoral Symphony” represents a summer countryside, birds singing, the approach and passing of a storm.[10] The “Mona Lisa” is a portrait of such-and-such a lady and her smile shows that she is happily pregnant, or that she knows a secret, or that she is, somehow, Leonardo himself. Picasso’s Guernica “means” that the artist is outraged by Fascist bombing of an undefended Spanish town, and the painting is at the same time a protest against the horrors of all war. But what about paintings with no discernable message, or paintings and ballets that are “abstract?” When it is proposed that the paintings of both Mark Rothko and Piero della Francesca are deeply religious, what is it that makes them so, utterly different as they are? What do Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello mean?

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. The Art of the Fugue is not a special pattern of thinking, it is not thinking about any particular thing….The whole piece is not about thinking about something, it is about thinking.

[Lewis Thomas, The Medusa and the Snail, p 127]

I would say, rather, that The Art of the Fugue is an instance of < >´, and so is Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection—and so is the focused human mind, functioning smoothly somewhere between order and chaos, as we saw in the last chapter. (How awkward it is, this wordless word! But it is only a sign, a reminder of the existence of something which cannot be named. Perhaps it can serve to wake us up to it: an ideogram with “nuisance value.”) If The Art of The Fugue is about human thinking as such, it is also about Piero’s Resurrection, and about the pattern of markings on the beetle’s back. Here is biologist Lewis Thomas again, describing thinking:

The process of sorting and selecting, when many aggregates are simultaneously in flight and the separate orbits are now arranged in shimmering membranes very close to each other, is like a complicated, meticulously ordered dance. New notions are flung from one elliptical path into the next, collide with unmatched surfaces and bound away, to be caught and held in place by masses at a distance….The aggregates begin to send out streamers, plumes of thought, which touch and adhere.

[Ibid. p 126]

He goes on to posit a temporary condition of fully organized, harmonious structure within the brain, that is, of < >, which then “hunts” for something “outside” itself, something which has matching receptors but which will inevitably disturb that structure:

Sometimes, not often but sometimes, all the particles are organized in aggregates and all the aggregates are connected, and the mind becomes a single structure, motile now and capable of purposeful, directional movement. Now the hunt begins again, for something similar, with matching receptors, outside.

[Ibid. p 127]

In focused reading, the mind takes in the sense of the words while at the same time experiencing the structure of the work, in its parts and in the whole, the images in their sequence, coloration, the rhythms and sonority of the language, the timing, the alternation of action and observation—every sort of nuance and connection and memory.

When the hunters reached the top of the hill, there among the tamarisks and scattered cork trees appeared the real Sicily again, the one compared to which baroque towns and orange groves are mere trifles: aridly undulating to the horizon in hillock after hillock, comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy. [The town] lay huddled and hidden in an anonymous fold of the ground, and not a living soul was to be seen; the only signs of the passage of man were scraggy rows of vines. Beyond the hills on one side was the indigo smudge of the sea, more mineral and barren, even, than the land. The slight breeze moved over all, universalizing the smell of dung, carrion, and sage, cancelling, suppressing, reordering each thing in its careless passage….

[Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, p 124]

As we read we experience a rich and multi-layered delight—in ideas, references, allusions, but also a formal structure of sounds, word lengths, pauses, rhythms. The author makes a picture, adds the waves on the sea and the moving wind and the heat, and, at the same time and inseparably, forms the structure of his prose. The story is only the most obvious layer. We live within the world of the book; it is an ordered cosmos, and at the same time an enlivened one. Vladimir Nabokov taught his students at Wellesley College that “Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash.”[11]

That which we describe as “deeply meaningful” is experienced as an indication, a re-presentation, of a reality underlying the universe and inextricably part of it, perhaps the first and ongoing cause of all that is. By the agency of experienced meaning we are made aware of that reality, and attuned to its continuing existence. This is profoundly reassuring and comforting to us. It reminds us of our place and home in the universe, of our own living reality, our individual and somehow sacred < >´, as one of the multitudinous current manifestations of < >´ in the existing world of the present moment. It is brought to us by great works of art, by another human being, or by an experience of the world of Nature, in which we are reminded of our harmony with everything outside ourselves. We experience this psychic grounding even when the “content” or “message” of a work is tragic or horrifying.[12] The last scene of Hamlet, when well played, is ennobling and thrilling to the audience, even though if it is badly performed there is every potential for farce—so many deaths, so many bodies! To stand and look at Picasso’s Guernica is to stand strengthened in the world, whatever the painting’s subject, whatever its “connotative” meaning. In fact, the tragic form may be the most deeply reassuring; our own life is necessarily tragic (all must die). By means of art, our personal tragedies can be seen as meaningful, in spite of all.

We can see therefore that aesthetic meaning, which is sensed, non-verbal meaning, is different from content, or message, or subject, and yet these words are often used as if they constitute meaning—another foggy area in our common understanding. In experience there is no clear dividing line between form and content; they manifest as one, inseparably. It is the form which gives force and power to the message, or subject, or content. The greatest messages, like the Beatitudes, the Old Testament Psalms, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gettysburg address, or Michelangelo’s painted vision of Hell in the Sistine Chapel, are necessarily and entirely wedded to the form in which they are expressed. The form/content whole somehow moves us to a sense of humanity’s (and by association our own), innate value. To attempt to present the message otherwise is to lose its strength and its specificity. One can imagine that the content could in theory be expressed in another, equally powerful way, but the form of these great messages is experienced as inevitable; translation must attempt to reproduce it or give it new form.

[The author in question] was not of course alone in failing to realize that the interest of subjects depends entirely on how they are treated by the writer.

