This Is Happiness describes the transition of a small community from a traditional way of living to one of modernity. The transition takes place in the Irish village of Faha on the western edge of Ireland, via the arrival of electricity in the 1950’s. Until that time, the villagers are described as living much as they had for the last thousand years, using horse drawn carts, oil lamps, and in touch with the rhythm of the seasons. Very few ventured outside the limits of the village if they could avoid it and most were suspicious of “foreigners”, such as those from the next village. The community was largely self-supportive, interdependent, close and for the most part, happy. The villagers entertained themselves with music, stories and interpersonal relationships and didn’t miss modern conveniences they’d never had.

This village is a classic example of what Max Weber, a founding figure in sociology, would have called Gemeinschaft or one with strong traditional bonds of family and local community. Villages like Faha offer support and a sense of belonging that is important to everyone’s identity, so that people in Gemeinschaft communities tend to be grounded and emotionally strong.

Modern or Gesellschaft-based relationships, according to Weber, are rooted in “rational agreement by mutual consent”, the best example of which is a commercial contract. In these societies, the individual is the important element rather than the community. But because of this fragmentation of community into autonomous individuals, people are less connected to each other and where they live, and therefore less happy.

This is Happiness doesn’t describe the world after the electrification of the village when it becomes part of modernity. But Williams provides hints of what is coming and what will be lost, especially the music and language that provide connection and joy to the villagers. With electricity will come the tyranny of clock time, as opposed to the unregulated, convoluted but free sense of time that it replaces. He describes this pre-electrified sense of time:

“To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenants of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion. And because in Faha, like in all country places, time was the only thing people could afford, all stories were long, all storytellers took their, and your, and anyone else’s, time, and all gave it up willingly, understanding that tales of anything as aberrant and contrary as human beings had to be long, not to say convoluted…”

Williams also describes the villager’s music, like storytelling, as insubordinate to clock time:

“One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that,, and unlike the clear edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound map Even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.”

It is rare and pleasurable for an author to so clearly link his writing style to his subject and theme, and Williams has succeeded in writing a novel that reflects the time, the music, the people and their stories. Williams’ novel takes us deep into the heart and soul of the community of Faha which is the source of the power of the music and storytelling in that place:

“It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realize once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.”

This is as good a description as any I have read of what makes any book, music, or painting worthwhile.

This is Happiness is an unabashedly nostalgic look at a pre-modern Irish countryside that fostered local arts and language born of the people and the place where they lived. Though not described, there is an implicit contrast with modern cities and arts that are divorced from the souls of those who write or create. But Williams is not attempting to provide a balanced vision of that rustic Irish past. As many other novelist have written about small town rural life, it can be stultifying and even violent toward those who don’t fit into the village norms.

In his study, Suicide, Emile Durkheim said, “…the taste for individuation, and the love of progress…cannot exist without generating suicide.” In order to combat “corrosive individual egoism,” and “the moral poverty of our age”, he suggested that decentralized occupational or social groups could replace the strong sense of community and connection to each other that we have lost with modernity. Ideally, these would also tolerate differences and allow for individual beliefs outside the norm.

This is Happiness raises similar questions about progress. Are we any better off driving in cars rather than horse drawn carts? Are we any better informed with electronic devices rather than books? Are we any happier with the over abundance of consumables in our stores? Williams doesn’t temper his strongly held conviction that we are not, having given up the true sources of happiness, which are the stories and music that come from our souls and connection to the place where we live.

In earlier blogs I have delved into the issue of modernity and the seemingly unstoppable onslaught of progress that has devastated the planet and risks the continuing existence of life on earth. If we had stayed at the pre-modern, pre-electrical, pre-industrial stage, there would be a much smaller number of human beings consuming a much smaller proportion of the earth’s resources. Other species would have benefited if we had remained in a state of Gemeinschaft, living in damp stone huts at a subsistence level. While this state may not have been one of happiness for all human beings, it would have been a state of greater happiness for other species and the Earth as a whole.

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Time’s Arrow

The assumption that artists must produce work that reflects the time in which they live is a widely accepted and unquestioned truism. This is part of the paradigm that, as time is moving forward, we must all keep in step, or that art, like technology, must progress. Otherwise, we may become “behind the times”, believed an undesirable place to be. This means that artists whose work is considered daring, cutting edge and contributing to a progressive understanding of art, are constantly supplanted by the next wave.

An example of this was enacted in a play produced many years ago called Red, by John Logan, directed by Kim Collier and performed at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre.  It was one of the last main stage plays the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company performed before it closed in 2012. What a delight it was to see such great acting, dialogue, direction, & sets. Classical, full-on theatre such as this is scarce these days in Vancouver and elsewhere, as there seems to be less and less funding for the arts. Available performance space is increasingly devoted to “multi-media performances” with video, photography, sound (as opposed to music) and as much new media as possible, perhaps to appear contemporary & relevant to the Tweet generation. Not that Red didn’t use video & stills, but they were used in such a way that they didn’t clutter up the play unnecessarily.

