A memory and a gift:
It is a summer in the mid 1970s. I am visiting Richard in the house he built for himself and his family in rural Cape Breton. We are in our late 20s, and we have recently been introduced by a mutual friend. He and I are looking at his new drawings. They consist of amoeba-like shapes moving through an expanse of white. My wife asks why the shapes are going in one direction rather than another. Richard explains he is exploring the idea that our world is structured by contingent, even arbitrary, concepts. Our conversation moves between the drawings and the broader philosophical ideas. How does context affect the way concepts get applied? Are there objective constraints on our concepts? How is all this related to our ability to shape our own lives? I mention a poem my wife, Mary, has written called “Pleasantland”. It deals with a kind of contingency. On a recent walk in England, we had come upon a lane with the sign Pleasantland. Down the lane was a deserted brick house in an otherwise empty field. It was a Sunday, and, although there were no workers present, it was clear the house was being worked on. Curiously, it was impossible to tell whether the house was being renovated for a new owner or being disassembled for scrap. There was evidence to support both hypotheses. On that sunny Sunday, Pleasantland existed for us in a peculiar temporal suspension.
I visit Richard the following week. He shows us the drawings he has been working on. Here are the same amoeba-shapes, but this time they exist in gravitational tension with strategically placed lines. He says he is calling this series “Pleasantland Continuum”, and one in particular, with the shapes veering off, he has named “Tangent of Mary’s Will”. It is a gift for Mary and me.
Conversation at its limit:
Richard once said –I believe as a minor provocation–that he thinks of his art as existing primarily in the conversations his images give rise to (rather than in the images themselves). This thought itself emerged in a conversation between the two of us around a specific image he had created. As part of a conversation, the thought was not a resting point, but an hypothesis to explore, to qualify, to move on from, and to return to. The title of the present exhibit “The Material of Thought” takes me back to that conversation. Richard’s images, one could say, are material of thought not only in the tautologous sense that they embody Richard’s thought, but in the sense that they are intended to be springboards for discussion about reason, nature, technology, the fate of humanity, and so on. Just as a film like “Dead Man Walking” would be a partial artistic failure if it did not generate debate about capital punishment, so the artistic value of Richard’s work, we might want to say, lies partly in the philosophical discussion it generates. There is truth in this way of seeing “The Material of Thought”. Richard’s art is self- consciously philosophical in a way that much art is not, and there is no philosophy without discussion and debate.
But the moment we consider this thought, its antithesis immediately forces itself upon us. We are confronted by the images Richard has created: the precarious columns, the fireboxes, the contorted Audubon birds, the wired feather trick, the drowning woman, the snake, the turtle, the sky, the scrunched face. Powerful, original images. Images are not discursive language, just as dance and music are not (“Everything is what it is and not something else”, says a principle of both logic and metaphysics. The corollary of which is that to subsume A to B is lose what is individual in A.) The only proper response to an aesthetically worthy image is silent attentiveness to the image itself. Richard’s materials of thought, his artwork, set a limit to what can be said – even between friends.
A book and a painting:
During the years Richard was working on his firebox and Descartes paintings, I was writing my book Reasonable Self-Esteem. My goal was to describe the central role of reason in a good life. I defended reason as a capacity for balancing contrary psychic forces, for transforming harmful emotions into productive ones, and for discovering our place in the scheme of things. Richard was meanwhile probing another side of reason. His firebox and Descartes paintings were exploring reason as the source of Faustian technology, misplaced mechanistic models, efficiency thinking, and as a stifler of the imagination. Two contrary pictures of reason. Both true, and both necessary to understand, if we are to be sane.
When my book was to be published, Richard and I talked of using one of his paintings as the cover art. Phoning from Halifax, Richard said he had the perfect painting–one of the Descartes pieces. I hesitated. Would a painting about the dark pole of reason be appropriate for my book? But Richard was right: the
painting is perfect. A white hand pointing with a stick overlays the red Audubon birds. Yes, the picture explores the dangerous side of technological reason. But it is also possible to see the hand and the stick, baton-like, harmonizing (not controlling) underlying forces. Contrary sides of reason are captured in one image, like an oppositional conversation that suddenly breaks through to common ground.
Friendship:
In explaining why friendship is the chief human good, Aristotle said that “a friend is another oneself”. This has been interpreted as meaning that friends care for each other as they care for themselves. But I believe there is a better way to interpret Aristotle’s dictum. Conversation is the essence of friendship. It is through disclosing their memories, tastes, and private thoughts that two people come to trust and care for each other. Thus conversation begins a friendship, just as it deepens one. Finally, when there is sustained discussion of ideas between close friends, conversation has the feel of dialogue with another part of one’s own mind. It is in this sense that a friend is another oneself.