who guards the gates of eden?

The greatest most implacable foe of humanity sits beside us all the time. It’s boredom and boredom is relentless. You can’t escape it – it’s built in. Without it we couldn’t live here at all, but this major element of our life experience is difficult to control. It comes in handy but can get out of hand. The clanging bell next to your head is quite distracting, but after an hour or so you won’t seem to mind. Early in the day the stockyards have a most pungent odor which disappears by lunchtime. Our perceptual apparatus is geared so that if it doesn’t bite us, fondle us, or feed us, whatever it is begins to fade into the wallpaper.

In dangerous times this boredom mechanism is a lifesaver. You won’t have time to smell the flowers when wolves are in pursuit and the critical things to think about and to be aware of at just that moment don’t want the company. When times are more comfortable boredom doesn’t retire to some back pasture, but instead turns on us and makes us miserable. It takes the joy out of the merry-go-round, reduces music to a thumping din, and drains all the interest out of the ball scores, the scenery, a partner’s conversation. Much of modern life involves various strategies to keep boredom at bay.

Some folks jump from airplanes, climb mountains, or drive too fast. They say they want to feel “alive”. The natural tendency when bored is to turn all the knobs up to nine, to dazzle the eyes with laser shows, and to burn the mouth when dining. Tolerance sets in and we’ve been increasing the dose, searching for more and more stimulation. Finally entertainment is reduced to violence and gore, popular music merges with porn, and tawdry sensation replaces art -- just nod if any of this sounds familiar.

There are common and traditional folk remedies for dealing with boredom and owning and living with original art is probably the most potent. A worthy work of art is capable of capturing your attention and awareness each time your eyes wander in its direction. Once that begins to happen you start to notice other stuff, drifting clouds, flowers in fence rows, nuances of thought and feeling. Art defeats boredom – that’s its job.

rehab tech from the fifteenth century

I’m a rehab technician of the fifteenth century. My specialty is realignment and recalibration of the sensory apparatus. My tools are a flat surface and colors and designs capable of engaging the machinery of recognition and gaining access to the sacred halls of memory. There I knock scale off the lenses, deflate and diminish distortions and errors, and rebalance inside and outside cognitive pressures. It involves techniques developed during the Renaissance to convert medieval thought processes, modes of perception, and notions of reality into modern rationalism. In a major leap forward for civilization painters of that era persuaded their viewers to reinterpret everything they saw in logical terms. It worked very well. Europeans dominated the world for several centuries and their advantage was Aristotle’s cause and effect reality depicted for the masses in visual terms and applied to engineering, chemistry, and commerce.

Painting as a technology has been superseded and its former potency trivialized but the machinery still works. Dusty and piled with centuries of patrician vanity and tawdry commercialism visual art passes the time these days pandering to the cultural tribalism of dynamic wealth, its chariot of mental reconfiguration under canvas out in the barn. Let’s get it out, jerk back that tarp, and find out if it has a role in times such as these. Some things we know already. Whereas everything we possess and enjoy seems to fade and diminish with time and familiarity, art instead becomes more potent and more real the more it’s seen. Find a favorite painting in a museum in some large city. Visit it every few years and spend some time looking. Just the second or third time becomes like seeing an old friend and this painting will have more to say each time thereafter. Lots of people who have done it themselves will tell you that. Living with art day to day is obviously even better.

Still we don’t face the same situation as the Europeans of the middle ages. Ours is an age dissolving in binary code as individual selves meld into cloud consciousness and universal connection. Maybe painting could help with that too. The presence of art pries the attention span back out to a level where sunsets, bird song, the smell of home-cooked all begin to enter consciousness again. The individual self emerges and the coercive consensus of the crowd begins to evaporate like morning mist. Original art in the living room is like owning a long-term technical device which changes the person inside instead of just constantly upgrading the peripherals. “Art is a lie which helps you see the truth,” -- this was Picasso’s little joke and it also happens to be true.