[Allan Massie, New York Review of Books, 2/10/2000. p 34]

Hamlet talks of suicide; the host of an imaginary talk show talks of suicide: it is the form, the poetry of Hamlet’s statement that we respond to. Not that Hamlet has expressed everything that could be said on the subject, in the only way possible, but that what he says is entirely convincing. A thoughtful talk-show host might muse, “Sometimes it seems really important to decide if we should live or die. Is it better to stay alive and deal with what comes up, to really fight against our problems and maybe get through them?…But to be finished with the whole mess would really be great!…But can we be absolutely positive that dying would finish it all? What if it’s worse after we die? It’s fear of that, the “unknown,” you could say, that makes us put up with what we have to deal with here, and not jump off a bridge. That’s how come we stay alive instead of committing suicide, a lot of the time.”

We might feel that the talk-show host is bringing up some big issues here—that when he said that he said quite a bit, when you think about it. Hamlet expresses the content this way:

“To be or not to be,—that is the question:—Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them? To die,—to sleep, —No more; and by a sleep to say we end the heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wisht. To die, to sleep:—to sleep! Perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; for in that sleep of death what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause: there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay…who would fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death,—the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns,—puzzles the will, and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?”

[William Shakespeare, The Complete Works]

In Hamlet’s soliloquy it is the character of the words used and the system of relationships among them that carry the sense of profound and universal meaning; it is the experience of < >´ that convinces us, time after time, through the centuries, that what he says is meaningful. I don’t know exactly why this is true, although of course it is both possible and interesting to deconstruct the soliloquy in various ways, in a reductionist “scientific” exercise. But this produces a pile of pieces rather than an understanding. To find the full answer one can only put the same pieces back together again in their original relationships, which again creates < >´, an entirely mysterious phenomenon. I once tried to write a paragraph which would set forth the necessary ingredients of an ideal urban park. In attempting to capture something of its full possible meaning within a contemporary city, I found that the closer the form of my description came to the rhythm and imagery of poetry, the better it could carry my strongly felt message—in fact, that until I discovered the right form I myself could not fully know what I was trying to say.

According to John Updike, “Nabokov wrote prose the way it must be written, ecstatically”—that is, written in a state of intense mental and emotional exaltation, oblivious of all else.[13]

Nabokov took early and lasting delight in the exact sciences, and [in] his blissful hours spent within the luminous hush of microscopic examination….[L]epidoptery placed him in a world beyond common sense, where on a butterfly’s hindwing “a large eyespot imitates the drop of liquid with such uncanny perfection that a line which crosses the wing is slightly displaced at the exact stretch where it passes through,” where “when a butterfly has to look like a leaf, not only are all the details of a leaf beautifully rendered but markings mimicking grub-bored holes are generously thrown in.” He asked, then, of his own art and the art of others something extra—a flourish of mimetic magic or deceptive doubleness—that was supernatural and surreal in the root sense of these degraded words. Where there was not this shimmer of the gratuitous, of the superhuman and nonutilitarian, he turned harshly impatient, in terms that imply a lack of feature, a blankness peculiar to the inanimate: “Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies.”

[John Updike, Introduction to Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, p xxiv]

With the respect due both Nabokov and Updike, I would suggest that the “something extra,” the “shimmer of the gratuitous” refers to that however slight departure from the harmonious that I am indicating by the sign “ ´ ”, and Iris Murdoch called “the contingent;” that is, something outside the system. But such a shimmer must somehow be coherent with the whole.

Truth cannot be convincingly expressed in a banal form, even in everyday conversation—to tell the full truth requires that the necessary form be discovered in the moment, and the most economical form is likely to be the most eloquent. “A stitch in time saves nine”—the proverb lives; “By doing something now you can save yourself more work later” does not. Form can be felt to have intrinsic meaning without any overt message, but without the form of art a message will not strike us as profound, will not penetrate to our core of being. Content or message and form work together, indivisible one from the other. When the Bible, or the spoken parts of the Roman Catholic or Episcopal liturgy, are put into “everyday” language, it is the magnificent poetic form, the < >´that we miss, not the archaic language. Significant truths must be stated in noble form or we are not convinced.

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To say that a word means something is to say that it represents or stands for or symbolizes something. But a work of art does not stand for something else, is not a symbol of something else. It may describe or refer to something other, but that is not the thing about it which most deeply moves us, which makes us treasure it. Certainly we can talk about the work, know things about it, place it in history, appreciate the artist’s technical prowess or demonstrated lack of it; all that information is entertaining to our categorizing and analyzing minds. But its essential meaning lies in its being, a fact of which Mozart gave the definitive demonstration. When a patron asked him for the meaning of a work he had just performed, he sat down and played it again. It is like the relationship between sports statistics and a great baseball game; the game is the significant entity—that game, that day, made up of all its parts, contingencies, nuances—the statistics generated and the comments of journalists are something altogether other. Matisse said, “I myself am fully convinced that the best explanation an artist can give of his aims and ability is afforded by his work.…”[14]

Our non-verbal experience of art is generally attributed to a work’s “emotional content,” or “emotional force;” we are told that the work expresses what the artist “feels.” And then authorities and experts tell us what the work (independent of the artist at last, out in the disembodied realm of words) actually means. In fact, the work means exactly what it is. It means by being. It means what it is. The greatest art resonates, subtly or powerfully, with our whole being—sensory, mental, physical, and emotional—and all at once.

