Wednesday morning

Thinking about things:

Today I am wondering about language and art and how they help us understand what it is we think about things. How the arrangement of words and images transmits and evokes thoughts for us to know about. How the details and perspectives, and not all of them mind you, sit upon the page/canvas and at the same time leap out and push against our selves. And how, then, we can hopefully "turn around on" what see and write or paint our own understanding of it all. Perhaps to become interlaced images in the firmament.

Plum Blossoms

H. Matisse

1948

I love this painting by Matisse. It is full of details and perspectives for thinking about. Even more so if we were to stand before the painting itself. I know you might say it is the artist's way with things, but I can't help wondering about how these arrangements come about for him.

Here are some words from the learned psychologist Jerome Bruner about what he calls externalization, his notion of how we come to place our ideas upon the page. I love this man's way of thinking and writing about ideas and concepts that are so hard to master and portray. He is now 96 years old and still writing about how he see the way we are in the world.

Externalization produces a record of our mental efforts, one that is “outside us” rather than vaguely in memory. “It” relieves us in some measure from the always difficult task of “thinking about our own thoughts” while often accomplishing the same end. “It” embodies our thought and intentions It is a form more accessible to reflective efforts. The process of thought and its product become interwoven. Bruner, 1996, p. 22

Language not only transmits, it creates or constitutes knowledge or “reality.” Part of that reality is the stance that the language implies toward knowledge and reflection, and the generalized set of stances one negotiates creates in time a sense of one’s self. Bruner, 1986, p. 132

All of this comes to mind because I am back teaching in the late afternoons in Kroeber Hall. Notemaking, listing, t-charts, maps abound!!!