aesthetics of joy

At the risk of becoming the all-rainbows-all-the-time blog, I had brave monotony to share one more. Though these rare formations have the familiar red-to-violet spectrum, they are technically not rainbows, but “circumzenithal arcs.” They owe their upside-down shape to light refracted by ice crystals high up in the atmosphere. Note also that the colors appear in reverse order, with violet on top and red at the bottom.

Circumzenithal arcs are about as common as rainbows, but they seem rarer; because they appear at such high altitudes, they are harder to spot. A good place to look for them is in cirrus clouds.

One more reason to look up more often: you might see the sky smiling back at you.

Via: The Weather Network, with thanks to Michael McQuay for the tip.
Images: Jack Justice and Michel Talbot.

Say the name Sam Gribley and many Americans of a certain age will be instantly transported to a hollowed-out oak in a Northeastern forest, to the fictional home of a fictional boy who ventured bravely into the woods thinking anything was possible. They may tell you of how quickly they devoured My Side of the Mountain, the book that introduced Sam to the world, or how they confidently packed up a rucksack and told their parents they were “running away” in emulation. They may tell you how that book kindled in them a love for nature, or a love for writing. Or they may just nod quietly, as if appreciating some stlll-burning embers of childhood wilderness fantasies.

My Side of the Mountain was unique in that it made manifest the joy of the wild to children, for whom nature was so often tamed and sanitized. It was the brainchild of Jean Craighead George, a prolific writer and naturalist who was for many children a kind of guide to the beauty and wonder of the natural world. I was among those many children touched by Jean’s words, but I also had the privilege of knowing her personally, of being her neighbor and friend. Jean passed away earlier this year, and last Sunday I joined the (very) many who gathered to celebrate Jean and share what she meant to them at a memorial service in Chappaqua, NY. She was a formative figure in my life, and I thought you might like to know more about what it was like to grow up within the orbit of this remarkable woman. Jean embodied joy. In fact, she taught me much about it before I even knew it was what I was looking for.

I never “met” Jean, I just knew her. I lived across the street from her while I was growing up and she was a part of my life going as far back as I can remember. I would show up at her house unannounced, knocking on the screen door, in the way that Dennis the Menace dropped in on Mr. Wilson on TV. (This seems unfathomable now, doesn’t it? How impossible and quaint such a friendship seems now as kids are sequestered at home in front of devices, rather than left to wander the neighborhood, finding their own amusements.) I would arrive with some discovery, a strange plant or insect, and Jean would examine it with me, identify it, and tell me stories. She seemed to know everything. When I found a frog in the skimmer of our pool, Jean helped me set up a tank with fresh water and rocks to help it recover. When I encountered a fallen nest crowded with hatchlings, she took them in. She took note of my curiosities, and fed them. After reading My Side of the Mountain, I wanted to know if it was really true that Sam could stay alive eating only what he could find in from the forests. She soon gave me a book on foraging. This led to my decimating in short order all the fiddleheads in our front yard to sauté for dinner. (I’m not sure that counts as “foraging,” but it was delicious.)

The door to Jean’s wood-shingled house was always open to me. Invariably she was hard at work, but she was never too busy for a visit. I was never told to come back later. I was always welcomed with an exclamation — “Oh, Ingy!” — and a hug. And how I loved going to Jean’s house. Across the dirt road and up a few steps from my house was a wonderland, a world of curiosities. Jean loved to travel, and her house was full of her findings from these journeys. Inuit masks hung on the walls, a feathery blade of baleen hung over a doorway, a shark jaw sat on top of the television. A giant whale vertebra, like a stone propellor, sat on the floor by the fireplace. At the same time, Jean’s house was more than a repository of souvenirs. A lush mural on the front wall had been painted by a friend. In the foyer, a koi pond burbled a comforting background track. It was an unusual but real home, a home well-lived into. And it smelled that way too, the warm smoky air of the always-burning wood stove mingled with transported scents from faraway lands.

