Category: Living

Visitors to the ‘Van Gogh and Britain’ exhibition, currently at Tate Britain, are welcomed to the show by a painting of a middle-aged woman, wearing a white blouse and a black dress, seated at a dark green table with two pale green books in front of her, against a rose coloured background.  She stares back at the viewer, her head resting on her left hand, her left arm resting on the table, her expression neutral but engaged.   This version of L’Arlésienne, painted in 1890, is on loan from the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.  There is a similar painting, also made in 1890, held by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, in which Madame Ginoux smiles.  In another version from the same year, now in a private collection, the wallpaper is pale yellow with a floral pattern, the blouse is pale green, the dress pale pink and the books on the table are red.

In June 1912, Robert Walser saw yet another version of l’Arlésienne, this one painted in 1888 and now held by the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Madame Ginoux, in three-quarter profile, stares ahead, avoiding the viewer’s gaze; a black ribbon falls from her hair onto the back of her chair; the wall behind her is bright lemon-yellow.  A book lies open on the table before her and she appears lost in thought: but what is she thinking?

In a short article, published in Kunst und Künstler, Walser struggles to find anything substantive to say about the painting, despite his obvious admiration for it.  It is, he says, “just a picture of a woman in everyday life”, but the mysterious quality of the brushwork has a “grandeur that grips and shakes you”.   Six years later, in an article published in Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Walser remembers the painting and his reaction to it.    He thinks at first that we should “pity the artist who had squandered such great industry on so low and charmless a subject”, but then says that the painting is a sort of masterpiece: “The colours and brushwork possess the most extraordinary vitality, and formally the picture is outstanding.”

Then Walser imagines Madame Ginoux speaking to him, telling him about her childhood, her family, her schooldays and her friends.  He considers her life: ordinary activities, quotidian experiences and emotions, the passing of the months and years.  And then, he continues:

One day a painter said to her – himself just a poor working man – that he would like to paint her.  She sits for him, calmly allowing him to paint her portrait.  To him she is not an indifferent model – for him, nothing and no one is indifferent.  He paints her just as she is, plain and true.  Without much intention, however, something great and noble enters into the simple picture, a solemnity of the soul it is impossible to overlook.

Walser’s process of creative imagination – what Madame Ginoux’s life was like, what van Gogh saw and felt, which he tried to capture in his portrait – is one form of active looking, one form of sensory engagement that fine art, at its best, provokes.

There are other ways of seeing.  Writing in the Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, Daniel Catton Rich described the influence of Japanese print makers on van Gogh’s painting style.  He says: “Van Gogh’s greatest work in the Japanese manner is undoubtedly the startling portrait of Mme. Ginoux…” and goes on to describe the version of this portrait that had so impressed Walser, noting the probable influence of Sharaku’s work:

Sharaku, through his heightened simplifications, his distortion of feature for emotional effect may easily have suggested similar qualities for “L’Arlésienne”.  At any rate the use of a vivid background (here yellow; in Sharaku yellow, mica or silver) which, instead of absorbing the figure thrusts it forward; the brief strokes for eye, deliberately lengthened nose, and mouth – all these altered in proportion to gain new power – the angular, rhythmic silhouette, the play of flat masses of colour (note the expanses of black and white, visibly stressed) all suggest that the Dutch artist may have consulted one of Sharaku’s amazing prints.

When Catton Rich looks at the painting, he does not imagine Madame Ginoux’s childhood experiences; instead, he sees how techniques characteristic of one form of image making in one culture, have been borrowed and adapted for a different form of image making in a different culture.

Walser and Catton Rich both admire the version of L’Arlésienne that now belongs to the Met. despite the very different ways in which they describe their experience of looking at the painting.  Their interpretations are not rivals but complements and, taken together, they illustrate an important truth about looking – both looking at art and looking at the world – namely that “we live and move in what we see, but we only see what we want to see” (Paul Valéry).  Paradoxically, what we know about the world is principally determined by what we see in the world, but what we see in the world is principally determined by what we already know about the world.  All our visual perceptions are judgments and – just as in the best traditions of case law – each judgment is grounded upon a set of pre-existing beliefs and assumptions.  We never look unprecedentedly.

In the 1860s – around the time that large numbers of Japanese prints started to arrive in Paris and other European capitals – changing forever the way that Western artists saw the world, and changing the way they painted the world that they saw – leading British artists and art historians were almost universally dismissive of the work of Sandro Botticelli: “puerile ostentation”; “bad drawing and worse painting, and such revelling in ugliness”; “coarse and altogether without beauty”.  Walter Pater, whose collection of essays, The Renaissance (1873) is seen as a landmark of modern aestheticism, devotes a chapter to Botticelli and writes that, “his name, little known in the last century, is quietly becoming important”, but even he describes him as “a secondary painter” (see Frank Kermode, Forms of Attention, 1985).   One hundred and fifty years later this all seems to be nonsense.  Botticelli’s place in the premier ranks of Italian Renaissance artists seems assured: but only because tastes have changed, and because few of us think about the history of the canon.  Standards of beauty are not timeless: what we see is mostly what we are taught to see.

It would be easy – but wrong – to assume that Catton Rich looked at van Gogh’s painting only from the point of view of an art historian, whereas Walser looked only as a storyteller; easy – but wrong – to think that scholarship is an obstacle to emotional response.  Knowledge of art history helps us to contextualise a painting – the visual content, its symbolism, the structural features of the image and their meaning for the artist’s contemporaries – and this in turn allows us to judge both its success in formal terms and its merits compared against the wider canon.   So too, our emotional responses to paintings are always – yes, always – conditioned by what we think we know about the object in our view, by our upbringing, our culture and our prejudices.  We can change the way we look at art, just as we can change the way we look at the world, but to do so we must educate our sense of sight: we must train ourselves to see better.

Two years ago, I sat in a room in the Kunsthaus, Zürich with my oldest friend (by which I mean, the person who has been my friend longer than anyone else).  We were looking closely at two Claude Monet ‘water lily’ paintings, both very beautiful.  It was a weekday in February and the gallery was quiet.  We sat, undisturbed, for many minutes, staring at the huge canvases.   We talked about how we each felt when we first discovered Monet’s painting when we were teenagers; about the way in which the popularity of impressionism and the ubiquity of its most famous motifs have jaded our reception of them; and about the thrill or our unanticipated re-discovery of them – their complexity and grandeur – in this room, together on this day.

