The Purpose and Power of Art & Poetry (2/4): The Science and Art of Being Human

As expressed in her book The Science and Art of Being Human, Margaret’s sense of the essential unity of science, religion and art is not dissimilar to mine as expressed in my STAR of truth acronym where all three combine to create the most effective path we can create to bring us closer to the truth than we would otherwise get.

Her approach is to broaden the definitions of art and science. She quotes Ludwig Tuman as saying:[1] “From this point of view, we can think of any organised body of knowledge as ‘a science’, and any skill that can be taught as ‘an art’.”

This is not a widely held view of the matter:[2] ‘The arts are [now] commonly understood as coming under the heading of the visual arts, the performing arts and the written arts.’ She adds that this was not always the case:[3]

Language understanding over time demonstrates that in the 1400s the words art and science had a similar meaning. Both were understood as involving knowledge and skills.

We’re all artists

She examines the discriminations which currently operate. For example:[4]

The arts and artists are set apart from the ordinary person.… In education, for example, the focus is on ‘academic’ achievement, so the arts, seen as vocational, are not equally valued.… Sciences are indispensable while the arts are dispensable.

Sher bases her case against this on the root meaning of the word ‘artist’:[5]

The word artist means a person with a skill, so are we saying that only those who practice a visual, performance or written arts have ‘skills’? Surely not. We all have skills, a huge variety and a vast array of areas of learning. Skill is also defined as expertise.… Surely this includes us all.

Use of our skillset is woven into the fabric of our entire life:[6]

We use our skills throughout our lives, to create objects and experiences for either the pure joy of creating, or for monetary benefit, or for the benefit of the world we live in.

The Shrine of the Báb, Haifa

She draws on the Writings of the Báb to emphasise just how important such skills can be:[7]

‘For everything within its own limits desires to attain to the highest point of its limits. And if a person has the ability to do this for it but does not, then he will be held responsible by it.… Every everyone should carry out these obligations according to their ability.’

So basically these broader definitions of art and science mean that in effect we’re all artists:[8] ‘From this alternative perspective a person with skills and capacity is an artist ; every single person is applying their skills in their life circumstances.’

Applying what we know

There is an important distinction to be made between science and art however:[9]

[Hooper Dunbar] states that the compilation on science and art he refers to indicates that ‘Science is knowledge and art is the application of knowledge or the application of science.’

In a sense, if it is not applied in some way, science would be useless:[10]

Science (knowledge) is a universal resource which we acquire, but without the perfection of art (skills) to apply it in practice, it serves no real purpose.

My own career trajectory may be of some relevance here. When I began to study psychology I did so because it would help me in my work with people struggling with mental health problems. There came a point when I could, after completing my BSc with flying colours, have perhaps opted for an academic psychology post, but I never seriously considered that a valid choice. Applied psychology in a clinical context was what attracted me the most, was what felt like my vocation. I decided not to pursue academic psychology and its related research, but to use my understanding of the research to enhance my therapeutic practice of clinical psychology. Seems like I was always drawn more to an art than a science!

She brings others in to corroborate her sense of the importance of applying what we know:[11]

Richard J. Bernstein, in his book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, discusses the meaning of knowledge, stating that ‘Knowledge is not conceived as an exact description of reality, but involves insight into reality that can guide effective practice.’

She goes onto to explain, with the help of others, how simplifying the complex reality of this can have damaging consequences:[12]

It appears then that, according to Robinson and Gardner, human capacity is complex and cannot be explained by simple and now outdated terms such as academic/non-academic, intelligent/unintelligent. However the education ‘systems’, designed for the convenience of control and management, have not yet recognised the vast potential of every individual to contribute, in multiple ways, to the well-being of the world and its peoples. Robinson suggests that we need to rethink:

… Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth for a particular commodity and for the future, it won’t serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we are educating our children.

I’m the one on the left running to play football at the grammar school

Forging Cogs

I resonate strongly to this critique having felt, ever since my decade as a teacher, that it is all too easy to slip into seeing education as forging cogs for the wheels of commerce rather than drawing out our innate capacities for the greater good. The simplest example of that I can remember is when I was marking some fourth year exam papers.

I had been recruited in the 60s to a grammar school by the then Head of English, who appeared at the door of my pokey bedsit near Bush Hill Park dressed in an RAF uniform (he also ran the cadets’ Air Training Corps) and parading a bushy white moustache that matched it well.

‘D’you need a job?’ he asked crisply, after explaining who he was and what he wanted. As I was working in a cemetery at the time for very little money, it was a no brainer. Uniform or no uniform, this seemed better than working for a pittance among gravestones.

