In his brilliant book of essays, A Place in the Country, W.G. Sebald celebrates the lives of six writers and artists who deeply affected his own creative mind, one of whom is the poet Johann Peter Hebel, most famous for a collection of lyric Alemannic poems — Allemannische Gedichte.

 

While Sebald is quick to acknowledge, as virtuous, Hebel’s descriptions of the order of the natural universe, as well as his moral differentiations between gratitude and

ingratitude, Sebald stresses that Hebel’s certainty is less dependent on his acquired knowledge of the cosmos. It is more particularly derived from “the contemplation of that which surpasses rational thought.”

 

I went to sleep with this phrase in my head the night I read the essay, knowing each of us brings to our either casual or studied perspective of art a unique collection of variables on how we access what we are seeing. Even if we strive to approach art being initially neutral, preconceived thought has made us all, at times, experience a streak of color across a canvas and mutter, “Well, I could have done that,” or, hear a contemporary composition and question, “How is this music?” What I like best

is when Hebel stops cataloguing and allows himself to wonder. It is then that he talks about the whimsy of being an extraterrestrial being looking out upon the speck we call the sun and being completely unaware of whether or not some war is being fought and unconcerned that it cannot see the Earth at all. This, Hebel calls a cosmic perspective.

 

Helping our students to cultivate a cosmic perspective, from Pre-K to Grade 12, is something I think we do organically at CA, yet it just may be the key to teaching young people how to see and respond to art beyond the time they spend in school. I was talking with our students recently about the Women of Abstract Expressionism exhibit at the Denver Art Museum, and, in particular the work of Perle Fine which seems to have resonated with all of us. In the middle of a discussion on Fine’s use of color, brush work and unique titles for her pieces, a student said, “You know, Doc, once I stopped reading the explanations for each piece, I was able to see so much more.”

 

This statement was a startling wake-up call for me. As an academic I am disciplined to know everything about a painting that I can, curious to understand the choreographer’s or director’s big idea before I watch a performance, eager to educate myself about the political and social situation of the composer so that I can make connections when I hear the concerto; and yet, at times, it robs me of having a simple pure experience, of seeing and contemplating what is beyond not only rational thought, but also, the programmed learning bent on instructing me how to respond to a given work or experience, which by its very definition as art, necessitates infinite suggestibility.

 

Hebel talks about looking at a mountain range with the naked eye and seeing a mass of green mist, but if you look through a simple field glass, you begin to see tree after tree, leaf after leaf, and you stop counting and defining because there is so much at once that you have brought yourself to see. I returned to that exhibit and allowed myself to do just that, gratis the wisdom of my student. I crept up close to works to examine the detail and then stood back and let the painting wash over me, waiting to read the text until after I felt something on my own, or had the slightest possibility of an original thought. And, in the end, even if this thought I claim as uniquely mine is shared with the multitudes, perhaps my contemplation has become a bit more cosmic.