What we believe

about a week ago my friend Jay told me a fascinating story. his uncle had to have his pacemaker replaced and while the uncle was on the operating table he died for about twenty minutes or so. this happened twice.

jay rushed to his uncle's bedside when he was completely back in this world and asked him what had happened.

"nothing his uncle said. nothing at all. there was just black."

"oh," jay said, "wow, nothing at all? how disappointing. "

"yeah, it was disappointing, there was no white light, no angels, my father was not waiting for me, there was just blackness and these two mayan indians standing next to me telling me not to answer this kid that was calling me to come over to him. he was the next door neighbor who had commtitted suicide a while back and he was there, sitting on a fence, calling me to come over to him, and the mayan indians, two men, kept telling me to ignore him and not to go to him. finally the kid turned around and his face was half gone. it was gruesome and sad. the indians told me to turn away, that he was dead and it was not my time."

Jay was astonished. and we who were listening to the story were astonished and blown away. funny version of nothing, i thought. And i have been ruminating on this ever since. We have these amazing, inexplicable brains, they process thought, emotion, sensations and then make stories so that we can make sense of things and we believe our stories so completely it seems we don't let ourselves open to new ideas even in the in between world. that is wild!!

when the priest came into the hospital room jay's uncle really was mad with him. he accused him of lying to him all these years. there is no after life etc etc..

Jonah Lehrer, in his excellent book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, explains similar phenomena over and over again in essays about art and the science of the brain. Here, in an essay about Cezanne, he shows us how Cezanne's paintings, the dabs of color and thin lines depict what the eyes really see, the mind fills in the rest. he explains the subjectivity of sight scientifically.....

"as Cezanne understood, seeing is imagining. the problem is that there is no way to quantify what we think we see....the shocking fact is that sight is like art. What we see is not real. It has been bent to fit our canvas which is the brain. When we open our eyes, we enter into an illusory world, a scene broken apart by the retina and re-created by the cortex.... It is art, and not science, that is the means by which we express what we see on the inside. The painting, in this respect is closest to reality. It is what gets us closest to experience..."

-PROUST WAS A NERUOSCIENTIST. Johan lehrer. pgs 112-119.

this book is so fascinating. i highly recommend it. he shows how the "human brain has been designed to believe itself.." pg 70.

it seems that actually we really have no idea what exists and what doesn't because we can only see what we believe in. Clearly we have made agreements in society about what we are seeing but even that is subjective. try and describe a shade of red to someone and get them to point out that exact color. almost impossible. we agree on red but the shades and variations slip past the agreement.

so maybe that's why i'm making these images with angels all wrapped in light. i'm trying to push the edges of what i can see. what i believe. and they are how i see. my interpretation of how i see. what i believe. i'm trying to give my own dream the slip.

here are the images. it's subjective. make of them what you will. oh and talk about subjective, an acquaintance was visiting the other day and she said to me, "oh but you do all this superimposing in photoshop etc.." i was dismayed.

so for the record. these are shot with a pinhole camera on polaroid film and minimally burned, dodged, toned in photoshop. less than i would have done in a dark room. that's the truth, no matter what you believe!


xx
iva