Travel, and 3 Problematic Metaphors

It has been said that all the plots of all the stories in the world can be distilled into two general themes: (1) a stranger comes to town, and (2) someone, the hero, goes on a journey. All stories worth telling can be seen as being about how we confront change or new situations, whether these come to us unexpectedly or we find or seek them out by purposefully leaving our comfort zone.

This essay on everyday aesthetics is about the second case, going on a journey, or traveling. However, travel offers a window onto the world that, in the right lighting, when the scene behind it becomes obscure--when the strange becomes virtually unknowable, as it can during travel--also becomes a mirror, such that even these two general themes become blurred. Who is the hero? Who is the stranger?

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Travel can be profound. Unlike some of the topics discussed in this blog on everyday aesthetics, Cooking and Eating, for example, travel is not really something we can or want to do everyday. However, it is highly aesthetic, as I will try to show, even though it is not typically considered in the same company as Art. But travel and Art serve the same purposes--providing meaning, making life special, and more deeply appreciating and participating in life.

Three common reasons offered for why we travel are to “lose oneself,” to “find oneself,” and to “see the world.” We will start with these metaphors, then explore how travel encompasses all of these and more, sharing the same purposes as Art, creating an aesthetic experience.

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Some say we travel to “lose ourselves.” And indeed travel--or tourism if we want to make that distinction--is often marketed as an escape from the monotony or burnout related to the daily routines that have built up around us. Images of inclined, swimsuited, happy people on the beach, relaxing with eyes closed or shaded by sunglasses, sipping cocktails in the open air under clear skies, or strolling aimlessly and slowly through a wilderness or historic city, suggest a comforting sort of nothingness as the blessed alternative to overwhelming obligations. In reality, true burnout requires a cure that is the opposite of nothingness. And travel can be one of those cures when the space it opens is filled with an engaging new somethingness, whether relaxing or exhilarating.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

But “losing oneself” is a misleading metaphor. Whatever we lose, we still follow our enigmatic selves into even the most novel situations (much to our gain). Truly losing even a part of oneself requires significant effort, which is just what some try to avoid when they travel. The travel we often engage in might might help us temporarily lose habits, obligations, and relentlessly familiarity, and this is a good thing--unless they are simply replaced by new habits that are equally limiting or even more debilitating.

On the other hand, this is not to say that there is no power in boredom, which rather than being frustrating might just create enough hunger for stimulation that it results in creativity. The effort to temporarily reject habits and remain open-minded to new options–this can release creative energy that is otherwise blocked by preoccupation. It might also release playful energy that has been submerged under the weight of obligations. Clearly, both of these are healthy outcomes, but travel can do more as well.

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Others might say we travel to “find ourselves,” another good but misleading metaphor. These two reasons sound like opposites, and “finding” looks like the proactive and productive one, while the former seems only passive. But they can also be flip sides of the same experience. Losing your current rendition of self creates the opportunity to find other possibilities.

Truly losing oneself requires a great deal of confidence, a willingness to accept and live with uncertainty, and trust that a new self can be found. It also requires a lot of work, both to give up the status quo and to build a new front to face the world, work that few are willing to undertake. Moving to live and work in a new, distant place is especially hard. There is no return ticket ready to take you back to the familiar routine.

“Finding oneself” can mean a lot of things, including adopting new goals, recognizing new strengths and capabilities, finding new perspectives on life and one’s role in it, or discovering a place (geographical or social) where one feels “at home,” where one can fit in, be understood, and apply one’s strengths. Contrary to a surface reading of this metaphor, finding oneself also involves seeing the people around us in new ways, because much of the self is revealed only in the reflections of others. Travel offers the perfect opportunity for all such changes.

Photo by Maja Kuna-Parrish

Travel is about more than changing our physical environment, although this creates significant impacts in itself. The shift from an urban environment to a wilderness, for example, might create a form of eco-shock if you are not used to it. Being close to trees and water and rocks, and mud and brambles and bugs, or larger and even potentially dangerous wild animals--these can call for new internal resources that force us to respond with new resilience, new selves.

However, those not accustomed to distant travels, where cultural differences are obvious, might not be attuned to the possibility that even short travels are also cultural excursions in which we find people who do things differently from us--and get along just fine doing them that way. Whether across town, or across continents, travel can reveal the breadth of possibilities of human experience. With an open mind, the traveler might begin to question her assumptions. Paul Bowles (1949), in his novel, The Sheltering Sky, offered the distinction that while a tourist “accepts his own civilization without question,” an open-minded traveler “compares it with the others and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” In other words, a traveler is open to change, open even to a new self, while a tourist might find cultural differences simply another one of the attractions or a necessary bother worth the suntan. There is a scene in Frank Capra’s film, “It’s a Wonderful Life,” where the young protagonist is planning to leave his small hometown to see the world, and has visited a local luggage shop. He asks for the largest trunk available, holding up his hands to indicate a size equal to his own height and width, assuming the size of the suitcase is proportional to the distance one plans to travel. This is, of course, quite the opposite of those who advocate a “vagabonding” approach to travel, where we leave as much of ourselves behind as possible, making our burden light and leaving space for the new things we are sure to find (for example, see Potts, 2002).

The spirit of travel versus tourism requires “crossing a border,” a significance highlighted by Ryszard Kapusinski (2004/2008) in his illuminating memoir, “Travels with Herodotus.” In his case this was the rarely penetrated border of soviet-ruled Poland, which he crossed more than once as a journalist to find India, Africa, and many other distant lands unreachable by most of his readers. That border, for him and for most of us, is to a great deal also the selves we have erected. “Finding oneself” can happen when crossing a cultural border because this transgression shatters barriers that might bind and blind us.

As someone travels, many parts of selves become available to try on--new ways of speaking, new attitudes, new graciousness, new tolerances, new skills and knowledge. The parts can be taken on incrementally, in a crash course, or not at all, depending on your needs and desires. But you don’t have to lose oneself entirely to find something new and useful. These part-selves can arise from the simplest elements in the new places we explore, both natural and human elements.

When we travel we often allow ourselves to explore the small details of a place, the ones we tend to overlook in daily routines. We might become like children, following the ones that “make the familiar strange,” like when we see something under a microscope for the first time. Following small leads to new experiences, which we have more time and opportunity to do when we travel, can lead to revelations. We might see them only out of the corner of our eye, have them rush past us as we move along like things glanced out the window of a train or moving car. Or they might come smashing us head on, like not knowing how to react in a critical situation such as a major disruption to our plans or difficulty addressing a basic need. The details might accumulate. We might not even recognize the evolving changes in ourselves, like a slow infection. Then one day, we realize we are new.