Art is a shared pleasure: we learn to look more carefully when we look in company, drawing on the insights and emotional response of others, whose judgments and honesty we trust.  It is not possible to educate our sense of sight alone, because the world that we see is a shared world, it’s objects and their meanings – and their representation, directly or abstractly, in painting – themselves the product of collective undertakings by many people over many generations.  There can be no solitary, private visual language because paintings are full of signs, and “every sign supposes a code” (Roland Barthes).  And what is true of painting is true of the world: it can be seen truly only when in company.

Recently I have visited exhibitions of work by Patrick Heron (at Tate St Ives) and Pierre Bonnard (at Tate Modern), both of whom painted gardens as a way to test the possibilities of the dissolution of form, the abandonment of perspective and generation of pictorial intensity through the adjacencies of colour.  Some of this I know because I read the catalogues, some I understand because of what I see when I look attentively at their canvases; some I remember from gardens I have visited, when the light is clear and sharp, but the borders of the flower-beds are not.  In each exhibition, I was reminded of that day in Zürich – of a shared experience of beauty and of a long and valued friendship – because Monet’s presentation of the water lilies in his garden pond at Giverny, seems to me to be a significant harbinger of colour field painting.  And, in consequence, a significant contribution to my understanding of and emotional response to the natural world: as painted forms dissolve, so the physical world manifests its complex reality.

The education of the eye is not just about the accumulation of art historical knowledge and cultivation of aesthetic taste; it is also the foundation of ethical judgement.  By learning to look carefully at the world we can teach ourselves and others to see the social world differently, leading us to treat people better, with greater sympathy, with more respect.   I think of Lucian Freud, the preeminent portrait painter in recent British art history, whose quest to capture ‘the truth’ of those who sat for him in his studio was legendary, and whose large canvases present the human form with candour, without illusion.   He is rightly admired for his work.  But …  but when I remember his major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2002, when I look through art books devoted to his work, I do not see my social world: I do not see London, I do not see Notting Hill, where Freud lived.  I see only pale flesh.

Next summer Tate Britain will host a major show of work by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, also a British portrait painter.  Her paintings are of fictional people in neutral nondescript spaces.  What makes her paintings ‘true’ is not the resemblance of the image to the person, for there is no person to resemble.  Rather they depend on the plausibility of the image: the look, the stance, the gesture, the colours of face, clothes and background.   All her portraits that I have seen are of people of African heritage, and in this sense her work challenges the dominant aesthetic of British art galleries, and the dominant ethic of British society.  She paints people who are mostly unseen, unrepresented, unheard and unwelcomed.  She is less acclaimed than Freud for her technical prowess, and I think this assessment is fair: her work at its best is very strong, but the quality is mixed.  But she presents a truth of our society that Freud shied away from, for which reason I look forward to her show next summer and the chance to look and learn more about the people who populate my world, my London.

Van Gogh was commercially unsuccessful, suffered from mental illness and killed himself in his late thirties but he changed the way we see the world: not just how sunflowers look in a vase, or how stars shine in a deep blue Mediterranean sky – although he helped us to see both of these natural phenomena anew – but also what an ordinary working woman might look like as she sat at a table, reading and thinking.  He died poor but he has enriched our view of our natural and social worlds, if only we take the time and trouble to see.

 

We walk steadily uphill together.  The peak is only 2km from the car park, but we have 530m to climb, which takes us 50 minutes.  Although the sun is bright, the breeze is fresh and cool, streaming off the Atlantic, to our west.  Our body heat – generated step-by-step, stride-by-stride, as we slowly rise, higher and higher, along the narrow quartz-strewn path up the mountain – soaks us in sweat.  I can feel the water drips running down my face, back and legs.  I lick the salty residue from my lips.

Errigal is fully exposed to the weather.  There is no shelter, no hiding place.  My ears fill with the steady pulse of the wind.  A small passing cloud coats us, briefly, with snowflakes, cooling and cleansing our faces as they melt on impact.  We reach the summit: we sit, we drink water and the pace of our heartbeats starts to slow.  We admire the views, which are spectacular.  This is a great place for a good conversation, but when we stop talking there are no other human sounds audible, only the gentle hum of nature.

Descending is easier on the lungs but harder on the knee and ankle joints, our leg muscles no longer stretching out to propel us upwards, but tightening and tensing, holding us back from slipping on loose rock, keeping us balanced as we drop back towards the moorland below.  The wind becomes gentler – now a modest breeze that tickles the skin – and quieter too.  We can hear the call of birds, an occasional car in the distance, and the steady trickle of brackish water in a mountain stream, that makes its way down the slope, skipping over the rocks, alongside us.

Two days later, now alone, I walk across the dunes to the beach.  The wind wraps around me, in my ears and eyes and hair, surrounding me with the sound of the sea, exfoliating my skin with minute particles of salt and sand, flavouring my journey.  The grass is spongy and springy: no need for walking boots here, light trainers will suffice.  The dunes rise and fall, like giant molehills, but the walking is fast and easy.  Where the path is sheltered from the wind the sun warms my face – the air temperature today is higher than average for mid-May – confirming that Spring has arrived.  Earlier this morning I heard a cuckoo.

The beach curves around the coastline.  To reach the far end will take me 25 minutes at a brisk pace.  I take off my shoes and feel the fine sand, firm and moist on the soles of my feet, and I hear the cries of gulls above the rushing of the air, and the rhythmic patterns of the waves blown repeatedly against the shore.  If I were to look closely, I would see flecks of white everywhere – sheep in the fields, shells in the sand, birds on the wing, foam on the waves and clouds in the heavens – and I could enjoy the endlessly variegated blues of the sea and sky, but my senses are already overwhelmed by the white noise of the wind and ocean in my ears.  My head is full of their vast sound.

Prompted by powerful sensations, my mind engages, searching its archives, making connections with previously stored experience.  It replays the lyrics of a song:

I am drawn to the western shore
Where the light moves bright upon the tide
To the lullaby and the ceaseless roar
And the songs that never die

My memory links the words, the tune, the image of a shell on the cover of the compact disc, with this moment, this place, this feeling.  For me, this is the western shore that will always be the subject of the song, this is the beach where the light will dance on the surface of the sea, these will be the connections that will never die.

