Humans, starting with beginner humans, have occupied the caves of Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy, France, maybe back to the Pleistocene. Sometime around 30,000 years ago, they created paintings and carvings on those walls that still exist. About a dozen years ago, I got a chance to visit.
The one that got me, was the outline of a child-sized hand. I was around five years old when I first traced my hand -- the same age as my children when they came back from kindergarten with tracings of their hands.
I got a chill of the numinous.
Tracing our hands indicates a stage in our human development where we develop self awareness to the point we can represent ourselves in art. This human's being appeared and left maybe 750 generations ago, and yet we were connected. They are gone. 750 generations are gone. Within the scale of this time frame, my little blip of a life is almost gone, but damn, this cultural expression is crazy durable and consistent.
Whenever I get a little extra time in Boston, I visit the Gardner Museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner built a small palazzo in Boston's Back Bay, and filled it with an extraordinary and eclectic collection of art from around the world. I always go up the stairs to visit a small Rembrandt self portrait.
Rembrandt was 21 with scruffy hair. He looks like the students from Berklee College of Music I pass on my way to a falafel. Last spring, I visited Rembrandt again. He is so alive 400 years later. His eyes look full of wonder.
I felt a chill of the numinous.
In the Gardner Museum that day, scruffy-haired Rembrandt, a couple of scruffy-haired music students, and maybe scruffy-haired me from 1976, were still alive.
Two years ago, in the Huntington Museum in Pasadena, California, I sat in a darkened room with Betye Saar installation Drifting Toward Twilight. Created by Saar in her mid-90's, I felt a peace that passes all understanding as I felt my own drift toward death.
In case you were wondering, this piece is the start of a series on what is comically called AI, and which is something powerful and cool, but not numinous; and, by contrast, what I and others call generative machine learning. I wanted to start this series with what it is that makes us most human.
REFERENCED IN THIS LETTER:
Arcy-sur-Cure: https://www.grottesdefrance.org/en/cave-aven-abyss/grottes-arcy-sur-cure-en/
Gardner Museum: https://www.gardnermuseum.org/
Berklee College of Music: https://www.berklee.edu/
Huntington Museum: https://huntington.org/
Betye Saar: https://www.moma.org/artists/5102-betye-saar
Drifting Toward Twilight: https://huntington.org/exhibition/betye-saar-drifting-toward-twilight