Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: July 07, 2019 12:54PM
Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884):
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/27992/a-sunday-on-la-grande-jatte-1884What are they looking at? Is it the river?
The sunlight on the river, the summer, leisure,
Or the luxury and nothingness of consciousness?
A little girl skips, a ring-tailed monkey hops
Like a kangaroo, held by a lady’s lead
(Does the husband tax the Congo for the monkey’s keep?)
The hopping monkey cannot follow the poodle dashing ahead.
Everyone holds his heart within his hands:
A prayer, a pledge of grace or gratitude
A devout offering to the god of summer, Sunday and plenitude.
The Sunday people are looking at hope itself.
They are looking at hope itself, under the sun, free from the teething anxiety, the gnawing nervousness
Which wastes so many days and years of consciousness.
The one who beholds them, beholding the gold and green
Of summer’s Sunday is himself unseen. This is because he is
Dedicated radiance, supreme concentration, fanatically threading
The beads, needles and eyes -at once!- of vividness and permanence.
He is a saint of Sunday in the open air, a fanatic disciplined
By passion, courage, passion, skill, compassion, love: the love of life and the love of light as one, under the sun, with the love of life.
Everywhere radiance glows like a garden in stillness blossoming.
—Delmore Schwarz-
—From “Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon Along the Seine”—
Tell me, o’ wise RfMers, what part of the genome painted this, wrote this? What neurons wrote this, painted this? What part of our evolution needed this for survival? Why do human brains do this?
We write and paint, view and read because it is our pleasure.
When I was told that Heavenly Father demanded suit-wearing reverence on Sunday Afternoons, which meant ‘sit-still and shut-up’, I wondered how this was supposed to be restful.
Human, with a genome smaller than a tomato, enjoying "the luxury and nothingness of consciousness..."