It is time to swim; or, rather, to confront the waves as they surge relentlessly from the north-west, knocking me over, plunging me under, my eyes stung, my mouth, ears and nose cleansed by brine.  My skin is everywhere taut and alert, stimulated by the force and temperature of the water, strong and cold – very cold – wrapping me, rolling me, pushing me down and lifting me up.  When I manage to empty my ears of saline, and lift my head into the sunshine, once again I feel the wind across my face and hear the sea.  The horizon line recedes into the silence of empty space, but the tidal flow advances incessantly in full voice.

The ceaseless roar of the wind and the lullaby of the ocean will stay with me forever, but the song does not remain the same.  Amid the repetitions – wave after wave, gust after gust – are countless minor variations: subtle changes according to the direction of the jet stream and water currents, the gravitational pull of the moon through its cycle and the rotation of the seasons: variations of tone, of pace, of rhythm, of melody, each asserting its unique individuality through minor differences, while also reinforcing their shared characteristics within the soundscape.  The music of the beach – repeated patterns, marginal deviations – is unlike anything else, but it mostly reminds me of Philip Glass: no, not the 1975 opera, but the piano études.

A few weeks previously I had attended a musical event at Tate Modern, during which an orchestra of professional musicians was joined by a choir and a band both comprised of people who are or have recently been homeless, to perform together.  My friend who works at With One Voice – the international arts and homelessness movement, which organised the event – had encouraged me to come and listen.  They played Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ blood never failed me yet continuously, from 8pm in the evening until 8am the next morning.  The sung lyric – recorded by an unknown homeless man, in 1971 – lasts for about 25 seconds, which means that the tape loop plays approximately 1728 times during the performance, with the instrumental and vocal accompaniments providing a series of musical variations around this repetitious central theme.

It was a truly immersive experience.  Initially my attention was centred on the recorded song but was then diverted by the changing combinations of instruments and voices performing live.  After some time, as these became familiar, predictable, anticipated, my attention shifted to the subtle changes – intentional or mistaken – introduced by the performers.  Then, as both theme and variations became routine, the experience became more hypnotic: the music was everywhere in the room, but it was also nowhere special; it enveloped me, filling my head, but it allowed my mind to wander, to search for connected memories, to bring to the surface of my consciousness thoughts and feelings that otherwise might remain submerged beneath the routine busyness of my conscious life.

After three hours, my physical reception of the music had transformed my sense of place and time: I was suspended in a moment in which all regular distractions were absent.  The experience – swimming attentively in sounds – was mesmeric and visceral.   In today’s world, music is ever-present but always in the background, lulling us without really bothering us, providing comfort but never touching us.  Listening to recorded music is a very different experience, a second-order pleasure.  To feel the music on our skin we need to be in the presence of the performers.

Our memories work mysteriously, unpredictably, unreliably, surprisingly, suggestively.  These profoundly physical experiences – climbing the steep mountain path, splashing in the cold, cold sea, and listening to the meditative music performance – reminded me of an essay by Montaigne, On the art of conference, which is in Book III of the collected Essays.  I did not have either of my printed copies to hand, so I re-read it on an electronic device, which feels different and slightly inauthentic.   But the quality of the writing was as I remembered.  Montaigne writes:

The most fruitful and natural exercise of the mind, in my opinion, is conversation; I find the use of it more sweet than of any other action of life; and for that reason it is that, if I were now compelled to choose, I should sooner, I think consent to lose my sight than my hearing or speech.

I was struck by this remark, since I am sure that most of us would, if we were now compelled to choose, consent to lose our hearing or speech than our sight.  Montaigne makes an unexpected choice, but – as always – he has cogent reasons.  He values conversation above the reading of books because it engages us more fully.  “When anyone contradicts me”, he writes, “he raises my attention, not my anger.”  And later, “’tis a dull and hurtful pleasure to have to do with people who admire us and approve of all we say.”

Spending time in the company of others, who question, challenge, counter-suggest, oppose, examine, cajole and tease us, is a great sensory pleasure as well as the cornerstone of friendship.  It is not just their company – their being-with-us – that matters, but their constructive resistance – their being-against-us – that counts.  We need our friends to be present, to hear their voices immediately in our ears, not mediated by some form of information communication technology; we need to feel them on our skin, to be touched in our hearts.  Their engagement with us is both a comfort and a stimulant: they remind us who we are and that we are alive.

These are the moments that feed our memories, creating reserves of happiness and goodwill upon which we can draw when we are alone, or separated, or simply reliant on mediated communication using electronic messages.  Like letter writing in an earlier age, the use of text and email today is a valuable lifeline, keeping us connected to our network of friendships; but it is always only a poor substitute for being with them in the same room.       Nothing can recreate the pleasure of the immediate, real, physical presence of a friend.  Montaigne is right to say that conversation is sweet; a glass or two of wine shared during conversation makes it sweeter still.

I chose not to stay at Tate Modern for the full twelve-hour performance.  After three hours I made my way home, tired from the effort of paying close attention, but rewarded and renewed by the physical and psychological demands of the task.   It is not a great piece of music; not as good as Philip Glass for sure.  Even so, the value of the experience – the lesson in listening – was evident.  The next morning, I woke early, walked back to the gallery and heard the final hour.  When the orchestra and choir finally stopped, their marathon performance over, the silence was immense.   I will remember this event for a long time, not because of the brilliance of the playing, nor the aesthetic qualities of what was played, but because of the message – creating one musical voice from the elite and the excluded – and because the telling of this story was itself an exercise in effort and endurance.  I was there and I was fully absorbed by my experience of others making music.

Listening, done well, is hard work, like walking up a mountain, like plunging into the ocean.  It makes demands on our reserves of energy as well as on the acuity of our senses.  We do not learn much from chatter, but we can learn to listen better and to sense the depths that lie beneath the surface of language.  We can train ourselves to hear more.  In the immediacy of the company of friends we develop the ability to hear the subtle variations of unpredictability as well as the regular repetitions of consistency; it becomes possible for us to be robust as well as to be gentle; we are able to ascend to greater heights of shared understanding and respect.  Friendship is a labour of the senses and of the memory.

 

The tasting notes told me to expect a “sparkling body with stone-fruit acidity, kumquat, honeydew melon and jasmine notes and a floral finish”, all of which sounds delicious.  What, I wondered, could provoke such a diverse and abundant medley of flavours?