In an often-quoted 1964 radio interview, the contemporary American painter Frank Stella said, “I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting—the humanistic values that they…find on the canvas….If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there….What you see is what you see.”[15] The painter is insisting here that “denotative” meaning is the only true meaning, that anything else is added. He says that there’s nothing “there” but paint and canvas (or in music, notes and the absence of notes), no “something other.” Yet the powerful whole, with all the complex relationships among its parts, is clearly greater than the sum of those parts, and that integrity or wholeness does constitute something other. The twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger called it “the almost palpable actuality of works [of great art], in which something else inheres.”[16] Is such recognition of overall integrity or cohesion what Stella means by “old humanistic values?” It is not other than that existing sum, those particular, specific, and infinitely numerous relationships among the parts and between them and the whole, but the work definitely can be more than “just paint and canvas”—as Mozart’s music is more than just “too many notes.”[17] I imagine that Mr. Stella’s point is really that the meaning in his work exists precisely with the paint and canvas, and exactly in the way in which they together constitute the work.[18]

Through the centuries artists have tried to get non-artists to understand that meaning exists in the work’s particular being, which is experienced in contemplation, not in talk. The movement toward complete abstraction in early twentieth century painting may be seen as an effort to insist upon this fact—that the most essential meaning of the work does not lie in any verbally expressible message (War is bad! Apples are red and yellow! Venus is good-looking!), or in any obvious mirroring of the “real” world. “This doesn’t mean anything” complains the puzzled viewer or listener when his effort to find a message, or any kind of nameable content in the work has failed. Artist and viewer or listener may be talking of two different things when they talk about meaning. However if the viewer observes or listens to the work, giving it both time and full attention, and finds himself uninterested, unmoved, unrewarded by that sensory, mental and physical (that is, sensory as “aesthetic”) experience, then viewer and artist can argue about whether or not the work is art, and actually hope to be talking about the same thing.

Meaning, not raw fact, is what humanity seeks, and society is a collection of kits or codes for processing raw facts into meaning. Ordering is one of the simplest and most durable human methods for finding or making meaning. Take a variety of things and put them in some kind of relationship, a simple sequence, a taxonomy, a hierarchy, a cause-and-effect pattern, say, and they make sense, apparently for no better reason than the tautological one that order and relationship are felt by human beings to be meaningful....

[Alvin Kernan, The Death of Literature, p 195]

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Where some kind of order is detected, scientists and mathematicians tend to presume the presence of some degree of relevance to the way the universe actually functions, and therefore of meaning. James Watson wrote that when he and Stephen Crick first proposed the double helix as the probable form of the DNA molecule,

Lacking the exact X-ray evidence, we were not confident that the configuration chosen was precisely correct…the objection could be raised that, although our idea was aesthetically elegant, the shape of the sugar-phosphate backbone might not permit its existence. Happily, now we knew that this was not true, and so we had lunch, telling each other that a structure this pretty just had to exist.

[James Watson, The Double Helix p 131]

Rosy [physicist Rosalind Franklin]’s instant acceptance of our model at first amazed me. I had feared that her sharp, stubborn mind, caught in her self-made antihelical trap, might dig up irrelevant results that would foster uncertainty…. Nonetheless, like almost everyone else, she saw the appeal of the base pairs and accepted the fact that the structure was too pretty not to be true.

[Ibid. p 134]

The brilliant French mathematician and philosopher Henri Poincaré described the process of thought by which the unconscious mind sorts and chooses among vast numbers of possible ideas:

The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so ignorant as often to be tempted to smile at it.

…Among the great numbers of manifestations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are beautiful and harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have spoken, and which, once aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious. [emphasis mine.]

[Henri Poincaré, in “Mathematical Creation,” from The Foundations of Science, trans. George Bruce Halsted, quoted in Brewster Ghiselin, The Creative Process, p 42]

Overly disorderly situations, on the other hand, be they paintings, symphonies, or political rallies, are experienced as meaningless, irritating—even threatening.

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Our response to the presence of < >´ is a sense of gratitude and exhilaration. It brings us to life. In the spring of 1996, Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New York Times, wrote in a review of a new book on architecture:

It is a striking and lovely paradox that [the author, Kenneth Frampton] finds meaning in the most obvious part of a building’s existence, the way it has been constructed. [His] book is, in part, a meditation on the contradiction that underlies all architecture; the paradox is that in providing us with what [he] calls “everyday experience” (and others might call fulfilling functional needs, or protecting us from the rain), buildings can rise to the level of great art. Yet we fail to understand the magnificence of that contradiction if we begin with the art, with the idea, and ignore the physical reality that gives tangible form to it. Yes, architecture is an idea, as all art is an idea, [Mr. Frampton] is saying—but it is not necessarily an idea first. It is a constructed object first, and let us remember that.

[Paul Goldberger, New York Times Book Review 3/10/96 p 5, discussing Kenneth Frampton’s Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press 1995]

For me, there is no paradox here, unless meaning is misunderstood. I reject the separation of the building into two parts or levels of existence—its physical reality and its existence as art-as-idea. The intellectual component of a building is the full causative thought of which it is the product, and which is intrinsic to it—that is, its logos. That full thought can be fully experienced only there. One can have ideas about the building, both before and after it is constructed, but a building is not an idea. It exists as art, not in the mind as an idea, but in its physical reality. Until it is a reality it is not art; it is not fully committed to a form—we cannot know what it actually is, so we cannot fully experience it, and that is the only way to know whether < >´ is there. It seems to me that in claiming this, I set myself in opposition to much of Western philosophy since Plato. The quality is not physical, but physical existence is essential to it. At the same time, I generally (and gratefully) agree with Mr. Goldberger. William Blake wrote of the need for clarity in art:

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wiry the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art…Great inventors, in all ages, knew this.”

[William Blake, 1809, quoted in Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Art, p 72]

I doubt that Blake is demanding that boundary lines be drawn around the elements of art. He is saying that the artist’s precise intent must be clear and definite—that is, set within limits. The shapes in Seurat’s beautiful drawings are clear, though without outlines. Clarity in statements of color, of sound, or of words or movement are as necessary in art as in life. Such clarity requires both honesty and courage, precisely the courage of one’s convictions. In great poetry, even the most ambiguous statement is made distinctly, in no other way but in precisely this way; the sumptuous riches of nuance and resonance and possibility arise from this exact word or sequence of words, not from something like it. In an interview with Lawrence Weschler of The New Yorker, Robert Irwin made this point with strong physical emphasis, in a gesture “gritty with determination,” of screwing “an imaginary anchor into an invisible massif in front of him”:

[E]ither you’re going to do it or you’re not going to do it, and if you’re going to do it you’ve got to get in there and—mmmff—do it. You’ve got to take all that and somehow, man—mmmff—you’ve got to nail it. You really have to bite the bullet…; halfway doesn’t count for anything and there are no excuses…if you’re going to pursue certain lines of thought, take on certain tasks, well—mmmff—you’ve really got to make the commitment.

