Stop Making Sense

My favorite Talking Heads album is called Stop Making Sense. Besides being an awesome dance party playlist, I think David Byrne is really onto something. While it is a naturally human thing to do, the problem with making sense is that we take the liberty to change things, to manipulate them, and I think in that we sometimes lose something. In terms of prehistoric art, instead of just enjoying it we apply an aesthetic. Ellen D writes that "for posttraditional humans whose thinking--and even fantasy and daydreams--is largely occupied with instrumental, pragmatic concerns, it is perhaps difficult to appreciate the more embedded, enactive, and symbolic type of thinking that is characteristic of nonliterates. Such persons may forget after they leave childhood that there are ways of knowing other than the rational, and that the world can be well and deeply experienced without being dissected and analyzed" (178). In other words, we, as the posttraditional humans she's talking about, apply our own modern logic to the cave paintings and this is how we "make sense" of them. We categorize and analyze and at some point there is an "AH-HAH!" moment when all the arrows point in the same direction or there is some magical ratios of bulls to horses. We think, "Now we understand!"...now that we have "dissected" and analyzed to a pulp. Maybe this is what the Paleolithic artists, all prehistoric artists, intended but they conceived of it in a holistic and symbolic way.  It's a paradox really. If modern people apply a strictly scientific understanding (as our culture would encourage) the art loses its cultural value, but if we only stand in awe we similarly lose an element of cultural value.  I think the real value comes not in understanding the art itself but understanding its relation to ourselves.  

In the modern world I think we conceptualize of art in a different way than our ancestors. We analyze and make sense in order to gather up experiences: we becomes experience mongers in a sense. What I mean is that we make sense of what we experience and then we spit back up bits and pieces as inspiration for a poem or  song or a painting, whatever. We are not "embedded" in the experience and we are absolutely not comfortable with things not making sense, even if our experience itself was elusive. We do not readily accept "ideas without exact reference which nevertheless have a compelling force of truth" (179).

This form of making sense is perhaps best represented in our quest to bring literacy around the world. This is the absolute be all and end all of making sense: we're making sense of the human mind, of the very thing that for a long time defined what it meant to be human: language. We break it down, assign discrete arbitrary symbols to represent words or ideas and associate them with specific meanings. In the end we fill up dictionaries full of these things and yet we seem to realize that many words mean different things to different people, words like love, beauty, fear, etc. They don't always make sense.

The reality is that at some point we have to stop making sense. To tell you a very personal story, at one point in the recent past I was completely in love with two different people. You might not understand this (you probably really can't just because you don't know me well enough and you don't know who I was in love with...but what I mean is that you might not be able to conceptualize how someone could be in love with two people). I kept trying to explain it other people and to myself, but I couldn't ever seem to really grasp the heart of how I felt. I couldn't put it in words. David Byrne's album title kept running across my brain. I realized that sometimes life doesn't make sense. You know the cliche sometimes bad things happen to good people... and when we try to impose a category or force an explanation it doesn't always fit. The human experience of life does not always make sense. Period.

Coming back to prehistoric art, I'm not saying we shouldn't try to make sense of it. In fact, I think there is something inherently valuable in the act of interpretation itself. But what we should realize is that these artists are past incarnations of ourselves, we are not isolated from them. There is no us and them...As Krisnamurti says, time is illusory. We are them.