I am no expert on wine, merely an enthusiast for the phenomenological enjoyment of wine-drinking, particularly in good company with well-prepared, flavoursome food.  A bottle shared is a pleasure doubled.  Or, in the words of the Chinese poet Li Bai, whose lyrics Mahler used in his song-cycle, Das Lied von der Erde: “A full glass of wine at the proper moment / Is worth more than all the riches of the world”.

I know that Californian chardonnay is sometimes said to taste of melon, and a little research informed me that rosé from Provence also has that reputation.  Jasmine, by contrast, is more often associated with dry white wine from cooler regions, German grown riesling being a good exemplar.  Yet it is another grape varietal altogether –viognier – from which connoisseurs most reliably find a hint of stone-fruit.  A combination of three different grapes, potentially from three different regions, might therefore be required to produce this complex balance of flavours; and, less we forget, we also have been promised kumquat.

The trick, however, is to gather not grapes from the vine but beans from the bush.  More particularly, to secure some Ethiopian coffee from Werka Wuri, a washing station located in the Gedeb Woreda, a small district in the region near the town of Yirgacheffe, internationally famous for coffees abounding with floral and citric flavours.  In the Gedio language, werka translates as “gold” and wuri as “high altitude”, so I am reliably informed by Caravan Coffee Roasters, from whom I obtained my beans, with their enticing description.

I repeat, I am no expert on wine:  I am not confident that I could distinguish a Californian chardonnay from an Australian, nor that I could pick a Rhone viognier from a marsanne, but I am sure – very sure – that I can distinguish a glass of wine from a cup of coffee, despite the fact that the tasting notes might be almost identical.

My point here is not to mock the writers of tasting notes: I am sure that some drinkers – better trained, more alert than me – regularly distinguish these flavours in both wine and coffee.  What interests me is that our sensory faculties function in such a way that two radically different experiences of taste can be appropriately – that is to say, competently and credibly – described using a shared vocabulary, without anyone thinking that drinking hot black coffee and chilled white wine are otherwise similar.

Our experience of wine and coffee – and of food and drink more generally – is almost always the product of two rather different forms of sensory experience: taste and smell.  Although we refer to tasting notes, wine tastings, and the cultivation of good taste, much of the richness and precision of our experience of wine comes from not from our mouths but from our noses.  We sense more variety, discriminate more finely, remember more clearly that which we smell compared to that which we taste.  The knowledgeable drinker always uses their nose first, when the wine is poured.   That said, to leave the wine in the glass, smelled but not tasted, would be an unconscionable waste.  The gourmet engages both nose and mouth, takes times to notice the range, intensity and balance of the sensations they produce, and finds pleasure in the apprehension of the world’s rich bounty through the combination of their messages.

The receptor cells on our tongues – and in the sides and roof of our mouths – can detect five main types of taste: bitter, salty, savoury (umami), sour and sweet.  While these provide important high-level information about what we are about to consume, they offer us a very limited vocabulary with which to discuss the finer points of wine consumption.  Our mouths can also provide us with information about a drink’s viscosity – important for our appreciation of port – its effervescence – important for champagne – and its tannic qualities – important for my fellow drinkers of barolo – all of which is valuable, but hardly sufficient to sustain a meaningful conversation about the relative merits of one vintage compared to another, or of an unusual but pleasantly striking paring of wine and food.

If we think that “terroir” matters, we must educate our noses.  Our olfactory neurones are stimulated by molecules from our drink entering the front of our noses, directly, and from the back, via our mouths.  These molecules provide detailed information about their source material, which is transmitted to the brain through our limbic system, which connects our sense of smell closely with our emotions and our memories.  Smelling is, by comparison with tasting, more detailed, more intimate and more memorable.  It is also more amenable to training and refinement: almost everyone can easily identify sweet tastes on the tongue, but it takes practice and concentration to distinguish stone-fruits on the nose.

We start with a basic ability to discriminate tastes and smells.  From an evolutionary point of view, these senses functions to protect us from forms of ingestion that would be harmful, but like other evolved capabilities, they provide us in addition the opportunity to enhance our enjoyment of being in the world.  What is needed to prevent harm can also be put into service to create pleasure.   Just as our ability to see colours or hear pitch varies from person to person, so too, owing to the individual physical qualities of our sense receptors and neurone system, we all start with our own distinctive appreciation of taste and smell.  But we are all able to develop these faculties, to improve our detection of the sensory qualities in the glass – and on the plate – and to store memories of smells and flavours, which we can draw upon to make comparisons with new experiences.

Learning requires us to attend closely to what our noses are telling us, and this is not always easy.  Several years ago, I attended a wine tasting event in California.  After four whites, we tasted four reds, one of which puzzled many of us.  It was hard to put into words what was wrong, but what we saw in the glass and what we felt in our mouths and noses were incongruent.  Characteristically, we gave priority to our vision, and tried to think of a red grape from the region that might have that lightness, that hint of butter, that suggestion of oak, which the wine presented.  Finally, the host confessed that we were drinking a fifth white – a local chardonnay – that had been dyed to look like a red wine.   He assured us that if we had been blind-folded we would have picked the grape, but we had all allowed our sight-perception to over-rule our tasting memories: a trick of the eye causing a failure to remember.

All this proves – some might say – is that we should read the label on the bottle, which will tell us where the wine came from, which grapes were used, the year that it was made, the approximate alcohol content and, perhaps, some tasting notes that will prepare us to discern flavours that some other, more knowledgeable person, thinks are there.  What is the reward for all the investment of time and energy – because paying attention to our senses of taste and smell in a sustained way over many years, must consume a considerable amount of intellectual energy – that it takes to educate our palate?  Why not simply rely on others to tell us what to expect, what to enjoy, what to look out for?

The quick answer is that relying on others to tell us what to experience is almost always a bad idea, particularly once we get beyond early childhood.  I am happy to defer to the expertise of horticulturalists and oenologists about the cultivation of vines and the technical production of wine, and to neurologists and philosophers about the way in which the brain interprets the sensory information sent from the tongue and nostrils.  I am not happy – not at all – to defer to anyone else when it comes to what I feel when I smell and taste the wine from my glass.  My experience of the world is my experience: I am its owner, I am its authority.  I want to understand it better, more thoughtfully, more deeply, but this is work that only I can do.