[Robert Irwin, in an interview with Lawrence Weschler, The New Yorker, 6/7/93]

We may have all kinds of reactions to an idea—delight, admiration, apprehension—but are not convinced until we see or hear it in committed form, in the world. That is why writing is an aid to thinking: until the idea is clearly stated in words or forms we don’t entirely know what we have so far. Ideas are necessarily more or less vague, contingent. They are not fully visible, audible, tangible, in an explicit set of nuanced qualities, details, and internal relationships. Our ideas about art may radically shape our experience of it, but we require that the finished work remain precisely itself regardless of our changing opinions. When a building or a symphony or a ballet is actually made, there can be no vagueness, even in the tiniest part—it is this proportion or another, this note or position of the body or another—and decisions in its making must be explicit at every level of attention, whether the decision is made by the architect or the builder, the composer or the performer. When painting fog in a landscape its very vagueness must be precisely where it should (must) be.

In cases where improvisation is called for, the performer becomes in fact the playwright’s or choreographer’s co-worker, and of course, and often blessedly, chance comes into it too.

Dance critic Arlene Croce clearly identified the multi-leveled resonance of the physical:

If Balanchine had any secret, it was one that has endured through two hundred years of classical ballet.…that dancing correctly in three dimensions in time to music creates the fourth dimension of meaning. Ballet becomes metaphysical not by aspiring beyond its material parts, but, paradoxically, by being humbly, gruellingly, systematically materialistic, working every technical fine point into the body until it becomes second nature. It may be the metaphysical plane in Balanchine’s ballets that is throwing his epigones into confusion. They don’t see that there’s a direct connection between transcendence and the fifth position.…

Balanchine’s system was ecological. Technique, style, discipline, morale are all…interrelated parts of a single organism—New York City Ballet.

[Arlene Croce The New Yorker 6/7/93 p 102-3]

A building is not art when it is only an idea. An idea of a building and the building are two radically different things. We may prefer the idea, because we cannot see the doorknobs, the stone of which the steps are constructed, the exact proportional relationships; we can either imagine our own, or ignore them. And our expectations as to what they might be will be prejudiced by our opinion of the architectural idea. The building can exist as art only when it is a reality; it has not stood the test of reality until it is built. It is fundamentally and most importantly a “constructed object,” and so is a drawing or a sonata.

The architect has ideas, confers with the client, designs a structure. He or she draws up increasingly detailed sets of plans and elevations, as decisions are made at smaller and smaller scales. Ideas are involved at every stage of this process, as are the constraints of function, budget, weight, stress, the availability of materials. Changes to the design are made throughout the process, as the realities of construction modify the original intent. The Taj Mahal may exist in our minds as an idea, but that idea is accurate only to the degree that it represents the actual structure. A building that is never built exists only as a description or drawing or model—however seductive or powerfully persuasive of what the work could be.

In painting, the vague is sometimes offered in hopes of indicating the mysterious profound. In an amorphous vagueness there is the possibility that < >´ is in there somewhere. The painter Piet Mondrian believed clear definition, the “determinate image,” to be essential:

Most people can recognize the universal only in and through the vague, because of the vagueness in themselves. They cannot recognize the universal in its pure plastic manifestation because the universal has not become conscious in them. However as soon as we have formed a determinate image of the universal in ourselves, we can recognize it in a determinate plastic expression.

[Piet Mondrian, quoted by Roger Lipsey in An Art of Our Own the Spiritual in Art, p 70]

Mondrian’s “determinate plastic expression” is that which the early twentieth century British critic Clive Bell called “significant form,” that is, “form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.”[19] It is experiential, and inexpressible in words.

Umberto Eco has written of works that he identifies as “open.” A playwright who leaves to the director and performers of the play many of the decisions customarily made by the playwright, for instance, may be avoiding the responsibility for making a complete work, or playing at the edge of possible chaos. Chance is being invited into the process, in the hope that something absolutely fresh and unexpected will occur. It is in the particular performance in the real world that we can know whether this strategy has been successful, this time. The full and “determinate” form of the work, as it is that night, will of course be there to be experienced, for better or worse.

If the audience doesn’t know what it’s really looking for, a failure to achieve < >´ may be overlooked; if the work is clearly “avant-garde,” and then the currently most influential critics praise it (perhaps agreeing with its political or social message, or afraid of being seen as not agreeing)—it must be art! If we ourselves are hip enough, or aspire to such hipness, we will agree with them. If it is the work of some cultural god, like Shakespeare, some members of the audience will be determined to enjoy it, and of course there is a feast obtainable in Shakespeare, almost no matter how it is played. Every sincere and convincing effort to produce interesting work should be applauded and supported, as being a step on the long road to great and original work. That which is novel and shocking for the sake of being novel and shocking is a waste of our time.

Painting can be seen as mere visual decoration and entertainment, music to be aural decoration and entertainment, and architecture works as shelter—but the arts, including architecture, go far beyond these functions; they inspire and transform us, give us life. We require of them a complexity and subtlety equal to or greater than our own. As we saw in the chapter on thinking, contemplation of art, in a state of “flow,” as Professor Csikszentmihalyi describes it, can enlarge and enrich our minds, our being. That architecture is a shelter and also art is not surprising…that’s the way human beings crave to do things, when their motives, those desires that move them to action, come from their deepest and finest core of being. Our museums are full of wall hangings and carpets, spoons and drinking vessels and tools, some of them designed for functions now obsolete. But they are also art, and remain as treasure.

