LANGUAGE, MAGIC, AND MEDICINE
A THESIS BASED ON SEVERAL EXPERIMENTS
AN INTRODUCTION
JULY 30, 2011. This is just a prelude to a much wider discussion.
I have written articles about new types of languages, and I will make another stab at it here.
Let’s directly consider abstract painting. For reference, assume I’m talking about a few of the “easier” painters, like Kandinsky, Motherwell, and Rothko.
We see shapes. We see colors. We see space.
What do they mean?
Well, that’s a rather vague question. It’s obvious these painters couldn’t expect a viewer to feel, sense, know, precisely what they, the painters, felt.
It’s more complicated than that, though, because the painters quite possibly didn’t know what they meant, either, as they were creating on the canvas. In other words, they weren’t striving for exact meanings.
They were operating in non-verbal territory.
All this is enough to infer that the gulf between painter and audience is so wide that the very notion of communicating anything is absurd to begin with. And yet, when certain people stand before one of these abstract paintings, something happens. Something that can’t quite be put into words.
This experience is quite acceptable when it comes to music; no one is expected to listen to a concert of, say, Mozart and then explain what it meant. But with abstract painting, there is more discomfort, and that appears to stem from the fact that we believe the visual should be more definitive—and moreover, when shapes on a canvas remind us even vaguely of language, we expect a “translation.”
And when we don’t find it, we throw up our hands in despair.
We could say, stretching things, that abstract painting is “like a language without conventional meaning.”
By all definitions of language, that’s another absurdity.
We live our whole lives with language, and we know it when we see it. The words have definitions. You can look them up. The words are pronounced in certain ways. Sentences are structured. We have logic (if we ever learn it). Language works. It’s useful.
When we look for something more, we reach for poetry.
How far can we look?
What would happen if two people were “talking to each other in abstract paintings?” What would that conversation be?
WHAT DE-CONDITIONING, IF ANY, WOULD NEED TO TAKE PLACE IN ORDER FOR IT TO HAPPEN?
Suppose the mother of a four-year-old child made a painting on a piece of paper and handed it to the child. They didn’t talk about it. The mother just gave it to the child…and the child caught on…and made a painting in response and handed it to the mother…and this went on, on and off, back and forth….for a number of years. What would develop, regardless of whether it could be articulated by either mother or child?
I say: what would happen is magic.
Intuition. Spontaneous intuition. Over and over.
Of course, mother and child speak their native language. This isn’t substitution or replacement. This is a parallel universe.
No one is there, as they keep exchanging paintings, no one enters a judgment on the quality of the responses back and forth. There is no judgment at all. No discussion.
Now here is my hypothesis:
In this process there is a medicinal aspect, in the sense that metabolism, endocrine production, neurotransmitter outputs, brain pathways would be affected. Not as limitation. Quite the opposite.
Paranormal experiences would occur. If this were to be called telepathy, it would be of a different order than the simple reading of simple thoughts. As the child grew up, he would, more and more, “catch on” to non-verbal overtones and undertones broadcast in people’s spoken (and written) language. Not just the usual extra-tones. Whole new dimensions.
Perception of the physical world would change. Objects would be seen as more than dead things. They would “imply previously invisible aspects of themselves.” The aliveness of nature would be heightened.
Behind it all, imagination would be operating at high, wide, and deep levels.
The neutral, dampened, and “sleeping” internal epicenters of experience/creation would dissolve with the flowing of energy, and an elasticity would come to the fore.
Physical coordination would improve.
Choked off paranormal faculties—the capacity to see into the future and to influence physical matter and energy directly—would surface.
In other words, this “non-verbal language” in action would supply what has been missing in many cultures since the dawn of time on this planet.
We would then see what, despite all our technological triumphs, has been lost and misplaced.
And we would have no more shrinking puzzlement about language that doesn’t fit the habitual mold.
I’ve tried some short-term experiments with “abstract art language,” and the results are promising. At the very least, people have realized the car they were driving, the one they thought had three cylinders, actually had 30…
Blood pressure has normalized. Memory loss has been remedied, to an extent. So-called hyperactive symptoms in a child receded. In one case, the need for hormone therapy reduced—lower dosages of bio-identicals worked just as well.
Sure, in this piece, I’m making claims I can’t prove all the way down the line.. That’s why I called it a thesis. But linking this experiment up with others I’ve done with sound, with guided imaginative “excursions,” as I call them, I’m seeing very large possibilities here—and they all point to the fact that we are speaking and writing language in a very narrow part of a much wider spectrum.
