Illustrate how things come together
March 10, 2016 10:48 AM Subscribe
I'm looking for either an illustration or video that shows how someone's mind, being confused about several different barriers in life, being all confused for a long period of time, then suddenly, one event triggers a coming together, a clarity and then a clear purpose.
I have been this way for a couple of years, following my father's death, dealing with my own mortality, life decisions I've made, etc., and have chosen a very safe path, but have grown increasingly bored and pigeon-holed . . .suddenly today, an event occurred that gave me more clarity than I've had in years. In trying to explain this to friends, I would like to give a visual and know that someone that is visually gifted has something that I'm looking for . . .
I have been this way for a couple of years, following my father's death, dealing with my own mortality, life decisions I've made, etc., and have chosen a very safe path, but have grown increasingly bored and pigeon-holed . . .suddenly today, an event occurred that gave me more clarity than I've had in years. In trying to explain this to friends, I would like to give a visual and know that someone that is visually gifted has something that I'm looking for . . .
I very much like janey47's suggestion.
Your description of a sudden appearance of clarity and purpose sounds to me like an epiphany. I'm not sure if you are looking for actual art or a visual metaphor to represent your experience. A Google image search for art depicting epiphany (including the search term "-Christ", to avoid getting nothing but Christian illustrations) might reveal something that fits.
The concept of epiphany is very prominent in James Joyce's The Dubliners. The final story, "The Dead" finishes with a striking image of snowfall:
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. "
The narrator can just hear the gentle tapping of the snow on his windowsill and see a few silver flakes through the panes, but he can visualize the storm's scope, imagine it falling "upon all the living and the dead." I find this moment of recognition of connection and commonality and attention to things beyond what can be immediately perceived a beautiful representation of epiphany.
posted by reren at 5:56 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
Your description of a sudden appearance of clarity and purpose sounds to me like an epiphany. I'm not sure if you are looking for actual art or a visual metaphor to represent your experience. A Google image search for art depicting epiphany (including the search term "-Christ", to avoid getting nothing but Christian illustrations) might reveal something that fits.
The concept of epiphany is very prominent in James Joyce's The Dubliners. The final story, "The Dead" finishes with a striking image of snowfall:
"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned softly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. "
The narrator can just hear the gentle tapping of the snow on his windowsill and see a few silver flakes through the panes, but he can visualize the storm's scope, imagine it falling "upon all the living and the dead." I find this moment of recognition of connection and commonality and attention to things beyond what can be immediately perceived a beautiful representation of epiphany.
posted by reren at 5:56 PM on March 10, 2016 [2 favorites]
Response by poster: Wow! Thank you guys so much . . . Janey47's answer was VERY detailed and complete . . . Reren's included the one word I had overlooked - "epiphany" . . . thank you guys very much :)
posted by pauldisney at 7:00 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by pauldisney at 7:00 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
Response by poster: This is very much like what happened to me yesterday . . . and I believe I can forego a visual, with this clearly explained text . . .
'For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn’t be any such functions. Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.
Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.'
posted by pauldisney at 8:04 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
'For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn’t be any such functions. Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.
Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.'
posted by pauldisney at 8:04 AM on March 11, 2016 [1 favorite]
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From Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig:
Seed crystal. A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened.
A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn’t crystallize out because the molecules don’t know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.
He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.
The one sentence "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students" was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.
Later in the book, he writes about the mathematician Poincare in similar fashion:
Then Poincaré illustrated how a fact is discovered. He had described generally how scientists arrive at facts and theories but now he penetrated narrowly into his own personal experience with the mathematical functions that established his early fame.
For fifteen days, he said, he strove to prove that there couldn’t be any such functions. Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results.
Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.
He described how a second wave of crystallization, guided by analogies to established mathematics, produced what he later named the "Theta-Fuchsian Series." He left Caen, where he was living, to go on a geologic excursion. The changes of travel made him forget mathematics. He was about to enter a bus, and at the moment when he put his foot on the step, the idea came to him, without anything in his former thoughts having paved the way for it, that the transformations he had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-Euclidian geometry. He didn’t verify the idea, he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty. Later he verified the result at his leisure.
A later discovery occurred while he was walking by a seaside bluff. It came to him with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty. Another major discovery occurred while he was walking down a street. Others eulogized this process as the mysterious workings of genius, but Poincaré was not content with such a shallow explanation. He tried to fathom more deeply what had happened.
posted by janey47 at 1:21 PM on March 10, 2016 [1 favorite]