There are two reasons to think that relying wholly on the taste judgments of others is a mistake.  (I say “wholly”, because the process of improving our taste involves listening to and learning from the judgments of others: connoisseurship cannot be learned from books but requires practice and – at least to a certain extent – apprenticeship.)  One reason concerns the role of the memory in the cultivation of our sense of personal identity, which in turn plays a central role in the development of our sense of happiness in life.  I will return to this point in a later text.  A second reason concerns the intrinsic pleasure of drinking wine (or drinking coffee, or eating flavoursome food), preferably in the company of others.  If we are to participate fully in our own lives, and to share the lives of others, we need to be able to develop our own ability to capture the full flavour of the world.

There are some who drink to forget, for whom the principal pleasure of alcohol consumption is the alcohol itself:  it numbs the senses, dulls the memory, takes away the pains of living, at least for a while.  This is a way life to be avoided, to be pitied.   But it would be a mistake – albeit one made seductive by the dogmas of religion and the prohibition movement – to assume that modest consumption is always the prelude to over-indulgence, to argue that the only responsible attitude to pleasure is to avoid it entirely from fear of excess.  Too little can be as bad as too much.  As Aristotle taught, the virtuous life is lived at the mean, with just the right amount, taken in just the right way, and for just the right reasons.

Much of the pleasure of drinking is social, reminding us of another of Aristotle’s great themes: friendship.  When we share wine and food in the company of others, we jointly connect our senses – of smell and taste – with our shared world.  Drinking and dining together provides us a means of opening our minds and our hearts, alerting us to the great range of taste combinations in the world, and to the pleasure of discovering how these combinations are perceived by others, whose tastes overlap, but also differ in interesting ways from our own.  Wine reveals to us to the variety that is in the world and, at the same time reminds us of our common humanity, that everywhere others also take great pleasure from exploring variety.  By becoming more alert to the richness of our own experience we are better placed to understand, and respect, the wealth of experience of others.

There is an old Latin saying, in vino veritas: in wine there is truth.  Conventionally this is taken to mean that because the consumption of wine lowers our sense of restraint, reduces our control of impulse, that under its influence we are more likely to say what we really think, or to disclose information that we might otherwise have kept to ourselves.   I suggest that there is another meaning to this saying, perhaps more profound, which is that in our experience of educating our taste we come closer to the truth of the world.  Not only do we learn to embrace more attentively the precious fruits of the earth, but we become better able to share more deeply with our drinking companions the qualities of these sensations: we come closer to the truth about our habitats and our friendships.

Now, it’s time for me to see if I can find that hint of kumquat …

I am in a strange place, on the cusp of paralysis. I want to write, so very much. But I don’t feel competent enough. How can I write, philosophy no less, without having read the entire canon of human thought?

 

At first, I dismissed this question as absurd! Even with complete devotion to reading for the rest of my days, I will not have enough time to digest all the texts in existence today.  Even if I limit myself to the last few centuries, the goal is still not SMART at all!  Yet, I feel obliged to give it due consideration.  How can I stand on the shoulders of giants if I don’t know what my predecessors stood for?

 

I’ll premise this essay by saying that I am reading a lot – more than ever!   But I am not like Peter, who reads at break-neck speed.  I am a slow reader – I actually hear the sound of the words.  In just a couple of months, I’ll delve deeper in the study of Philosophy – starting another BA this summer.  It will take me at least 5 years to complete this endeavor. So good student that I am, I am reading ahead!  I find most of the texts I read fascinating – even those that I don’t quite understand. Still, I perceive within myself a tension.  When I don’t write, I feel the nagging impression that I am hiding in the voice of others.  I wonder: am I looking in books for the answers that I can only find within?

 

Previously, I’ve studied economics.  It was post-crisis and I wanted to know what had brought our society to the edge of the precipice.  My university wasn’t a particularly good one – we only derived equations!  We assumed cetis paribusand perfect information – which obviously made our discipline approximate at best, but most likely unrealistic.  We held firmly to the scientific method – thus we put more efforts on understanding the mathematics than in the evaluation of the assumptions and limitations of our theories.  But I’m still grateful for the drudgery, ‘cause it got me over the edge into the rest of my life!

 

Now, I’m aware that within philosophy, there is also an analytical tradition.  Its aims is to apply rigorous and argumentative methods to the study of the ‘objects of philosophy’ (ie: reality, knowledge, reason, morality, and experience or consciousness, even language).  However, the extent of analytical rigor actually created dead-ends. As it turns out, there is a very limited range of logical conclusions that can be reached without starting from arbitrary premises.  Therefore, analytical philosophers have now turned to arguing – amongst themselves – over the meaning embedded in the primary texts written by their predecessors.

 

Indeed, philosophical writing nowadays falls into two categories: original thoughts and derivative – though maybe highly insightful – analysis.  Most of the philosophical literature is of the second type – and might be very interesting – but the first category includes the works that I read as I initially explore this strange land of philosophy.

 

So I’ve been reading Nietzsche.  And I’ve wondered: What makes him a philosopher? Is it because Bertrand Russell included him in his book History of Philosophy?  As such, he has been accepted as an ‘initiate’ by other community-members. But to belong in a discipline, one must first write about the ‘objects of philosophy’.  In philosophy, do methods matter as much as in the sciences? Again, reading Nietzsche, one must clearly answer ‘No!’, he writes cryptically, allegorically, mostly without clear argumentation.  Most of his writing wouldn’t be accepted as an undergraduate final paper – and yet he has something to say !!!  Thus is philosophy more defined by the value of its insights?  Some say that philosophers impact the world by introducing new ‘Ways of Seeing’ it.

 

Indeed, in some deep way, philosophy studies ideas – in and of themselves – as well as their impact on man.  Ideas are not these ‘abstract’ things floating in the ether – like Plato suggested.  They live in us!  In fact, philosophy addresses how mankind regards the very concepts which he cannot separate from himself.