I got a strong sense of what was in store when I used the same classroom immediately after his lesson in the first week I was there. The entire blackboard was covered in clause analysis examples which displayed huge numbers of every kind of subordinate clause in different coloured chalk – red for adverbial, green for adjectival and blue for noun clauses. (How many people reading this post can honestly say they have an intense desire to know more about this? For those few who do, please see link.) I began to realise that death comes in many disguises.

The final straw came three years later when I was marking the mid-year English essay exam (that’s an adverbial clause, by the way!). There were two essays that became the litmus paper that detected the exact extent of my discontent.

One was written by the boy with the neatly parted hair and the smart blazer with his hand in the air to every question, who always came top. It was exactly the right number of words on two sides of paper, the handwriting was beautifully legible and the content completely predictable. I gave it 11 out of 20.

The other essay was written by the classroom rebel, forever slouching in his seat with an unkempt shock of hair, crumpled uniform and a scowl on his face. The essay covered eight sheets in straggling barely legible script and was so utterly original and compelling that by the time I finished reading it I didn’t even notice the scrawl it was written in. I gave it 19 out of 20: I took one mark off for the poor handwriting.

Steeped as I was in Dylan’s music and only a year away from enthusiastically joining in the widespread spirit of protest in 1968, I realise now I was a touch biased, but what followed was not a balanced and correct response, replacing as it did a mild injustice with a greater one.

I think the parents of the first boy must have appealed against my mark. The Head of English insisted on re-marking all the essays but the only marks I remember his changing were for these two essays. He gave the first boy full marks and failed the second one because of his poor handwriting. This was one of the main reasons I left the school at the end of that year and moved to a college of further education (and that was not without its challenges, of course). It is interesting how, after all these years, this incident has stayed with me so vividly.

How far does creativity extend?

Margaret Appa expands the important role of creativity even further:[13]

[Robinson’s report states] . . creativity is not unique to the arts. It is equally fundamental to advances in the sciences, mathematics, technology, in politics, business and in all areas of everyday life.

In the process we expand our understanding of reality:[14]

Sir Harry Kroto responded : ‘… In all creative processes we are pushing the boundaries of what we know now, to explore new possibilities…’

And it here she explicitly lands on almost exactly the same page as I feel I am on:[15]

Howard Gardner, in thinking about education in this globalised world,… also asserts [in his book Five Minds for the Future], that too often we think of science as the prototype of all knowledge, rather than one powerful way of knowing that needs to be complemented by artistic and humanistic and perhaps also spiritual stances.

I’m very much in synch with another of her conclusions:[16]

As soon as the concept of the integration and connectedness of science and art is accepted, we can approach everything we do in a more holistic manner.

This resonates with Saiedi’s explanation of the importance of the heart, as the Báb has explored it, in helping us to reach higher levels of understanding:[17]

 . . . by attaining the higher perspective of the heart, one can transcend the oppositions of the limited station of intellect and arrive at a more comprehensive, holistic perspective.

He goes on to explain the potential implications of this for humanity as a whole:[18]

Humanity has now arrived at the beginning of a new age: human spiritual culture has evolved from the stage of the “body” through that of the “soul,” to that of “intellect,” and has arrived at the stage of the “heart.”

I am also on the same page as Margaret Appa about our need to take as much care cultivating our inscape as our landscape:[19]

One’s inner spiritual life requires the same commitment as one’s outer creative life if progress is to be sustained over a lifetime; [the conscientiousness required for skilled craftsmanship] needs to be cultivated.

And then almost my favourite word comes in:[20] ‘The source of crafts, sciences and arts is the power of reflection.’[21] I think I’ve said more than enough about that already on this blog so I’ll stay schtum this time.

Towards the end of her book, she homes in on what she feels is a crucial benefit of her approach:[22]

 . . . It would take several years to arrive at a point where I had the confidence to share my research, which appears to demonstrate that when these narrow interpretations and understandings are broadened and science is understood to be about the ‘accumulation of knowledge’ and art is the ‘skilled application of knowledge’, either in the sense of an object or an experience, then the opportunities to include everyone in the process of generating and applying knowledge seems logical.

Without this breadth of definition, a creative application of what we know becomes problematic:[23]

 . . . art is the application of science, but only if the understanding of both science and art is broad and inclusive, where science is seen as any system of knowledge and art any form of practice that enables that system of knowledge to be applied in practice.

It’s time at last to move on in the next post to a far more challenging area of exploration. I want to look at the work of a poet, R. S. Thomas, who seems to be attempting to draw on art, spirituality and to a lesser degree science, in order to explore his consciousness and get closer to the truth.