The play, taking place about 1968, foreshadows artist Mark Rothko‘s suicide in 1970.  The visual metaphor is that of the colour black, symbolizing death & destruction,  gradually engulfing the colour red, symbolizing life in all its beauty & horror. It was an apt penultimate play for an excellent theatre company about to be scrapped.

The play suggests that much of Rothko’s mental anguish was caused by his feeling of growing irrelevance as the art fashion of the day moved to Pop Art as defined by such artists as Roy Lichtenstein

Artists who follow their inner direction and volition with luck can find themselves on the crest of the latest fashion in art. Then, when the tide turns and brings the next wave of young artists, influenced by a new set of circumstances, the formerly fashionable artists are considered behind the times. As the critic Harold Rosenberg said, Rothko and his contemporaries tore down “…unlimited formal experimentation and parody and fragments of radical ideas” only to have their own ideas derided as egotistical and outdated by the next generation of artists.

The following is a quote that I wrote down without noting the source.” The rhetoric of isms and counter-isms has vexed the art world since the Second World War with new stylistic trends set up every few years to oppose whatever has become fashionable (postmodern succeeding modern, deconstruction succeeding that, and so on). The superficial theoretical pretensions of the various after-modern “schools” use cheap pronouncements cribbed from works of philosophy or literary theory.  Art enjoys an oedipal energy in which creation is always destruction, usually of one’s most intimate influences.”

This Oedipal energy is as integral to art as it is to the culture of consumption.  We are constantly reminded that we must have the newest, best, most fashionable and most cutting-edge of everything, from electronics, to hairdos, to art.  God forfend that we should have last-year’s, let alone last decade’s, version of anything.  More profoundly, this is a belief that we are moving ever-forward on a trajectory of constant improvement. In this view, we are ever-striving onward & upward toward social & individual perfectibility in which all wrong thinking & wrong acting will be eradicated.  So the clunky cars of the 50,s, the horrendous politics of the 40’s, the economic errors of the ’20’s, the stultifying social mores of the 1900’s, and all the ignorance and pestilence that went before is being left ever-further behind us.  And the more recent & contemporary the art movement, the more likely it is to be closer to the goal of full understanding and intelligence.  It’s a view solidly ensnared in the belief that time’s arrow moves in only one direction – forward into the future and we must be constantly changing with it. The type, quality or direction of change is not important, as long as we are not left behind the times.

Recent thinking is that time moves not only forward but also sideways (backwards is disputed). We are programmed (no doubt for our own sanity) to only perceive the forward motion of time, but it’s sideways mobility accounts for the frequently reported non-linear temporal events. This has implications for our attitude toward not only art but all human creative activities throughout time.

Transcending Time

An excellent website called Art History Unstuffed provides a meaty discussion of Abstract Expressionism.  In the section called How Abstract Expressionism Re-Defined Painting and Art: Abstract Expressionism and Meaning, the author, Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette, states that, “The Abstract Expressionist artists translated “meaning” from subject matter to the broader and deeper intent of the word.  For these artists, “meaning” had to be profound and transcendent so that art could rise above the rather minor role it played during the Thirties as handmaiden to politics.”  She sums up her section of this discussion on Abstract Expressionism by saying:

“With Abstract Expression the primary moral act is the decision to paint, followed by the question of what to paint at the time of the end of painting.  In a world that has experienced an all engulfing war and a horrifying holocaust and a brilliant blast of annihilating light, painting becomes a moral activity, one of the last possible ethical gestures. Abstract Expressionism was an art of pure idea, considered to be sublime, even transcendent and thus reconnected with the early Romantic tradition of landscape painting in America.  Nineteenth century American painting had sought God in Nature, but in a universe that had be denaturalized and had been scourged of God, the only transcendence or saving grace was art itself, the last refuge of godliness.”

On the one hand, this assumption appears to be the epitome of hubris – the idea that we can attain spiritual transcendence and godliness by playing with colour & form.  And it suggests arrogance and egotism to assume that the arduous discipline necessary to find God, as taught by the world’s major religions over thousands of years, can be cheerfully circumvented by picking up a paintbrush and going at it.

On the other hand, as Barnett Newman said, “The artist expresses in a work of art an aesthetic idea which is innovate and eternal.” This idea captures the essence of abstraction as the artist seeks to remove all vestiges of identification with a particular place & time and creates a work that is universal. In this there is an element of spiritual transcendence and some abstract art could act as a bridge between the spiritual and the worldly. This appears to be the case for the Rothko Chapel, in Houston, Texas. As the magazine, Texas Monthly says: “To its devotees, the chapel is sublime: a darkened cosmos that facilitates powerful spiritual experiences. The space, which features fourteen dark paintings by Rothko, is famous for being dim and moody. It’s a sensory deprivation chamber that also functions as a theological deprivation chamber. Many customary signifiers of religion—statues, altars, stained glass—have been stripped away. It is, as Houston architectural historian Stephen Fox puts it, “a space that seems sacred for a post-religious world.””

