The Times Quotidian

How to Survive Our Own Success
by Guy Zimmerman

In Santa Fe dramatic thunderstorms are common late on summer days. Afterwards the massive banks of purple clouds will often part, allowing shafts of intense sunlight to angle down, creating sometimes vivid rainbows. At a house near downtown last summer I saw a rainbow like this, clear as a Technicolor dream. I was with a group of young scientists and I watched as their wonder shifted into analytical mode – here is an example of water molecules interacting with rays of refracted light – and then back again toward a more embodied appreciation. The sequence reminded me of the Buddhist saying in which a mountain becomes, for the meditator, something very different …and then, at a later stage, returns again to being just a mountain. Then, as the rainbow faded in the sky, we trooped inside to watch Charlton Heston chew the scenery (and a few other things) in the Sci-fi flick Soylent Green.

“Charlton Heston is an axiom,” said Michel Mourlet, the film critic, in 1960. Mourlet was a member of the French New Wave, and one must never argue with the French New Wave. “He constitutes a tragedy in himself,” Mourlet continued, “his presence in any film being enough to instill beauty.” This serenade comes as a shock to us today, given the political causes Heston shackled himself to late in life. But think of Heston playing Vasquez in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, or the title role in Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee, the film that inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece, Blood Meridian. And on a more iconic level there’s also, of course, the latex miracle that is the Planet of the Apes series, not to mention the be-sandaled epics Ben Hur and The Ten Commandments.

In all these films, Heston serves to emblemize aggrieved masculinity, the strong and righteous father-figure who recoils in disgust as evil and injustice are unmasked. As soon as the Hestonian visage enters the frame all problems, apocalyptic or otherwise, begin to whither of their own accord. If evil has flourished recently, it’s only because this man’s attention was occupied elsewhere. Even when Heston himself goes down to death and defeat, we know the forces of good will prevail in the end…because man, in his essence, is like this. If ever there were a man to teach us how to survive our own success as a species, wouldn’t it be Heston?

On a mythic level I would make the case that the iconic appeal of Charlton Heston is linked to the essentially Protestant archetype of man as a fixed and separate instrument of divine providence, taming unruly nature. With the Reformation, God was thought to be an immanent presence in this world, as well as a transcendent deity. Man’s destiny was to make God’s will manifest in a perfectible happiness. The Enlightenment was animated by this mythic ambition, and the scientist remains the most significant embodiment of the world-conquering, Protestant impulse. From Galileo forward, the view of science has been reductive, oriented toward locating the indivisible units of matter and energy upon which an edifice of fixed values could be erected and against which all things could be measured. This reductive inquiry culminated in the great discoveries of 20th century – General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics – which seemed to deliver us, paradoxically, into a world defined by non-local, spooky effects our minds are not set up to comprehend in any direct way.

This breakdown of the Heston effect occurred to me at the screening of Soylent Green in Santa Fe. In case you don’t recall, the film takes place in 2022 in New York City, a time when overpopulation has resulted in frequent food riots and other horrors. Loosely based on a book by Harry Harrison, the film features Heston as detective Thorn, dispatched to investigate the murder of a wealthy industrialist named Simonson played by Joseph Cotton. Gum-shoeing his way through sweltering streets, Thorn discovers that Simonson was murdered before he could go public with a shocking truth: the new food product, Soylent Green, is made, not from a highly nutritious form of algae …but out of dead people.  Driven by insurmountable environmental problems, the species has turned to cannibalism in its corporate form.

Dennis Meadows

Doyne Farmer, who hosted the screening, has devoted his career in physics to the new field of complex systems. After exploring this terrain in various contexts, including Los Alamos National Labs and Wall Street, Farmer has come to focus on the arena, rich in complexity, of environmental sustainability. The screening of Soylent Green closed out the second week of an annual Sustainability Summer School, organized by Farmer and hosted by St John’s College, to catalyze new research and debate. Presenting lectures were a roster of heavyweights in various fields, including economist Samuel Bowles, anthropologist Lisa Curran, paleobiologist Doug Erwin and the seminal environmentalist Dennis Meadows. In his presentation, Meadows looked back to the Club of Rome “The Limits of Growth” report of 1972, which he co-wrote. Surveying the forty year interlude since that talk, Meadows underscored how resource depletion and over-consumption have unfolded pretty much as predicted, with the most challenging patches coming at us now around the next corner.

The screening of Soylent Green was attended by young working scientists and post-docs, roughly the same demographic mix that would have heard Meadows speak 40 years ago. I had been wondering how they were bearing up under the steady barrage of dire predictions, and the screening was my first chance to meet outside the St. John’s lecture halls. When the lights came up there was a good deal of amusement about the costumes in the film, the sexual morays and the cheesy dialogue of the 1970s. But there was also an uncomfortable, deflated silence. Among the few comments people managed to make was the sobering notion that, given the problems that confront us, eating each other might turn out to be a decent idea.