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Another popular metaphor for why we travel is to “see the world,” to look beyond the limits of oneself. As you might already have guessed, this metaphor is linked to both “losing” and “finding oneself,” because seeing the world is not just seeing new things, but being prepared to see them with new eyes. We all already have a world to see. From our infancy, from the day we are aware, we are already “in the world,” as phenomenologists like Heidegger would put it, partly because we are unavoidably immersed in our social and physical context that so heavily influences how we choose to be (even when we choose to withdrawal from it). Moreover, our consciousness is not really as much self-consciousness, as we are led to believe, as consciousness of the world around us. As phenomenologists might put it, we are aware because we are in the world, and even more so, because we are part of it.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Yet, as the song goes, “there’s such a lot world to see.” There are all the famous sites we have read about and seen in photos, there are all the peoples we have glimpsed in films and heard speaking in strange tongues. There are the mountains, the rivers, the buildings, the landscapes, the seas, the national parks, the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Few do not want to have the experiences of visiting these. For some, it is a matter of collecting them, like books on a shelf. Other people feel incomplete without them. For them, NOT traveling is like living inside a fenced pasture. They need to jump the fence, cross the border, or they know they will be missing out on the wealth of experience available. And it is not just a matter of seeing things, it is feeling and being new things. Finding new sensations, new selves.

These travel-oriented people may also realize just how finite their lives are, and how special moments can be. As Paul Bowles (1949) put it: “How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.” Travel can be a way of refilling the container, extending the finite, and edging toward the limitless.

As the other metaphors imply, travel is also an inward journey. An acid “trip” came to be called that for the journey it can entail. Some disparage travel as a distraction from the most important journeys one can take, the internal ones. As the underrated Beatles song by George Harrison goes (“The Inner Light,” B-side to the more famous Lady Madonna single):

“Without going out of my door
I can know all things of Earth.
Without looking out of my window
I could know the ways of heaven.
The farther one travels
The less one knows”

There’s no place like home. It is not that we do not already have a rich and wonderful world, but that others are also available if we have the urge to look for them.

This talk of losing and finding and seeing the world leads to questions about the substance of a self and a life. Whether a self is defined with the physical boundaries of the skin or the experiential boundaries of a consistent point of view, and whether a life is defined as the sequence of events of an individual self or a process of an evolving interchange between the world and that self, losing oneself is a nonsense proposition. What we really mean when we say we want to lose ourselves is that we want to change how we converse with the world. We want to learn. We want to be enlightened.

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In the end, as useful as the metaphors are, the attraction of travel is better explained in its qualities of aesthetic experience. It often follows the quintessential pattern of artful activity, with a slight twist in that the need, desire, or puzzlement that propels it is often only vaguely defined. In this sense, the conclusion is also open to opportunity--to varying degrees depending on the open-mindedness of the person. We choose to travel based on our trust that all the qualities of an aesthetic experience can be checked off:

• A perceived need or desire: in this case, a desire to explore new things or need to escape from mundane habits, not necessarily a search for specific answers or resolutions. The choice to travel may simply reflect a desire for evidence that raises new questions and mysteries to explore that might force our minds to expand beyond their current narrowness.
• Compelling anticipation: What lies beyond the next corner, the next airport, the next train station, the next mountain pass? What will we find that challenges or rewards our expectations?
• Deep engagement: in the newness of the places visited, historical or natural wonders, challenges faced, people encountered. We need to pay attention or risk losing our way or missing an opportunity.
• Immediate experience: not an experience that comes from media like a TV, computer, tablet, or phone, but directly. A focus on the now, not our past or future, magnified by the influx of sensual details that come with being someplace new.
• A conclusion: a return to a status quo that is somehow no longer the same, a return that can bring the comfort of a rounding out rather than renewed boredom, a return with new eyes, which enhances life by closing a story worth remembering and telling, and, potentially, bringing an internal change that changes everything.

You might notice that all the metaphors for reasons to travel have a place in this pattern of experience. “Losing oneself” is a positive desire when it means opening up to new things or the determination to forget negative experience. Losing oneself, in the form of losing self-consciousness and preoccupation, is also required for deep engagement and immediate experience, for becoming absorbed in the details. “Finding oneself” is a noble goal, a desire that leads to compelling anticipation that new answers and new learning awaits. “Seeing the world” is the opened eye and expanded engagement that arises from anticipation and from attention to the immediate things in the aesthetic experience. Seeing the world means seeing the now that is always there, but frequently lost. It also, of course, means seeing new things that were not available before, but have potential for new impacts—what we came for. It means the power of forgetting and learning how to see in new ways.

What is added to the metaphors is a holistic context, from impulse to resolution. The return is just as important as the journey out, as described in Joseph Cambell’s theories of the power of myth. The return is reaping the reward of the experience. Losing, finding, and seeing combined, and finally taking what we find back to carry on with new energy and insight--this is the powerful thing about travel.

If there is no return but instead a decision to stay, it is no longer travel. It becomes something else, emigration perhaps, or escape, and the metamorphosis is even greater.

(A very nice summary of the metaphors discussed here and more can be found in the essay, Why we travel, by Pico Iyer. Iyer travels the same path, notices different things, and finds different but compatible conclusions.)

Take a walk

Even our first, unspectacular steps are a wondrous experience. Typically, a parent or parents are urging and cheering us on as we make our first journey on two feet, so it can be a social event of high order. And even though we quickly end up grounded again, the arc of the struggled rise to our feet and tenuous traversing even a small distance before falling back to the safety of the horizontal, one of the early dramatic arcs of our lives, gives us a sense of power, with all manner of things beginning to come within reach. The vision of the longer journeys ahead, offering escape from our safe but small worlds, keep us trying until our skills are up to the task.

Photo by karen ybanez

It is difficult to imagine the number of walks I have taken. Perhaps assuming it is slightly less than the number of days I have lived since I was about 1 or 2 years-old is a good starting point. Subtracting for some days of too much desk work, horrendous weather or illness in bed keeps the number realistic, although on many days I there were more than one. By using the term, “a walk,” I am referring to those experiences in which walking itself was a primary motivation or the central activity. This includes not only walks or hikes just for the joy of walking—the sights they enable, the physical exercise, the contemplative state of mind they engender—which we will come back to, but also those with a targeted destination, like school, work, the library or museum, a restaurant or movie theater, where walking may have been either an optional or mandatory mode of travel, but became an event of its own.

For example, I recall my walks to and from school from 1st to 9th grade as distinct events, not just necessary transitions. These short journeys, for a time as much as two kilometers one-way, often in challenging weather, included some momentous mind-wanderings as well. Whether through introspection or conversations with friends, my habits of thought and disposition of character grew during these walks. Because they were repeated so many times, I can almost envision, no, experience them still, with their still-vivid milestones, including the green parks, painted homes larger than my own, and busy streets creating a familiar daily pattern not unlike a favorite song one can listen to every day. These walks were an important part of the texture and rhythm of those days, as well as sources of inspiration.

Photo by hc_hillary

Touring an unfamiliar city on foot is another type of targeted walk--destination or no destination in mind. Becoming acquainted with a place from the ground up, the unevenness or smoothness of its surfaces, the labyrinthine nature or predictability of its paths and street crossings, the encounters with its buildings and artworks, the natives who walk by us with other things on their minds, with purposeful speed or bedraggled slowness. Walking allows us to use all our senses to expand the experience of the tour—the sounds and smells in the air and textures beneath our feet are as much a part of the “there” of a place as the visible structures, paths, and plants. Most will agree that walking a place is the only real way to get to know it.

