others.”
The longer I sat in Greenacre Park, the more thoughts of other hours I’d spent in nature enveloped me. The act of remembering can itself create a greater silence, wrapping the present in layers of the past that sound doesn’t penetrate.
At last I rose and walked on to 1221 Avenue of the Americas, a pocket park that allows you to walk through a plastic tube that takes you “under the waterfall.” It’s a bit too gimmicky, but it’s still a welcome respite from the street.
PICTURES OF PAINTINGS
I was very close to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was a Friday and I knew the museum would be a madhouse, so instead I found a random stoop nearby, plopped down, and drew out the postcards I’d brought with me on my walk: small, pocket park— style reproductions of works by Giotto, Vermeer, Chardin, and Hopper. I stared very hard at the images. After a time, the stillness of a certain work of art will communicate itself, apart from specifics of the artist’s vision. The bustling din on the street around me began to subside. I’m a skittish meditator, but there are numerous ways to achieve the silent states of mind thatstereotypically come through closed eyes and open palms. We all can find something that stills our mind when we concentrate upon it.
The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot once made a peculiar but fascinating observation about what happens to us when we stare at a painting. He said that the beholder of a work of art is like a Deaf man watching mutes sign on a subject known to him. The metaphor suggests that staring at a painting places us in a communicative silence. (Not every work of art has this provocative effect. Diderot was also one of the first thinkers to focus on the problem of visual noise. He described the paintings of François Boucher, master of louche frivolity, as creating “an unbearable racket for the eye.” They are, Diderot said, “the deadliest enemy of silence.”)
Certain paintings and sculptures can trick time. And if we lose ourselves gazing on a work of art, we may find a glimmer of the experience Keats had before the Grecian urn: “Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.”
THE ENDANGERED SILENCE OF PAINTING
We all like to learn more about what we’re looking at, but when is the last time you found yourself able to stand for any length of time before a great painting without either your own handset or the insect murmurings of another visitor’s electronic guide? You may learn a great deal, but you won’t come to know “the foster child of Silence and Slow time,” as Keats put it.
There’s a still more frightening cognitive question that’s beingraised by some researchers in the new field of neuroaesthetics. We know that the architecture of our brain circuitry dramatically shifts with repeated experience. Two primary modes of visual processing are the so-called “vision-for-action channel” that takes place in the dorsal processing stream, and the “vision-for-perception channel” that transpires in the ventral processing stream. Computer and video games, along with other televisual formats, trigger the former almost exclusively. Crudely put, this means that what is seen sparks an instinctual reaction (a physical motion on the joystick, for example), rather than mental reflection. Overstimulation of the dorsal processing stream means that eventually vision demands a moving target in order to focus. Basically, as one recent study suggests, if a child accumulates untold numbers of “pictorial micro-interactions with moving images,” he or she may lose the neurological ability to explore a static painting. Without repeated exposures to unmoving, quiet works of art, the inner silence that can be transferred by that stillness is lost on the individual. The unheard music simply goes unheard.
PLACES OF WORSHIP
When I finally rose from my stoop and stowed my pictures back in my pocket, I went to church. There are many
The longer I sat in Greenacre Park, the more thoughts of other hours I’d spent in nature enveloped me. The act of remembering can itself create a greater silence, wrapping the present in layers of the past that sound doesn’t penetrate.
At last I rose and walked on to 1221 Avenue of the Americas, a pocket park that allows you to walk through a plastic tube that takes you “under the waterfall.” It’s a bit too gimmicky, but it’s still a welcome respite from the street.
PICTURES OF PAINTINGS
I was very close to the Museum of Modern Art, but it was a Friday and I knew the museum would be a madhouse, so instead I found a random stoop nearby, plopped down, and drew out the postcards I’d brought with me on my walk: small, pocket park— style reproductions of works by Giotto, Vermeer, Chardin, and Hopper. I stared very hard at the images. After a time, the stillness of a certain work of art will communicate itself, apart from specifics of the artist’s vision. The bustling din on the street around me began to subside. I’m a skittish meditator, but there are numerous ways to achieve the silent states of mind thatstereotypically come through closed eyes and open palms. We all can find something that stills our mind when we concentrate upon it.
The French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot once made a peculiar but fascinating observation about what happens to us when we stare at a painting. He said that the beholder of a work of art is like a Deaf man watching mutes sign on a subject known to him. The metaphor suggests that staring at a painting places us in a communicative silence. (Not every work of art has this provocative effect. Diderot was also one of the first thinkers to focus on the problem of visual noise. He described the paintings of François Boucher, master of louche frivolity, as creating “an unbearable racket for the eye.” They are, Diderot said, “the deadliest enemy of silence.”)
Certain paintings and sculptures can trick time. And if we lose ourselves gazing on a work of art, we may find a glimmer of the experience Keats had before the Grecian urn: “Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought / As doth eternity.”
THE ENDANGERED SILENCE OF PAINTING
We all like to learn more about what we’re looking at, but when is the last time you found yourself able to stand for any length of time before a great painting without either your own handset or the insect murmurings of another visitor’s electronic guide? You may learn a great deal, but you won’t come to know “the foster child of Silence and Slow time,” as Keats put it.
There’s a still more frightening cognitive question that’s beingraised by some researchers in the new field of neuroaesthetics. We know that the architecture of our brain circuitry dramatically shifts with repeated experience. Two primary modes of visual processing are the so-called “vision-for-action channel” that takes place in the dorsal processing stream, and the “vision-for-perception channel” that transpires in the ventral processing stream. Computer and video games, along with other televisual formats, trigger the former almost exclusively. Crudely put, this means that what is seen sparks an instinctual reaction (a physical motion on the joystick, for example), rather than mental reflection. Overstimulation of the dorsal processing stream means that eventually vision demands a moving target in order to focus. Basically, as one recent study suggests, if a child accumulates untold numbers of “pictorial micro-interactions with moving images,” he or she may lose the neurological ability to explore a static painting. Without repeated exposures to unmoving, quiet works of art, the inner silence that can be transferred by that stillness is lost on the individual. The unheard music simply goes unheard.
PLACES OF WORSHIP
When I finally rose from my stoop and stowed my pictures back in my pocket, I went to church. There are many
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