 

Philosophy starts by asking: What are we?  What is reality?  Where do we belong in the world?  As an answer, one might draw this:

 

But we’ll observe that philosophy is nowhere in that diagram.  Thus, is philosophy the mere asking of questions for which we know too well that the reason we propose answers is actually to see ‘_whatever is_’ differently than before? If so, than all we have to do is follow Socrates…

 

I believe that ideas deeply affect man’s understanding of himself, his duties, his purpose – both individually and collectively.  How we think of ourselves and our place in the world actually affects our behavior – even delimiting what we can perceive (through confirmation bias for example) and what we consider possible.  It would be too crude to say that ‘thoughts shape reality’ – for thinking does not ‘cause’ existence in the way that we usually understand causality.  But on some level, (my) philosophy aims to explain all the ways in which ‘ideas’ ripple into the fabric of our lives.  Is this the goal of all philosophers?  Maybe not.  Still, the practice of philosophy allows me to postulate this as my research orientation.

 

I can do that because philosophy is a conceptual study – using thought-experiments instead of a physical apparatus to ‘prove’ or falsify hypotheses.  As such, someone new like me – though deep in my own way – might offer a meaningful contribution.  Or, a rereading of philosophers like Plato or Aristotle can be as relevant today than 2’500 years ago.  There are gems hidden in both Epicureanism, Stoicism, Cynicism and Skepticism.  We can’t literally transpose these insights into our 21st century society, because man’s conception of himself has changed over time.  And voila! Why should one read the key texts of philosophy written over millennia?  Because it is not only history that changed.  It is not only our way of living into our environment that evolved over centuries.  Crucially, the way we think of ourselves – which is actually distinct from, but interwoven with, what we think about – has changed with intellectual discoveries. By that I mean, the ideas we host within ourselves to abstractly represent ‘how the world is’ AREactually changing over time.  Ideas are not these fixed ‘abstract things’ waiting to emerge in consciousness.

 

Somewhere else, I’ll argue that a sensitivity to the evolution of man’s understanding of himself is actually crucial to the ‘doing’ of philosophy.  ‘Crucial’ is maybe not ‘essential’ but particularly useful in order to gain a vantage point from which to observe this strange land of thoughts and ideas.  I have Peter who gifted me Charles Taylor’s The Secular Ageto thank for that particular insight.

 

So here I am, feeling like I am moving into this strange place – where reading and writing meets in a swirl of tension and unconscious thinking.

 

On the reading front, my ever-expanding reading list is daunting!  And I’m kinda looking for a way to cut corners… but that’s counter-productive!  I cannot deny that men’s discourses react to one another – and as such, primary texts are embedded in a rich web of socio-historical context.  Yes, I believe that ideas grow in the particular ‘climate’ of their time and place. As intellectuals, philosophers reflect on the historical challenges of their days.  Their texts embody thoughts and ideas that – in themselves – can be ‘grasped’ or understood by people of other eras.  Written language, while that too evolves, is still permanent enoughto carry one’s ideas forward into time and space.

 

I’ll compare Western philosophy to a tree, taking roots in Ancient Greece and ever since growing limbs.  Its branches are different schools of thoughts, ‘growing out of and becoming distinct from’ the trunk – and yet still made from that same love of wisdom.   Every new branch – every thought – may keep changing: grow, be added on, or become brittle and wither.  But until it is forgotten, it will always be part of that illustrious tree.  But one’s philosophical contribution can also be a seedling, whose seed has spawned independent of tradition – though it is still made from that same love of wisdom.

 

When I read, I honor the tree – the traditions. When I write, I grow into my own shape – which may graft itself onto the tree or be a distinct entity altogether. All I know is that I am less interested in writing about the tree than in ‘being’ a tree.

 

I have a calling to write – of that I am sure. But what?  That question can truly stymies me.  Until I am sitting before my blank page, I do not know what will emerge. However, I know that form matters. Randomly, I discovered that John T. Lysaker, in Philosophy, Writing and the Character of Thought, makes the simple claim that the way we choose to write – in aphorisms, in personal essays, in scholarly articles, in systematic treatises – not only shapes ‘how a thought is expressed’ (and eventually perceived by a reader) but also ‘what emerges as thought’ in the first place.

 

Thus, choosing a genre and a tone for a particular project becomes fundamental.  And challenging because I have no way to know how my literary choices will affect the thoughts that emerge.  Only practice will enlighten.  Only the actual act of philosophizing – argumentatively or not, in fiction or non-fiction, etc… – will allow V’s ‘way to see’ to emerge with time.

 

Everyday that I sit at my screen, I rely on the flow of writing.  First because letters, words and sentences need to line up, one after another.  But mostly because of that mystical thing called ‘the state of flow’ – the energized focus which allow creation to occur.   As writer, we are constrained by language – like Ursula LeGuin said: “Words are my Matter” – yet the flow is indispensable, because it is the unconscious and non-verbal that I shape into becoming a shareable thing.

 

It is with humility that I accept how much I cannot control the writing process.  I know that reading feeds my soul – that integrating ideas within my understanding may contribute, in unforeseeable ways, to my own growth as an intellectual. I’ve also made peace with the fact that philosophy dwells in the territory of unknown unknowns.  It includes – but is not delimited by – the bringing to consciousness and methodical evaluation of all that we take for granted.  A tall order already, and it is merely the first few steps toward unknown discoveries.

 

For this pursuit – to which I am committing – I know that I must ‘Be Brave. Show Up. And Speak Honestly’.  Only with ‘Praxis’ will I fight my paralysis.  I advance with my fears in check, for I know that I have things to say.  Still, I can’t silence that nagging voice that says: “Who are you?  You are not yet initiated!”

 

Thus dared to write Viktoria.

I wrote in my last essay in passing about a belief I have, that value will become decoupled from money in the foreseeable future.  What that decoupling will consist of was left unstated, but I got a couple of requests for more detail, and then I read a collection of essays, The Wisdom of Money by a French philsopher and writer, Pascal Bruckner, and what struck me about the book – which examines recent historical and contemporary attitudes towards “money” in modern capitalist societies – was how money, wealth, and the measurement of relative value is almost universally conflated when people think about money.  And that made the strange lock mechanism that is my thought process shift, and twist, and align, and I realized I was ready to describe what I meant by “decoupling.”

At its core, Bruckner’s argument – and most discussions of money in our current Pinketty era of inequality – perpetuates a core confusion.  That is, they collapse the very different concepts of the pursuit of wealth and the process of translating labor or intellectual effort into money. That is, they posit that when we pursue wealth,we actually pursue the accumulation of money.  This creates a definitive confusion, which I think most of us experience when we try to talk about “money.”  On the one hand, when we rail against value disparity, we are talking not about the normatively false differentiation of value between a CEO and a schoolteacher, but rather about the different amount of moneythey make.  And when we talk about money itself, we rarely clarify what role it is playing at a given moment – that is, is it a store of value, a transmission device of relative value between actually realizable goods and services, or is it a point-in-time comparator between different value regimes as it expresses itself against other forms of money or value transmission devices or potential stores of value.