Jean amazed me with her adventures, traveling well into her golden years to places I hardly knew existed. She was always just back from somewhere at the edge of the map, and because of this she expanded the boundaries of what I considered my world. Jean traveled outside the realm of guidebooks. She trod the off-off-beaten path. She traveled to connect with the people in foreign lands, more often than not the native peoples who lived in kinship with the wildlife she studied and wrote about. And they embraced her because she was genuine in her desire to understand those places, the spirit that kindled their unique beauty. She listened with reverence to the songs of the wildlife, giving voice to creatures that for many people are distant and silent. She interpreted their characters for us in the hope of creating empathy that might protect them from the dangers of the encroaching modern world.

Jean’s life was so vibrant, I think, because it was all about life, the joy of all that lives and breathes and squirms and squawks around us. Jean embraced all of the messiness of the world, savoring its incongruities, its tensions. She didn’t let discomfort stand in the way of discovery. She ventured into the world’s mysteries deeply in tune with her own sense of wonder, and she cultivated that wonder in others. It was infectious. You couldn’t be in Jean’s presence and not be amazed by what fascinated her. You couldn’t read her books, especially the ones so beautifully illustrated by her collaborator Wendell Minor, and not fall in love with the landscapes she depicted. She understood that she only had one life and she was keen on using the time she had to experience, to explore, to create, and to love.

When I was discovering writing, Jean cheered and fed my passion. When I didn’t know what to write, Jean said to me,”write what you know.”* But she may as well have said, “write what you love.” It is what she did, and oh, the places it took her. At the memorial last weekend, as I listened to so many people speak of how Jean had changed them — how she had pulled them out of depression or inspired them to adventure or taught them to listen to their inner child — I thought of the words of another writer, the poet Mary Oliver:

               Tell me, what is it you plan to do
               with your one wild and precious life?

So many of us forget, in our humdrum routines, that we only have one life. We let days full of potential go by without realizing just how rare they are. But Jean didn’t, and looking back, I believe that is her most important gift to us. By living her life to its wild and precious fullest, she leaves a light for the rest of us. And I feel sure that there’s no better way to honor her memory than to do the same.

For more:
Jean’s website
NYT obituary
Jean’s books

*To any of you who aspire to write, this remains the best advice I’ve ever been given on the subject. It’s certainly what keeps me at it.

About a month ago I promised more rainbows, and here they are. This rainbow, produced by the artist Michael Jones McKean for the Bemis Center in downtown Omaha, Nebraska, is a kind of controlled magic. Like Berndnaut Smilde’s indoor clouds, which I wrote about back in April, McKean’s rainbow attempts to bring something elusive and ephemeral into our grasp. I love these lines from the artist’s statement:

Whether a majestic arch in the sky that appears after a short spring shower or a small, homespun rainbow created with a garden hose on a sunny day, a rainbow operates as an egalitarian visual experience. It is by nature temporary, undetermined, and wonderful. The Rainbow exists somewhere between real and representation, actual and artifice.

It’s an interesting thing, this space between real and representation. Is McKean’s rainbow (or Smilde’s cloud) as joyful as a real rainbow? It takes advantage of the same physical phenomena. It is materially identical to a natural rainbow. And yet, part of the joy of real rainbows is that they can’t be summoned — they are by definition elusive, serendipitous. And actually, this is part of what makes them, in McKean’s words, “an egalitarian visual experience.” No one owns the means of rainbow production. We are equally entitled to its mercurial visitations.

More from McKean:

Although the symbol of a rainbow has been co-opted, politicized, branded and commodified, an actual prismatic rainbow still has an ability to jolt us from the everyday. It feels hopeful, yearning, optimistic, ghost-like and meaningful. Whether perceived immediately as an artwork or not, the experience holds the power to connect diverse publics through an intangible, shared encounter.

McKean isn’t the first artist to attempt to manufacture rainbows. In fact, while researching my last post on Andy Goldsworthy, I discovered this:

Rainbow splash
hit water with heavy stick
bright, sunny, windy
River Wharfe, Yorkshire
22 [23?] December 1980

Perhaps it is only human to try to extend and expand the joys we observe in the wild, to conjure it in whatever ways we are able. And you know, I’m not sure I’d want to be human if we didn’t.

Images: photos of McKean’s piece, certain principles of light and shapes between forms, courtesy of the artist. The last image of Goldsworthy is from the Goldsworthy archive.

