Aura

We were visiting the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I bent over a display case in the Yellow Room, one of whose themes is music, to look at a letter, which I think was written by Brahms, but as I did so I noticed a small card in the corner of the case explaining that its contents were copies, since the originals would be damaged by the light. I was surprised at how quickly I lost interest in the case once I knew that.

 Blue Room from the Gardner Museum (www.gardnermuseum.org)

The Gardner Museum is a wonderfully bizarre place, designed by Isabella Stewart Gardner herself to house the particular art collection that she owned. She envisioned the museum itself as a work of art, so she specified where and how all the art was to be displayed. The museum was completed in 1903 and her decorating tastes are Victorian, and by today’s standards, she is into clutter. Of course, the museum professionals have built a modern wing where they can do it “right,” but the main part of the museum embodies the vision of a particular person shaped by a sensibility different from today’s. An exhibit while we were there featured some masterworks from the collection. A section of the museum was closed and they had placed (as it says in the exhibit description) “[a] select group of paintings and drawings in our contemporary exhibition space, [to be] seen up close and lit to best advantage.” We could indeed see the paintings, hung at gallery height with space between them, but the effect seemed generic compared to Isabella Gardner’s more idiosyncratic arrangements.

That same disconnect from the past may also be at work in my response to the letters in the Yellow Room. The difference between the real thing and an accurate reproduction of the thing makes me recall Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, and prompted by the rise of photography, sound recording, and film. The ability to reproduce a work of art raises the question of the role of the original. The problem has only intensified since 1936 with the creation of digitization, since the colors of a painting on a high definition screen glow from the inside and allow the examination at extraordinary detail.

This reproduction of Rembrant’s The Night Watch and this detail of the left eye of the central figure [though such detail is possible anywhere on the painting] are from the Google Art Project.


Benjamin talks about the real thing having an aura, and surely that is part of it. An original is something Rembrandt touched and being in the presence of the actual object gives me, at least, a slight tingle that resonates from the physical connection with an object created over 300 years ago.

 Night Watch Gallery --Eric Smits

The actual object today is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, so the setting of the original is quite different from the one I see it in, a computer screen in a small second-story room in a house in northern Massachusetts. The context in which we see something has an impact on how we perceive it, even though that context is generally extraneous to the work of art. As my Gardner Museum experience reminded me, displaying art is itself art. Ultimately, however, we cannot look at a work of art in its original context because contexts have quick expiration dates; any film with the world Trade Center in the New York skyline has been changed forever. 

The ability of a reproduction to take the work of art out of context seems less damning than what reproducing implies about the object itself. To value the high quality reproduction, we must assume that the essential aspects of the work of art are being reproduced in the reproduction. We capture the color, the structure, the tones and shades, even the cracks in the texture. But each age has its own values, its own sense of what is important and what is unimportant, and we will leave out what we think is unimportant, and something is lost in the transmission across time. Only some fresh eye looking at the original will see it and point it out, and our eyes will be reopened to something we have become blind to, even when we look directly into its huge, enlarged eye.

Science and Arts

At one point, I thought I had figured out the crucial difference between science and the arts: Science could speak with authority only about things in general; it could not say anything about a specific individual. Science draws conclusions about the species acer saccharum; the artist writes about what a specific sugar maple outside the window means to her as a window into the connection between humans and trees.

Sugar Maple planted 

in front of our house 

in Wellsboro, PA

One problem with my tidy conclusion grew out of my work with biologists in our university’s environmental studies program. When I looked at specific trees with them, they saw so much more than I did so they could spot variations that I missed. They seemed better equipped to appreciate individuals than I was.

My brother Tim is a research scientist and a medical doctor who is senior associate dean for clinical and translational research at the University at Buffalo Medical School. So I thought he might have some insight into this paradox; so one day as we were sitting on the patio during a visit to our younger sister, I summarized my theory:

Me: Science can speak only in generalities. Since scientific conclusion must be replicable, it can draw a conclusion about a species but not about one particular tree.

Tim: Actually, your statement ignores the importance of the particular in science because the foundation of science is statements about particular events, each one maintaining its individual characteristics. I run a series of experiments and then look at the outcomes of each instance, and the initial conclusion I draw is that in n% of t cases, when we did x, we obtained a result y in the range between a and b, or whatever. We make a restricted statement about what we observe in the sample we analyzed. Any subsequent generalization we draw is valid only in so far as it connects with what happened in the particular instances in the experiment we performed. If a generalization is insufficiently connected to those original specific incidents, then it is not scientifically valid.

Based on what Tim said—that scientists depend on their ability to observe and distinguish particular individuals to draw their conclusions—I concluded that I needed to revise my neat distinction. And the more I thought about his point, the more I began to question, for example, the role of the specific in literature. After all, Emily Dickinson sits in her room and writes,

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—



Dickinson packs into four brief lines the insight that a person standing under the sky (contained by it) can also contain the sky in her mind so that each one contains the other. In addition, both the mind can contain “You,” which could mean the reader, who is in the poet’s mind as she writes, or it could be the universal “you,” so that not only does a person’s mind contain the sky that contains it, but the brain also contains the person who contains it. Folding these ideas in on themselves should unbalance us a bit and force us to look with fresh eyes at our place in the world.