It may be that the greatest depth of meaning, within the capacity of the artist and the medium, is generated by the highest motive. Bach composed “for the glory of God and the delectation of the human spirit.” In his great four-volume work, The Nature of Order, Christopher Alexander wrote, “It is in my struggle to want this…unobstructed purity that I am helped, most of all, if I try to make each thing a gift to God.”[20]

Though of course the artist needs food and shelter, the motivation to acquire these things can propel him or her in many directions. But the work of art, to the degree that it is “good,” is motivated by the desire to align oneself with the structures and rhythms of a reality experienced as both harmonious and lively. The artist wants to experience < >´ in an as-yet-unrealized form, as we all do, and hopes to make it happen. Critics argue over Norman Rockwell, because there is obvious aesthetic quality in his work, and yet he worked for money, modified what he did for money; we can feel that it is “commercial.” Surely we can understand that his motives were complex. To the extent that his work was motivated by the desire for money, it is trite and sentimental. To the extent that he was doing his utmost, out of love for his subjects and for the world as he found it, the work “rings true.” The artist is pulled forward by < >´, by the living being of things, by love for a person, an object, a color, a contour, a relationship between shapes, the art of others, the world.

Paul Goldberger continues, in the piece quoted earlier:

Perhaps one has to have paid one’s dues wallowing in the hermetic and self-referential world of architectural theory to find this book as refreshing as I do. I feel as if I have been waiting for years for a scholar of Mr. Frampton’s caliber to shift the focus of the theoretical dialogue in architecture back to the way buildings are made, to the way they feel and to the way they are perceived, and to say that meaning should derive from these things, not precede them….

…Mr. Frampton’s chapter on [Louis] Kahn…concludes with a discussion of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, one of Kahn’s masterworks. “In such a setting, perhaps more fitting for a temple than a museum,” [Kenneth Frampton writes] “we find ourselves returned to the tactility of the tectonic in all its aspects; to a meeting between the essence of things and the existence of beings, to that pre-Socratic moment, lying outside time, that is at once both modern and antique….” [Architecture] in the last analysis has nothing to do with immediacy and everything to do with the unsayable. What was it Luis Barragan said? “Architecture which does not express serenity fails in its spiritual mission.”

[Paul Goldberger, The New York Times Book Review 3/10/96 p 5, in a review of Kenneth Frampton’s Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture, MIT Press 1995 ]

The familiar analogy between a temple and a museum of art is an interesting one. The word “temple” comes from a root meaning a place of augury, that is, a place for intuiting the structure and moving rhythms, the Logos, of the universe. [21] Perhaps we know on some level that an art museum is such a place, a place where those rhythms can be found, a building revered because it is a house of the Logos, “a meeting place between the essence of things and the existence of beings,” as Kenneth Frampton so beautifully says. Luis Barragan’s “serenity” is produced by the meaningful calm of harmonious order. The “spiritual mission” of architecture is not occult, it does not lie in the realm of the unreal.

“Everybody wants to understand painting. Why is there no attempt to understand the song of birds? Why does one love a night, a flower, everything that surrounds a man, without trying to understand it all? While as for painting, one wants to understand. Let it be understood above all that the artist works by necessity, that he is, he too, a least element of the world, to which no more importance should be attached than so many natural things which charm us but which we do not explain to ourselves. Those who try to explain a picture are most of the time on the wrong track.”

[Pablo Picasso, translated from “Conversations with Picasso,” Cahiers d’Art 1935. Quoted in Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process: A Symposium, p 51.]

The artist making art, says Picasso, is a bird singing; a natural element of the world. He asks us to be still, and look and listen, the way one quiets oneself, listening to the bird. Don’t try to explain it, identify it, interpret it! Experience it! Birdsong can be ravishingly beautiful in its specific combinations of sound and emptiness, simplicity and decoration, one tone and another…and because we are listening in full awareness we hear the silence which is an essential component of the whole. The great contemporary Irish poet Seamus Heany has written of “that moment when the bird sings very close/ To the music of what happens.” [22] That “music of what happens” is < >´.

If you are interested in why the bird is singing, or rather in knowing the latest human story regarding this phenomenon, learning answers to such questions is a different pleasure entirely—and may be only superficially related to the actual experience of the bird’s song. A story, or theory, which says that the bird sings for his little mate, or that he sings to establish his territory in a Darwinian contest for the survival of his genes, is extraneous to (and in the moment destructive of) the experience of the bird’s song. Of course < >´ does not occur every time a bird pipes a note or two, at least at our scale of being; we have to fully listen in order to hear “when the bird sings very close to the music of what happens.”

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The designs painted on an Innu coat…came to the hunter in a dream and expressed both spiritual power and a desire to please the caribou, who would then allow themselves to be captured. [The hunter] described them to his wife…. It was her responsibility to incorporate them into a coat…[the basic forms] belong to a widespread northern tradition, but each coat is unique, a combination of the hunter’s dream and his wife’s interpretation of it. A man needed two coats every year, for the summer and winter hunting seasons. It is reported that each coat was discarded or traded away at the end of the season, its power spent…. This coat exemplifies many objects whose meanings have changed with their use. Conceived in a dream, worn with reverence, then discarded, it is now a rare museum piece, admired for its beauty by people far removed from its creation, who can only imagine its original significance….

[Eskimo masks] were worn in dance festivals to please the spirits of animals, bring success in hunting, and maintain an orderly universe…. Each mask was the product of an individual vision, to be worn once and then discarded, its spiritual energy consumed. Belief was eternal, but the mask itself was ephemeral; making the mask and dancing with it were meaningful acts; keeping it for display was not.

[Mary Jane Lenz, in Tom Hill and Richard W. Hill eds., Creation’s Journey: Native America Identity and Belief, pp 195-196.]

These passages speak of the desire to please the caribou, to please the spirits of animals, which may persuade us to dismiss the people involved as charmingly naive. But the statement is directly related to other statements in the text, all of which are references to a vital understanding which we may be unable to remember and reluctant to re-learn: the understanding that we and our works are part of the universal pattern, and our natural and passionate need, now forgotten, is to conform to that pattern, to dance with that music.

