My Dear though Unknown Friends, I’m struggling up from an oozy swamp, just beginning now to break the surface with my snout.  No one’s asking me to explain my weeks of absence from writing this blog, but I feel impelled to tell you that I haven’t felt able to write new posts, and I’ve already made false starts at this one, because I’ve felt buried under layers of injury, surgery and therapy, illness, anxiety, doubt, unaddressed household tasks, and self-recrimination.  Of course, there’s been the pandemic and related confinement, and the countless reasons for worry and discouragement that come with the daily news.  Which is to say that my trials and tribulations have no doubt been similar to what many, many of you, too, have been facing.

But my difficulties in getting restarted here have also had a lot to do with something that others, including many artists and mystics especially, have wrestled with over the centuries:  the confounding challenge of expressing what is inexpressible, of bridging the lonely distance between what I experience and what you experience, of bringing people to a point where they can see through the common illusions of names and concepts to .  the living mystery beyond description (as Kafka wrote, “Language is always a poor translation”).  In other words, reality and the glories that that can’t be bought or taught.

Among the greatest barriers to meeting those challenges is the ego-serving fiction that something we call Intellect can exist as a faculty apart from other human faculties; that we’re best served when it dominates our decisions and actions; and that it’s our supreme human faculty.  According to our society, it’s what “makes us superior to the animals.”  Supposedly, it has made Caucasian Westerners superior to people of “different” races and cultures.  (Distinctions which exist only in divisions created by ego and intellect, like the maps that we paste on an undivided earth.)  Time and again, we’ve used that illusory division and bogus superiority to justify the enslavement or slaughter of multitudes of our fellow beings, including our fellow homo sapiens.  A person who successfully strives for seeming objectivity, seemingly-independent operation of the intellect, triumphs only in creating a deformity, a detrimental and disproportionate reliance on an illusion, like believing that you can run with your skull, without moving your legs and feet. As a clinical matter, people who strive with apparent success to make important decisions based on intellect alone do so with regrettable results.  Some of the people who do that most thoroughly are those we call psychopaths.

The faculty that we call intellect is good for figuring out how to transport water uphill from the river to our hut.  It can do astonishing things.  It’s pretty useless, however, in disclosing the satisfactions of tasting that water, swimming in it, watching its ever-changing motions and reflections, hearing it as rain on a roof or waves on a beach.  I don’t want to argue or dissect much in these posts, partly because of my concern about the very things that I’m writing about now.  I’d rather offer you stories, illustrations, observations, suggestions, artworks that convey rather than attempt to explain.  Let me share with you a memory that illustrates the blindness of intellect when faced with what matters most.

I had a roommate in college who’d been a classmate of mine in high school.  He’d been an exceptional athlete, breaking various school records in his sport.  He was intelligent, intellectually-eager, and had been accepted by one of the best universities in the country.  For his reasons, which don’t much matter here, he looked up to me and valued my opinion.

One night, he came home late from a party.  He’d taken as his date a woman he’d been seeing on and off for little more than a couple of weeks.  In recent months, his behavior and thinking had become gradually odder, disturbed in a peculiarly-obsessive way.  That night, as soon as he got back to our apartment, he began to describe to me the events of his evening, in minute detail and at great length, including every word he could recall from conversations between him and his date, as well as from their interchanges with other party guests.  After more than an hour of this fine-toothed report, he asked me:  “So, do I love her?”

It wasn’t a lack of intellect that made him so strangely unable to answer that question.  What was lacking was the healthy functioning of the Higher Faculty which partakes of, but isn’t limited to, what we call heart, intuition, and soul, based on experience, not conceptualizing.

The intellect is just a tool, not a driver.  In the absence of guidance from that higher, more complete function, other forces, like vanity, aggression, greed, lust for power, a taste for cruelty, are all too ready to take the reins.  Psychopaths don’t lack intellect; they lack the higher faculty.  The same is true of certain politicians, business executives, corporate attorneys, drug cartel members, and for all of us at times, as we destroy the world we live in.  What exactly is that higher faculty?  No one can define it, partly because it partakes of the infinite, but we all know it, in the same way that we know “the light that is given to every man who comes into this world,” but which we so often shut out.  We have knowledge of that light, but intellect can’t define or analyze it, or identify its source or its presence.  We can’t provide to anyone else a scientific or mathematical proof of its existence, its effects, or its value.  Yet everything depends on it.

Let me offer as a kind of exhibit a photograph that I’ve printed here before.  There are certain artworks that are perennially named by practitioners or lovers of a given art form as the best example of that art.  In jazz, it’s been Kind of Blue by the Miles Davis sextet.  In film, it’s been Citizen Kane.  Among American novels, either Moby Dick or The Great Gatsby.  Among photographs, it’s been this one:

Can the intellect or language truly define, describe, or identify where this image’s greatness lies?  Is that needed?  Does its greatness have much to do with the fact that when Edward Weston made the exposure on which it was based, the principal object in front of his lens was what we commonly call a pepper?  We can note that the image, through patterns of shape and light and shadow, conveys an unusual degree of dynamism.  Does that cover it?  Would any intellectual analysis or linguistic description, in the absence of a viewer seeing the image, convey what makes it great?

Part of what makes it great is the fact that, although on the surface the “subject” might seem a humble one, for many of us who love it, it somehow evokes an almost-cosmic energy, an almost-divine presence.  Weston wrote in his Daybooks that one aim of photography as he practiced it is to show how all of life informs every part of life — which calls to mind William Blake:  ““If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”

To find great, enlivening experience in even the small, the overlooked or despised, whether vegetable or tree stump or impoverished human being, is one of the marks of vision, of the higher faculty in both the artist and a spellbound viewer of, say, Weston’s numinous Shell (1927), or an entranced reader of Basho’s merely-seventeen-syllable haiku masterpieces.  To receive what is most valuable in such works requires neither great intellect nor wealth nor any kind of pre-eminence.  It does require, however, that light, that higher faculty.

My observations here aren’t new by any means, but they remain crucial.  One person who wrote that intellect is a mere pretender to the title of supreme human faculty was George MacDonald, a Scottish writer and preacher of the 19^th Century.  His views were basically unwelcome to the Church of his day.  Most of his marvelous sermons were never delivered.  Yet (partly as the inventor of modern fantasy tales) he became the literary and religious master for, among other authors, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien — in whose Lord of the Rings, fittingly, the fate of the world turns mainly on the brave and loving heart of a diminutive, furry-footed Hobbit named Frodo.

Unhappily, though, as I’ll write about, the world of contemporary photography over-values and misuses intellect, in ways that reinforce the rigid shells, the Matrix, that great art works to break.

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