Dickinson exploits both her insight into experience and the elasticity of language to point to a universal experience. She draws a conclusion based on an insight; when that conclusion is (finally) published, we get to see whether it resonates with others so that, as in science, the particular is the foundation for the general. The experiment in this case is the work of literature, and where v is value, p is the number of people who read it, and t is the time over which people continue to read it, we decide whether something is a great piece of literature based on v = pt. If the poem contains an effective combination of particular and general experience, then the value is high.

For a while I had a shiny new theory about the difference between science and art, not one based on general vs. particular, but one based on unambiguous vs. ambiguous or single statements vs. double statements of truth. The goal of science is a statement so restricted in its meaning and scope that there is no difference in understanding between speaker and listener, or that difference approaches zero. Thus, scientists can communicate (ideally) without ambiguity,

In previous posts I have argued for the complexity and ambiguity inherent in questions, in metaphors, in creative non-fiction, in art, in humor, and in the concept of truth, and have asserted that the ability of artistic and humanistic expression to embody and help us understand the ambiguity inherent in our worlds is its great strength. So, here is another tidy distinction.

Schrodinger’s Cat By Dhatfield  

[CC BY-SA 3.0 viaWikimedia Commons]

But then, of course, there is quantum mechanics, with its wave-particle duality and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Erwin Schrödinger, by creating a thought experiment—a metaphor of sorts—tried to point out the absurdity of positing that the quantum state of an electron should be measured using probability. In his experiment, a cat in a sealed box has an equal probability of being alive or dead. Using probability, quantum theory would assert that the cat was partly alive and partly dead, a patently ridiculous idea. Unfortunately for Schrödinger, his opponents embraced his experiment as an explanation, stating that opening the box and observing the state of the cat collapses the superimposed states and resolves the conflict. Unobserved, however, the cat is both alive and dead, just as an electron can be in more than one state.

I do not pretend to understand what is going on with quantum theory yet, but out at the edge, where theoretical physics is operating, we are dealing with ideas where opposites must be held in tension, the kinds of ideas that have long been formulated in the language of art and literature. I don’t know what we will discover when we are finally able to open the quantum mechanics box and look inside, but right now the unopened box seems to be half art and half science.

So ultimately, science and art both contain ambiguities and set side by side are contained in a larger ambiguity, which also includes all of us.

The Act of Art

Terra, our goldendoodle, and I went out for a walk in the snow this afternoon. We walked not just on the snow but in the snow because it was blowing and falling all around us. Plowed and shoveled snow edged the road in elongated piles that expanded and contracted in diameter. My face felt the moist ping of flakes scooped in by my long-cowled hood, and the curled fur on Terra’s back filtered snow from the wind. Despite the cold—19ºF that felt like 4ºF—since I had multilayers on and Terra was in her element, it would be a while before a deep cold seeped into the ends of my fingers and toes and the snowballs in Terra’s fur would begin to bother her.

We were walking in a built environment, and in a way when we dig out roads and sidewalks we reenact their construction, reasserting the taming of the environment. “Blow your hardest. Weigh us down with your snow. But see, with our machines we can blow it back, push it aside. Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The snow was light, however, and at that time a thin rime of snow covered even the plowed places. Despite my cold and the cold and the reluctance with which I began the walk, I warmed to being chilled, developed for a short time a mind of winter, and settled into walking.

Now it would have been more exciting if we were almost run down by a rogue snowplow or if the snow was up to our knees (as it had been last year), but as it was, the interest in the passage must depend on the effectiveness of the imagery, the value of its insight, and a touch of irony. If I were writing a fictional paragraph, I could have come upon a burning bush, or a hawk could have landed in our path, challenging us to a staring contest. Because what I write is creative nonfiction, my actual experience puts a limit on what I can say, in addition to the limits imposed by language itself.

In creative nonfiction the writer is expected to use the techniques of creative writing to draw the reader into the world of the writer’s experience. Too many dry facts, and the world is dead; too much creative enhancement and the world is a lie. This sort of writing appeals to me because (as you can tell from the first post in this blog) it reflects our situation in the world and requires balancing along an ambiguous border.

In writing creative nonfiction I am making visible that balancing act. However, too often the product is confused with the creative balancing act; the tombstone is mistaken for the life it commemorates. We use creativity to solve all sorts of problems, but when we make art, the theoretical purpose is to create, to be a creator; the object produced is merely evidence.

In slim book The Tree, John Fowles connects the dynamics of nature and art, showing how they share the act/object problem:

the danger, in both art and nature, is that all emphasis is placed on the created, not the creation. All artifacts, all bits of scientific knowledge, share one thing in common: that is, they come to us from the past . . . . Yet we cannot say that the ‘green’ or creating process does not happen or is not important just because it is largely private and beyond lucid description and rational analysis.

The exciting part about creating something is the experience of creating, what creating does to us, what we become when we create. Life’s excitement lies not in what we have done, but what we are doing. It feels good to create something that others can appreciate, but it is in the act of doing it that we create ourselves and make an art of living.