Shimon Hasegawa

If We Percieved Like Goldfish Picasso Would Be Among The Wealthy

Shimon H. — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 23:03:11 +0000

In Plato’s allegory of the human condition, we are tied by chains in a dark cave, able to see a passing parade of objects we think real but which are only cast shadows. Since the Renaissance it has been held that the world is a tangible phenomenon slowly being unraveled by science. An alternative view is that its a mirage, a construct of imagination. A web of ideas, a fabric of our own making.

Stephen Hawking: ‘ we see the universe the way it is because if it were different, we would not be here to observe it.’ And, on a less metaphysical plane, Werner Heisenberg: ‘what we observe is not nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ Or plainly put, what a piece of bread looks like depends on whether you’re hungry or not. Our notion of reality is molded by our parents, schooling and culture. Since we all come from different backgrounds so do our perception of things. That is not to say we experience totally different things but different aspects of those things. The Hindu’s view of a cow in no way corresponds to that of a canning factory meatpacker, and in Instanbul they keep their pigs in the zoo instead of making them into sausages. We build our own models of reality. Even those created by Newton or Einstein or fashioned by Picasso or James Joyce, are merely alternative versions of the same hologram. To alter our particular personal construct requires a substantial leap of imagination as we need to see things from a new angle. And only when this is expressed through a creative action, can it be experienced by others. At which point their perceptions can also change. Tolstoy described it this way: first one had to evoke a feeling in oneself; and having evoked it in oneself by means of movements, lines, colors, or words, then one had to transmit that feeling so others could share the same feelings. When Picasso showed his portrait of Gertrude Stein to someone (probably Alice) they remarked it didn’t look much like her. ‘It will’, prophesied Picasso. Of course not it does. Another oft-quoted story makes the point. Seeing Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at an exhibition opening a man approached Picasso (who was hanging around) and asked why he didn’t paint people the way they looked. ‘Well, how do they look?’ Asked Picasso. The man took a photo of his wife from his wallet and handed it over. Picasso looked at the picture; then handing it back, said,’she is small, isn’t she. And flat too.’ What things look like is a convention not a truth, as how we see things us a weird amalgam of observer and observed. We have to accept the uncomfortable fact that much of what seems real to us is governed by our own perceptions. During his lifetime Van Gogh couldn’t give his paintings away yet eighty years after his death Sunflowers (all a 14 of them) was sold for £24.75 million. The painting hadn’t changed but the aesthetic and visual attitudes had. Now the artworld considers there is a string possibility that is is a fake. Naturally the owners, a Japanese Corporation, won’t even countenance such allegations.

Of course you may find all this sort of thing a bit tedious and prefer to be a goldfish. The awareness of a goldfish is about 4 seconds, so it never gets bored as each trip around the bowl is a new journey. A condition which has advantages.

If You Want the Rainbow, You Gotta Put Up With the Rain

Shimon H. — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 22:40:09 +0000

If you’re in a hole don’t keep digging – look around. Then get the bits and pieces into some kind of order so as to point up to the problem. Sometimes it comes easy, other times it’s like confining jelly with a rubber band. Anyway, once achieved, the next move is to head off along the most promising route. The solution may become evident or you can end up in an exasperating period of hiatus when, despite trying this and that, the answer remains elusive. Hopefully he germ of an idea eventually peeps through, but before leaping on it with relief let it incubate for a while. Here the mind works on the idea in some mysterious way. Either the potential evaporates, in which case you have to start all over again, or it emerges (said Henry James) with ‘a firm iridescent surface, and a notable increase in weight’. Designing looks easy if you don’t know how, difficult if you do.

Underlying Foundations of Modesty

Shimon H. — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 20:10:34 +0000

It is best not to pretend to know all about everything. Even if they do know something, cultivated people do not advertise the fact. It is the bumpkin who talks as though he knows everything. Even if one is outstanding in some way, to think of ones self as impressive is unbecoming. It is better not to talk much about what one knows, not to speak of it unless asked.

When ignorant people make assessments of others and think that they know others know, they cannot be right. For example, when someone who lacks intelligence but is good at chess sees intelligent people who are not good at chess, he thinks they are not as smart as he is. And when he sees people who are skilled at all sorts of arts but don’t know how to play chess, he thinks he is better than they are. This is a big mistake.

A capacity for cerebral acrobatics so the mind can juggle

Shimon H. — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 08:58:52 +0000

Trying to explain how to ride a bicycle is notoriously difficult; the same lies between experience and theory in describing the design process. To find my mind defining design as problem solving smacks more of routine procedures than creative thinking. What really motivates designers is the pleasure of plying around with problems. That’s a private game, so if you a a designer how they came up with an idea, you’ll probably hear what they think you expect to hear. [They are too embarrassed to confess they've enjoyed mucking around with whatever it is.]

Anything from ‘It just popped in the head’ to ‘levitating by reversing polarities like a llama’. Design is what happens between the thought and the action. I try to sum up the situation, back in edgeways, cut against the blas, and cast around for ideas which to hang further ideas. It’s an intuitive process involving search, discovery, recognition, evaluation, rejection or development.

There are no specific rules or penalties.

One might slip though a sequence of actions in seconds or sweat through step by step/ Start backwards, move randomly from one point to another, or do what surfers call ‘hang ten’ – get your toes into the board and ride the waves.

However there are some essential conditions. A capacity for cerebral acrobatics so the mind can juggle while freewheeling around the possibilities. A mind-set which has the credulity of a child, the dedication of an evangelist and the spadework of a navy. Above all a motivation to keep on trying and being prepared to kiss a lot of frogs before finding a prince. All of which is dedicated to one end. To achieve that ‘condensation of sensations’ which, Matisse said, ‘constitutes a picture’.

