Metaphors on Vision

"We have art lest we perish from the truth." -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Stan Brakhage has a contextually timely love of humanity's garden state. The excerpt "Metaphors on Vision" is a ponderous, longing ode to the purity and unbounded freedom of ignorance. Brakhage bristles with Rousseau-like wonder at the possibilities of human experience without socialized categorization. This native innocence of labels and names is purported to be a lost Eden of art and childlike wonder, tainted through the introspective lens of an adult's socially organized consciousness, the very memory of this unbound state divorced from the concept of language. We have torn ourselves from pure experience through labeling the natural world, and then further ruined our connection with the natural order through performing much of our personhood through technology.

While Brakhage's Romantic biases may come from a lengthy intellectual tradition, his claims' veracity concerning his two-fold disgust with humanity's interactions with language and technology is debatable.  People experience the world through labels and metaphor because they are wired to perceive, love, and remember patterns. Labels and categories give the natural world the order and logic necessary for human comprehension; the human mind is no more bound by labels than a molecule is limited through the necessity of containing atoms. Language, profuse and adaptable, continuously provides new ways to record and create experience in all nuance and color. Indeed, decades after Brakhage's "Metaphors on Vision", scientists discovered that distinctions in language enhance the ability to perceive subtle differences in color. Labels grow to fill the entirety of human experience, forming additional perceptions of the world that would otherwise be lost.

Brakhage's second issue, the loss of the natural world through technological interference, is  a less straightforward case than language. Brakhage deals in art, truth, and the perception of both. Abstraction of the real, both in language and technology, distills and intensifies the essence of the subject matter. Language categories, while capable of generalization from the particular, create  and preserve meaning.  A life lived through technology is similar in many ways. While there are additional lenses of filtration from the "natural state",  an abstraction and reinterpretation of base reality, there are records of a life lived, and these records have meaning. Art is reality, but it is also, possibly more importantly, the human interpretation of reality and a record of experience. Nietzsche  considered art to be a palatable abstraction from reality, something meaningful and necessary, forming human understanding of reality in a way they could bear.

Surrealist art, through stylization and abstractions of reality, records  the debatable realities humans experience exceptionally well. Jan van Eyck, a Belgian painter, used intense detail, vivid hues, and bizarre fantasy to describe religious settings that seem more real and vivid  than reality itself. This interpreted fervor and shared memory bleeding into myth is exactly the subject matter the assigned essay brought to memory.  Below is an excellent article concerning Van Eyck's Magical Realism themes with large, full color plates of some of my favorite pieces  of his work.  It's definitely worth the read.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3795460?Search=yes&resultItemClick=true&searchText=van&searchText=eyck&searchText=magical&searchText=realism&searchText=art&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3Dvan%2Beyck%2Bmagical%2Brealism%2Bart%26amp%3Bprq%3Dvan%2Beyck%2Bsurrealism%26amp%3Bgroup%3Dnone%26amp%3Bacc%3Doff%26amp%3Bfc%3Doff%26amp%3Bhp%3D25%26amp%3Bwc%3Don%26amp%3Bso%3Drel&seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Color Study Link:
http://m.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full