Bruckner regularly conflates meaning across these three dimensions, and he’s smart enough to occasionally realize what he’s doing, but by and large he can’t escape his own confusion.  I don’t find any fault in this; he’s doing what we all do, and if he were extremely precise in his understanding, I think the essays would suffer in their role of trying to understand how we have come to have a fraught relationship between ourselves, both as individuals and as members of overlapping societies of people, and money as a dynamic social construct.  But our relationship is going through a time of massive transition, just as the information revolution is destroying long-held notions of “society” – built-in geographical spaces and subject to normative constructs of race and dialect – and creating instead dynamically created and destroyed “societies” which exist and die both in time, space, and virtually.

It should be no surprise that money – existing as a means to allow societies to transmit within themselves commonly held notions of value, to store and move that value through time and space, and to convert that value in trade and in competition with other societies, depending on its role at any moment as store, transmission medium, or comparator – would need to go through a similar redefinition.  Money is, after all, the supreme abstract creation of any given society; its use is in effect the purest mirror of the norms and expectations of a society, far more natural a portrait than anything put on canvas or sculpted in stone or bronze.  Perhaps only the law as a construct can match it, but even that has a kind of conscious intent to it; money, on the other hand – as revealed by the inability of economists and philosophers to pin down a common way of discussing it but nevertheless being forced to observe it and comment on it – is an unconscious abstract. It is defined by its use, which is itself defined only indirectly, through how society chooses to use it.

As a monolithic and reliably static notion of “society” breaks down, however, it’s not surprising to see money as a construct also start to fragment.  Take, for example, money in the form of a store of value.  Fundamentally, money no longer plays a role in storing value except in small quantities and for very short periods of time.  Rather, ownership interests are the primary store of value.  Equity – be it in the classic legal form of common stock, or the very traditional older form of real estate title, or ownership of unique items of artistic or cultural value – has more or less completely replaced money and money equivalents (bonds, which are nothing more than rights to future money) as value stores. And we observe this in financial markets, where equity valuations are now decoupled entirely from any future money generation and instead are based on newly ephemeral concepts such as brand value, the ability of an enterprise to accumulate data or user hits, or in the case of real assets, the likelihood of future demand value increasing due to population, decay of existing stock, or scarcity.

This phenomenon has been observed in the financial press but only indirectly through the recognition that “equity valuations” no longer reference dividends or cash flow, and that accounting profit and loss (which defines enterprise value in terms of money as a unit of account and reference to a primary unit of value) no longer drive the actual market price of a company.  That valuation decoupling is what allows the value of financial assets to skyrocket without any noticeably impact on the prices of use goods – but the idea that the reference point no longer serves as reference point has largely been ignored.

What I’d posit is that the market for ownership of real assets now exists in a separate society, consisting of a defined set of actors – mostly corporate actors, including pension funds, mutual funds, and other cooperative players which dip into the world of “real” individuals, but also including some individuals who by virtue of their ownership of sufficient assets or access to intangibles now largely express value in this separate world.  This society always existed to some extent but is now more or less completely decoupled from the actual requirements for survival and daily living.  Oddly, many of the “real” people – you know, physical people named Larry or Melanie or Greg – live lives which look very much like “ordinary” middle class people.  They might have better houses or better cars, but they aren’t living like the robber barons of the last time we went through this round of wealth accumulation, where the Rockefellers and their ilk constructed the estates and ranches of the New World – or married into or bought the formerly feudal estates of the old world.  They have no pressure, as do the rest of us, to budget carefully, but by and large their wealth lives in a world fully decoupled from the items that they might purchase in the “real” world.

The only time most of us come up against this world is when we purchase an equity object like a house – indeed, a home purchase is effectively the only time most of us encounter this new decoupled world of value storage.  And fewer and fewer of us are encountering that world, because like all value store objects today, the valuation in terms of value of money in its role as a short-term value exchange item gallops ever higher. Our use-value wages, the prices of use goods (food, clothing, immediate shelter such as a room overnight or a monthly rent, Legos), have remained largely constant, which is a good thing when you think about it because we’re humans, temporal, real, concrete – massive disruptions in prices have a consequently massive emotional and physical impact (ask the people of Venezuela).  But the end result is that there has already opened up a world where the same unit of account has almost entirely eliminated its ability to play a role in intermediating transactions between two distinct societies, the society of entities who own future ownership value and the society of individuals who exchange current use value.

With this decoupling, I’m increasingly of the opinion that the society of owner-value transactors will develop a much more direct barter economy.  Why bother converting into the unit that describes use-value when it’s so much easier to trade ownership interests directly for one another? Indeed, even temporarily using the unit of account of use-value makes one’s wealth dead for a period of time, and no one wants that.  There is even historical precedent for this, albeit the inverse of what I think will occur today in a world of informational efficiency.  Throughout much of the Middle Ages, coins and bills of exchange were only used to facilitate trade over distances (confined to luxury goods in large measure or in goods used in war, ie., state goods), while use-value exchange was conducted entirely in kind.  “Money” only existed in the real world when real estate or civil and state penalties were involved (including levies for war); only then would the “average” citizen encounter pricing in the form of shillings or pounds. Prices in pounds, indeed, would be absurd to most people, much as the idea of exchanging pre-IPO non-SEC registered ownership interests in Uber or Pinterest or whatever non-publically tradable ownership right would be absurd to most people.

In that historical world, “money” existed only for those large purchases between state or quasi-state actors who would deal in items which implied ownership or the potential for future ownership in productive assets, and it existed because the ability to exchange in kind was limited due to the spatial and geographical limitations on transfer.  In our modern de-materialized world, fully abstracted, there are no limits to transfer, and few limits on information – the only differentiations are on demand preferences and opportunity sets.  Similarly, in the medieval world, small-scale transactions were extraordinarily limited in variety, making barter and in-kind exchange actually quite simple – whereas today, individuals are faced with effectively limitless choice, even among those living at or below the poverty level.  In-kind exchange is impossible when choices are unlimited and in constant flux, making an intermediary descriptor of stable valuation in the form of a dollar essential.

