The Human Brain, 'Seeing' and Symmetry

So, the human brain then...

When our eyes communicate with the brain as to what they 'see' they are not presenting a complete set of data. Instead they scan a few bits of information for the brain to compare against its template of what reality is, in case those bits of data contain anything 'surprising' or 'off the map'. Figures from research suggest that information from the eye only provide 10-15% of what we see. The brain's pre-set picture of reality is the other 85%. This is because there is just too much information in our reality for the eye to cope with. The short-cutting is how we can interact with our environment speedily and without being overwhelmed, or taking so long that we are eaten or attacked. We take a lot for granted. To wit, the entire image of reality that the brain holds up as a knitting or jigsaw pattern. Our brains posit that human adults are upright creatures and trees also are vertical. The unpredicted and 'strange' are when we see a human or a tree horizontal. Then context comes into play as a modifier. We may not find a human lying down so strange if it is on a bed, or a sunlounger or a lilo. A horizontal tree, well has it been cut down or blown over in a storm? Or was there simply no one to see & hear it fall over and therefore it didn't? Perhaps an example of a left-field logic trying to explain something that doesn't accord to the regular template. 


In order for the brain to hold this template of constancy as to what perceived reality is, it requires pattern. Since our senses are actually searching for deviations from pattern to report to the brain as divergence requiring a possible response. And pattern derives from symmetry. Is it at all surprising that we find symmetry underpins all laws of the universe? (and of course is vital for the hermetic system of mathematics to function, the same maths that defines the physical laws of the universe). We need symmetry to organise and pattern the templates of our brains. Which our brains then stamp on all its interpretations of reality making them symmetrical. Again, I don't really buy into the centrality of symmetry. It just suits our anatomies and how they interact with our environments. And yet there are no straight lines in nature to form an axis of mirror or radial symmetry. Are our faces symmetrical? Not to my mind, but since face recognition is so hard wired into us humans, conceiving of face symmetry is an important value in face recognition so again we overlay it into our processes of seeing other faces. 

So for me my desire as an artist is to get to that 85% picture of reality the brain holds and take an axe to it. Or at least figure out where some of its assumptions/constructions derive from. That way madness lies? I'm pretty confident not. Also to strip away the notions of symmetry where they in fact may not exist, but our brain proffers that they do because it is so reliant on it. And as part of this process, that involves moving away from the symmetries of story, of beginning, middle and end as established by Aristotle in his "Poetics" The argument is that human beings are so constituted that story is naturally very important to us. And indeed it is because story organises events and experience into patterns. But as I suggest above, these patterns do not accord to anything by a workable reality, when in fact we may now strive for something just a bit better than 'workable'. I really believe that our fixed notions of reality hold us back and we would be far more creative and inventive (and who knows less exploitative in our dealings with our environment) if we had say more of a quantum approach to our reality. Just because it's comfortable for our brains to tell us this is how things are, doesn't mean that's the best recipe for going forward. Time for artists to think and write out the box. Visual artists have over a century's head start on us writers as painters like Monet, Cezanne, Seurrat et al challenged the way we 'see' things on a flat 2-dimensional canvas. They explored light, colour and materiality. They did not take their reality as given. 

The Search For Identity

Identity permeates every aspect of our lives. From the informal social dealings as to how (and who) we present ourselves as to other people. Through art as many artists explore notions of identity. All the way to politics as under-represented groups advocate for more visibility or equal treatment and status.

As a writer I tend to steer my work away from questions of identity. In politics I see it as atomising and preventing of any useful consensus that allows us to get things done. However, I fully recognise I can only state this from a position of privilege; that is my identity is not overtly under threat from others and is not ostensibly one that feels under-represented or unequal in society. While this seems the only pertinent argument for identity politics to me, it does also place the whole question within a negative context, one of asserting one's identity in order to overcome prejudices and barriers towards it. That such searches and struggles for identity are inevitably and irrevocably wrapped up and often defined against the prevailing majority identity it is contesting with.

However, I can't help feeling that such questions about identity do not address the real deep issues of what is means to be human. The questions of 'who am I?', 'what have I done?' and 'what am I here for?' that philosophy rather seems to have given up trying to figure out. Existentialist questions. Given that we are mortal and finite, what is the purpose for living a life? The philosophers starting from the Ancient Greeks, picked up by the Christian theologians, took us down quite a narrow path by asking 'what does it mean to lead a GOOD (moral) life?' The humanist philosophers also addressed themselves to this same question, Hobbes and Locke minimising the role of the divine and instead musing how man could live in societal groups without killing one another, from which developed the modern concept of the rule of law.

