Month: November 2010

Rollo May’s My Quest for Beauty

I’ve been absorbed in Rollo May’s My Quest for Beauty: … heroes and ecstasy, a personal story of redemption for several days now. I’ve taken so many notes that it’s going to take a while to sort out my ideas, but this passage from late in the book struck me as a perfect example of the kind of peak-experience that Maslow was talking about in his book:

We arrived in Chamonix after dark. Our room in the inn had a large picture window to the southeast, and in the darkness we could see the vast dark lines of Mt. Blanc, silent lord of the entire horizon. On the windowsill of the room was the customary box of geraniums which made a foreground over which we could feel and dimly see the presence of the great mountain.

The next morning I sat on the windowsill for half an hour intensely concentrating on the mountain peak. I cleared my mind of everything and held my gaze stead- ily on the great cone of glowing snow. As I gazed for the first part of the half hour, Mt. Blanc remained a realistic mountain, pure ivory white, incredibly beautiful against the deep blue of the morning sky.

Then, as I continued to concentrate on it, the mountain gradually changed before my eyes into another form. It became abstract. It was now, as the underlying form emerged, composed of disembodied squares and circles and planes. I loved it still, as I love the cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque in the first decade of this century. The mountain form seemed to be painted on a canvas, it was disembodied, pure form with no weight or movement. Or one could as easily say, the mountain form was all weight and all movement; with living form it does not matter, as Brancusi illustrates in his sculptures of a golden line soaring up from its base which he rightly calls “Bird in Flight.”

But as I continued to concentrate steadily on it, this weightless form gradually changed again. The vast mountain took on a body, now organic, three-dimensional. It became a new being on a new level. Now I saw it in a living depth. The glowing ivory forms had come together again into an organism, not personal but

neither was it impersonal. It seemed to be pure form. I felt more than saw an embodied structure, now an ultimate form, part of the universe as I was also. The mountain, like myself looking at it, embodied a uni- verse of beauty and meaning.

Since that day, this experience of my concentration on Mt. Blanc has remained vivid in my mind. Back in New York, later, when I looked out the window of my office on the 25th floor high above the Riverside Drive, I saw in the delicate skyline of New York also pure form-now pure lace. The clouds above the city like- wise assumed the forms I had seen in Chamonix, and as I walked home at night the giant elm trees on Riverside Drive took on this same significant form, all part of the same universe.

This experience of living forms, this embodied being, took me out of myself. Whenever I called it out of the past and into my mind again, it gave me a new experience which was beyond living or dying. The feeling was oceanic, as Freud or Einstein would say; it was my participation in the Being of the universe.

Such an experience cannot be said to exist only in my imagination, nor is it solely a kind of “telepathy” emerging from Mt. Blanc. The experience is both inner and outer, both subjective and objective. It is a fusion of my imagination and the emanating form of the mountain.

This is an illustration of ecstasy. The word comes from the Greek ex-stasis, meaning to stand outside of, or above. It is also self-transcendent. It gives one the experience of going beyond, or absorbing the old self, and a new self, or more accurately an enlarged self, takes its place. To put it in psychoanalytic language, my ego was not denied but absorbed. My self was enlarged by participation in a new being which happened in this case to be the form of Mt. Blanc.

I’ll have to admit this passage probably struck me so strongly because it reminded me of a print I’ve had hanging in my house for 26 years. I bought it right after my divorce from my first wife. I couldn’t afford furniture, even a bed or chest-of-drawers, but I knew I had to have this picture the moment I saw it. I stapled it to the bedroom wall, and it stayed there for ten years until Leslie finally bought a frame for it.

Mountain Peaks Watercolor

It also struck me that most of my own peak-experiences have taken place while hiking or backpacking in the mountains. Perhaps that’s to be expected from someone who grew up in Mt. Rainier’s shadow and who loves Japanese mountain prints. May’s book made me wonder how much those peak-experiences were influenced by the art I love, both poetry and paintings. I suspect they are so interlinked that it would never be possible to know how important one area is.

Cosmic Zoom

Maslow’s emphasis that in peak experiences “the whole universe is perceived as an integrated and unified whole” reminded me of how I felt when I first saw this Canadian short film while taking a film-making class at Portland State:

Watching it may not have been a peak experience, but it was certainly one of those “aha” artistic moments when an artist expresses a thought you’ve held but never quite been able to articulate. The power of the spell it cast on me is attested to by the fact that reading Maslow immediately made me think of the movie, and I could still remember it vividly enough to find it after a short search on the web (with a little help from friend Mike).

Great Egret

I’m in the middle of Rollo May’s My Quest for Beauty and more interested in reading than commenting at the moment. Normally I would have been out taking pictures Monday or today, but with a steady rain falling the last three days and rain and snow forecast for the rest of the week, it doesn’t look like I’m going to get a chance to get out and take pictures at least until Sunday.

So, I’m forced to fall back onto these not-so-Great Egret pictures I took last Wednesday. This was actually the closest I’ve gotten to a Great Egret in quite awhile, so I naturally snapped away again and again. Though none of the shots are as good as some shots I’ve gotten in the past in California, I’d never pass up a chance to get a shot of one, whether it’s stalking it dinner,

Great Egret

gulping it’s dinner,

Great Egret with Fish

or just flying off to a nearby snack bar.