Via: Designboom, with thanks to Maggie

PS: For those worried about wasted water in McKean’s rainbow project, read below. And cheer up!

The artwork will solely utilize captured rainwater and will be powered with renewable sources. Leading up to the exhibition, extensive modifications to the Bemis Center’s five-story, repurposed industrial warehouse took place — creating a completely self-contained water harvesting and large-scale storage system. Throughout the project cycle, collected and recaptured stormwater will be filtered and stored in six above-ground, 10,500 gallon water tanks.

certain principles of light and shapes between forms

The $50 off a print at Lux Archive goes to Kate, who wrote:

I live in Canmore Alberta, a mountain town situated in the Bow Valley. Around these parts fall includes the turning of the larch trees, a unique coniferous tree that loses its needles ever year. The turning of the larches motivates hundreds of people to venture into the rocky mountains to witness these glorious pillars of light. So much so that Parks Canada had to close the road to Moraine Lake at the base of Larch Valley, as the park reached capacity. It is like an ecological pilgrimage.

This year, which I am sure people exclaim every year, the larches are particularly magical. I don’t know if it is due to the above average weather we have been having or what, but it seems all the larches turned golden yellow at exactly the same time. It truly is wondrous to see such natural coordination, a sight that really lifts the spirit and induces dropped jaws in awe.

Thanks, Kate, for that beautiful image! It made me think about the energy and synchrony of nature, to burst into beautiful color all at the same moment, to create such a spectacle. That in turn made me think of an artist who works with the energies of nature to create arresting, but similarly evanescent, beauty.

Andy Goldsworthy has been a favorite of mine since I discovered his winding wall up at Storm King. There is a documentary about him, Rivers and Tides,  that I highly recommend. (I watch it at least once a year, usually at moments when I’m feeling creatively worn out.) In the film, you get to see him in the process of making these works, how he learns from the materials and adjusts to them. It is all about energy for him, harnessing the energies of his materials, their color and form and heat to create something that is perfect, but only for a few moments. I think this is what I resonate to most about his work — that it is a monument to the idea that what really matters in life is to go out every day and try to make something significant. So many people strive to make something lasting, something that will outlive them. So many people toil for posterity. But Goldsworthy creates for the now, for the exact moment he is in, and creates the most perfect thing for that moment. It doesn’t matter that it’s not lasting. Beauty, not durability, is the measure of success.

And this of course is the nature of joy: fleeting, in the moment, significant, but not permanent.

I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately, and I find his pieces have a kind of poetry to them. They are succinct yet lyrical, and take their meaning as much from their context as from their content. Goldsworthy’s notes likewise have a poetic quality, as he writes about the piece above, entitled Elder leaf patch / edge made by finding leaves the same size / tearing one in two / spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another:

Diary: 10th Oct

Helbeck Woods
Wet earth but no longer raining
fairly calm to begin with but
now very windy – blew work
away

rain
again.

elder purple patch
the colour of the stain left
by sycamore leaves.

Images: Most from the Andy Goldworthy Digital Catalogue. A treasure trove!

Well, I’m back after a longish, unscheduled break. Let’s call it a summer (working) holiday. But wow, did I miss it. I don’t plan on taking this much time away from the blog again for a long time. There are just too many interesting and joyful things to write about…

Before I launch into some thoughts on the things I’ve been reading and observing in the last few weeks, I want to just say a quick thank you to everyone who has commented, sent me an email, or sent me links recently. This summer has left me breathless, and I haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone yet, but rest assured that I will, and that I appreciate the kind words, the thoughtful recommendations, and the healthy debate you bring to my inbox. Thanks!

On my mind today are the aesthetics of nature. A big part of my thesis for Aesthetics of Joy is that joy evolved to guide us unconsciously towards things that would have been beneficial for our survival (or more accurately, the survival of our genetic material). It stands to reason that since during the bulk of this evolution humans were nomadic creatures living in an environment with far more trees than skyscrapers, natural environments are going to be replete with stimuli that make us feel joyful. Bright sunlight, ripe fruits, wide open spaces—these primal joys hold clues that give context and meaning to many of the things that delight us in the modern world. And as the research supporting evolutionary theories of psychology continues to accumulate, the evidence suggesting the connection between aesthetics of nature and our wellbeing is beginning to mount.