But these questions it seems to me address only the second layer of fundamental existence- How do we live together? What about the first layer, why are we even here to live at all? It is taken as a given that we exist at all, therefore the consideration is how to maximise the quality of that life on a practical/organisational level. But it is very much not a given and any answer would definitely feedback and inform the notion of how we live our lives. Leaving aside the religious answer of 'to glorify god' which doesn't hold much truck in our contemporary age, little has been done to explore these greater questions. Of course it is entirely possible that there is no answer to the 'why do we exist?' questions. Science and cosmology may not be able to furnish an answer. The blind, motiveless mechanism of DNA reproduction may forever remain blind and impermeable to our understanding. The human brain remains the most complex and unknowable organ in nature, for all our advances in its study. Notwithstanding all this, our current level of inquiry into identity I feel still misses the bigger picture, by remaining firmly rooted within the cultural sphere and finding one's place within that. Somehow we need to root the question in the species sphere.

Over to the artists rather than the philosophers and scientists now. Albeit from an acknowledged position of privilege...

Triptychs Cover Reveal

Writers often get asked where they get their ideas from. And if like me you write short stories and flash fiction, you have to come up with a whole host of ideas to feed all your stories. I get most of my ideas just by keeping my eyes open in daily life, especially when commuting and observing my fellow passengers; or from items on the news.

But when I was approached to become part of the Mind's Eye third collection of stories all in response to photos, that was a bit different for me. Because I'd had no prior relationship with the image I was presented with, I had to react to someone else's artistic sensibilities, that being the person who took the photo. (Mind's Eye 1 and Mind's Eye 2)

Even more interestingly, the participating writers were sharing the same images. The collection is called "Triptychs" because each image will have three different stories from three different writers. I haven't seen the stories yet, so I'm really excited to see what the other writers did with the images I was asked to create from.

Before I give the cover reveal for this collection and before I show the two images I was asked to riff off, I just want to give the blurb for the whole project:

Now this notion of three different angles on the same image is exactly what I love doing in my flash. I've always described it as like turning a gemstone to reflect the light in different ways from all its facets. In such a way I believe you can show all the subtleties and nuances of things in a way that is very condensed and compact, unlike in a novel when things like character perspective may limit just how many different angles you can show, or the effect is diluted through the sheer length of the story.

So, now the two images I was asked to create stories from.

 

credit: Martin David Porter                  credit: Helle Gade

Now, one was an absolute breeze, I was struck by an idea instantly (can you guess which one?) But the other, well I was racking my brains for months on end. The setting sun was the instant one, such a beautiful image. The only teaser I'll give you is the title, "Cloud Animals". But the teapot on a barge with some swans swimming by... Man I was struggling with that, as those who know me I tend not to write pastorals! And eventually that was my way into a story, to try and come up with something utterly opposite the tone of stillness and grace conjured up by the image. So I did! Don't think the title is much of a clue for this one, but it's called "Water Fugue In C-Minor". "Cloud Animals" is a flash story at under 1,000 words. "Water Fugue..." is a short story at 2,350 words.



So that only leaves the cover reveal for this inspiring project. I give you - "Triptychs"

You can preorder from AmazonUK AmazonUS

Never Mind The Jackson Pollocks - 10 Songs about artists

Lyricists namecheck their literary heroes often enough, but a few also honour their inspirational artists too. Here's 10 artists immortalised in song.

1) "Andy Warhol" - David Bowie
Written when Bowie went to New York and hung out at The Factory with the artist. Apparently Warhol was not best pleased with what Bowie saw as his tribute. God it was if Bowie had never heard the Velvet Underground's album. This live version of the song is bizarre in the extreme, starting out as jungle or dub step almost, before reverting to it's carnivalesque pub stomp from the original Hunky Dory album.


2) "Pablo Picasso" - Jonathan Richman And The Modern Lovers

Jonathan Richman goes to the heart of the matter and ditches Picasso's artistic merits, instead concentrating on the man's magnetism. And I love it. The track was used in the film "Repo Man"


3) "David Hockney's Diaries" - Television Personalities
The king of ice cool art here honoured by the British kings of indie lo-fi pop. Note, despite the proud/ironic boast of the cover art "They could have been bigger than the Beatles", the TVPs were so far ensconced in their niche that couldn't even be bigger than the Television Personalities.


4) "Born Toulouse Lautrec" - New Bomb Turks
Slightly odd alliance of US prole-punkers and fine art, but there you go.


5) "Vincent" - Don Maclean
Not only does Don dedicate the song title to the famous artist, the song proceeds to describe Van Gogh's paintings.