Dreams and visions are identified as the source of aesthetic form—an understanding that what we call the unconscious mind is in some way our conduit to the source of < >´, or is perhaps itself that source. (All this belongs in the vast realm of things we cannot yet understand, and perhaps never will fully understand.) We are told here that to dance in the ritual, wearing the mask, “maintains an orderly universe.” This is the sort of statement that is made without attempting to explain or justify it, because it cannot be explained, and the author may trust that it will be intuitively understood, on some level, by some people. The coat made by the hunter’s wife, the mask made by or for the dancer, the dance itself—each is a leap toward full unity. It is a connection or loving and magical conversation with the < >´ of nature as manifest in the soul and being of the caribou, in the creative spirit of the wife, in the dreaming mind of the hunter, in the patterns within the dance, and in the order of the universe. These things are done for love.

The author says that the meaning of the hunter’s coat has changed with its use. It was once a protection from the weather and at the same time a magical talisman for good luck in hunting (what is luck but finding oneself in harmony with events, with universal order?); it is now a precious object in a museum. But that which made it “pleasing” to the caribou, and harmonious with and supportive of the order of the universe, is the same quality which causes it to continue to be “admired for its beauty;” that is, for its innate < >´.

Native American languages, and others like the Japanese and the Iranian, have no separate word for “art,” nor did the language of the ancient Greeks.[23] When people made things by hand, often slowly and laboriously, they made art, to the best of their ability, the way a bird sings. But not without a purpose. Again, Bach said that he wrote music for the glory of God and the delectation of the human spirit. Beyond the obvious practical purpose of a given activity (to write a cantata for Sunday’s service, to make a bowl for holding ground corn) the artist or gardener, the potter or composer—if not working for the current market, or the critics, or to conform to a theory—works for the delectation of his or her own spirit in its love for < >´, and within whatever level of craftsmanship has been attained. Somerset Maugham said, “I write the books I want to read.” If one is oneself delighted, so may others be. The influential American psychologist Carl Rogers observed:

What is most personal is most general. There have been times when in talking with students or staff, or in writing, I have expressed myself in ways so personal that I have felt I was expressing an attitude which it was probable no one else would understand, because it was so uniquely my own. In these instances I have almost invariably found that the very feeling which seemed to me most private, most personal, and hence most incomprehensible to others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others…. [I have come] to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves.

[Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person, pp 24-26]

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In any discussion of meaning, the question of motive is fundamental; it has surfaced here before. Motive is both the initial and the ongoing cause of the eventual form of the work, that is, the form which carries the work’s essential meaning. Motive underlies and influences every choice in the creative process.

The hunter dreams the form which when it is made manifest will have the power to please the caribou, to maintain the sensed order of the cosmos. The Japanese potter aspires to make a vessel that in being entirely itself will express our human connection to our sources. Both seek to make things which are in tune with the innate, ever-changing-but-ever-the-same, orders of the universe, the source of < >´ which is itself < >´.

[In traditional Japanese culture]the crafts have always been a major interface between the sacred and the material world. This was once true everywhere, but in Japan it is still true in many ways. The craftsman respects and honors the inner qualities of his materials, his tools, and, by extension, of all materials and art. The act of making something is a recognition of processes and forces larger than, or at least different from, the merely human.

A close physical bond with nature as well as a spiritual bond with the gods of the forests gave carpenters and woodworkers insight into the soul of the tree, its nature and disposition. Wood was considered a living thing with a soul, and the way of the carpenter was to keep that soul alive.

[Amy Sylvester Katoh, Japan Country Living: Spirit, Tradition, Style, pp 102, 109]

When the pot is broken, or the mask discarded, that particular manifestation is ended— but an infinite number of possible variations on that form, and of other possible forms, can be found. Alternatively, an almost identical form can be reconstructed, as in many craft traditions, and in music, theatre and dance. When the fundamental form is already established, we are already part of the way there.

During the eleven centuries between 736 and 1863 CE, the Kasuga Grand Shrine at Nara, Japan, was taken down every twenty years and rebuilt with new materials on an adjoining site. This was in accordance with Shinto principles of purity, and in recognition of the essential reality of impermanence and renewal. Though the building achieved great age and venerability, it was always fresh; though its materials were ever-new, the form was unchanged and so the building’s fundamental meaning, its Being, was continuous. As Heraclitus observed, “Fires kindling, fires going out.” The great Shinto shrine still stands intact, meticulously maintained, but it has not been rebuilt since the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate.[24]

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The Greeks believed that they had found the fundamental orders of the universe in mathematical relationships in Nature, and in the analogous consistencies of mathematics and music. The principles of proportion and relationship they practised were used to determine form in buildings until fairly recent times. Jonathan Hale suggests that in our culture, for many reasons, 1830 was the watershed year when what he calls “the old way of seeing”—a seeing based in our humanity and harmony with the natural world—began to be abandoned. He quotes Thomas Carlyle, who in 1829 wrote: “It is the age of machinery; in every outward and inward sense of that word.…Wonder, indeed, is, on all hands, dying out.…What cannot be investigated and understood, mechanically, cannot be investigated and understood at all.”[25] The Modern movement in architecture, says Hale, was the last great effort to keep these principles, this connection between the built environment and nature, alive. He writes:

There may be a limit to how great a skyscraper can be, because the primary purpose of the skyscraper is to express corporate power. That purpose is too narrow to admit much of the larger power that comes from play, and that leads to grace. The metaphysical cathedrals were much more down to earth than the skyscrapers of our time...

...The Gothic cathedrals involved the contributions of various masters, but each designer could trust the next to continue the work in a way that would be constant and beautiful. The changes introduced from one master to the next might be radical or as small as a different way of carving a molding; but the inconsistencies we see do not come from any lack of skill or vision. It was not that people were too primitive to notice the differences; the subtleties of the great cathedrals are unsurpassed...The work shows a profound belief in proportioning systems, a belief that goes beyond what is expressed by any structures built since. Their purpose, like that of the builders of any temple, was to embody the aspects of universal spirit.

[Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, p 106]

Whether consciously or not, we can “read” the motive in the work—in shoddy materials, careless workmanship, inferior construction, or in subtlety of form, coherent proportion, and meticulous joinery. We are ashamed to do inferior work, because we dislike the result ourselves, and know it can be read, that we and our failings are inherent and legible in it. A young construction worker told me, “I’m ashamed to work on that school. Aluminum siding, and everything the cheapest! It looks more like a motel or a gas station.”

In our cities, sprawling suburbs, and disappearing countryside today, the motivations behind the design and construction of buildings are often simply layer upon layer of personal greed, the profit motive, the bottom line, or self-advertising by the architect or the client. Such buildings depress and alienate us, but in North America, and increasingly in the rest of the world, most of us now live and work in environments made up almost entirely of buildings and exterior spaces of this kind. We attempt to restore ourselves, if we can, by visiting remnants of the natural world, or older human communities where buildings motivated by other values (or culturally required to conform to classical proportioning systems) can still be found. When we say that a Victorian neighborhood or an 18th century village or a European town is “unspoiled,” this is what we mean. We make these forays in search of our own well-being and, as we say, re-creation, and we may instinctively avoid those places where clients, architects, and builders have been motivated entirely by the desire to exploit the opportunity for personal gain of whatever kind. We work hard so that we may someday escape once more—or perhaps retire and live in the “unspoiled” countryside, or buy a mansionette looking out over the expensive, environmentally destructive, pseudo-natural, scrupulously engineered, but still to some degree vital, landscape of the golf course—living grass, real trees, real sky! At the same time we take it as a given that we as a culture are “stressed out,” disoriented, alienated. And of course the urban poor, who live where no one else wants to live, have no escape except to the extent that their culture and spiritual life may still be rich in forms that structure and enliven.

Earlier I quoted an observation by British Jungian psychoanalyst Anthony Storr, who wrote: “The human mind seems to be so constructed that the discovery, or perception, of order or unity in the external world is mirrored, transferred, and experienced as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.”[26] The opposite is equally true: the inevitable and cumulative result of our continual bombardment by the smarmy and chaotic is an increasingly disordered and unharmonious state of mind.

Jonathan Hale uses terms like “pattern” and “the resonating play of shapes” to identify that which I am calling < >´.

“[M]ysterious harmonies” paradoxically are the source of the sense of reality, place, meaning—if we accept that intuition does have control, then intuition can link us to the universe without mystical explanations…. In the past, there were supernatural reasons…. Now we are thrown back on ourselves…how are we to get what ancient builders had—spirit—without their belief in spirits?…[These harmonies] are perceived mostly by the mind unconsciously…. We go into a great cathedral, and we know that we are in a place that has a pattern of the sort that we have…the energy we feel may be something which we bring[[27]]…[the builders] thought the energy was there, created by the building itself.

[Ibid. pp 74, 85, 86, 104]

This “energy,” or elevation of life force, is a product of our recognition of, and intuitive alignment with, the presence of life and meaning in the building, qualities which in turn feed and strengthen our experience of our own life; it is the same. “The place has a pattern of the sort that we have.” As Anthony Storr says, we experience the building’s energized order “as if it were a discovery of a new order and balance in the inner world of the psyche.” Though the particular manifestation of < >´ which is the building differs from our own individual < >´, both are examples of that enlivened order which is essential to life. Jonathan Hale points out the counter-intuitive fact that a solid brick wall is in fact mostly empty space.[28] Solid masses appear to be solid only because of the patterns made by the paths of subatomic particles, and we are “solid” in the same way. Those same particles and patterns exist within us, in the space between us and the building, and within the building itself, where they add up to the form of the structure—and they affect us. The rhythms and patterns of what we look at, or listen to, alter and affect our own rhythms and patterns, in a subtle but sometimes consciously experienced way.

To relax into an alert equilibrium, in contemplation, “attention open,” is to allow ourselves to operate in harmony with those rhythms and patterns. It is only in contemplation, the monkey mind silenced, that we can fully experience our own being and the world around us, and be conscious of the experience of meaning in what we see and hear.

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When many layers of meaning are present we say that something is “rich in meaning.” The young woman in the blue robe holding a baby on her knee probably symbolizes the Virgin Mary, the white dove represents Peace or the Holy Spirit, the seven candles signify the seven tribes of Israel, the country house in the background is the ancestral home of the husband of the lady with the spaniel. We “read” such symbolic meanings, within a given culture, in the same way that we read words on a page. This is the primary consciously-recognized interest of art for some people; they are proud of their ability to read such “meanings,” and eager to learn more.

However Piet Mondrian asserted that though Art is an end in itself, it is (surely on the deepest level) “the means through which we can know the universal and contemplate it in plastic [that is, malleable] form.”[29] If such “universal” meaning, underlying all others, is non-verbal, and if in order to be meaning it must signify in a language or system of signs, as some believe, then to what system of signs does it belong? We are returned to the ancient and recurring idea that God “speaks” through Nature. In As You Like It, Shakespeare gives us a Duke and members of the Court taking up life “like Foresters” in the Forest of Arden. After listing some of the “sweet uses of adversity” in such a situation, the Duke suggests another benefit of life in the woods;

And this our life exempt from public haunt,

Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,

Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

I would not change it.

[William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II Scene I]

We can recite that famous speech, and we do—or we could say that there are occasions in art and nature and human behavior when that which occurs is perhaps harmonious with universal physical realities which will one day be fully explained, in all their infinite complexity, by science. What we say about such things is a matter of taste and temperament, since at this juncture we certainly cannot know for certain—and on a purely intellectual level it really doesn’t matter. God, it could be said, does not speak to us in words, but rather in forms and relationships. Or one could say that we take harmonious part in the dance of the universe when we act creatively in any of our possible actions, including when we sit still, fully attentive, and observe the Creation. Or that art and the observed instances of < >´ in nature remind us of the reality of the universal dance, and by affecting our own inner harmonies, allow us to take part in it— until entropy and entropic chaos re-establish their dominance once again.