On his Frontal Cortex blog, now on Wired.com, Jonah Lehrer has a great discussion of some findings from the emerging field of ecopsychology, which looks at the relationship between nature and the mind. (I first wrote about this field of research in February, here.) One study, dating back to the mid-1990s, looked at female housing project residents, some of whom were living in apartments facing city streets and basketball courts, and others who had views of a grassy, landscaped courtyard. The women were tested on everything from attention to their ability to cope with life’s challenges, and those with the more natural view tested better on nearly every measure. Similarly, in a 2008 study led by Marc Berman at the University of Michigan, students who were given time to walk through a park before taking a series of tests performed better on measures of attention and memory than those who had walked through city streets.

According to psychologists, views of nature are restorative. They seem to allow the brain to reset and concentrate again. This reminds me of an insight noted by Chip and Dan Heath in their book Switch: Willpower, they observe, is finite. When you expend a lot of effort trying to control cravings, desires, or emotions in a certain situation, it can be draining, leaving you with little energy to control yourself in others. I wonder if there’s a similar mechanism going on here. Functioning in urban environments takes a lot of mental energy. It requires high alertness, and it’s sensorially complex; there’s a lot to process. I wonder if views of nature provide a reset because they are simply easier on our brains, evolved as they are for processing the stimuli in this environment.

This may be, but it’s not the whole story. Another study, also cited in the article on solastalgia I quoted in my February post, adds another piece to the puzzle. The study, conducted by Peter Kahn, took participants and stressed them out with a series of math tests, and then gave them one of three views to look at: a window facing out onto a tree-filled view, a plasma screen of the same view, and a blank wall. Those looking at the natural scene had the quickest stress reduction (measured by a decrease in heart rate). Those looking at the blank wall had a much slower return to normal heart rate. We could’ve predicted that. Subjects who looked at the nature scene and the plasma screen both looked at their views longer than those looking at the blank wall. Also a no-brainer. But surprisingly, the subjects who looked at the plasma screen showed virtually the same stress-reduction pattern as those looking at the wall. So while we’re drawn towards a views of nature to relieve our stress, it has to be real nature. It’s not something we can trace to one aesthetic element—like the color green or the contours of the leaves—and bottle it. It’s the full multisensory, immersive aesthetics of nature, all together, that foster wellbeing and joy.

Apparently, the kind of nature matters too. Lehrer’s post mentions another study that demonstrated that people who spend time in parks with a greater diversity of plant life score better on tests of psychological wellbeing than those who spend time in less biodiverse parks. A patch of grass may be green, but it’s not nature. A diverse park is more like nature, naturally, and probably a lot more like the environments in which our brains grew up. Variety, as much as greenness or leafiness, is an aesthetic of nature, and it seems it does us a lot of good.

Another fascinating insight about our brain and nature comes from an interview with Mark Changizi, an evolutionary neurobiologist whose latest book explores new research on human vision, on the Neuronarrative blog. Changizi observes that one of the reasons its so easy for humans to read (those of us who are literate read thousands of words in a day) is that our letterforms mimic natural shapes. He suggests that if our words looked like barcodes or fractal patterns, we would not be able to process them nearly as quickly. He says:

To be easy on the eye, writing needs to “look like nature,” just what our illiterate visual systems are fantastically competent at processing. The trick of that research direction was making this “writing looks like nature” idea rigorous, and coming up with ways of testing it. I show that there are certain signature visual patterns found in nearly any natural environment with opaque objects strewn about, and that these signature patterns are found in human writing. In short, writing has evolved so that written words look like visual objects.