I’m not at all bothered by this bifurcation of exchange societies; it is what it is. Historically, I’m pretty confident that the world of ownership exchange will periodically be destroyed, because human beings show an amazing capacity for slaughtering one another in war and revolution.  The losers in such events invariably – although not obviously – are the holders of ownership interests; the markets, state structures, and exchange norms upon which they depend to make ownership worth owning are the prime casualties of war, even if the most obvious casualties are the people who own nothing who are killed.  I don’t like the fact that the ownership class – owing to a different but no less human yet inexhaustible demand for pleasure and satiation and the sensation of control and power – tend to misuse their wealth, to take advantage of the bifurcated worlds to occasionally translate their ownership value into baroque displays of use value, but “not liking” that fact doesn’t mean I’m exercised about it.  Humanity, in a word, sucks; to get upset by it does nothing but upset ones digestion.  It certainly doesn’t result in a change in human nature.

Ah, there’s a term I’ve been avoiding – but now that I am forty-four, I am completely convinced that there is a human tendency – not an absolute behavioral imperative, but definitely a tendency – towards selfishness and narcissism.  I’ve seen too much of it in others, including those who purport to being “enlightened” or “awake” or “conscious”, to think otherwise.  And that includes me, and I make no pretence of thinking that I’m particularly enlightened at all.  I think about morality – the art and science of how we value one another as intangible and indefinable objects, or beings, or worlds – but that doesn’t make me moral. If anything, it just focuses a lens on my own immorality and failings.  I see in myself my own tendencies towards selfishness and bias, and while I might try to rise above them, I see every day how I find new ways to wallow in my own desires. Human nature is to fool oneself.

And human nature has very little to do with money.  Money is simply an expression of how we value things within our worlds, our societies – the clusters of human beings that share a critical mass of commonalities such that they create the ability to define a clear and internally understood notion of purpose and meaning.  Money is created wherever such communities form – which is why online “communities” of gamers take so readily to the creation of in-game money forms, and readily exchange real-world dollars for them – and I think that will only proliferate, only it will increasingly involve exchanges of real world goods as well as online virtual stuff.  But the more isolated money circulation pools that are created – whether it be of ownership value exchange, or online virtual rights exchanges, or scrip among small businesses in a given community, or in-kind exchange in areas where state decay or local hyperinflation induce it – the more every such community will still want what’s called a numeraire currency, a comparator object – that third function of “money” – that facilitates cross-border transactions by providing a stable and more or less universally acknowledged denominator.

In our world today, that is the dollar – and I see no reason why it will be anything but that in the future, mostly because the United States remains the place which, unique among nations, seems able to balance the seeming contradiction of dynamically creating societies while at the same time facilitating both ownership rights and the ability to create new notions of what is own-able, and yet can proliferate choice among use objects without limit.  In every other country that I’ve lived in (with the exception of Canada, but proximity may prove the concept here), either a lingering sense of the stasis of tradition, or the inescapable lure of the will-to-power of the totalitarian state (or both, China), effectively means that the equilibrium that seems to exist in the dollar economy doesn’t and can’t exist in other potential comparator units of account.

My father and I once had a long argument about what makes a country, and I said a “country” is by definition a coherent body of law coupled with the infrastructure to enforce it.  It’s not a geographical construct – although often that infrastructure requires geographical coherence to enforce the law consistently and efficiently.  It’s also not a people, or a race, or a group of people united by common cause.  In that regard, Rome was truly the first country, coming about at a time when geography supplied ample limits to its ability to enforce its law, but defined truly by the concept of “citizenship” and the legal rights that entailed.  Because of what money does – as store of value, as transmission of value, and as comparator of different conceptions of value – it needs to have some connection to legal rights to “work” in a sustainable way.  The only major currency in the world that has that linkage is that of the United States.

And that, in its way, has made the philosophical concept of money that much harder.  With the numeraire currency also effectively the sole currency for ownership value, and with the US economy being the one that produces most of the economic research and financial innovation, with American economists consistently producing the most research into monetary theory and what limited bits of the philosophy of value that get produced, it takes a supreme act of self-consciousness and self-criticism to examine a system in which the researcher has been embedded since birth, in language, transactional norms, and in observable history.

Bruckner, on the other hand, is from France, a country which has lost its currency – excuse the multifaceted meaning of that phrase – while being unable to lose a kind of quintessential need to impose a single definition of “society” and “culture” on itself, in a way which American society couldn’t care less about.  It’s unsurprising that coming from such a place, Bruckner would be able to identify the tension points in what money is today, even if he can’t escape the linguistic, cultural, and academic ambiguity when one starts to use the term “money” with rigor.  But I think understanding the next stages of evolution for money’s role in society – and for understanding what forms money will take in fulfilling those roles – we as humanity will need to become more self-conscious, will need to be aware of how we can abuse the notion of money even as we acknowledge the fact that we’ll continue to abuse it.  Complaining about inequality or about wealth accumulation or the like will get us no where; thinking about what we want money to do for us, as opposed to how much or what kind of money we want, is the only path forward.

That’s a facile way to end, however.  Ultimately, there is no path “forward” – at least so far as I can tell.  Unless we see an evolution of human motivations that shifts definitively away from the unconscious bias towards physical and emotional gratification, we’ll just cycle back and forth between a now fairly routine rotation of money as value store, money as use value representation, and money as translator. The path forward would decouple value from money entirely, and release “value” into the space spiritual. Our physical use needs would be recognized as secondary, and our representations of value – and our most diligent and imperative needs to trade that value – would be based on a set of moral needs which would have little, if anything, to do with simply gratification.

My sense – especially reinforced over the past few years, of both self-criticism but especially a kind of observational critique of those who claim spiritual truth – is that we are quite some distance from that.  That is to say, that particular decoupling of value and money is not in our foreseeable future.  In our lifetimes – and in the “lifetimes” described by the modern press, enamored of the time scales of the internet where today’s world is declared obsolete once the IPO gets past the employee lockup date – we have nothing to look forward to except the proliferation of money spaces, and a resulting dissolution of the money concepts of ownership value storage and use value exchange.  The authors of this site are trying to live by example for our children (and everyone’s children, frankly) for what a more complete decoupling might look like.  We are neither optimistic, nor are we declaring defeat.  Pragmatically, we just continue to live, and write, and reflect.