We typically place limits on what qualifies as a walk. Distance is relative to our speed, which depends on our level of health and abilities, but since time is more directly correlated with effort, it makes the most fitting measure. And like the temporal distortion described in Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, the increased experience of gravity we struggle against when climbing a steep hill makes time expand. Walking in a city like Lisbon or on a mountain trail might make shorter walks satisfying. But there are minimums.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Five minutes is not “a walk,” and 15 minutes does not qualify for most of us. It takes at least twenty minutes to make a walk. This is the average time a person needs to walk a mile, but physical distance is not as important as mental distance. Not coincidentally, twenty minutes is also the recommended time for a session of transcendental meditation, the time it takes to calm the mind and receive the benefits. Many might prefer much longer walks—even hours, to make the experience more impactful—but twenty minutes is enough to allow a walk to come into its own. In this time, the mind can go through a transition from the ongoing noise of internal deliberations, mental replaying of annoyances and outrages, and worries of upcoming demands, and shift to more free-flowing, creative thoughts. It is enough time, with practice, to lose oneself in the moment—where the mind is free to play without the constant claim for our attention from the past and future. The arc of rising to one’s feet, traveling, and then coming to rest again becomes also the luminous, electrical arc of creative connection.

Photo by Edison Tech Center

This is not to discount the physicality of walking. The rhythm of two legs propelling us forward, two arms swinging to keep the balance and provide further momentum. For such a simple activity, walking is invigorating, and can be a critical part of any healthy life. The choice to take regular walks has been shown to be a marker of good health, especially for older people. Unlike other forms of exercise, walking requires no equipment other than comfortable shoes and clothing to suit the weather, no special skills other than a bit of endurance, and no special location in which it needs to be conducted, other than a safe footpath. Even many of those with mobility limitations can engage in a form of walking.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Despite the long tradition of dualistic thinking, the mind and body are not easily separated, and taking a walk, like all physical activity, engages the whole person. This proposition is more than a philosophical one—medical research also widely recognizes the mind/body connection. Nonetheless, dualism is especially common in applications of aesthetics, which are typically reserved for objects of beauty or stories and melodies. But a close analysis of the attention to form, ritual and the deep engagement people feel when participating in, or even just watching sports and other physical practices like martial arts and yoga throws this assumption out the window. In fact, it is precisely the rhythmic physicality of walking that makes it so compelling and conducive to thought.

Short walks, let’s say 20 minutes to one hour, can be fit into about any day, and can be one of the most important parts of it. A change of scenery, whether to the street or park, is liberating, but even an indoor treadmill brings rewards. Not unlike swinging or rocking, the rhythm of a walk alters our perspective, puts us more inside our body, but also inside the outside world. No longer static, the world moves by us and through us--it becomes animated through our movement. We take it less for granted. We might find new nuances in its objects, perhaps, as Charles Baxter puts it, even handing over our “feeling and thinking to the objects that constitute (our) environment,” attributing sentience or even wisdom to the world’s objects. Perhaps it is the trees and grass or stones that have something to say about existence that we have not been privy to lately. At the same time this worldly connection occurs, the mental focus on our inner world blurs, and we might become more creative or open to new trains of thought. Solutions might appear to us that would otherwise stay hidden, and new perspectives on a situation are almost certain. These changes usually emerge in a predictable pattern-- the period of slow disengagement, a renewing emptiness, and then the glow or brilliant arc of the unpremeditated. But an epiphany is not necessary for a walk to be worthwhile. A subtle change of mood is sufficient.

Photo by Giuseppe Milo

Some feel that twenty minutes is barely scratching the surface, and are only satisfied with a hike. While hikes were a necessity of life in the past for most people, to conduct commerce or for gathering food, water or other critical goods, hikes are these days performed by people determined to escape their too-sedentary lives in urban or suburban areas. Hikes can enhance the common qualities of walks, but also allow other dimensions to emerge. Hikes are set off more clearly as aesthetic experiences.

Several qualities come together to achieve this. First, hikes are usually associated with walks in wilderness areas. Where nature is more raw, unadulterated, we are more likely to find beauty and what we are willing to accept as truths. Nineteenth century Romantic period literature and painting dramatized this, attributing to the wilderness an equivalence to our underlying emotional potential and granting its superiority over human powers. Research has shown that experiencing the outdoors, even in small-scale parks, has very positive physical, mental, and emotional impacts. On the large scale, like wilderness areas, this effect is perhaps magnified. Panoramas of natural environments are almost universally loved, but even the details in a wilderness, unusual to those of us living most of our time in urban habitats, draw our appreciation—a mushroom patch, colorful lichen, wild animals, a rushing stream, towering or thick stands of trees, the expanse of fallen leaves in autumn, and the wider expanse of green leaves in summer.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

The length of hikes and their typical elevation gain make them more physically challenging, raising our heart rate and creating the pleasurable burning sensation in our muscles. Our body is telling us we are achieving something, that we are building stamina to bring to all aspects of our lives. Hikes are usually more destination-oriented than “walks.” Like other aesthetic experiences, we set a challenge to reach a place with a rewarding sight, such as a panorama, waterfall, or other landmark, or we aim to traverse a variety of ecosystems for the cumulative effect these differences have on us. This challenge compels us, offers resistances to overcome, and finally brings physical and emotional rewards when met.

The things that make good Art are also the things that make a good walk. The opportunity for new sights, sounds, and sensations beyond our mundane experience. The ability to make us think in new ways or perceive things differently, including our own bodies. The chance to change ourselves a little, enabling new conclusions, ideas and emotions, as well as physical improvements. And the potential for a good story, or at least a dramatic arc of departure and return.

Writing for Aesthetic Experience

All written expression--not just fiction and poetry, but also the everyday writing we do for work or personal correspondence in the form of letters, reports, papers, emails, social media posts, or blogging--has the potential to become aesthetic, showing the same general pattern common to all aesthetic experiences. When the process comes together, it begins with (a) a tension, need, or puzzlement that requires communication and is driven by (b) the anticipation of a result that makes the work of expression compelling. The work itself is colored by (c) deep engagement with (d) the immediate act of composition and, perhaps, preliminary research. Composition can be highly immersive, with its both rational and sensual qualities (e.g., opening and framing, structure, word choice, tone and voice, use of metaphors and other signs, phrasing, sentence structure, etc.). Finally, written expression creates gratification when the outcome has (e) a resolution that makes it satisfying to readers and the author. The outcome can at times feel profoundly meaningful and rewarding, resolving deep questions or conflicts, or explaining things in new and more effective ways. This potential for discovering meaning (not just sharing it) might have driven the urge to write.

