Final Thoughts!

FINAL THOUGHTS

Even though this class has its origins in finding the connections between art and science, for me it has become a platform to explore how art percolates every facet of my life and every dimension of my thought process. For me, it’s become the art-and-everything-else-and-how-they-and-we-are-all-connected class.

In a very practical sense, fieldtrips to JPL were incredible bolsters of artistic confidence, as we saw artists thriving in scientific fields, relied upon for their applicable skills. It’s a scary world out there for a kid with an arts degree, and NASA made me feel like there’s a place for us nerdy visualizers where we are not only appreciated, but necessary.

But in a greater way, this class was a mental jumping off point for me in thinking about how I think. And how the intersection of art and science has always been something that has been duking it out in my brain. Right vs left brain or whatever other analogies that can be attached to such a controversy just speak to a greater idea of paradox. Whitman once said, “do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” These multiplicities and paradoxes do not, I think, within the scheme of art and science, need to necessarily be resolved. I think the friction that occurs between mediums and disciplines is healthy—it’s exciting. I’m most stimulated and inspired when I’m talking with people that have something different to say to me, something outside of my own experience. The phenomenon of social homogamy states that we are more likely to become attracted to (in a friends or other sense) other people who share similar thought processes or even socioeconomic backgrounds with us. Although I agree that these connections are easier and more likely, I would say that they can sometimes be less fulfilling. Those connections that you have to work for, that don’t make sense until you’ve really delved into the kinks…those kinds of interactions between people, and between art and science, are the ones that I think are the most valuable.

On a very base level, I think art and science inherently have a reliance upon one another. Art relies upon science in its technicalities—astrophotography is cool, but only if you understand how your camera works, for which you need to understand the physics of light (ie, science). Science is indigestible unless visualized and conceptualized by someone who can take ideas and put them into pictures, charts, diagrams, and there is an art to that.

But most significantly, art and science are both fields that search for meaning. We ask why and how. We want to understand, to investigate, to experience. And then to communicate that experience, to replicate it or synthesize it in a meaningful way. We are meaning-seekers, and meaning-makers.

With this in mind, Katie and I collaborated to create a piece about connectivity. When I took astronomy my first semester at college, I remember reading what stands as the most significant line of text I’ve ever encountered in a text book. In describing the recylcling of star matter in the creation of new stars and also therefore galaxies and other cosmic bodies, the book said, “we are all star stuff.”

This connection of all beings with mass, attracted to each other by gravity, is a theory of science. But it is a concept that is constantly grappled with by artists, by seekers of spiritual meaning. So with ideas of spirituality and science and art and the connections of all three and the connections of everything ever…we started to make a video. Accompanied by a free-verse poem I wrote, and a list-style free-verse poem by Katie.

Mine is this:

science and spirituality take us on similar journeys, and help us arrive at parallel realizations of our connections to the universe. theories of quantum entanglement explain to me what i already know when I’m holding hands and listening to rain on my window. i begin to understand that i am only one piece and that the one piece i am is actually an unquantifiable bazillion things that have nothing to do with me, that have never known my name. but all the parts of me that have no concept of me do not make my sense of self less significant, but make me realize i am an entire universe a million cells in orbit that whether or not i have a soul i am soulful and firefull and starfull and lightfull and lifefull all that fills me is what fills everything and everyone and every place else. i am star stuff you are star stuff it is all we are all star stuff and one and many. it is all starstuff. everything. this and that and you. roses and smiles and fires. oceans and sands and waves and hands. and dog licks and cold fingers. and atoms and solar flares. and craters and mountains on earth on the moon on mars on planets we’ll never hear of before our lifetime. star stuff, all of it. in the beginning if there ever was a beginning it was all one we were all one. but even now wherever now is relative to beginnings and endings, the cyclic nature of matter is such that there is never any matter created or destroyed. and so we are supernovas and cosmic catastrophe, we are what has always existed and we will always exist. as matter. we matter. matter matters. we exist as matter therefore we matter. and we are all conglomerates of each other and the past and the future we will be a new combination so there are really no differences. except that there are. those beautiful variations of this same star stuff that makes either a person or a pond, a mountain or a molehill, a sound or a fingernail or a scale or a snail or a river or a canyon or an earth or a comet. this little pieces this star stuff that makes us. it aligned to make you. and me. as we are as we can be as we choose but also as the matter chose to be. we live our lives as all our parts fulfill evolutionary destinies unknown to us unrelated to us. there is no malice in cancer, only programming. death kills only the combination of parts that makes us in this moment. our parts never dissipate. the star stuff lives on even when we think we die. even if by our actions we kill this planet we cannot truly kill anything. there is no destruction that escapes the recycling of matter. we are indestructable in our parts, though fleeting in our wholes. now i am human. but tomorow i could be breath or blankets. tiles or bark on a tree. an apple, a cheeto, a streetlamp’s glow. i am an ocean in a drop. i am an entire universe, and all you know of me is starlight.