What the author (Peter Plagens) says:

There’s not an ounce of worry in the surreal, cartoony “Open Drawer,” at right. It’s almost gigglingly non-abstract: a big yellow hand opens a drawer with something that might be a brassiere hanging out of it. But the image also contains some serious painterly business: the drips against the empty canvas at the bottom alluding to Pollack, the drawer’s black void turning into brushstrokes at the side to remind you what every painting is made of. Would Kandinsky have approved? Probably-if he could get with the spiritual lurking in everyday life.

Apart from the discovery of a painter I had, until now, never heard of (not surprising really, I’m woefully ignorant about the visual arts) and the wonderful pictures I got to stare at along with Plagens’ interpretations of them, what I liked best about the article was that it made me remember reading Kandinsky’s Point and Line to Plane and how it effected my thinking.

I have long been interested in symbols as condensed elements of meaning, but I hadn’t really considered the elements of the shapes as evocative in and of themselves.  That is, I knew human beings invested meaning in shapes and colors.  I knew we obsessed over, worked with, and meditated about things in the world (both dimensional and abstract) until they were infused with codifications of our history and our minds.  What I hadn’t really considered was how the elements of symbols might effect us: that is, how we were evolutionarily predisposed to be changed by them rather than the other way around. Not that Kandinsky talked about evolutionary predispositions. He didn’t. Rather, what he did have to say made me think about it.

It was Kandinsky and his insights about point, line, plane and colour along with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone and her rule of uprightness (other posts) that got me interested in the rules of the senses: the rules by which the eye (or the ear, or the nose, or the inner-ear and our sense of uprightness) perceive, limit, order and assess the world.

If you don’t have synaesthesia, or another perceptual oddity, art is the thing. (Well, I suppose it is the thing even if you do.) It is, I think, an externalized form of playing with perception: moving from the center of our normal perceptual world to its edges and purposely stepping beyond. It’s one of the best ways I know to learn to experience the world differently, in a way that permanently enlarges the world which you can perceive.

Things, whether words or symbols, carry a (usually) hidden payload of meaning. The specific content of that “payload” is contingent: what books you read, who you meet, what culture you were born into, what films you see, what languages you have learnt to speak, what accidents occur around you, what superstitions you carry, what your parents told you was true. For example, someone I know says that for her, “uprightness” is mostly to do with morality; the word carries a sense of surety and an image of some human being standing tall in his or her goodness. Not for me. Paradoxically, the word triggers an image of a human male slightly crouched over while another postures, flinging his arms back, expanding his torso, his leg stance wide, exposing his groin to view. For this bit of hilarity, I blame Maxine Sheets-Johnstone.

Sheets-Johnstone, in her book The Roots of Thinking, suggests a theory that recognizes the primacy of human movement and body form in the conceptual development of the traits we think of as quintessentially human – things like our bidedalism, but also our concepts, things like art, philosophy and love. Essentially, one trigger for our conceptual evolution was the change in how we saw the world. Literally. Once we got up on two feet, lifted our heads higher from the earth, we got our eyes facing out to the horizon more and more each day. It changed what we saw, what was fodder for our thinking origins not to mention what it did to our pelvis, and the capacity for human females to give live birth to those mutations – big-brained babies. I mean who knows if our lineage produced the occasional big-brained child prior to bipedalism? What’s true is that now matter how potentially good a mutation is for the evolutionary line, it means nothing if the young can’t be born alive. Whatever the truth is, the fossil record strongly suggests that bipedalism was a watershed in the evolutionary potential of Homonids like Ardipithecus and Australopithecus.

The thing I find most delightful about the whole idea of uprightness being the genesis of our evolution into the intelligent, aware beings we are today is what Sheets-Johnstone says may have triggered the upright stance. What she says is that sexual display in males was probably the impulse for this shift. Such a wonderful idea! It reached into my mind and grabbed my attention with such force that I felt it wrap its conceptual arms securely around my idea of how we got to be this way so that I know it is unlikely ever to let go. And now, for me, blown away is the primacy of the moral connotation suggested by that acquaintance of mine.