References

[1]. The Science and Art of Being Human – page 6.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 7.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 21.
[4]. Op. cit. – page 9.
[5]. Op. cit. – page 10.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 11.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 15.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 19.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 22.
[10]. Op. cit. – page 25.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 27.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 36.
[13]. Op. cit. – pages 36-37.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 41.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 49.
[16]. Op. cit. – page 83.
[17]. Gate of the Heart – page 180.
[18]. Op. cit. – page 227.
[19]. The Science and Art of Being Human – page 86.
[20]. Op. cit. – page 88.
[21]. Tablets of Bahá-u-lláh – page 72.
[22]. The Science and Art of Being Human – page 120.
[23]. Op .cit. – page 122.

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The Purpose and Power of Art & Poetry (1/4): why it matters to me.

As I began to try and pull together all the material I had gathered (at least 20,000 words of it!) I began to feel more than a little intimidated by the task I’d set myself, and came close to giving up. How on earth was I going to write anything that would take it further than any of my previous attempts to tackle this issue?

In the end I decided to risk failure and blast on anyway.

At the start I’ll do a summary of some key personal experiences followed by an exploration of why science, art and spirituality are all important to any investigation of the truth, before using in later posts the poetry of R. S. Thomas as an illustration of my case.

Perhaps it’s worth mentioning at this point that, while I love pictorial art, my experience of any attempt to create a painting is non-existent: poetry plays rather more strongly to my strengths as a subject of investigation in terms of the power of art in general. So, much as I love pictorial art, I’m not competent to explore it deeply: I’ll have to stick to poetry as an example of the power of art. However, much of the first two posts in this sequence deals with art in general, and not just poetry. The focus on poetry comes in toward the end of the sequence.

Caveats

Right from the start I am aware of a couple of caveats that may disqualify my perspective, which is all this sequence could ever hope to be.

First, if poetry does not speak to my heart it is no better than mute for me. My prejudice against much modernist poetry stems in part from this. The absence of music puts off my heart and the obstinately cryptic obscurity repels my head so they both stomp off in a strop.

Also am I overrating poetry? As Stephanie Burt makes clear in her book Don’t Read Poetry[1] we should not ‘assume poetry ever means only one thing, other than maybe a set of tools for making things with words as music means a set of tools… for making things with sounds.’ There may be no such single generic thing as poetry. However, subjectively, I am convinced that poetry of some kind is close to my heart.

The Roots of my Connection with Poetry

My connection with poetry goes back deep into my childhood. My sensibility is rooted in the 19^th century thanks to my parents and the bookscase they filled with novels by Rider Haggard, and Walter Scott. I was probably still at primary school when I read my first poems. That’s what the memory feels like anyway. In the front room of our family home in that same tall book case with glass doors on its upper section, amongst many other books there were two books of poems: Lyra Heroica and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury.

I wasn’t particularly interested in boys on burning decks or Horatios at bridges – I think tales about my father and the First World War had well and truly scuppered Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori for me even by that stage so the Golden Treasury tended to win every time. I still remember the sight and feel of the dull red and slightly roughened cover as I strained to slide it off its high shelf.

So, I was primed to favour the lyric, I think. My attachment was strong to poetry but it competed with novels and sometimes lost the contest. After ten years of teaching literature I finally discovered what the real attraction of the novel was for me: it showed me how to understand people better.

I shifted careers and moved into psychology, and didn’t realise at first that poetry was paying a heavy price.

Then I had a wake up call.

Dancing Flames Dream 1980

When I was getting too immersed in studying part-time for my first degree in psychology at the same time as holding down a job in mental health, I had a wake up call. It was towards the end of my first degree in psychology, when I was doing a full time job as Deputy Manager of a Day Centre for people with mental health problems as well as studying for the BSc part-time, that I was struck by my dancing flames dream.

The key moment in the dream was when my car broke down. I clambered out to look under the bonnet to see what was wrong. It seemed like a routine breakdown. When I lifted the bonnet though everything changed. I didn’t recognize what it was at first— then I saw it was a golden horn. I mean the instrument, by the way, not the sharp pointed weapon of the rhinoceros. The engine was underneath the horn. When I removed the horn I could see the engine was burning.

A chain of associations, many of them involving Yeats’ A Prayer for my Daughter, explained that the golden horn represented the arts, and most especially poetry and song. The bottom line for me was that the dream was telling me in no uncertain terms that I was working too hard in the wrong way, and had sold out poetry/song for prose, heart for intellect, and intuition for reason and most of all the dream was emphasising that this choice was ‘breaking down,’ that perhaps even the car, a symbol of a mechanical approach, was the wrong vehicle to be relying on so exclusively.