But transcendence in abstract painting is not easy to achieve, and much of it is either a substitute for the ability to draw and create realism, or is a lifeless copy of a fashionable abstract painting style.

But to imagine that one artistic approach, such as Abstract Expressionism, can replace the search for spiritual enlightenment is suspect, since some of the most brilliant artists found more solace in drugs or the bottle than in their work. For Mark Rothko, a successful career of creating powerful paintings was not enough to defeat despair. To imagine that we can replace God, however understood, with Art is like assuming we can replace the signpost for the road, or more accurately, the road for the destination. Art is a genuine bridge between the spiritual and the worldly, but not the only one, or the one that works for all artists. Art, like yoga, prayer and other disciplines can lead toward spirituality, but surely the guidance of tried & true religious practices is needed. Art alone is too amorphous.

Conclusion

If there is a point to this discussion, rather than just being a ramble about the mysteries of Art, it is this: art is not, and should not be, time bound. There is no overarching need for artists to be limited to expressing the fashions or paradigms of the culture of the time in which they live. Artists can work with what Wllette called, “an art of pure idea“, or can build on the best work of past eras, confident that time is elastic and art can transcend time. There is more on the topic of art and the time in another blog.

The post Behind the Times first appeared on Marion-Lea Jamieson, Artist.

In the adjacent upland area of the French Creek Estuary we counted more Juncos and more Spotted Towhees than I’ve ever seen in one place, a couple of Hummingbirds, some Quail, many Sparrows, and a few birds that are rare at this time of year such as a Townsend’s Warbler. There were at least 14 majestic Great Blue Herons nesting in the trees and flying overhead to fish. On a cold day in March the trees and bushes were simply alive with birds and it was entrancing.

The joy of seeing these exquisite creatures up close in my binoculars is my reason for bird watching. These elegantly feathered animals so entirely at one with their surroundings, are a strong contrast to us humans in our environment. We constantly ward off our surroundings with walls, heating/air conditioning, machines, clothing and devices. But birds belong to a different, more attuned, more perfect way of life than us domesticated human beings. Is this innately what it is to be human or were we at one time more like birds and other wild beings? Their beauty, super-awareness and finely-focused attention on the present moment, every moment, is like a lesson in how to be in the world.

In Margaret Atwood’s forward to The Bedside Book of Birds: An Avian Miscellany, by her late husband Graeme Gibson, she describes what bird watching meant to him. ”…every new Bird was a revelation to him. He wasn’t much interested in making lists of the birds he had seen, though he did make such lists as an aid to memory. Instead it was the experience of the particular, singular bird that enthralled him: this one, just here, just now. A red tailed hawk! Look at that! Nothing could be more magnificent!“

But yesterday it was difficult to be enthralled in the present moment knowing that an area of marvellous bird habitat, adjacent to the protected area of French Creek, will be bulldozed for more human habitat. Sadly this is not a protected area but private land slated for development of 14 homes. This is the dilemma of bird-watching: the more you watch them the more you treasure birds, and the more pain you feel as their habitat is destroyed, lot by lot, forest by forest, ecosystem by ecosystem.

In several earlier blogs I have explored birds in both sculptures and paintings such as the painting below. Then Again was part of a series called Time Lines, that used schematic images inspired by European Neolithic art from 7000 – 3500 BC. The series examined the linear concept of time or the understanding that we are constantly moving forward into the future and out of the past. It explored the possibility that time is a more circular phenomenon that is relative or even illusory. The simplification of images in Neolithic culture produced an abstract, symbolic, conceptual art that subverts the idea that art is progressing, and that whatever is created today is superior to what went before.

Time LInes also continued the exploration of the relationship between humans and other species using figures with both animal and human characteristics in 2D and 3D. This investigation was ongoing for many years and always seems relevant. Creation is the largest and final piece in this series. The melded figures contrast with the belief, common in Western and modern cultures, that humans are separate from and independent of nature. The series referenced ancient animal/human mythological images suggesting that the split between mind and body, human and natural, is a fairly recent paradigm that replaced the previous understanding of a more interactive relationship with other species.

Some of the paintings, like Flight, shown below, were painted as though sculptural. Flight, features a melded human/bird figure, and visualizes a sculpture that I could make in steel at some time in the future. It was inspired by the elegantly constructed armour in European museums, and how wonderful it would be to use the same techniques to build a sculpture on the animal/human fusion theme.

This series included some sculptures such as the one in wood shown here

These works are in praise of birds – these gorgeous, jaunty, mysterious beings. May they persevere, survive the Anthropocene era and continue for eons to come as they have done for the past 150 million years.

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