6) "Music For Jackson Pollock - Morton Feldman
because they not only knew each other, but the avant garde muso wanted to draw parallels with the revolutionary artist. A fertile period in US arts with the two art forms informing one another. Plinky plink music for slithers of dripping paint. A perfect symbiosis.


7) "Music For Marcel Duchamp" - John Cage
More plinky plink minimalism to honour the prankster godfather of the avant garde, he who recycled a toilet urinal and made it art, Marcel Duchamp. Cage wrote a piece of music without any notes or sounds at all. The "players" were still instructed to turn over the music score even though they weren't playing  their instruments.



8) "(I Want To Be) Tracey Emin" - These New Puritans
Quite jaunty tribute to the queen of jaunty trash art aesthetic herself, la Dame Tracey. Their genre is described as "Art Rock" which is quite fitting really. Don't forget that many of the early punk rock bands in the UK were formed by art college students.


9) "Painting By Chagall" - The Weepies
An example of lazy writing. Why come up with your own metaphor when you can just reference the style of a proper artist like Chagall. Dreck.


10) "Goodbye Toulouse" - The Stranglers
And so Toulouse gets 2 songs dedicated to him in this chart. This song doesn't really work for me, the wistful lyrical description of the street scenes painted by Lautrec, propelled by an ultra modern bass thrum, that's more stampede than café flaneur.

The Moral Responsibility Of the Writer Part 1

 



Stephen King decision to withdraw his novel "Rage" from publication, is explained in his latest Kindle published essay "Guns". King cites four cases of boys attacking others in their schools who each made mention of King's "Rage" (the book, not any animus felt by King). He quite reasonably explains in "Guns" that his writing neither "broke [those boys] nor made them killers; they found something in my book that spoke to them because they were already broken".

Despite claiming that the book had no causative influence, King still took the decision to remove his book. This seems to me to contradict his own faith in his contention that the book has no baleful influence. At best, it is simply because he is uneasy at the thought of even being associated with such terrible events. That though there is no blood on his hands, somehow there is secondary spatter transferred on to his shirt sleeve.

King tries to draw the comparison that his book is protected under the 1st Amendment for free speech, so that he was under no compunction to withdraw it but did so voluntarily as a responsible act, with the position of automatic gun owners; that they are entitled to own such guns under the 2nd Amendment's right to bear arms, but out of responsibility the mass killer semi-automatics and automatics ought to be voluntarily handed over to the authorities. Nice sentiment, but the mentality of a gun owner isn't readily comparable with that of an author, there being a chasm of difference between a work of literature and the cold hard steel of a gun. Sorry Mr King, but all of this seems to me to demonstrate a hopeless wishful thinking.

As a writer myself here in the UK, the gun ownership debate doesn't really enter my thinking at all, let alone my work. But I was struck by King's stance awkwardly straddling the issue, as well as his decision to withdraw his own book. Personally I think any artist who puts their work out into the public domain, ought to believe in it to the extent of standing by it no matter what. If they don't, then they are admitting that they got it wrong, which is of course both possible and proper to own up to, but fundamentally compromises your reputation as a decent artist. Good artists manage to produce prescient work, work that tips us off ahead of time as to certain occurrences possibly coming to pass. That such events are so terrible, but do actually occur, is no reason for the artist to backtrack on their work and apologise for demonstrating imaginative foresight. King didn't withdraw his story "The Running Man" which has a similar ending to what transpired at the Twin Towers in 9/11. And nor should he. Presumably he felt there was enough distance in that futuristic, sci-fi scenario, from the extreme religio-terrorist reality that struck the Twin Towers.

I don't believe an artist has any responsibility other than entertaining their audience and staying within the laws of the land on things like obscenity, offense and the like. (Whether said artist agrees with such laws is a different issue). Artists are only responsible for backing their own work, defending it to the hilt if required. Equally they can make no demands of their audience to react only in certain prescribed ways. Audience members will run with a work in whatever way they will. Audiences bring their own value systems ahead of contemplating any work of art, ahead of opening up  a new book and no artist or author can control this. All the artist has to do is maintain responsibility for any ideas they put into the public pool of thought and conception. Beyond that, it's open season.

The author has to be aware of the likely reception to their work if it contains inflammable ideas. Once the author has gone ahead and published said work, then it behooves them to deal with the fallout in the public reaction. And that shouldn't include withdrawing the book from publication. Self-censorship is the most insidious form of censorship. A good artist edits themselves at the outset, instead of censoring themselves late in the production and distribution process.

*

Tomorrow I'll blog about a different aspect of the moral responsibility of the artist, when an author puts themselves into the lives of those people they write about.