Admittedly, writing can also be tedious and painful. Unlike most other activities with aesthetic potential, which are largely voluntary, almost all of us are at times forced to write. The pain can come about because what we are writing holds no interest to us, we don’t feel comfortable with our level of writing skill (particularly in a non-native language), or that we don't foresee a value in the result, no matter how skillfully we perform the task. Yet many people find it highly rewarding to tackle almost any writing project because they have discovered its aesthetic potential. Like swimming, which is a lot of work and even frightening to some, writing is avoided as a painful chore by many people. Yet a devout swimmer seeks to increase the challenge by swimming farther and faster, just as a devout writer might feel compelled to tackle a writing task on a topic that is relatively unknown (such as the case of many journalists), requires a lengthy treatment, or takes a unique point of view for the writer.

When it becomes aesthetic, the act of writing can seem to be guided by unconscious or exterior forces, like the collective unconscious, muses, or a private genius, because it is no longer just a goal-driven process, but also one of imagination and surrender to unexpected connections. We may not even recognize the source of our words or ideas, coming from forgotten conversations and readings, or from truly creative places. They might come to us in waves of coherent phrases or growing swells of ideas that seem to break and crash on the page in front of us out of our control. Writing can feel a little like swimming in an unpredictable surf.

At other times, it is only us. We know we are the only agent at work, and writing might draw from the deepest resources we own to meet the challenge. Writing can at times be like solving an elaborate jigsaw puzzle, an arduous but absorbing task of finding the right pieces and fitting them in just the right arrangement to create the effect we are after, or creating new pieces, carving them out of raw materials to custom fit. When we complete the puzzle, the sight can make us ebullient, either as we imagined it and struggled to get to, or something much more than we imagined. But we own it as something that only we could have achieved.

Alternatively, writing might feel like squeezing blood from a stone--each word and sentence a futile effort. We face the task with little hope or expectation for reward, and we surrender, resorting to perfunctory statements just to have something written.

When it is working, though, writing can create an all-absorbing flow, or undertow, not unlike more physical activities in which we lose attention of our surroundings, and we focus only on the growing words and sentences in front of us, considering how to fit them together to further our argument, explanation, description, or story. Writing calls for a variety of fortitudes. Words can be rational, but also emotional, sensual, and even ecstatic--useful for the full range of experience. And we can’t forget that words themselves represent sounds, and are not just characters on a page. They create music in the mind. For some, writing can be as expressive as singing.

Aesthetic outcomes can be achieved in any form of writing and are not reserved only for poets and novelists. However, much of what we write is rote, made up of boilerplate language we have repeated or heard others repeat many times, filled with clichés meaning little to anyone, and just adequate to fulfill the task. Some everyday writing tasks may simply be a gesture, like a thank you note, or a record, documenting a few facts, paying respects, or making an opinion known, and not an attempt at deeper expression. But everyday life offers many reasons to immerse ourselves in the act of writing to create something of richer value with bigger potential repercussions.

Written expression shares a quality that is common to other aesthetic experiences that end with a tangible outcome (e.g., gardening, collecting, taking photos, cooking, etc.)--the product itself is animate and has aesthetic potential for others, making it closer to the world of Art. Since literature is one of the seminal artforms, this is not surprising. Reading a well written work can bring not just new understanding, but deep emotional resonance, and also wonder and enjoyment of the language and text that gets readers there. When we express ourselves in words (or in any other medium for that matter), we create a world of meaning that assumes a life of its own arising from the words themselves, even if we see ourselves as the source. In fact, once we hit “send,” “publish,” or sign off on publication, we have decided to share ownership of those words and the eventual reader becomes owner of a new, proprietary interpretation. This “life of its own” quality is another reason that writing is often seen as collaborating with supernatural entities.

Expression as transaction

Despite common notions, expression is not simply a process of spilling out our thoughts and emotions (or those of guiding spirits) with little care for the reader. Expression is a collaboration, or transaction, with both our readers and the world we experience.

Firstly, expression is always committed toward an audience that demands our consideration, not just for oneself, so it is from the start a sort of transaction. The model reader theory of Umberto Eco suggests that a text is necessarily full of open spaces that the reader must fill in, and the author needs to consider how a typical reader will do this. Not just any reader, but one toward whom the text is directed. Every text “demands cooperation.”

Secondly, in a very real sense, expression does not begin inside us, but in our experience--in the transactions we have with the world. It begins in the world within which we are just one actor (see Dewey, 1925), albeit a critical one. Any expression is first a process of co-mingling with the world (we might call this impression, or, literally, pressing in), and only after this can the work of expression begin (literally, pressing out). Otherwise, we have nothing to express. For a more radical perspective on this, see Manzotti’s (2016) theory of consciousness as existing in the world’s objects, and not just in individual minds (the mind-object identity theory, or “spread mind”).

Actually, Dewey (1934) would say that expression begins with an “impulsion” of the individual (and not an “impression”), a goal or action that receives a response from the world--the response being the impression mentioned above. I prefer to avoid this chicken-versus-egg argument and use “co-mingling” because I believe that it is not only we who have agency to affect the world, but the objects of the world as well. This perspective is useful because it captures the situations when expression is imposed upon us, or is inspired by unexpected observations. The point is that expression doesn’t spring from nowhere, out of nothing, and not just from individuals. It is a lot of work, and collaborative work at that.

Due to the work involved, none of this talk of attribution to the unconscious, collective unconscious, muses, genii, spread-minds, or object-agents, which applies equally to all creative acts, should disempower writers. On the contrary, it is better to take responsibility and know that we can use our minds (spread or not), experiences, and the media of expression to create new experiences that would not exist without our own hard work--experiences that can then profit not only others, but newly enjoyed as aesthetic by ourselves.

The material and tools of written expression

The raw material of written expression is of course language, and what a material it is! Language is sometimes considered the substance of thought itself, even though this is a bias that reflects its predominance in social environments. We swim in our language, and almost forget that it is a medium, just like the fish does not see the water. But language also restricts our expression to live within what words can do. Words inform our thoughts as much as they communication them. Research shows that conceptions of the world can be bound in the language we use. But these restrictions are more like safety ropes and scaffolding, offering infinitely more support than restriction.

Images, sounds, and physical gestures also represent thoughts, sometimes with more fluency. Buildings are thoughts rising into the sky, using a language of visual impression, space and time and physical relationships. Films are thoughts that flow in a montage of suggestive images. Sculptured gardens are thoughts that grow and age in pre-visioned fashion. Thought is manifest in all the materials we manipulate. But none offer the same malleability and precision of words to represent the flow of rational and poetic thought--its development, its connections, its missteps, its contradictions, its digressions, its emotional underpinnings. This opinion is highly arguable, and I suspect painters and filmmakers would be the first to challenge it.

Language is the raw material, but written expression offers myriad tools to work the material, some obvious, and some less obvious. Among the obvious: word choice, paragraph and sentence structure, grammar, tone (all of which offer levels of formality and impacts on meaning). Among the less obvious: treatment of time and sequence, such as pacing; use of signs like metaphors, similes, and symbols; choice of voice (authoritative, questioning, cautious, reserved, angry, objective, etc.); degree of sensuality versus abstraction. The list could go on and on.