Contemplative Rant

Shimon H. — Sat, 03 Dec 2011 02:43:29 +0000

Our identity is a tricky business. Human cells are constantly being renewed and those which now constitute our persona are quite different from those of ten years ago. Thus the cells of our body are a great deal younger than we are. So although we think we’re the same person, it could be an illusion to which we are attached through habit.

There’s No Recollection of What We Saw

Shimon H. — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 08:40:08 +0000

To imagine is like flying a kite. The mind, loosely tethered, is free to be blown about. Usually the direction it takes just happens but sometimes by tweaking the string it can arrive at an unlikely destination. Take Einstein who, struck with the thought of riding on a shaft of light in outer-space while looking at himself in the mirror, interpreted the imagery to come up with the principles of his theory of relativity.

Imagination, an unimaginative person wrote once, is what happens when a drunk loses his watch and has to get drunk again to find it. Although fantasy and make-believe flourish in childhood they rapidly atrophy as one is molded to fit the adults grey consensus of reality. A child, out on a walk with its mother, suddenly points and cries out, ‘look, a purple cow’. The mother, perhaps rather tired and domestically harassed, snaps, ‘don’t be silly’ and then delivers the crunch line:

‘There is no such thing as purple cows.”

So the child, a vagabond in the backwoods of rationality, is brought up to see the world in the prosaic terms of grown-ups and eventually forgets he ever saw a purple cow.

Now purple cows walk around unseen by anyone.

We are living fossils

Shimon H. — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 20:11:17 +0000

Our inner ear bones have developed from those of our jaws when we were ancient fish. As embryos we still show vestiges of tail and gills. We are living fossils carrying a heritage within us that goes back to the beginning of humanity and far beyond that.

Nonetheless our recollection of the past is pathetic. Few even know the names of their four pairs of great grandparents or even of their grandparents. I don’t either – I find that sad

Heraldry is an expression of its past.

Obviously a classy genealogy is more desirable than a dubious one. The more illustrious ancestors you can muster the greater the implications of wealth, social importance and personal grandeur.

The catch is that there is only a one in eight possibility of inheriting a gene from a great grandparent, you don’t have to be a genius to figure out that one set of genes is rapidly diluted, or more accurately phased, recombined, every generation. Furthermore, it so happens that you probably share an ancestor who lived a couple of hundred years ago with the next-door neighbor. Sorry, but that’s how it is.

And if one unravelled a family line all the way back to the time of B.C. and A.D. met each other, and counted up the forebears – ech of us would probably have had as many direct ancestors as there were people living in the world at that time.

We are a family of man.

Beware of Artists, For They Are Found In Every Class

Shimon H. — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 22:26:13 +0000

Ambrose Bierce, a journalist in San Francisco in the 1880s, described creativity, in the prose style of his time, as ‘that particular disposition of the intellectual faculties which enables one to write poetry like Hector Stuart and prose like Loring Pickering; to draw like Carl Browne and paint like Mr. Swan; to model like the immortal designer of the Cogswell statue or the Lotta fountain; to speak like the great O’Donnell…’ Parodying a commonly held view that creativity is something some are born with and others not. Actually it could be that everybody has creative potential but that some seem able to access this more easily than others.

The barrier is inhibition-not wanting ‘to make a fool of oneself’.

No one seems to know where creativity comes from or how it works. ‘I have thought about the nature of this creative process’, wrote scientist William Beck, and have reached a somewhat aberrant conclusion. I don’t understand it and I don’t think anyone else does either.’ Certainly those who tru to pin it down only come up with unintelligible answers to what is probably an unanswerable question. Poet A.E. Housman said he could no more define poetry than a terrier could define a rat. And somebody else, although I can’t recollect who, lucidly explained it as ‘a leap across a chasm not bridgable by reason’. For those who find that inadequate I can only recommend the Fortune Cookie message which declares: ‘the answer you seek is in an envelope.’

However, when it comes down to where creativity operates, things get clearer. I think Arthur Koestler got it right when he said it was in ‘the absurd, the useful and the beautiful’.

Humor makes us laugh. Discovery makes us understand. Art makes us marvel.

Contemplative Rant

Shimon H. — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 06:14:36 +0000

The thing about my moments of zen is that it pushes contradictions to their ultimate limit where one has to choose madness and innocence. And this moment of mine suggests that I may be driving toward one or the other on a cosmic scale. Driving toward them because, one way or the other, as a madman or an innocent, I’m already there. it might be good to open my eyes and see.

Its Going to Rain Because My Corns Hurt

Shimon H. — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 02:05:02 +0000

Carl Jung maintained there are only two types of basic personality: those who react to external situations by giving a measured thoughtful response, and those who react to internal stimuli and give a knee-jerk response.

Most of us oscillate between the two.

The differences in personality are determined by the swings and roundabouts of thinking. Diagramming this with the Yin Yang symbol, Jung suggests personalities are shaped by feelings and thoughts, while sensations color the details and intuition interprets the currents.

☗Feeling: looking though a telescope an astronomer grumbled that it was going to rain. His assistant asked how he knew. ‘Because’, said the astronomer,’my corns hurt.’

☗Thought: ‘in thinking’, wrote Plato, ‘the soul is talking to itself.’

☗Sensation: two people can look and marvel over the same star but nobody ever shared a splitting headache. Sensations can be exclusive

☗ Intuition: ‘my hand is simply “a tool controlled”‘, said Paul Klee. ‘Its not my head that’s functioning, but something else, something higher and more remote, somewhere.’

☗Conscience: an inner voice which tells us how we are performing. It also warns us that somebody else may be looking in.

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