Harold Sjursen

Opening Interior Spaces and Places

The gift of art

For reasons that are mostly conventional and historical we tend to picture the world as a set of concentric fields, the outer limit being something like heaven and the inner most circle our private self. The question arises whether the same rules pertain to the entire cosmic extent or, for example, do only some apply here to ordinary life on earth but not at the external limits of the universe or at the other extreme within our private consciousness. The rules of time and space as explained over the ages by mathematicians (like Euclid and Newton) and accepted by philosophers (like Kant) were meant to describe the physical world of ordinary and shared experience. On the peripheries the possibilities were thought to be different, although not completely unconstrained. Internal time consciousness can accelerate or slow down the measure as presented in the mundane world of daily experience. Spatial extents, too, can be rearranged in ways not found in ordinary experience. But even in our wildest dreams some arrangements still seem impossible; can I even dream of a round square?

The fluidity of internal spatial and temporal experience is not entirely —sometimes not at all— under our control. When I am hurtling downward through space in the not infrequent dream, filled with terror, I may not be able to slow down or redirect my trajectory onto a more auspicious bearing. If the frog standing before me grows to fill the room completely, I cannot will it to a normal dimension. Some of these anomalies distorting our expected spatial and temporal norms are as noted frightening. But the impressions may be compelling in other ways as well. Despite the dissimilarities our private apparitions may possess the characteristics that place them in a separate category from the mundane, they still populate a realm continuous with that domain. This quasi-continuity provides the basis for much of the fantastic visited in myth, religion art and literature. What makes our inward adventures so important to us and why do we not simply dismiss them as having no consequence for our normal lives? Why do they seem to speak to us about our destiny, counsel us as we make crucial choices, inspire us and evoke fear?

Both Heidegger and Kandinsky recognized that the artist gazed upon the physical world as a source. But in this gaze, in this assimilation of space and place, another source enters in and equally directs the artist’s hand. Paul Klee, a diverse artist influenced by Kandinsky whose work cannot be reduced to any one school, is known as a transcendentalist who considered the ordinary world to be only one among many realities that are present to human consciousness. He felt his many approaches to design, pattern and color all exemplified this principle. When Klee visited Tunisia in 1914, standing before the city walls of Kairouan, he is reported to have said, "color possesses me, the color and I are one."7

In sharp contrast to this attitude, in the space of the ordinary world we typically communicate and share objects and experiences with the aid of formal measurements, that is in the terms of Descartes’ res extensa, the world that can be accurately and adequately described by the formalism of mathematics and within which dreams can be rejected as likely deceptions. The work of art also takes us beyond the vivacity and forcefulness which for Hume were validating. When William James describes his friend’s nightly hallucinatory dreams, it is clear that they are a representation of his daily experience, but they do not stop at that. They are augmented and revised through contact with something beyond, with Heidegger’s earth, the world to come or some alternative universe.

Let us recap: Some of our most vivacious and arresting experiences, despite presenting explicit physical location in space, are situated in places vivid only to the mind because (at least we are convinced) they transpire as dreams, hallucinations or some other subjective, interior event. Upon reflection we are convinced both of their imaginary status and in some way their reality. It is this duality that compels us to express them, to convey their vivid impression outside of our interior, private space. If we say that works of art come from the imagination we mean that the vivid images found within the interior space of our consciousness have combined with touch points in the ordinary, mundane, physical and external world.

How are we and especially the artist equipped to allow others to visit our private, interior estates? It is more than the technique of putting brush to canvas that elicits this capability. When one ventures to show what is otherwise not plainly visible the process requires an openness to pure possibility. The permission to grant others access entails a degree of risk, as well. How might one’s most personal and even self-defining experiences be received? Will the guest invited to this inward place ridicule or repudiate what is revealed? The alternative, the suppression of this drive would be for the artist, and probably all of us, tantamount to the denial of our true being. This is the gift contained in the work of art and why art opens the door to earth, world and self.

Footnotes

1 Delmore Schwartz, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (Norfolk, Conn.: Norfolk, Conn.: New directions, 1938).