Great Egret

It’s whiteness makes it a startling beautiful, but it also makes it difficult to get a really good shot without perfect lighting. More often than not the whole bird turns completely white unless you adjust the colors, which, as a result, makes it appear dingier than it actually is.

The Poetic Peak-Experience

It goes without saying that poetry is a foci of my life. So it shouldn’t be too surprising that I wondered how Maslow’s peak-experiences might relate to poetry. As such, I was particularly intrigued when the author of What are the Peak Experiences of Self-Actualization? suggests

Peak experiences have been given many different names by many different people, including ecstatic experiences, peak experiences, spiritual experiences, and in Buddhism it is called Santorin. In Psychiatry, they are sometimes called bipolar manic episodes.

This passage immediately brought to mind William Witherup who I just finished reading and, of course, Theodore Roethke. A quick glance on the internet produced a much longer lists of poets who are often thought to be bipolar: Bipolar poets. Why is that so many of the poets I love were bipolar? Surely not because I’m bipolar. If anything, I tend to be rather even keeled. (I like to say that’s ’cause I’m just deeper than most people 🙂 I wonder if these poets help me to better see moments in my life that I’ve actually shared with them. Or, is it simply a desire on my part to be more emotionally involved than I really am?

I think it’s also significant that Maslow found himself resorting to “poetic,” rather than more traditional objective, scientific language as he pursued his research.

In trying to elicit reports of peak-experiences from reluctant subjects or from non-peakers, I evolved a different kind of interview procedure without being consciously aware that I had done so. The “rhapsodic communication,” as I have called it, consists of a kind of emotional contagion in isomorphic parallel. It may have considerable implications for both the theory of science and the philosophy of education.

Direct verbal description of peak-experiences in a sober, cool, analytic, “scientific” way succeeds only with those who already know what you mean, i.e., people who have vivid peaks and who can, therefore, feel or intuit what you are trying to point to even when your words are quite inadequate in themselves.

As I went on interviewing, I “learned,” without realizing that I was learning, to shift over more and more to figures of speech, metaphors, similes, etc., and, in general, to use more and more poetic speech. It turns out that these are often more apt to “click,” to touch off an echoing experience, a parallel, isomorphic vibration than are sober, cool, carefully descriptive phrases.

Not surprisingly, figures of speech, metaphors, and similes are also used to describe religious experiences (unless you believe that all such descriptions have to be taken literally) because they cannot be described “directly.”

Maslow goes on to describe how he even became a “teacher” in his research:

We are taught here that the word “ineffable” means “not communicable by words that are analytic, abstract, linear, rational, exact, etc.” Poetic and metaphorical language, physiognomic and synesthetic language, primary process language of the kind found in dreams, reveries, free associations and fantasies, not to mention pre-words and non-words such as gestures, tone of voice, style of speaking, body tonus, facial expressions-all these are more efficacious in communicating certain aspects of the ineffable.

This procedure can wind up being a kind of continuing rhapsodic, emotional, eager throwing out of one example after another of peaks, described or rather reported, expressed, shared, “celebrated,” sung vividly with participation and with obvious approval and even joy. This kind of procedure can more often kindle into flame the latent or weak peak-experiences within the other person.

The problem here was not the usual one in teaching. It was not a labelling of something public that both could simultaneously see while the teacher pointed to it and named it. Rather it was trying to get the person to focus attention, to notice, to name an experience inside himself, which only he could feel, an experience, furthermore, which was not happening at the time. No pointing is possible here, no naming of something visible, no controlled and purposeful creation of the experience like turning on an electric current at will or probing at a painful spot

.

Despite what Maslow says, I think that this is precisely the kind of teaching that English teachers, and art teachers, and ?, do. Perhaps that’s why it’s so tough and why so many kids resist it. What other way is there to teach poetry or art? The attempt to use rational, analytic, linear language to “explain a poem” destroys the poetry for many readers – including myself.

Naturally, I also found this statement

The ethologists have learned that if you want to study ducks and to learn all that is possible to know about ducks, then you had better love ducks. And so also, I believe, for stars, or numbers, or chemicals. This kind of love or interest or fascination is not contradictory of objectivity or truthfulness but is rather a precondition of certain kinds of objectivity, perspicuity, and receptivity. B.love encourages B-cognition, i.e., unselfish, understanding love for the Being or intrinsic nature of the other, makes it possible to perceive and to enjoy the other as an end in himself (not as a selfish means or as an instrument), and, therefore, makes more possible the perception of the nature of the other in its own right.

by Maslow particularly intriguing. We don’t think of “love” when we think of “scientist,” but once we start to think about it we realize that the great scientists are those who love their subject, though it’s often restated as “having a passion” for their work.

I’m sure that my increasing understanding of birds and my ability to get better and better shots has flowed from my love for them. I no longer bother claiming that a particular bird is a a “favorite.” I love them all; they’re all favorites. I’m not sure if they know that or not, but without a doubt it has improved the quality of my photographs.