Our goal in cultivating aesthetic experiences in any of their forms in our lives is to create meaning. Ultimately, aesthetic qualities are not about the surface of things, but the potential for meaning behind the surface, reflected there but born out in our experience. Written expression, and all expression in fact, also has at least three levels of meaning, corresponding roughly to why, how, and what. These are gesture, word, and text. How much we are aware of and address these levels of meaning determines the final impact of what we write.

• Why we write is the gesture level of meaning. We may write to persuade, to honor, to clarify, to explain, to teach, to assert, to confront, to irritate, to console, to placate, to impress, to show appreciation, etc. The gesture might not always be explicit, or might even be hidden. But the writer, at least, should be aware.
• The word is the next level of meaning, the exegesis, the meaning emanating from the choice and structure of the words, taking into account the use of all the tools of expression. Because meaning is never purely literal, the word is not exactly what the translator translates, but what the translator must understand about the the intended meaning of words in order to translate the text accurately.
• The text is the meaning behind the work as a publication, its relationship to other texts, and its actual impact upon publication and over time. “Publication” does not imply only books and articles. Web pages and blog posts and emails are also publications with a multiple levels of meaning. And they can go viral, have more cultural impact, even more than a best-selling book. The textual level of meaning is not fully under the influence of the author, but also previous and contemporary authors, publishers, and the audience.

Whether writing a note of apology, a project report, a job recommendation, a news article, a “white paper” to influence a strategic decision, a blog post, or sharing a holiday experience with a family member, remembering to exploit the tools and levels of meaning of written expression can lead to more aesthetic experiences with writing, and less anguish squeezing blood from stones.

Taking Photos

Each second, over 41,000 photographs are taken. Based on recent trends, it is estimated that worldwide the number of non-professional photos alone that will be taken in 2017 is 1.3 trillion. Nearly 80% of these can be attributed to the rapidly growing use of smartphones, which make cameras available to most people all day, everyday. The number of photos taken has tripled each year since 2010 from a mere 80 billion. This growth is enabled by technology, but not driven by it. It is driven by the human desire to make experience aesthetic, for which taking photos is a particularly common avenue.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Long before digital photography made such growth possible, the sound of the mechanical camera shutter had become one of the distinctive sounds of the 20th century. Already by 1930, 1 billion photos were taken each year, and number of shutter clicks continued to grow exponentially. However, this click/sliding noise of the moving mirror still fills our soundscapes because digital cameras reproduce it artificially, as a comforting reminder of cameras past and, more practically, as assurance that we did indeed take a photo.

Photography as Art

Few question any longer whether photography is an art form, but when it was a young medium, like film, it was considered simply a means of mechanical reproduction of what we see, and not equal to painting the same scene, for example. During the second half of the 19th century, its primary purpose was documentation, portraits of people, places, and events, such as the famous battlefield photos of the American Civil War, or Edward Muybridge’s photosequence studies of people and animals in motion. In fact, the artistic uses of photography remain secondary to this day.

Eadweard Muybridge, 1872, Public Domain

That photographs could also be Art was recognized only over time. But by the first decade of the 20th century, one could find both many more consciously artistic documentation photos and photos that were created purely as Art. One early photo of a young woman dying of turbuculosis with her worried family, is a famous example that shows early realization of photography’s dramatic potential. Due to the limits of the technology at the time, the photo is made of multiple exposures carefully planned and artfully arranged.

Henry Peach Robinson (1958), Public Domain

Arguments persisted that photography was a lesser art because it WAS mechanical reproduction after all, and was soon widely open to amateur use, but any serious reflection saw that image choice, composition, image settings, and manipulation during processing could turn it into “high” art (we can use “Art” with the capital “A”) as much as any other medium. But the dominant use has always been taking photos that are meant to just document what we see. We might make a distinction between “making photos” (using the tools available for artistic manipulation) and “taking photos” (what we do quickly in our everyday use). However, the premise of this article is that even everyday photos are taken with an aesthetic intent (although some, like Sontag, 1977, wrongly belittle this intent, comparing most everyday photography to “aesthetic consumerism”).

Like so many other forms of everyday aesthetics, the line between taking everyday photos and artistic activity is blurred, perhaps even unnecessary. Nonetheless, this post is focused on the aesthetic aspects of everyday photography done without the primary intent to make Art.

Photography as Life

Then why will non-professionals take 1.3 trillion photos this year? While we are all concerned to some degree with how everyday photos look, and while many of the millions of photos shared each day on social networking sites can be quite artistic, for most people how the photos that they share look is usually less important than what they show, and that they show something meaningful about us.

Everyday life is made meaningful, lifted above the ordinary, when we delineate it somehow, give it borders or shape, or stamp it in a personal, effortful way. It can slip between our grasp unless some effort is made to mark it in this way, or to dramatize its events and our experiences of them. All the ways mentioned in this blog, including preparing food, decorating homes, gardening, collecting, storytelling, sports, mental achievements, and many others, function to set off experience as aesthetic. Taking photos is yet another way to give shape, dramatize, and set off our experience for aesthetic appreciation. Capturing a scene within the boundaries of a photo immediately creates an object of appreciation above the blur of the ongoing events that pass in front of our eyes. We might take a photo to preserve a moment to share with others, whether the moment denotes a major accomplishment, a milestone, or just that we are alive here and now. This is what millions, or billions rather, do via social media sites. We might otherwise preserve the photo primarily for ourselves, so that we can recall what we and those around us were like on this day, to be appreciated on another day in the future. Photographic preservation can provide a sense of control over time and intransigent nature. On the contrary, some suggest that it can kill the vibrancy of the moment by calling out the fact that change and eventual decay make the captured moment already a dead one (which is also a valid aesthetic response if you think about it), Sontag (1977). This rather negative view, while potentially in the background, does not often come to mind. But taking a photo can steal our attention from an experience, in effect deadening it, if we are overzealous with our cameras instead of our naked eyes.

On holiday travels in popular destinations, the most common sight is not a monument or beautiful scene, but one person being photographed by another.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Travels are a time to step away from everyday life, an aesthetic experience in themselves, but also a perfect opportunity to have our images preserved during a heightened moment, a time when we might feel we are at our best. Travel photos of people are often taken at famous sites, but are just as often taken at any representative location that says we are somewhere else than in our normal location, because the important subject is the person, not the place. Depending on the person, posing for such shots is either a dilemma or a delight. Some are happy to shout their presence with a glamour pose or with arms raised in real or pretend joy. Others remain uncomfortable, struggling to achieve an awkward smile, hoping the image will not look unnatural, but knowing it will anyway, because posing is always posing.

Richard Shusterman (2012) explores the interplay between the photographer and subject during a professional photo session, comparing it to theatrical performance. He mentions the complex interpersonal exchange needed to achieve the artistic goals of the portrait, whether mutual or owned only by the artist. The subject needs to feel comfortable enough to let themselves be seen for who they are, and the photographer needs to negotiate to expose who the subject really is, or who she wants him to be.