2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects (London: London: Printed for John Noon, 1739).

3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902, (New York %3B London: New York, The Modern library, 1902).

4 Aron Gurwitsch, Theórie Du Champ de la Conscience. (Bruges, Belgigue: Bruges, Belgigue; Descleé, De Brouwer 1957, 1957).

5 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (London: London: Tate Publishing, 2006).

6 Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns, Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

7 Annie Bourneuf, Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (London: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

Bibliography

Bourneuf, Annie. Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible. London: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Gurwitsch, Aron. Theórie Du Champ de la Conscience. Bruges, Belgigue: Bruges, Belgigue; Descleé, De Brouwer 1957, 1957.

Hofstadter, Albert, and Richard Kuhns. Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger. Chicago: Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning Into Moral Subjects. London: London: Printed for John Noon, 1739.

James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901–1902. New York %3B London: New York, The Modern library, 1902.

Kandinsky, Wassily. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. London: London: Tate Publishing, 2006.

Schwartz, Delmore. In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Norfolk, Conn.: Norfolk, Conn.: New directions, 1938.

We may assure a young child who upon wakening from a bad dream that it’s not real. But in some sense the dream is exactly that, real, and in the moment to the child more real than the world to which she has awakened. Is the frequent vividness of our private dream world and our effort to understand what draws us so deeply into the created fantasies of art and literature and sets us on a quest for what is hidden behind the spaces and places of our ordinary acquaintance? Is it, as Delmore Schwartz says, that “In dreams begin responsibilities”? 1

Sometimes what we experience inwardly or privately, in our imagination or in a dream, strikes us with greater force and vivacity than incidents that are publicly verifiable in the realm of mundane reality. Such occurrences are frequently characterized as a break with reality, and are medicalized as an indication of mental pathology. Alternatively, to the individual who hears voices or sees apparitions the experience, if not morbid or frightening might be thought of as mystical or perhaps merely a flight of fancy. Whatever they are, though, they should not from this point of view be seen on the same plain as the real world.

How should we understand this interior geography? Surely it should not simply be dismissed. Can it be distinguished from what we regard as normal experience? When we do, do we risk closing ourselves off from a dimension of reality that bestows insight? Let’s begin by considering the viewpoint of David Hume. According to him actual sense impressions are stronger and more vivid than acts of the imagination. He says,

“Thus it appears that belief or assent always attends the memory and senses, is nothing but the vivacity of those perceptions they present; and that this alone distinguishes them from the imagination. To believe is in this case to feel an immediate impression of the senses,

or a repetition of that impression in the memory. 'Tis merely the force and liveliness of the perception, which constitutes the first act of the judgment, and lays

the foundation of that reasoning, which we build upon it, when we trace the relation of cause and effect.” 2

This is the standard, how vivid something is in our experience, and not just that it does, but how it stands out in our conscious experience. The interior space is a field of consciousness and it is from this place that we infer whether the event is interior, somehow within us, or outside of what we think of as our private or individual self. What is striking is that it is not unusual for an experience believed to be entirely within our mind, that is originates in our consciousness without an apparent immediate proximate cause from without, is more intense, forceful and vivid, than most mundane and familiar experience in our daily affairs. Why is this?

Descartes had earlier argued that only the innate ideas, that were by his reckoning clear and distinct, that is the purely rational and abstract concepts of space and thought that were best expressed mathematically, were reliable and the standard for true knowledge about the world. Hume on the other hand asserted that reason was (and properly so) the slave of the passions. Why does Hume favor the passions in their forceful and vivid apparitions? Do these visitations to our innermost places connect us with each other?

