This is how my mind work …. 

Part way through reading ‘More on Metaphor’ I recalled a presentation I went to at The Frick in New York given by my personal hero in art and edcuation – Rika Burnham – and I remembered how she gently but insistently through a very concrete and literal/grounded reading of Chardin’s work ‘Still life with plums’ – drew us or maybe walked/thought beside us as we (or maybe I) moved from the profane to the sacred. Surely from the literal to the metaphoric

I decided to see what The Frick has online during COViD and ended up watching this you tube with a  Frick curator

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD8KxM1Ia9c&list=PLNVeJpU2DHHR_0y_Zvgn3MgZQQFcFx2eI&index=6&t=0s

Whilst it’s not nearly as transformational as my experiences with Rika Burnham, at The Frick with the Chardin, the curators video on Bellini, did after a shaky start, lead me to a moment of transcendence (or perhaps immanence) on a Friday morning on the 7th floor of a high rise in the heart of Penrith CBD. That’s not to say there isn’t always the sacred waiting to be found in the profane – but Bellini’s work and the curators words helped me step away from the banal to a moment of aesthetic beauty (truth).

I didn’t care much for the curators view about how we should think during COViD – I think its a sign …. of something dishonourable when people tell us how to think … which is already getting me in trouble in academia where being concurrently explicit and obfuscatory seems to be the name of the game.

I have faith that the PhD will offer some ‘riches’, although currently I’m wandering around in the desert seeking that which I don’t yet know I am looking for. I hope I recognise it when I see it – that’s where the faith part comes in.  

In A Field Guide to Getting Lost: Rebecca Solnit offers a few words on How We Find Ourselves:

 “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation… Never to get lost is not to live.”

 I’m still seeking – I hope with eyes wide open

Warmly

Naomi