This performance aspect of taking a photo exists also in any non-professional photo portrait, even if it is less intentional or impactful. Each portrait, even the one almost lost within the crowd marveling a historical location, is a micro-drama outside the normal flow of events during those moments that lead up to the shutter snap, and both the photographers and persons being photographed usually enjoy this artifice. The act of taking the photo might even become one of those moments of feeling fully alive, even if it is a balance of pretense and genuine emotion.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Of course we also take photos of the places and things we visit, not just people in front of them, but similarly, it is our being there and the act of taking the photo that is often the most important subject. An uncountable number of photos are taken each year at places like Ayer’s Rock, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon, and the Disneyland’s Sleeping Beauty’s Castle. No one really needs to document these sites yet again, but they do need to document that they were there, and maybe to attempt a photo with that personal touch that demonstrates it. Perhaps a thousand photos each day are taken of the Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa hanging in the Louvre. None of these photos lives up to the painting, and most are not even worth looking at, taken along with the accompanying tops of heads of complete strangers who were lucky enough to get closer. But the photo is still special because it is proof that we were there.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

Other than travels, milestones and special events are another favorite time for taking photos. Weddings, graduations, birthdays, group lunches and dinners, and parties of any kind are mandatory times for photos. It is almost as if the event did not happen unless there is at least one photo taken. These photos are certainly about the people in them, but also about the event and the implied time that precedes and follows it, and photos are even one of the things that makes the event special. A wedding without a photo is almost unthinkable. In many weddings, the photographer is one of the most prominent people after the bride and groom.

Special events come in all sizes, and even a new haircut, a well prepared meal, a new dress, or a rainbow, sunset, or moonrise might demand a photo to mark the occasion.

Photography as Artful Life

With the explosion of smartphone ownership, we now have cameras at our fingertips to document not just special moments, but everyday observations that interest us. Before smartphones, the effort to find a ready camera might leave many rainbows uncaptured, but no longer. Today, the creative eye might capture special images each day--an interesting play of light, a subtle pattern or geometric arrangement of objects, a dramatic closeup, an interesting tableaux, or something seen frequently but this time in a new way, maybe due to how it is framed, angled, juxtaposed, or zoomed in or out. A daily walk, the commute to work, or the evening’s closing minutes on the balcony can all provide photo opportunities. Anything can be the source of a moment of beauty worth capturing in a photo.

Barcelona, Spain, Photo by Maja Kuna

While most everyday photos are intended to document something, some do more. Representation, which is one of the most traditional roles of Art, is the the role that Socrates railed against, feeling that art as an imitation of life hid the truth from us. Had the technology been around, I suspect Socrates would have hated photos of all kinds. But photos, both everyday and artistic ones, can also be used to create a new experience, and not just a representation. Photos necessarily borrow from the visual materials of life, but they can also transcend it, and the result might be like nothing at all in our daily experience, nothing like what the naked eye usually senses, at least consciously. Photos allow us to manufacture something personal, mystical, or just indefinable, which can be another one of photography’s aesthetic rewards--a means to the creation of new meanings.

Bytom Musuem, Poland, Photo by Maja Kuna

Representation is not a dead end, but it is a limited one. It impossible to capture experience itself. We might want to hold onto the feeling, the flow of thoughts, the evolution of sensations over time, the entire field of view along with its sounds and smells and textures and our internal responses to them. But we can never catch it all. Even the best works of literature and films, with their richer source material, struggle to do this. What we capture in photos, when we are lucky, is always a synecdoche of the experience, a piece that we accept to remind us of the whole. When we find that small piece that is powerful enough to suggest the total experience, this is when we approach the realm of Art. But it happens everyday too, in those lucky moments when we are especially attuned. When a photo might just be enough.

Taking photos reflects a fundamental drive, an everyday aesthetic activity with the goal to make life special, to give it meaning, and to help us connect to others, the world and the transient moments that comprise a life.

References

Newhall, B.  (1964) The history of photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Shusterman, R. (2012) Thinking through the body: Essays in somaesthetics. Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Sontag, S. (1977), On Photography. New York: Picador.

Is life an unfolding story?

One of the most common and fundamental forms of aesthetic experience is when life takes clear shape as a story with a narrative logic, and not just a series of unrelated events. This story can relate to the pursuit of a goal; following a chosen, imposed, or slowly revealed path; confronting a conflict or adversity; solving a problem or uncovering an unknown; or discovering oneself and those around us. Whether the story is one we impose or discover ourselves or is one imposed by others is a key factor for the potential degree of aesthetic reward. The question is, does a life-story just disguise a more mundane truth--that life is really just episodic, a series of disconnected moments?

Photo by Patrick Parrish

We are surrounded by stories. Parents read and tell stories, friends and family tell stories, we tell stories to others and to ourselves. TV and movies show us stories (nearly 10,000 movies each year are released), and hundreds of thousands of works of written fiction are published each year. Stories come in many other forms as well--in songs, in poetry, and in the openings and asides of good essays and editorials. News is stories--who, what, when, where, how, and tabloid news fills some heads with morality tales of the faulty rich and famous. Good public speakers include stories to help make their points more accessible and less academic. Commercials sell products by telling mini-stories about their benefits. Stories are fundamental to communication, and in fact, to knowing and understanding. We crave stories, and we create them, large or small, each day. But what is behind this craving?

Photo by Parker Knight, Creative Commons 2.0

Even though we intuitively know a story when we are presented one, it is probably useful to have a definition of a story, or more generally, a narrative. Like aesthetic experiences in general, they are more pervasive than you might think. Kenneth Burke (1945) attempted a basic definition of a narrative in his work to create a Grammar of Motives. His premise and conclusion was that a narrative is fundamentally a way of attributing motives to actions, and that the result always contains the following five components, at least implicitly:

An ACT: What took place in thought or deed.
A SCENE: The background of the act, the context or situation in which it occurred.
An AGENT: The person, or protagonist, who performed the act and received its repercussions.
AGENCY: The means or instruments of the act, how it was undertaken.
A PURPOSE: The reason, or reasons, why the act was undertaken.

The act is the WHAT, and the rest help to demonstrate motive. This brilliantly simple analysis of a narrative’s components describes almost any narrative, from the story of why we were late to work yesterday, what we chose to cook for dinner, our choice of careers, how we met our significant other, or the complex interwoven stories to be found within a great novel like Anna Karenina. We can use this five-part analysis to reflect on our own lives to help us understand our motivations to shape our self-image and future actions.

Pioneering cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner, who calls the self “the greatest work of art we ever produce” (Bruner, 2002), describes a similar set of qualities of a story, but his are more closely related to traditional literary theory: (a) a cast of characters who are free agents with (b) expectations about the normal state of the world, confronted by (c) a breach of this expected state. The story continues with (d) their efforts to cope or come to terms with this breach, and (e) an outcome or resolution. Note that Bruner adds the element of conflict, a breach of the normal, that must be overcome. This is the element that elevates a simple account of events to a real story, something worth paying attention to, an aesthetic experience, perhaps. But most interestingly, and most importantly, Bruner adds that the final component is (f) a narrator, a reason for narrating, and a particular perspective on the story. The narration, or the act of telling a story, is another layer of motive on top of the story itself, and can in fact can contain its own story: Why was the story told? What is the context of the telling? Who it telling it? How is the telling constructed? Given this final quality in particular, we are compelled to ask why we tell the stories in our lives to ourselves and those around us.

