This is a book about art: what it is, and how it is related to human beings and to the natural world. It is an attempt to understand something of the relationship of these things to God, by which I mean: to the Ultimate Answer, however one believes, whether or not one “believes” in anything other than the physical. At the same time I want to ground the subject here among us, in the world where we all stand, where it belongs—in the “common sense.” It is an attempt to awaken memory of connections and continuities often forgotten in our irresistible human compulsion to analyze and categorize, to name and to isolate and measure in order to study and ultimately to control.
In the face of one or another sublime human achievement, our categorizations, and analyses, and theories are finally useless, and we say things that carry us into the unknowable, like the dance critic who writes, “Margot Fonteyn had a purity and harmony of line that had moral force,”[1] or, “[The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s work] is an expression of the vital force that animates everything in the universe.”[2] These are radical statements in a conscientiously materialistic world! Critics write such things under the pressure of their desire to transmit an actual experience, presuming that we will understand what they’re saying on a deep level, explanation being neither possible nor necessary. It is the edges of these realms beyond analysis that I will attempt to explore. Any such exploration is difficult—even, perhaps, impossible—but it is essential to try, because when we ignore all this we lose awareness of what Art and the world of Nature really are, and of their fundamental importance to our life. People sometimes say that the forests or the mountains are their church, and we often hear that art museums and concert halls are the contemporary equivalents of cathedrals. There's a sense in which these things are obviously true—we seek out such places in order to be spiritually reborn, we view them and what we find there with respect and even reverence. Why is that?
The great basketball player Bill Russell told an interviewer,
"Every so often a Celtics game would heat up so it became more than a physical or even a mental game, and would be magical….When it happened, I could feel my play rise to a new level.….It would surround not only me and the other Celtics, but also the players on the other team, and the referees….The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I couldn't feel competitive—which is a miracle in itself….On those five or ten occasions when the game ended on that special level, I literally did not care who had won."
[William Russell and Taylor Branch, Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man.]
We know what he means, in relation to some experience in our own lives. The hope of such experience is what keeps us going to concerts and plays and, I imagine, to sports events. But just what is going on?
In such rare perfect moments during a performance when the music flows fluidly through Yo-Yo Ma's body to his cello, he has no doubt about the inseparable nature of the mind and body. “I feel like I don't have to actually physically do something. It feels like an out-of-body experience, like being in love.”
[Bill Moyers TV, “The Mind Body Connection,” 1993.]
Christopher Alexander, architect, emeritus professor at Stanford, and author, once told a writer for Architecture magazine that his ultimate goal is “the creation of beautiful, timeless buildings, whose sense of wholeness unites thought and feeling and which are tiny but complete pieces of a larger, universal order.”[3] The journalist complained that Alexander’s writings sometimes have “a maddeningly mystical tone,”[4] but added that his buildings “share a timeless simplicity and unpretentious warmth…it is seductive in photographs, but its real magic must be experienced.…form and processes so inextricably united that any shortcuts would tell.”
Some degree of comprehension of “maddeningly mystical” statements such as Alexander's is available to every human being within his or her own nature and experience, but in our everyday lives most of us in the industrialized countries have lost our memory of it. The writer’s use of the word “magic” (as in Bill Russell’s “magical”) allows her to remark it without attempting to define it. We wander in art museums with curators and experts (that is, people with academic degrees in art history and art theory, and with varying levels of personal understanding) telling us through rented headphones what to look at, what it all “means”—and we submit to this in the same respectful way that we take the too-common arrogance and didacticism of “experts” in general to be their just and priestly right. Walker Percy wrote of this situation:
The worst of this impoverishment is that there is no sense of impoverishment. The surrender of title is so complete that it never occurs to one to reassert title. We have given away our birthright to the “experts.”
[Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man is, How Queer our Language is,
and What One has to do with the Other., p 54]
A child I knew once protested, “I don’t want to know what the teacher tells me about the book. The author wrote the book for me!” It’s true: the author wrote the book, the painter made the painting, for us; the essential experience of the work is our own.
Inevitably, some of what I will say “goes without saying.” As my title suggests, we know—we simply forget. I hope that the obvious may serve as the basis for explorations into the currently not-so-obvious. I want to tread carefully on the solid ground of our common experience, as far as it is possible to go, and then to say unabashedly: From here on it's a mystery. I use only everyday words, as found in any student dictionary of English. Surely, in speaking of things of which we all have knowledge there is no need for jargon or for an impenetrable prose. I have used many quotations: this is a chorus of voices, testimony gathered from the long history of opinion through the centuries and from people now living; mine is only one of many voices.
When the idea of writing this book was first generating in my mind, I began to watch for texts that would support my argument. I found that they turned up regularly, and in many different kinds of places. What I say is common human knowledge, at least subconsciously, subliminally. The process of collecting testimony to such knowledge has often been like walking in an orchard and gathering the apples that fall to me as I move about among the trees.
You will think me lamentably crude; my experience of life has been drawn from life itself.
[Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson: An Oxford Love Story, p 105]
[1]Tobi Tobias, New York magazine 2/19/90, p 24.
[2] The New Yorker, 1980s.
[3] Progressive Architecture magazine, June 1986.
[4] As in, for example, Toward a Pattern Language, and The Timeless Way of Building.