If that is the case, it’s obvious we are operating in a compartment from which we can exit.
Personally, I already knew that for myself, because I made the exit a long time ago, when I started painting—based on an aptitude I’m sure standard tests would have put in the minus range.
So much for cultural measurements. They don’t begin to tap into what is going on in the realm that is the freest and most powerful of all: individual creation. The quality that underpins life.
Magic.
Here is a description of one “case”:
A very bright boy of six was brought to me by his mother. The boy and I talked for a little while, and I saw he was distracted, irritated, dour. His mother had already told me he’d been diagnosed with ADHD (but wasn’t on medication). She said she was having major problems with him. He had frequent sinus infections.
I told the boy I was going to do some drawing, and he could watch me if he wanted to. I spread out a large sheet of paper on my table and opened up boxes of oil crayons and dumped them on the table. I began making shapes on the paper and…just drawing.
After a few minutes, he picked up a crayon and asked me if he could draw, too. I nodded and kept on working. He started in on a blank section of paper and began drawing his own shapes.
We worked side by side for a half-hour or so. He had no problem focusing on what he was doing.
I told him we could make this drawing together if he worked with me long enough. He said okay.
So a couple of times a week, his mother brought him to my studio and he and I kept drawing on the large sheet of paper. At one point, he asked me whether he could draw over my work and change it. I said that would be all right, as long as I could do the same with his work. He agreed.
So we did that. But it wasn’t a struggle. Now and then he would draw over my shapes, and vice versa.
When we were finished, in a month or so, I pinned the paper to the wall and we looked at it. He said he liked it. He said he wanted to do more.
That’s when I suggested we could sit at the table together, and he could make a drawing and give it to me, and then I’d make one and give it to him. He shrugged and said okay.
All in all, we made perhaps 80 drawings apiece…back and forth, over a two-month period.
Then his mother told me his sinus infection had gone away and he was much easier to deal with at home. He was also doing better in school.
At one point, he said to me, “Sometimes I know what you’re going to draw.”
In conjunction with another problem he had, a year earlier, he had received a bran scan…and now he went in for another one. The examining doctor told his mother the changes were extraordinary. Areas that had been suggestive of possible damage were now looking fine.
It was my distinct impression that the boy was benefiting from the drawing, from the exchange of drawings with me, and from the fact that the sheets of paper were new (and free) spaces he could create on in any way he wanted to.
Interestingly, the boy and I felt no need to talk to each other about what our abstract drawings “meant.” We never discussed it. It was given that we were…drawing, and that was enough.
A few months passed. His mother brought him to my studio again. He looked quite healthy. He was friendly. When his mother went for a walk, he told me he was “seeing things” at school. He was seeing how the teacher was “making a list” (in her head) of the students…which ones she favored and which ones she didn’t. When she spoke to one of the favored ones, he saw green and silver shapes and lines moving between her and that student. When she spoke to an unfavored student, the lines were gray and they had “bumps” in them. A few times, he was able to make the gray lines “go away.”
We talked about this for a minute, and then he said that he also saw different colors in the corners of the room. He said they were like “stalls,” and the teacher would “choose” different colors when she was speaking to the class.
The boy was quite calm about all this. He wasn’t in a “fantasizing” frame of mind. He was just reporting, as if he had been to the park and was telling me what he saw.
I asked him whether he thought it was good that he was seeing all this. He said yes, it was helping him. He felt smarter. He wasn’t getting tired in class anymore. He was “learning better.” (In fact, his grades were improving.)
On the playground, he said, he was running faster and “getting better at games.” He could sometimes feel or see things before they happened.
He had one question. Since he was becoming more popular at school, he could just keep on doing what he was doing, or he could “become a leader.” The teacher had talked to the class about “leadership.” He said he had thought about it, and so he made two drawings. He showed them to me.
In one, where he was “just himself,” the shapes and the colors were quite varied. He’d used many colors. There was a sense of motion. The shapes overlapped. In the other drawing, representing “leadership,” the shapes were gray and they were more orderly and similar. They floated in space.
He said he liked the first one better.
I told him I was sure he could answer his own question. He agreed.
We drew together for an hour that day. Occasionally, when I glanced at him, I saw a healthy glow in his eyes. A happiness that people dream about.
JON RAPPOPORT