The history of the word “meaning” is relevant here. It comes from the late Middle English verbal noun maenan, which grew from the same Indo-European root as did the word “mind.” Meaning and mind are twin conceptions: it is whole mind that discerns meaning, and it is whole mind that causes meaning through action in the material world. But here again, as in the case of the Greek word logos, a prejudice in favor of the verbal in all things has resulted in a great loss, in this case the loss of appreciation of the powers of the non-verbal mind, which is the creative mind. It is the loss of an understanding only beginning to be found again by neuroscience. In older systems of thought, the meaning discerned in the manifestation which is the universe (ever more astounding as we learn more about it) was seen as resulting from the activity of the mind of God.

I know that < >´ exists, that it occurs continually, and that, in its infinite manifestations in nature and in our own actions, it is our greatest treasure. This knowledge is a product of experience and observation, not of faith. It can be (and is for me) the foundation for a faith in God, whatever that may be, as somehow good. The teachings of the great religions are systems of instruction in how to benefit from it, how to tune oneself to its harmonies, for the good of oneself and for the good of all the world. But many people who do not subscribe to any such religion are intensely conscious of it. Albert Einstein, in an essay called “Strange is Our Situation Here On Earth,” wrote,

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. His eyes are closed. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men. It is enough for me to reflect upon the marvelous structure of the universe, which we can dimly perceive, and to try humbly to comprehend even an infinitesimal part of the Intelligence manifested in Nature.

[Albert Einstein, quoted in Scepticism and Religious Relativism, tape 2 side 2 (punctuation mine)]

That statement pairs well with one made by the His Holiness Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, in 1997:

We cannot expect to leave no trace on the environment. However, we must choose either to make it reflect greed and ugliness or to use it in such a way that its beauty shows God’s handiwork through ours.

[Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, quoted in Time Magazine, May 5, 1997, p 50]

[1] This although it is probably natural to us: a majority of children appear to have an innate gift for it. It cannot be produced by “rational” thought; it must be found by insight. Picasso said that when he was a child he had to learn to paint like an adult (skillfully, mimetically, “academically”), and then later, as an adult, to learn to paint again like a child.

[2] “[A] single, unbroken, flowing actuality of existence as a whole, containing both thought (consciousness) and external reality as we experience it.” [David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order].

[3] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, and FDK Ching, Architecture, Form and Space p 386. But the labels denotative and connotative are difficult to remember, since “con-” means with, together, and “de-“ means down, away, a removal. As Heidegger points out, the substance of a work of art, occurs together with its attributes. That which is actually “away” from the thing is its referential meaning, which is forever subject to interpretation.

[4] In one instance, Professor Danto wrote that “artworks themselves are internally related to the interpretations that define them.” [The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p xii]

[5] For instance, William H. Whyte, in a still-quoted 16 year study of public spaces in New York City, discovered that the combination of features which will draw people to use an urban open space are recognized by intuitive preference and intuitive choice rather than in response to any academic Design principle. [William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Project for Public Spaces,1980

[6] “Distant Harmony: Pavarotti in China,” Pacific Arts Video, 1987

[7] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

[8] Note: In E.M. Forster’s Passage to India, the sensitive and intelligent Mrs. Moore is psychologically undone by her insight, within the Marabar caves, that what is beyond All is—absolutely nothing, even a sinister Nothingness.

[9] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary— “move: ( # 5a): to stir the emotions of: affect emotionally: rouse the feelings or passions of…” (but in this instance not to make “happy” or “nostalgic” or “fearful.” We shed the tears of coming home at last.)

[10] Yet I have heard a radio critic sneer at the symphony for just this reason. The “story” has in fact nothing to do with the fundamental meaning of the music, one way or the other.

[11] Quoted by John Updike in his Introduction to Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature, 1980, p xxiii]

[12] In 1996, paper cocktail napkins printed with the image of Picasso’s Guernica were sold in the gift shop of Madrid’s Museum of Modern Art. Images from Goya’s series of etchings of The Horrors of War could never be so used. Their message is much too “graphic,” as we say—that is, literally and powerfully delineated, explicit. Guernica is relatively more bland and general, and more “abstract.” When The United States and Britain attacked Iraq in 2003, both The New Yorker and Harper’s magazine used Guernica as their cover image.

[13] John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Literature

[14] Quoted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p 131

[15] The New Yorker, 3/25/96

[16] Martin Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art, in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings p 148.

[17] Legend says that this was the Emperor Franz Joseph II’s initial opinion of Mozart’s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.

[18] Roger Lipsey’s fascinating and important book, An Art of Our Own: the Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, is full of testimony by major abstractionists about the “something else” embodied by their work.

[19] Dictionary of Quotations #54.1, p 12: from Art, I:3

[20] Christopher Alexander, the Nature of Order, An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe, Vol IV, p 309.

[21] This is logos in the ancient Greek meaning, as design inherent in, and indivisible from, the manifest; design in the sense of manifest purpose.

[22] Seamus Heaney, in Human Chain, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2010, quoted in The New York Review of Books, November 11, 2010, p 20.

[23] Harvard Design Magazine. Sept-Oct 1999.

[24] This occurred in 1868, less than twenty years after Admiral Perry and the American “black ships” forced Japan to open to foreign trade.

[25] Thomas Carlyle, in Signs of the Times, quoted in Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, p 32.

[26] Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self, pp198-200

[27] This is the peculiar dogma current now—but I wonder why, if I bring it, can I access it only there? Do I put into Mozart’s music what I find there? If so, I should be radiant with pride, and of course be able to find it wherever I go. In fact I can find that instance of it only there, in that specific symphony or concerto, that particular bird’s particular song right now, that particular cathedral.

[28] Jonathan Hale, The Old Way of Seeing, pp 107, 89.

[29] Piet Mondrian, quoted in Roger Lipsey, The Spiritual in Art, p 67