the artistic impulse

A recent article in the New York Times explains that the impluse to create art could originate with the intimate interaction between a mother and child. Below is a section of the article. A link to the complete article is at the end of the post.

"Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington, Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. By her reckoning, the artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate.

Ms. Dissanayake argues that the creative drive has all the earmarks of being an adaptation on its own. The making of art consumes enormous amounts of time and resources, she observed, an extravagance you wouldn’t expect of an evolutionary afterthought. Art also gives us pleasure, she said, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance.

The most radical element of Ms. Dissanayake’s evolutionary framework is her idea about how art got its start. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions — the intimate interplay between mother and child.

To Ms. Dissanayake, the tightly choreographed rituals that bond mother and child look a lot like the techniques and constructs at the heart of much of our art. “These operations of ritualization, these affiliative signals between mother and infant, are aesthetic operations, too,” she said in an interview. “And aesthetic operations are what artists do. Knowingly or not, when you are choreographing a dance or composing a piece of music, you are formalizing, exaggerating, repeating, manipulating expectation and dynamically varying your theme.” You are using the tools that mothers everywhere have used for hundreds of thousands of generations."



The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start

thanks giving

Yes, I'm thankful Mom has caring people making sure she is as comfortable as possible, well fed and clean. I'm thankful my husband and I and children are here in Detroit and will be sharing dinner tonight with their 80+ relatives. All of this with the pinch of truth that Mom will be without family today as will be so many other elderly people.

There was an article in the newspaper the other day that said depression is a recent phenomena. The human species wouldn't have survived if as many people suffered from depression in our development as today. Connection with other people, family is a huge way to combat depression. Would this blog be necessary if I was surrounded by family as Mom had when she grew up? I think not.

humming along

Our dryer recently gave out on us, and we suffered without it for 4 days until a new one was delivered. Wet clothes were hanging off of backs of chairs, stair banisters, basically every free surface that would provide air circulation. With two kids, we go through what seems like a massive amount of laundry.

Once again, I thought of what a remarkable amount of work Mom did (with no thanks and very little appreciation) every single day. I suppose most women of her generation did the same. How did they do it without going crazy?

With 3 boys, a messy daughter and a husband who came home from digging ditches and working with greasy pipes, laundry was a huge chore for Mom. The remarkable part is that all of our clothes were also crisply ironed and mended, hung neatly in our closets the day after we tossed them on the floor. We never, ever used a towel more than once. Bed linens were clean and though the sheets were not ironed, the pillowcases were starched and ironed. She did all of this on top of keeping a clean and tidy house, home cooked meals that were delicious, and bookkeeping and general management of my dad's business! My only contribution was to vacuum and dust on Saturdays, hang out the sheets on the clothesline when I was out of school (oh yes, we always had sweet smelling, clothes line-dried sheets when weather permitted) and dry the dishes before we got a dishwasher. The boys did nothing, which was fine with her.

Really, I think I would have gone stark raving mad before collapsing from exhaustion. Mom would get fed up with us every once in a while, but mostly she went about her tedious chores, humming some big band song and occasionally adding a dance step or two as she worked.

rest in peace

Recently, an episode of the radio program This American Life told the story of a son who knows of his mother's plan of suicide. She slipped into the grips of dementia and after caring for her own mother who also had dementia, she decided that she did not want to get to that awful point and wanted to commit suicide before that happened. She told her son and asked for his support, though not his active involvement to save him from committing a crime. The son tells of the whole process.

Believe me, I've felt the same way as his mom, I don't want to die that way. But would I be able to take my own life? First of all, once I noticed the signs of dementia, would I even have the ability to do it? It seems so, going by this woman's experience. But could I?

We don't choose the diseases or injuries that befall us, but we figure out how live with them and if lucky, become a better person by learning from the difficulties of coping with them. There are all kinds of inspirational stories out there. I guess I'm an optimist at heart,and I feel like at a core level, I could survive about anything that came my way. I might be miserable and depressed, but I can usually see a flicker of goodness and beauty in almost anything.

I'm struggling to see this with my mother's battle with dementia. I have gained so much by caring for her but I see nothing gained for her. She clearing wants to die and tells me on a regular basis. There are moments of comfort and happiness for her but no ability to savor all the joyful moments in her life. Her cognizant self is but a whisper. What is left is her corporal self and her soul and is cared for in the best, kindest way.

But I'm haunted by her verbal wish to die. Is it the dementia speaking, or a moment of clarity. I, of course, can not make that choice for her. But as dementia takes hold of my brain, and the odds are that it will, will I choose to succumb to this awful disease, that robs one of their humanity? I try not to think of it very often.

Here is the link to the This American Life episode, titled: "How to Rest in Peace".
There are two parts, and a warning: the first act is rather gruesome and tells about a son coming to terms with his mother's murder. Act two is the one I've referred to and it titled: "The Good Son".



This American Life, Episode 342

floated away

Forgetfulness

by Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.