A&O note: Listening Angels

ART & ORGANISM

note on 

LISTENING ANGELS

In the tension between INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION, one phenomenon is the extent to which we internalize the voices of others.  This happens as nonconscious incidental learning or intensely consciousness close attention to the words of a caregiver, or mentor.   It can be tuned by intersubjectivity–phenomenology’s term for the finding of shared aspects of who we are. 

Diary note/reflection.  I have he common experience of passing a colleague in the hallways of work and asking “How are you doin’?”  – “Fine.” –   And then, for no obvious reason, I sometimes ask, “You sure?” – and my colleague can choose to go beyond the socially constructed custom.  I’m asking for a “check-in.”

Scholars sometimes speak of the “social construction of reality” – the construction of our “selves”–  and we do this first by observing others and then by interacting with them.   To become wholly ourselves  —to fully manifest our authentic selves—  we must have countless shared exchanges.

 Before the dead hand of habit has turned many of us into sleepwalkers, social automatons, we must rediscover the enriching joy of genuine connectedness with our cohabitants in the net of time and space we call our lives.  

And we begin by getting to know our neighbors.   We need to know about each other, what others see, think, feel.  How they are likely to act . . .

Someone once wrote that  Manhattan is a city of  “conversations overheard,” of  “people reading over your shoulder on the subway train.”

Well, I lived on that crowded island for several years and learned the meaning of that observation.  I learned that a few human habits that I thought were peculiarities of overcrowding were, in fact, givens of human nature.  And part of that given is a need to connect.  As in the John Prine song, “Hello in There, hello”   —I am a biologist and one of the things I’ve learned is that there a whole areas of the human brain dedicated to creating, interpreting, and appreciating social signals.   

I am also interested in the tensions (and convergences) of art and science and I have always been troubled by a famous aphorism by one of the fathers of physiology, Claude Bernard: “Art is I, Science is we”  – But I also believed with John Donne that “no man is an island” By that reasoning,  “I is we.”  

We can’t be alone because we have internalized those we love (as well as those we hate) — we are not necessarily like them but they affect us, they are there.  And the ones whose judgments we value.  With respect to the creative artist, Goethe may have written that ‘talent is nurtured in solitude,’ but as Khatchadourian observed speaking of artists, “good art often blossoms out of human connection. Basquiat maintained a creative symbiosis with Warhol, as Robert Rauschenberg did with Jasper Johns. Van Gogh believed that his brother Theo was essential to his paintings—’as much their creator as I.’” (quoted by Khatchadourian 2022) ^[i]

Allen Ginsberg had pictures of friends on his apartment wall: he called Jack Kerouac (among others) his “listening Angel.”

George Burns’ listening angel was Gracie, Herman Melville’s was Nathaniel Hawthorne*, Virginia Woolf’s was Katherine Mansfield.  We need to listen and we need to be listened to –even when we speak to ourselves, someplace there are listening angels  –and when you speak you imagine, “this is how Dad would have responded,” or “Mrs Goldman in the third grade,” or “that taxi-driver in Amarillo.”

In the small community of an A&O seminar I hope that all participants can become each other’s listening angels  —We want to be understood but we also speak to understand.  A curious phenomena whereby we understand our own thoughts better after tryng to express them to others.  And so I encourage and relish “checking in.”  I have a favorite line by the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado:  se hace camino al andar – “we make the road by walking” –

 

This is the WISDOM of CHECKING IN.  We become connected — we may or may not laugh and cry together — BUT every check-in helps create the pathways we seek between our own – and each other’s hearts and minds.

In the tension between INDIVIDUATION and SOCIALIZATION, one phenomenon is the extent to which we internalize the voices of others.  This happens as nonconscious incidental learning or intensely consciousness close attention to the words of a caregiver, or mentor.   It can be tuned by intersubjectivity–phenomenology’s term for the finding of shared aspects of who we are. 

Diary note/reflection.  I have he common experience of passing a colleague in the hallways of work and asking “How are you doin’?”  – “Fine.” –   And then, for no obvious reason, I sometimes ask, “You sure?” – and my colleague can choose to go beyond the socially constructed custom.  I’m asking for a “check-in.”

Scholars sometimes speak of the “social construction of reality” – the construction of our “selves”–  and we do this first by observing others and then by interacting with them.   To become wholly ourselves  —to fully manifest our authentic selves—  we must have countless shared exchanges.

 Before the dead hand of habit has turned many of us into sleepwalkers, social automatons, we must rediscover the enriching joy of genuine connectedness with our cohabitants in the net of time and space we call our lives.  

And we begin by getting to know our neighbors.   We need to know about each other, what others see, think, feel.  How they are likely to act . . .

Someone once wrote that  Manhattan is a city of  “conversations overheard,” of  “people reading over your shoulder on the subway train.”

Well, I lived on that crowded island for several years and learned the meaning of that observation.  I learned that a few human habits that I thought were peculiarities of overcrowding were, in fact, givens of human nature.  And part of that given is a need to connect.  As in the John Prine song, “Hello in There, hello”   —I am a biologist and one of the things I’ve learned is that there a whole areas of the human brain dedicated to creating, interpreting, and appreciating social signals.   

I am also interested in the tensions (and convergences) of art and science and I have always been troubled by a famous aphorism by one of the fathers of physiology, Claude Bernard: “Art is I, Science is we”  – But I also believed with John Donne that “no man is an island” By that reasoning,  “I is we.”  

We can’t be alone because we have internalized those we love (as well as those we hate) — we are not necessarily like them but they affect us, they are there.  And the ones whose judgments we value I’ve nicknamed our …

INTERNALIZING THE OTHER:  Focused on women, in The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir (as explicated in Elaine Blair 2019[i])  argued “…that the human consciousness housed in a female body in twentieth-century France is, in certain consistent ways, checked from early childhood in its attempts to project and to act, and is instead pressed to identify with perspectives other than its own—to perceive itself from the outside.

Beauvoir’s notion is akin to W.E.B. Du Bois’s racial double consciousness, the “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” that he had described forty-five years earlier in The Souls of Black Folk. Beauvoir’s was the first attempt to show how consciousness of one’s lower status, of one’s deviance from the norm, can affect women. Though earlier thinkers like Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had made the case for women’s rights, Beauvoir went beyond advocacy: her deep study of the philosophy, psychology, and history of female alterity opened up entirely new channels of thought.” (p.40)

[this is a version of SOCIAL REFERENCING … a principle in child development theory in which an individual establishes coherence & correspondence based on the perceptions of “a more knowledgeable other” to help one select from alternative intuitive impulses.  For example, an infant may “ask,” “how should I feel about this novel experience?”] 

[ALSO: could this phenomenon be an expression of seeking COHERENCE?  Adopting (or changing) a view of one’s self to create greater corroborative consistency?]

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* A letter from Herman Melville’s to his close friend Nathaniel Hawthorn dated November 17, 1851, says, “But, I felt pantheistic then-your heartbeat in my ribs and mine in ours, and both in God’s. A sense of unspeakable security is in me this moment, on account of your having understood my book”