William James quotes a friend of his having this experience:

“It was about September, 1884, when I had the first experience. On the previous night I had had, after getting into bed at my rooms in College, a vivid tactile hallucination of being grasped by the arm, which made me get up and search the room for an intruder; but the sense of presence properly so called came on the next night. After I had got into bed and blown out the candle, I lay awake awhile thinking on the previous night's experience, when suddenly I felt something come into the room and stay close to my bed. It remained only a minute or two. I did not recognize it by any ordinary sense, and yet there was a horribly unpleasant ‘sensation’ connected with it. It stirred something more at the roots of my being than any ordinary perception. The feeling had something of the quality of a very large tearing vital pain spreading chiefly over the chest, but within the organism—and yet the feeling was not pain so much as abhorrence. At all events, something was present with me, and I knew its presence far more surely than I have ever known the presence of any fleshly living creature. I was conscious of its departure as of its coming: an almost instantaneously swift going through the door, and the ‘horrible sensation’ disappeared.” 3

In this case the individual understood the experiences as interior hallucinations of which he was both inside and outside at once. The main feature of the experiences was the encounter, the place being ambiguous and the space amorphous. Yet a particular place was registered and proximity to the his body was felt. This was no Platonic idea situated outside of time and space, nor a Cartesian clear and distinct idea, firmly and innately in the mind. On these two counts, thus, typical epistemic expectations about what is real are challenged. Yet due to its force and vivacity these likely hallucinations cannot be easily dismissed, all the more so because of the normally calm and rational demeanor of the visited individual.

Our inner space, our private consciousness, the turbulent activity of our minds, stretches out before us, a place mapped as a field. 4 This phenomenon raises questions. Philosophers in early modern Europe wondered how it was possible for us, in our mind’s eye, to possess images of a greater spatial extent than could fit within the head. When I see the buildings before me they are indeed in my experience of then larger than myself. It was argued that the content of consciousness, the ideas beheld in our mind, were either impressions from without, or the innate and clear and distinct ideas of the rational mind. Either way, it was argued, they possessed a representative function; that is, they represented the world as in a mirror. Still our belief in the reality of our inward experience, as something more than simply representation, is bolstered by their appearance of dimensions that correspond to those in the next circle out, the physical world we inhabit with others. If they are not mere representations of external mundanity, perhaps rearranged, where is the origin of such vivid experience to be found?

It seems natural to want to reconcile these two adjacent worlds, and to reveal the content of the inner dimension to the participants in the outer; and perhaps vice-versa, to bring into the inward hallucination the normality and regularity of our contrasting normal experience. The process of reconciliation can take varied forms. For some individuals, whose sensitivity to inward experience is strong, it can become a way of life, their raison d 'être . For the artist this way of life becomes a quest, spiritual in a way, a kind of ascending and descending of Jacob’s ladder. The work of art emerges, as Kandinsky suggested, from an inner need that is fundamentally spiritual.

"The spiritual life, to which art belongs and of which she is one of the mightiest elements, is a complicated but definite and easily definable movement forwards and upwards. This movement is the movement of experience. It may take different forms, but it holds at bottom to the same inner thought and purpose." 5

Art works reveal truths that are both from within the artist —consciously or not— but also reside in something like Jung’s collective unconscious and thereby reveal a community’s shared understanding. In The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger argues that the artist is not fully in control of the work of art, but exists in a dialogue with it in a way that engages us with reality in dimensions that go beyond appearance and utility.6 The relationship of the artist to the work of art, in Heidegger’s view, presents a dynamic exchange where each seems to contribute to the other, neither is without the other, as he says. The This includes the dual relationship artists have with both the immediately external world and the inner world of mysterious visits in private places. The encounter with the work of art opens the possibility of going beyond what Heidegger calls world, which is what I have been referring to as the domain of ordinary or normal experience, to point to (in Heidegger’s terminology) earth, which is the background or possibly the source for everything that appears in the world. Heidegger’s very well-known meditation upon Van Gogh’s 1855 painting A Pair of Shoes exemplifies the evocative nature of the work of art. In fact some of the worldly features of the painting, the indications of the peasants work such as the showing of the residue of soil, their representation of a culture and way of life and other features mean that when we look at those shoes we do not encounter them as equipment, something that can be objectively measured, but indeed as something that draws us beyond the space of the normative world into the place of inward experience.

Harold Sjursen

Opening Interior Spaces and Places

The gift of art

OPEN WINDOWS