Dawn’s Return–At West End Gallery
Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.
–-Voltaire, letter to Frederick II of Prussia in 1767
It’s one of those mornings. I am filled with uncertainty and the idea of focusing on writing something seems like an unbearable burden. I would rather get to a painting I am working on that will be included in my annual June solo exhibit at the Principle Gallery. That’s where the uncertainty sets in.
I am in the midst of a group of new work that is really hitting the mark for me on all levels. Oddly enough, that’s where the problem begins. My strong positive reactions are triggering equally strong feelings of doubt. It sounds crazy, I know, but the idea of certainty– my own or others– almost always raises my anxiety levels, especially when it comes to my work.
Trying to balance these two polar opposites– doubt and certainty–results in times when one prevails. This morning, doubt wins the day. After I begin to work, certainty will make a mighty comeback. And after my painting day is done, the two will wrestle until I drift off to dreamland.
All in all, it’s often an uncomfortable existence bouncing between the unpleasant and the absurd conditions, as Voltaire called them.
I sometimes wish for absolute certainty. It seems like it would be satisfying to believe that your every word, action, opinion, and belief were absolutely correct. But we’ve seen where the extreme nature of that kind of certainty has taken us. I sometimes think the great divide between people is one of those who sometimes feel doubt and those who always feel absolute certainty.
Well, for someone who didn’t want to write this morning, I seem to have done quite a bit when all I wanted to do was write few words to share the post below that first ran here in 2014. FYI, I am not ready to share my new work yet but will start showing it in the coming weeks–on a day when I am more certain of things.
Much of my work seemingly has a journey or a quest as its central theme. But the odd thing is that I don’t have a solid idea of what the object is that I am seeking in this work. I have thought it was many things over the years, things like wisdom and knowledge and inner peace and so on. But it comes down to a more fundamental level or at least I think so this morning. It may change by this afternoon.
I think I am looking for an end to doubt or at least coming to an acceptance of my own lack of answers for the questions that have often hung over us all.
I would say the search is for certainty but as Voltaire points out above, certainty is an absurd condition. That has been my view for some time as well. Whenever I feel certainty coming on in me in anything I am filled with an overriding anxiety.
I do not trust certainty.
I look at it as fool’s gold and when I see someone speak of anything with absolute certainty–particularly politicians and televangelists– I react with a certain degree of mistrust, probably because I see this absolutism leading to an extremism that has been the basis for many of the worst misdeeds throughout history. Wars and holocausts, slavery and genocide–they all arose from some the beliefs held by one party in absolute certainty.
So maybe the real quest is for a time and place where uncertainty is the order of the day, where certainty is vanquished. A place where no person can say with any authority that they are above anyone else, that anyone else can be subjugated to their certainty.
To say that we might be better off in a time with such uncertainty sounds absurd but perhaps to live in a time filled with absolute certainty is even more so.
Redtree Times 