INLINES and OUTLINES

INLINES and OUTLINES

Isn’t that a visual portrait of life itself, in three words? When I say I can see your outline, am I not also saying the reverse? “Hey, your background’s inline takes a good picture.” We can say that this is what art is all about. But really, it’s we who imitate art in this very manner. Life is all about selective attention while remembering the operative word – selective.

We do it not only with inanimate backdrops, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches, but with personalities and first (and last) impressions. We listen to our own warning signs but also to those taught to us. We become portals of social limitation, and our norms begin and end with selective patterns of attention.

We collect just as much information from the outlying gray and blurry shadows as we do from the objects they profile. In a way one is a statement about the other – like twins pointing to one another. If something has depth and substance, it’s because of the reflective properties of what surrounds it in contrast.

We could call the surrounding energies mirages. They exist under special conditions, with mental/physical atmospheres. They are also auras. Just imagine an aura in reverse: a lit object, the center of our attention, being the aura of what frames it.

Reality then comes down to where we decide to “draw the line.” When we’re very young all the lines are nondescript and mercurial. Everything’s fluid and difficult to define. In old age we return to the same surreality but with a certain peace of mind about it. Those of us troubled by it get caught in webs of “diagnostic” doom. They’re indoctrinated by disease “symptoms” that must be remedied. There’s the patient in a mental facility, and then there’s the elderly woman I watched one day sitting on her front porch, clearly “out of her mind,” but wearing the smile of an enlightened yogi.

“Oh, but how will she toilet herself or feed and clothe herself?” Her response: “That’s your problem. You take care of it.” “Oh, but she isn’t lucid enough to make that decision.” – Oh really?? Thus, it becomes your “hard” line against her gray, translucent line. And, now that we’re on the subject, exactly why are you “nursing” her at all? To keep up appearances? Why are you keeping her alive? Is it for her needs, or your own? It’s the century-old debate, still unresolved: What is medicine’s first job? Quality of life, or to prolong life?

Leonardo and other genius-artists called it sfumato and chiaroscuro. Sfumato is what makes the Mona Lisa what it is. It literally means “softened, vaporous” and refers to the transitions from light-to-dark in a manner which is almost imperceptible. Chiaroscuro is Italian for “light-dark” and refers, again, to the almost imperceptible gradations of light to dark (more associated with Leonardo’s personal technique). Later, the term “painterly” was also employed to distinguish soft shades from “hard-edged” lines. Leonardo understood the symbiosis of inlines and outlines and the nondescript universes in between.

The background behind the Mona Lisa is, interestingly, a landscape often described as “the unconscious.” Her gaze wanders off. She’s in mourning and yet smiles at the same time – and no one even knows who she is. ¹ That alone gives us a clue as to what it is we’re looking at – an expression (outline) of the universe seen through human eyes (and a smile) and the inline of an infinitely mysterious horizon. Psychologically, it throws a “figure-ground reversal” at the viewer.

The line therefore becomes something magical, an optical illusion, which takes us through many adventures. Colors and tones inside lines, when juxtaposed, fool us as to their relative relationships. A dark object placed inside a light background is the exact same shade as the light-appearing object set inside a dark background. The small-appearing black dot set inside surrounding large dots is the exact same size as a large-appearing dot set inside surrounding small dots. And the famous “hour-glass/two faces” Rorschach shows two things at once but allows us to see only one at a time. One is always excluded. We try to see both simultaneously, but it’s impossible. Nature makes us in such a way as to swim in a universe of endlessly competing contrasts.

If/When we choose, to encounter a person or thing on the street can instantly take on a spiritual dimension. Though we can’t see both at the same time, we can still perceive the codependent “line” between what he is and isn’t. One is the atmosphere of the other. Not only is what you see relative to what you don’t see, but what “you” are in that moment (as observer) plays into it just as much. You are also a “condition” of many competing contrasts and lines. Suddenly, everything is indefinite, contingent, tentative, translucent, and fleeting. Nothing is fixed or tied down. Everything is relative – including relativity itself (since our “predisposition” also relative, declares it to be so). Suddenly everything deconstructs.

We end up walking around wondering which exactly are the optical illusions, and what (if anything) is real? The mind has to constantly superimpose a safe and predictable reality over all this, like a geometirc grid over nature. Alan Watts used to say that what is “wiggly” becomes “squared away and straightened out.” We don’t “exist” unless/until we implant our pre-programmed lines.

And thus begins the struggle that began long ago, at the beginning of time with our cave-dwelling ancestors. The intuitive and natural inclusivity with nature (infinitely “wiggly”) – versus — our interminable fear of the unknown, the need to respond differently, to build illusions, fantasies, and myths (grids) of supremacy over the unknown. We fabricate an idea of “Eden,” and then “square it away.” Meanwhile, as someone said, our alienation slowly kills us much like a frog cooking to death in boiling water without it knowing. Soft lines congeal and crust around us.

Civilization seems to have been the progression of just that – a frog placed in a pan of water slowly heated to boiling. All civilizations die in the end, along with their sophisticated, carefully calculated lines. As the sage says, “there are no straight lines in nature.” Nor are there squares or boxes of any kind. The American Indian, builder of round homes, says “there’s no life in a box.” Euclid was a wise man, but one has to get past his basic geometric principles to know what we really meant by them. His first common notion: “Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.”

Much closer to home, I pick up on this scenario every morning when I hear a news story, when I watch a squirrel eating a nut, or a neighbor shoveling snow. We all do it. We have foregrounds and backgrounds, and we all do it differently. It’s what makes us unique to one another.

But I have to ask: In this post-postmodern world, in this very late “season of our discontent,” are the lines of reality crossing and blurring en masse and even fasterdespite ourselves?Just looking at how lines are crossing politically, religiously, socially, sexually (with genders), etc., there seems to be a mega-crisis of identities. And again, are we to treat it as a “symptom,” a disease, or like the crazy woman on the porch clearly “out of her mind?” Is being out of one’s mind the just the drawing of new lines?

I will admit, I have had my “episodes” of resistance to all these changes, as recent times have brutally dropped many old lines. I’m a product of my generation, now beginning to fade off along with all the generations that came before it. I sometimes see my own parents inside me. I wax nostalgic as they did, bitch about the present, and wish for more control and predictability in the world.

But then I shake it off and force myself to see it all as a kind of sfumato. And maybe the “new mind” (the lady who was “out” of hers) is the same as what the earliest troglodytes saw – being “fused and confused” with nature. Only this time around we know it and embrace it. We even talk about it now.Life is one huge pot of gray transpositions and “wiggles.” Everything is temporary. It begins to die as soon as it’s born. We are becomings. And as Buckminster Fuller said, “I seem to be a verb.”

© 2021 Richard Hiatt

1The most current answer to the question of identity is that she is a total fabrication of Leonardo’s imagination, someone meant to symbolize a mother-figure to the illegitimate child of Giuliano de Medici. The child’s real mother might have died (hence the Mona Lisa in mourning), or she might have lived (her mysterious smile). No one knows, and neither did Leonardo. – A thin gray line he walked even in this commission.