Assuming we agree that we all do tell stories about our lives, the question remains whether is this a good thing. Is life a naturally a story, or is this quality artificial, perhaps even detrimental to our ability to experience life for what it truly is? Is viewing life as a story simply a form of lying, hiding from the truth, or wishful thinking? Can a storied life bind us, make us prisoners of it? Can it set us up for disappointment when the bar it sets is too high for the constraints of our situations or abilities? The answer to these questions can on occasion be a definite Yes. How detrimental a life story can be depends on our active engagement in the process of telling it (accepting that we are, in fact, Bruner’s narrator when it comes to our own stories). It depends on our flexibility in allowing ourselves to grow with the unfolding story rather than remain closed-minded, and our willingness to actively reshape the story components while it also unfolds on its own.

Bad outcomes can result from sticking to a story. Atrocities are conducted based on the self-convincing stories that justify them. Lives can be ruined due to obsessive adherence to dangerous self-stories. Bruner outlines the famous and particular sad story of Christopher McCandless, the 23-year-old who died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness (see the book and film, Into the Wild) after convincing himself that he should live in complete self-sufficiency away from the world of people. His inspiration was a story he derived from the writings of American author Henry David Thoreau, whose call to “simplify, simplify” led him to isolate himself to the edge of Walden Pond, a full 2.6 kilometers from the town of Concord, Massachusetts--far enough to inspire an important philosophical book, but not self-destructive by any means. Much more common negative self-stories are those of victimization, low self-worth, or an unbreakable streak of bad luck. The success many achieve by practicing meditation stems from its goal to help us let go of our stories, if even for only 20 minutes at a time, as a way to relax and re-energize, and release new creative energy that might otherwise remain locked up in a fruitless self-story.

However, a life-story can be extremely positive too. It can be the driver behind our goals and hard work, our rewarding relationships, our connections to life, society, and nature. The narrative basis of ethics has been discussed by both Bruner (2002) and John Dewey (Fesmire, 2003). Bruner points out the intertwined nature of stories and law, the prevalence of stories about courtroom drama, and how stories are the basis for legal decisions, not just coded laws, because for each potential infraction a motive must be assigned. Dewey spoke our use of “dramatic rehearsal,” how we construct a story of potential outcomes to help us make moral decisions (or perhaps any decision for that matter). Stories are serious business. They are not just for entertainment.

By Unknown -
http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85042462/1905-01-01/ed-1/seq-4/
(Los Angeles Herald), Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36561822

As for the question posed in the title of this post, Is life an unfolding story?, most of those who have ponder it have concluded positively that our fundamental experience of life is founded in narrative. Some have even proposed that the near universal grammar of our languages, with their subject-verb-object structures, and the myriad ways of modifying those with adjective and adverb phrases, show that we think in narrative terms. Story is an important way of knowing, not just a pleasant veneer we impose. As Bruner (2004) puts it, “There is no such thing as life itself.” We naturally discern a narrative structure in the events we experience, attribute motives, and take actions based on those motives. Humans seem particularly good at this, but the famous four-year Gombe Chimpanzee War suggests that apes also maintain a historical, narrative view of their experience, and act on it.

This life story seems to have two levels (Breen & McLean, 2017). One is a generalized, master narrative that is culturally based, and which exists as a standard to which we measure the value of our own lives. There are many of these master narratives we might relate to--one about redemption for a past misdeed, or one regarding rising from rags to riches, for example. The personal narrative is the second level, and it is based on our lived experience interpreted through or in opposition to the master narrative. The master narratives can be seen as forming the basis of fictional genres as well. How much agency we assert in confronting master narratives is a good part of how well we use our aesthetic potential. Do we follow blindly, or do we take personal responsibility for composing a meaningful story of our own?

However, some have claimed that life as a story is not just a dangerous idea, but also incorrect. Strawson (2004) argued that life is in fact episodic, and that its narrative qualities are something that we (some more than others) impose on it. After all, a story does not account for the little bits of life that take up so much of our time--waiting for the train, having your teeth cleaned, filing taxes, washing the dishes. How can one feel part of a story while enduring these? So perhaps a story is just a facade imposed on the flow of mundane occurrences and habitual actions.

Photo by Patrick Parrish

A life without a story is hard to imagine, if not frightening. Freeman (2017) describes his mother’s decline due to Alzheimer's disease, and the revealing stages of its effects. At first, the confusion caused by her growing inability to connect events was terribly frustrating. Her own self-story was becoming disassembled, no longer was she the independent, self-sufficient person she had been (she could no longer live up to the master narrative). Then, as the disease progressed, she became more peacefully accepting of the moment, which was all she had. Freeman even recounts his feeling of envy in her ability to enjoy simple pleasures, the sights and sounds around her, without the clutter of needs to think about. Finally, however, her state collapsed into one of near constant terror. She was unable to understand where she was or why. Not only was the master narrative gone, but any degree of personal narrative had become impossible. The aesthetic rewards of creating a life story appear to be not only rewards, but necessary to our being.
---------------------------

Breen, A.V. & McLean, K. C., 2017. The intersection of personal and master narratives. In Schiff, B., McKim, A.E., and Patron.S. (Eds), Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience. Oxford University Press.

Bruner, J. (2002) Making stories: Law, literature, life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Bruner, J. (2004) Life as narrative. Social Research, 71(3), 691-710. (Originally published in 1987.)

Burke, K. (1945/1969) A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fesmire, S. (2003) John Dewey and Moral Imagination. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Freeman, M. (2017) Narrative at the limits (Or: What is “life” really like?). In Schiff, B., McKim, A.E., and Patron.S. (Eds), Life and narrative: The risks and responsibilities of storying experience. Oxford University Press.

Everyday Divination

Divination, as a method of envisioning our potential futures, is different from straight fortune-telling, even though some use the terms interchangeably. The difference is one of intention and our presumed ability to take action to affect outcomes. Divination, literally, is to be inspired by the gods (or some other omniscient power, like the natural world) to gain insight into the truth of a current situation (“soothsaying”), as well as the likely future(s) that might result. This is done to guide our decisions and actions. It is not about discovering an inevitable fate. In this sense, divination is an aesthetic act--a way to gain a degree of control over the seemingly random events of life by giving them meaning.

Some of the most famous stories about divination mislead us about its true uses. For Macbeth and Oedipus, for example, the divination performed by the witches and the Greek oracles offers what look like impossible statements of fortune that at first make the characters overconfident, and in the case of Macbeth, willing to commit murder. The drama in both cases is watching the stories unravel to show that even the impossible predictions were unavoidable truths after all. This sort of divine detective-story has fascinated audiences again and again, a clever narrative genre that has its own aesthetic rewards, but it is not at all what everyday divination is about.