I have to pause to marvel at the beauty of this insight, which is nothing short of thrilling for readers, writers, and typographers all. But as the awe subsides, I wonder if this fascinating insight holds a clue to applying aesthetics of nature to design in ways that really do foster our wellbeing. I’m sick of seeing wallpaper that looks like birch trees or tables with grass growing in the middle put forth as design’s  solution to the urban condition. Can’t we do better? As the plasma screen experiment demonstrated, a picture of nature isn’t going to cut it, and while it’s certainly a fine idea to have some plants around, I think we could go about “bringing the outside in” in a more sophisticated way. Perhaps there are visual patterns or spatial arrangements that better mimic a natural environment, design ideas that can be applied to urban planning, architecture, interiors, and products to provide some of the same benefits. It’s encouraging to think that we may be on the cusp of learnings that will help us bring more aesthetics of nature into our citified lives.

Of course, there’s another implication here, not for the design of a home necessarily, but maybe for the design of a lifestyle. Get outdoors. Do it often and especially when you’re stressed. Because no matter how well we’re eventually able to design to mimic nature, there’s no substitute for the real thing.

I’m  still trying to put my finger on what exactly is so joyful about Bzzzpeek, a site where you can play recordings of what children think animals sound like in different parts of the globe. Is it the sweet, earnest quality of the children’s imitations? The general cuteness of the site design? Or just the charm of being able to travel the world via quacks and ribbits? I don’t know, but the moment it appeared in my inbox (thank you, Jon), it brought a smile to my face.

The deeper question here is why we feel the need to imitate animal sounds when we have words to describe the animals. Before we had language, “Moo,” was a good way to alert neighbors to a food source. Now, when we can say, “There’s a herd of cows grazing just over the grassy knoll,” “Moo” seems terribly obsolete. Of course, there are still a few functional reasons to make animal sounds: birders do it to attract different species to look at, pet owners do it out of some empathic desire to connect with their pets. But why do children do it? I wonder if there’s some innate pleasure in imitation, or if there’s some other reason why we simply enjoy making animal sounds. Thoughts?

Artist Pete Dungey says of his Pothole Gardens, “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” Indeed. And a gorgeous, surprising example of urban renewal and joyful activism.

{via for the love of bikes}

Fascinating piece by Daniel B. Smith in Sunday’s NYT magazine about the emerging field of ecopsychology, which studies the relationship between the health of the natural world and that of the mind. The field views mental health more broadly than any preceding branch of psychology, suggesting that our sanity is inextricable from the vitality of our surroundings and the strength of our connection to them.

This makes intuitive sense to me. After all, our physical health is deeply dependent on the health of our immediate environment. Perhaps before the Industrial Revolution we could have conceived of our bodies as separate entities, impermeable to pollution. But now we know that chemicals in our waterways end up in our veins and that smog chokes our lungs as much as our visibility. The link between environmental soundness and mind is less apparent, but still plausible. If we evolved for an environment filled with the aesthetics of lush, green life, but we live in an environment that deprives us of these aesthetics, isn’t it possible that this state of being becomes like a nutritional deficit of the mind? That robbing our environment of certain essential stimuli decreases mental performance and makes us not only less happy but also less functional?

There are already disorders recognized to have a relationship to the stimuli we take in from our environment. The appropriately named SAD (seasonal affective disorder) is a kind of depression related to the low levels of available light in winter. SAD is worst at higher latitudes where the light difference between seasons is most extreme. Yet some Scandinavian peoples, such as Icelanders, have been found to have an immunity to this condition, perhaps because it was selected as a favorable survival condition by evolution. This is only one data point, but it suggests to me that people may evolve for certain environments, that our brains may be subtly wired through generations of interactions with a place, and that the rapid rate of change (/devastation) of those places could be a latent source of emotional trauma.

Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht terms this trauma solastalgia, which combines the Latin solacium, meaning comfort, and the Greek root -algia, meaning pain. He defines his coinage as “the pain experienced when there is a recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault…a form of homesickness one gets one when is still at ‘home.’ ” It’s an instantly evocative word to match an evocative concept (though perhaps not so precise — I can think of lots of cases of comfort-pain that have nothing to do with place). Smith notes that the word has spread rapidly, not just in academic or journalistic circles, but as a title for songs and works of art. The idea of defending our land as a people is nothing new, but throughout history usually it is from invasion, and what we are defending is livelihood — the resources for living and the livelihood we have created in a place. This goes much deeper to say that environmental destruction is a slow, creeping invasion, and what we are defending is not just our livelihood, but our sanity.