Think Sheets-Johnstone’s idea is bollocks? Male chimpanzee displays, whether sexual or aggressive, are often augmented by the on-two-feet stance. It makes them suddenly appear bigger, and therefore more intimidating, more powerful. The stance displays the penis as opposed to the on-all-fours position where male sexual traits are hidden. Now think about what a rush of excitement and sense of power does to a penis. It does the same thing in chimps. So when they stand up and display, it isn’t their chests that they are really showing off. Feeling powerful and sexual arousal go hand-in-hand. Think about male ritual displays – war games, sports, etc. – and the reputation those “warriors” have when it comes to women. Think about suddenly facing and surviving danger and what it does to the libido. Aggression, power and desire are linked in the Hominid line and it shows in our behaviours and in our bodily responses.

Another interesting thing: in the on-all-fours position of most primates, the displayed genitalia are female. With the advent of bipedalism, the primary sexual region of the female is hidden and the male’s is frontally displayed. I wonder if this change explains the sexualization of the female breast? We want something to swing too? Especially having gotten used to being the one to display — seriously now, display has a real purpose. Perhaps the changes brought about by uprightness required some adjustments in the female form and male attitude to that form in order to accomplish the original primate goal associated with genital display in females. Of course much of that changed with the advent of hidden oestrus but, I suspect, that also evolved as a response to bipedalism.

As an aside, remember the famous footprints from eastern Africa? When I see graphic representations of the ones who made the footprints, it looks like a male and female pair bond. It may not be a true representation, but still, those pictures, along with Sheets-Johnstone’s theory, made me wonder if hidden oestrus, and indirectly bipedalism, wasn’t the environmental impetus to the development of human pair bonding, which contrasts so much with chimp and bonobo sexual and relationship organization. I mean, what’s a man to do when he can’t tell when a woman is receptive by the colour of her butt? He has to convince her to stay with him so that when she is receptive, he’ll be right there.

I imagine the difference a lack of uprightness would have made to how we perceive the world. Would our ideas of proper “gender” displays for each sex have different content? How many genders would we have? Is the sudden (on an evolutionary timescale) hiddeness of primary female genitalia the reason that our breasts have suddenly become—compared to chimps or other primates—enlarged? Is the use of the penis in a permanently visible display the reason why the human penis is so much larger than any other primate’s?

Uprightness. Stars. Evolution. Spiritual discipline. Ethical choices. Wants and needs. What the body knows. They are all connected in my head, but whatever the term denotes in any given sentence, always underpinning it is that image of the two males in the middle of a symbolic display of evolutionary humanity. Morality, our capacity to think at all, the concepts we form, discard, renegotiate, all these are pinned on the what I have learnt about the origin of our uprightness.

The world of the moving body, like that of the skin is continuous and immediate, but unlike the skin this is a world of spatial extension. It is a world of here and far. It is a world that has a primitive sense of past and future—cause and effect—since many of the possible movements of the body occur consecutively and need recourse to concepts like “before” and “after” or “this-then.”  Like the skin though, this world is complete in itself. It organizes reality as if there were no other.  It is this capacity that makes the various selves (both dominate and non-) so fundamentally independent of each other, yet makes the aware-self (which is completely reliant on the non-dominant selves (in-part the senses) for information about the world) such a dependent entity.

With reference to memory and the pattern of neurons which store memory, according to Rita Carter, concepts can be thought of in a similar way. That is, the physical linkages between cells in a neuronal pattern (what Carter calls “unconscious concepts”), which get stronger and stronger with each use or reactivation, when activated to a certain level of energy and “integrated with the general ‘chorus’ of activity in the brain” causes us to become aware of the stored concept—as a concept.  In this way the body, which moving through the world, repeats and repeats and repeats general “knowledge” about sequencing, pattern, movement, cause and effect, etc. creates and stores concepts that our aware selves take to be the product of itself thinking and reflecting.  But, in fact, they are the body thinking.