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Leave it to Nietzsche.
I remember writing a letter to my parents after first arriving in San Francisco 19 years ago. In describing my affection for my new neighborhood, North Beach, I recall writing about how I awoke to the smell of coffee beans roasting at the Graffeo Coffee Roasting Company every morning, which reminded me of Saturday mornings at my grandmother's house when I was a child -- the smell of burnt toast, and all the happy feelings of childhood I had associated with that memory.
I've briefly written about this before, but the incident -- the memory and its re-telling (now and when I first wrote about it to my parents) -- has taken on a greater significance to me. It's unsettling to realize how many of my experiences have gone unexamined and simply accepted -- and relayed as anecdote, charming or otherwise.
I've come to many things late in life. So be it...this is my "Madeleine Moment." |
| Regretfully, the most significant late-occurring revelation concerns my almost total lack of introspection when it comes to what has motivated me over the years. It was far easier to read what others thought (or believed or discovered) what motivates us and simply adopt their ideas as my own. What I've neglected over the course of these many years, however, was to be truly fascinated with myself, and to listen to me. Worse still, in those times when I have been confronted with the possibility that what I feel might be correct despite what I've been taught or have learned about human nature, I have deferred to the higher authority -- rarely trusting in myself. What I have lacked, all these years, is the Artist's Eye; the often painful and almost always solitary exercise of self-examination which can lead to truths not only about the artist, but ultimately about us. Art may be interpreted subjectively, but it is borne of a sensibility - an unflinching sense of self - within the artist which usually transcends what Science can fully explain or ever hope to explain about who we are.
Better late than never...and, fortunately, I'm not alone in being late to this party. Science is probably 100 years late in arriving (bet you thought I was getting all Oprah on you.)
There's a tendency, in sophisticated circles at least, to eschew Feelings in lieu of The Rational. What science is now beginning to acknowledge is that emotions provoke, rather than inhibit, rational thought, and that feelings and reason are inextricably linked in the brain. This is something that artists as varied as Walt Whitman and Auguste Escoffier have innately understood and demonstrated through their contributions to Literature and the Culinary Arts, respectively. They trusted their insights. Rather than denying their feelings and ignoring the conflict they felt by questioning the conventional wisdom of their days, they accepted the dissonance their feelings generated and trusted their bodies to lead them to the truth...leading the way for ALL of us.
Jonah Lehrer, in his book Proust Was a Neuroscientist, explains how "feelings generated by the body are an essential element of rational thought," even though we have been taught that emotions interfere with reason. What was impossible for Science to explain back in the days when Whitman was shocking the sensibilities of his Victorian-era peers with his 'erotic', poetic verses or when Escoffier was revolutionizing French cooking by determining what the body wants and how to prepare and serve it to the body, is now not only possible through Neuroscience, but is confirming what these artists felt, but could not prove through the scientific method. Science, by employing the tried and true method of deconstructing complex organisms or systems into their smallest examinable parts, has itself partly to blame for its inability to understand how the brain and body function together. According to Lehrer:
The moral of Whitman's verse was that the body wasn't merely a body. Just as leaves of grass grow out of dirt, feelings grow out of the flesh (...) - the grass and the dirt, the body and the mind -- were actually inseparable.
How often, and how sadly, do we ignore our own bodies? How much energy do we expend in overcoming the emotions it generates in pursuit of reason? Is it any wonder we are not all Whitmans? I believe that our misguided attempts to squelch our emotions inhibit our ability to be rational. I can't prove it, but I can feel it...and if it's good enough for Walt Whitman (or Escoffier, or Woolf, or Eliot, or Proust, or Cezanne), it's certainly good enough for me.
Is that burnt toast I smell? Truth is in the nose of he who smells it...even scientists are coming to grips with The Artist's Eye. |