Divination usually includes a process of uncovering the portentous signs latent in random events. Mechanisms for generating random signs can include laying out an array of tarot cards, throwing coins for an I Ching reading, reading smoke, wax drippings, or patterns in tea leaves at the bottom of a cup, counting flower petals, or, in older times, discovering the arrangement of the insides of an animal. The mechanisms are almost endless. Natural phenomena such as weather, flight paths of birds, and, especially, astronomical events are also particularly valued as sources of divine signals. It is through such random acts that it is presumed that the gods can speak to us. A more down-to-earth but still spiritually infused explanation is that we naturally impose our subconscious influence over the physical world. We (or the gods) influence which side of the coin turns up, which tarot card is drawn from the deck, which flower we pick, or the shape taken by wax poured from a candle into a bowl of water. Some Tibetan Buddhists believe that the world is created in the mind, but even non-buddhists harbor beliefs that the mind influences what happens in the material word. Sports fans’ magical thinking can make them believe that they must watch a game to help their favorite team win.

Many otherwise traditionally rational people appreciate divination, even if they do not accept it with blind faith. This is because it works in ways that have little to do with conversing with gods. Divination practices provide a structure that allows us to use our creativity and intuition to interpret the state of our world by considering how a sign or symbol might indicate truths about our current lives and potential futures. Divination, which begins with a question to stimulate the process, helps us to create the story that lets us make sense of our life. It encourages us to reflect about the turbulent present, with its many confluent forces, gives us a structure in which to tame it, and then a direction to consider the outcomes that might make narrative sense of this complexity and guidance toward a justified outcome.

Consider a typical Tarot card reading. The core of a deck of Tarot cards are the 22 cards known as the “major arcana,” the ones that depict an archetypal character, force, or situation (the Sun, Moon, King, Emperor, Empress, Death, Justice, Lovers, etc.). In response to a question, each of these symbolizes a category of task, goal, and potential risk, but also an attitude toward life, which together helps one envision an answer or set of potential answers to the question. The major arcana have been used for centuries, and have been interpreted in both mystical and psychological terms (most effectively, in Jungian terms), but also in simpler dramatic terms--as key elements of a basic narrative, typically one centered on a journey. But nearly any narrative can be seen in terms of a journey, including those of internal struggle or growth, which are journeys of knowledge growth. (See Learning is an Aesthetic Experience.) The remaining cards, the minor arcana, which resemble the common numbered cards of a modern poker deck, are sometimes ignored, but also have symbolic importance in providing tone or means to the narrative. Most consider these as an historically later addition to the core, Major Arcana.

The reader, either an individual doing a self-reading, or a person reading for a friend or client, lays out the “spread”--and arrangement of cards that gives each card a different influence in the reading. There are many popular spreads, and the choice is up to the reader, perhaps depending on their level of experience in using it. Each requires a slightly different brand of symbolic thinking, and practice helps. The Celtic Cross is one of the most popular layouts, but others have similar components. All are based on helping to answer a question, not providing a general statement of the future or current conditions. In the Celtic Cross, the first and central card is the Significator (literally, the one who creates significance or meaning), or the question asker who we will assume is you. The second card is the Crosser, laid across the first, and represents the person or thing that is opposing you. Note the narrative already forming with just two cards--we have a person with a question, you, and a conflicting force. The next two cards describe the present, Foundation, or the motivation for the question, and the Recent Past, the most immediately pertinent backstory. Only in the 5th and 6th cards does the future come into the picture--the Crown, or significant issues that may only now be emerging, and the Future, what lies ahead. Cards seven, eight, and nine come back to the present, current emotional states, external forces, and hopes or desires. Not until the 10th card do we come to the Outcome. But it is not a predetermined outcome, just one that is likely based on the current path and influences. It is an outcome ripe to change if that is what you want.

The Tarot cards in each position of the layout, whether divinely chosen or a random occurrence, can trigger surprising revelations through their potent archetypal symbolism. Aided either by any of the many published guidebooks or by the developed connoisseurship of a seasoned Tarot reader, almost anyone can recognize elements of truth about their present situation, and twinges of excitement or concern about the future. This is a human reaction, and an aesthetic experience--the process of reaching a satisfying culmination through a concerted analysis of an indeterminate situation (the triggering question). (See What Makes and Experience Aesthetic.)

The I Ching, another very old (perhaps older) but still very popular system of divination, offers another approach, but contains many of the same core elements. An I Ching reader, in this case most often an individual performing his or her own reading, first asks a question or considers an upcoming event or just the day or week ahead. The reader then throws three coins six times to determine the whether each of the six lines of a vertically stacked hexagram is either solid or broken. The result is a potential of 64 hexagrams, made up of an upper and lower trigram symbolically named for the archetypal forms of Lake, Fire, Wind, Earth, Mountain, Water, Thunder, Heaven. The I Ching is itself a book of interpretations of these 64 hexagrams, filled with wisdom about the changing nature of life and the virtue of qualities like modesty, restraint, perseverance, patience, tolerance, balance and independence. In fact, the title “I Ching” can be translated as the Book of Changes, viewing life as transient and composed of a series of decisions leading to either successful or dangerous outcomes. A reading helps the reader to take a coherent outlook toward a question about the present or future by consider how things have changed and will change.

Photo by Ross Griff, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0

Myriad other forms of divination with much less structure and bodies of literature exist in every culture. Any random event, particularly dramatic ones like natural disasters or powerful forces of nature, are felt as omens an open to interpretation. A list of other random, but purposefully generated, outcomes was provided above. Some require a visual imagination to find symbols in abstract shapes like clouds, smoke, and tea leaves. Others require discernment into how passages of words, found perhaps by flipping through a text or overheard from passing strangers, can be interpreted to provide answers to a current situation.

Science was invented to replace practices like divination for foretelling events. It is based on rigorous and systematic observations of cause and effect, and determinedly works to avoid creative interpretation. Yet tremendous amounts of data are generated by scientific or pseudo-scientific studies for which solid theoretical foundations are lacking, or which contain suspect causal assumptions that can mislead interpretation. In the end, much of what is offered as scientifically sound, particularly in these days of big data, may be considered a modern form of divination.

To summarize, divination is a set of methods to:

• Understand the present through interpretations of random outcomes.
• Consider our lives as a coherent, well conceived narrative, following established paths of wisdom, some of which were established centuries ago.
• Help us make decisions that will lead to positive outcomes, based on analysis of the forces at work in our current situations, including our own motivations.
• Enhance our agency by providing the confidence to make good choices.

Divination works because everyday we are building our futures. Every decision we make affects our tomorrow, and the attitudes we take lead us in the directions they will. Divination is a way for us to take a degree of control, even if it appears to be granting control to outside forces and random events. It provides aesthetic rewards through the justification and closure it brings. Whether or not you agree that divine spirits can send us messages through these events, our interpretation of them and our resulting decisions are our own.