Maybe this was the first time I got too close to the position Iain McGilchrist reminds us that Darwin found himself in.

He draws from Charles Darwin’s Autobiography which speaks of the great pleasure he derived as a young man from poetry, music and art, something now almost completely lost to him:[2]

My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts . . . And if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once a week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through the use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

Further reflection led me to feel that the spirit (petrol in terms of the dream) fuels (gives life to) my body (the engine of the dream). When I channel the flames of life appropriately there is no danger. However, if we, as I clearly felt I had, allow the patterns of work and relationships to become inauthentic and detached from our life force, we have bartered the ‘Horn of Plenty’ and

. . . every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellow full of angry wind.

(Yeats in A Prayer for my Daughter – stanza 8).

I shifted the focus then to art in general stating that art is an external representation of an inner state which is sufficiently expressive to communicate to other human beings an intimation of someone’s else’s experience of the world. Art not only conveys the artist’s experience but also lifts the understanding of both poet and reader to a higher level.

In a way poetry at that time was my substitute for religion. In 1980, I wrote in my diary:

Poetry is my transcendent value or position. It gives me a perspective from which I can view the ‘complexities’ of my ‘mire and blood’ with less distress.

When I found a religion, which gave me a sense that seemed to offer some hope of walking the spiritual path with practical feet, thereby balancing intuition and reason, efficiency and love, I ceased to monitor carefully the way I was treading the path. To extend the metaphor by imagining that my heart was my left foot and my head the right, each governed by the opposite side of the brain, I lost sight of whether I was using both feet. I didn’t notice that I had begun to limp. My left foot was growing weaker.

Was I again discounting art this time in favour of spirtuality?

 

Reminder of my STAR insight

Iain McGilchrist, in his recent book The Matter with Things, states that art can serve as bridge between our consciousness and the ineffable aspects of reality. When I came across that thought a couple of years ago, I came to see all too clearly a truth that I had been blind to all those years: art is not just a meaningful but subordinate domain to science and religion – it is of equal importance. We need all three if we are to mobilise all parts of our brain to enable our minds to grasp almost any important and complex truth more completely in all its aspects. One of these domains is in itself not enough for most of us, at least.

The realisation of art’s equivalent importance almost immediately created the acronym S.T.A.R. in my mind (Science, Truth, Art and Religion) — a peak experience, in its way, because of the uplift in spirits that it generated – certainly a light-bulb moment at the very least. If I am to provide true C.A.R.E., in the sense of combining consultation, action, reflection and experience, I must resolutely follow my S.T.A.R. It’s only taken me eight decades to realise this. In fact, only by taking CARE and following my STAR will I really be able to achieve anything remotely close to my life’s true purpose.

When I came to read Klebel’s book The Human Heart my sense of this essential unity was reinforced in at least one important respect (see Chapters 3 & 4).

Poetry and Revelation are closely related in Klebel’s view:

The affinity revelatory writings have with poetry, and the fact that some of them even take the form of poetry, can be explained by the fact that poetry speaks primarily to the heart, and only secondarily can be understood by the brain. This is true also for Revelation, as this is understood primarily by the heart and only afterward scrutinized and evaluated by the logical mind. It could be said that the language of the heart is not only the language of dreams but also the language of poetry; this is how spiritual values and understandings are expressed. Ultimately, it must be stated that the language of the heart is the language of divine Revelation.

He goes on to argue that just as ‘Poetry, for example, originates in the heart . . . [t]he same process underlies the poetic aspect of the Revelation; hence, the special language of any Revelation has this poetic style and needs to be understood by the heart. It speaks directly to the heart but also needs to be understood by the brain; or rather, it needs to be internally translated to the logical and intuitional ability of the human brain to be fully understood.’

When I was at the Bahá’í National Convention recently, I managed to snatch a few moments to wander around the room full of books for sale. I’d been alerted beforehand to the imminent appearance of a book by Margaret Appa on the importance of art. I had not expected it to map so closely onto my recent insights. As I quickly scanned the book there was no doubt I had to buy it. I dashed to the till cash in hand, rammed it into my shoulder bag and fled back to the meeting hall.

I didn’t have chance to do read it properly until I got home. I finished it remarkably fast and began the process of digesting some of its implications for incorporation into this sequence.

More on her book next time.

References:

[1]. Don’t Read Poetry – page 7.
[2]. The Matter with Things – page 619.

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