The most interesting aspect of this discussion, for me, is the recognition of certain kinds of environmental aesthetic stimuli as essential to mental health. We know that the brain is a sensing, processing machine, requiring constant stimuli to make sense of the world. Remove all stimuli, and people quickly go insane; without new data points, the brain stops making sense of itself. Too much stimuli and we become overloaded — equally unhealthy. But beyond variations in quantity, there are also variations in kind to pay attention to. Are there certain qualities of light that better enable us to function? Are there proportions and perspectives that make us feel in balance and emotionally secure? (For example, having evolved in an environment where trees have a certain proportional relationship to the human body, say between 2x and 8x as tall, does living in an environment that is more vertically structured, up to 220x in height maybe, create a sense of insecurity? I wonder this as a devoted city-dweller — I love skyscrapers, but is there another level on which they are making me anxious? Would I be smarter or calmer if I lived in the forest?)

One study, done by Peter Kahn, a developmental psychologist and member of the editorial board of a new journal called Ecopsychology, suggests that natural stimuli effect our physiology in basic ways. Kahn tested a group of adults subjected to mild stress while looking at one of three different views: a window looking out over a scene of grass and trees, a 50″ plasma screen of the same scene in real time, and a blank wall. Measuring the heart rates of the subjects showed that they decreased fastest in the group looking at the real nature scene, while those looking at the TV had the same results as those facing the wall. This suggests that not only does environment unconsciously effect our reactions, but also that we can’t fake it. An authentic aesthetic experience is necessary to feel the benefits of the interaction with the natural environment.

What does this have to do with joy? Many of the stimuli we consider to be aesthetics of joy are natural and environmental. Sunlight, lushness, open and expansive spaces. The emotion joy evolved at a time in human history where there was no dichotomy between artificial and natural — before industrialization, before agriculture, when our connection to the environment meant survival. The ideas of ecopsychology — solastalgia and the idea of an ecomental system — resonate so strongly with me because of this history. Joy isn’t a result of what goes on in the mind alone; joy is an ecomental interaction, a constant dialogue between the brain, the senses, and the things we encounter in the world. It’s often said that happiness comes from within, but joy comes from without — from the impressions made by pleasurable things on our retinas, our fingertips, and our tongues, the way they disrupt the flow our thoughts and focus them on beauty and wonder. For me, this piece was an important reminder that those wonderful, natural things may be instrumental not just in joy, but in the whole of mental health — and therefore an important reminder that so much depends on our willingness to defend them.

NYT: Is there an ecological unconscious?
Illustration: Artwork by Kate MacDowell; photograph by Dan Kvitka for The New York Times

Well, I’m back! And I must say, I have really missed my daily posts. On Friday, I presented the masters thesis portion of Aesthetics of Joy — the theory as well as ten furniture concepts and a designer’s toolkit for creating joy. Over the coming weeks I want to share some of these ideas, as well as revel in some of the holiday joy I’ve missed while I’ve been in thesis isolation.

This video shows one of my furniture concepts. It’s a stool based on the idea of a firefly lantern. I could imagine a bunch of these scattered around a garden restaurant or bar, gently lighting up the night. The lights are LEDs driven by an Arduino board, programmed to pulse randomly using a sine wave function. Getting the lights to look like fireflies was no mean feat, and required a lot of fine tuning of the code. Fortunately, my electronics professor Liubo Borissov was extremely generous with his time in helping me get this going.

The inspiration for the stool is the magic aesthetic, which has to do with joy from things that seem uncanny, implausible, or impossible. Magic is about the apparent defiance of ordinary laws of nature, and for me bioluminescence has always been a conduit to that strange and wonderful magic.

Nice mention of AoJ in this post on Brandchannel about Toyota’s creation of two new flower species that absorb nitrogen oxides and take heat out of the atmosphere. The two flowers, variants of the cherry sage and the gardenia, are planted at Toyota’s headquarters in Japan. Designed to highlight green improvements to Toyota’s manufacturing facilities, the flowers are an interesting marketing move and a great example of a joyful gesture. It may be “joywashing meets greenwashing,” but it’s hard to be skeptical when it just makes you want to smile.

{image: crossmage}