"In Front of the Kindagarten" Hans Staub
This is a good one to use as an example. Many of you know about my use of the words feeling and emotion. Feeling being something that emanates from outside of us, registering a mood with our senses. Emotion being something that emanates from within us, being a mood triggered internally from thoughts or from automatic associations launched from an external input.
The problem is that we often confuse these two, and ascribe emotions to the outside situation. We see a child all alone somewhere, and we take that image, and it triggers our own inner aloneness, which we then project to the child, saying, "oh how sad". When in fact the child may just be sleepy and in no sadness whatsoever. We do this all the time - ascribe our emotions onto external objects.
In this picture, what first registers for me as feelings is the softness, the texture of their coats, and the simplicity of the whitish background, the wheels, all giving me the feeling of simple natural and unpretentious pleasure. A feeling I seek in my own life, from what I call 'ramshackle beauty' which I like to create in my home.
But then my emotions begin and I feel a mood of love and happy home life - that these people have a beauty of relationship that is too often missing in the world today.
See what I have done now - I have assumed this image pictures two people who are happy - why? There is nothing in the image to say that. And then I make extensions of mood to picture their home life. For all I know they may have just had an argument, and are engaged in a purely perfunctory parting kiss. Look at the child. S/he is actually quite unemotional, almost disengaged.
And the man is not giving any reason to say he is happy. It is my own inner processes of emotion that for whatever reason has jumped to purely internal imaginations and moods.
Then I end up making an emotional projection about the world, and what it isn't and should be. Not that those projections may not have value, but they have nothing to do with the image - they are flights into abstraction with emotive connotations that are about my own filtering of the world.
There is nothing wrong with this transference from feeling to emotion, but we must be aware when we part company with the external source. The image Rudi put up of poultry says nothing about their happiness, or our responsibility or lack there of, for the world we inhabit. They are a bunch of chooks, and that's all. But that it causes us to reflect about how we acquire our food, is a reasonable extension, so long as we realise we are now in abstract emotive associations. They may be perfectly reasonable reflections and emotions, but that
feeling does not come from the picture - just so long as we know the source of our moods.
The child and the vulture: again there is no sign of anguish on the child's face. I feel a sense of struggle and determination, but what makes me sad and troubled, is nothing emanating from the image itself, but rather what it is telling me about the state of humanity, and what it has done to the world and itself. Its behaviour in light of how I know humanity could be.
I recall the book Snow Leopard, in which the author described different villages he passed through, and how some gave off a healthy wholesome feeling, and others a feeling of decrepit energy. Anyone who has travelled will immediately know what he is speaking of, how one place has vitality, urjong, shakti, and another reeks of despair or degeneration. Humans can create power, or weakness - individually or socially.
That picture speaks of a choice humanity has, and one which is hard to see it is making in the direction of fulling its potential and its place in the matrix of the earth's potential. That is a story for another time, and I usually don't speak of it - we have to walk before we can carry. However you should know that carrying is how muscles are developed - muscles which can be used for a dramatic leap.
All these pictures have their own moods, their own feelings, and even those feelings have to be in us for us to register, but we do travel through a world of feelings. However, best you be absolutely aware, that when these feelings trigger powerful internal emotions, the first consequence is that we shut off the flow of feelings from outside. Emotions isolate us from the universe. They trap us in a cycle of repetitive internal obsessive inflammation, which cuts us off from the most incredible experience of our short life - out there, the passing indescribable.
just so long as you know....