But before you start measuring your neighbors for the tureen, Soylent Green, in its very dated-ness, revealed where we might look for the expansive energies of optimism. The bleak city-scape of the film seems dated when compared to the more prescient production design of, say, Blade Runner, which was made only a decade later. Working in the 1970s the filmmakers failed to anticipate the explosion in the speed with which human beings are able to process information, the computers and digital imaging technology that decorate urban landscapes today. This exponential increase in information processing – commonly known as Moore’s Law – is ongoing, and while it’s unclear how much it will weigh in the balance against large scale threats such as global warming, its transformative effects remains a wild card in a deck which is otherwise stacked against us.

The rapid spread of internet communications is itself an “emergent” aspect of the steady increase in our capacity to process information. No doubt political authorities are working overtime to figure out ways to put the genie back into the bottle, but our sudden ability to communicate with anyone on this planet, is a powerful and unpredictable force. We may discover that it’s harder to demonize people when you’ve friended them on Facebook. Also the Solylent company is going to have a substantially harder time hiding its tracks when one whistle blower is all it takes. In the era of complex systems, perhaps connective wealth will come to replace material wealth as the signifier of social value.

The internet has other surprising effects as well, including rich cultural cross-pollination. Insights from Asian wisdom traditions, for example, have been integrated with Western psychology and brain science in ways that shed new light on the psychological dynamics that are fueling over-consumption. Readers of this column will sense the approach of a plug for the “revolutionary” Buddhism historian David Loy advocates in his work, and they would be right to do so. I subscribe to Loy’s diagnosis of our root malady – that our problems arise from an inability to make peace with our fundamental groundlessness with respect to being. From this point of view the vast array of problems confronting us can be viewed as a single mistake we are making in a vast array of contexts: seeking to ground what can never be grounded.

Techno-pastoralism – the idea that salvation will arrive via new technology – is a dangerous tendency, no doubt. But in the view of some, the science of complex systems reverses the reductionist focus of the material science that first ignited uncontrolled industrial growth three centuries ago. Something may have shifted at the source of the problems of over-development, in other words.  And looking back some years from now we may discover that this shift has transformed the scientific establishment into a powerful ally in the effort to reverse the dangerous trajectory we are traveling…and all Charlton Heston needs to do is get out of the way.

Slowly we discover how we are.
By Guy Zimmerman

On a visit to Santa Fe recently I read up on neuroplasticity and found myself haunted by the memory of a set of cement stairs. These stairs I encountered briefly when I was eight years old and my parents were hurtling toward their final separation. The stairs belonged to a monthly rental in Santa Monica where we had traveled for the summer from the East. They led up to a hallway and, at the far end, an apartment I never wanted to enter. At night the thin walls would shake with my father’s wounded bellowing and the sound of things breaking. We children would gather in the corner of the bedroom, the three of us, around our youngest sister as she cried from an ache in her chest that wouldn’t ease. There was no safety in the world for us, huddled there in the dark, and we knew it and were filled with fear.

I’ve come to Santa Fe to attend a workshop in science writing and I have been reading the recent books authored by the instructors. Sandra Blakeslee, one of the country’s top science writers, is leading the workshop, the 15th of its kind. Working with her is George Johnson, a writer duly celebrated for his ability to explain things like Quantum Chromodynamics in elegant, simple prose. On the first night the attendees gather in the courtyard of the Ghost Ranch for dinner and drinks. As I say hello I keep catching little glimpses of those cement stairs, the somatic charge of old remembered fears traveling up through my body.

You can’t pursue a meditation practice nowadays without bumping into a book on neuroscience. Advances in the technology of brain imaging have opened the inner realm of meditative states to empirical study. The Embodied Mind by Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosche, first published in 1991, was a seminal text. A Buddhist himself, Varela, along with his co-authors, reviewed recent developments in the neuroscience of perception to buttress the core Buddhist concept of non-dualism. After The Embodied Mind, the stream widened considerably. Psychopathologist Richard Davidson began hooking Tibetan monks up to brain scan machines and recording the results. Davidson was soon joined by a growing circle of accomplished scientists and meditators including Jon Kabat Zinn, Daniel Goleman and more recent authors such as Daniel Siegel. Sensing the opportunity, the Dalai Lama lent his considerable weight to the endeavor, helping to create the Mind-Life Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where these investigations continue today. The controversies surrounding this research will continue for a time, no doubt. In the end we will arrive at a closer understanding of the underlying reality of how experience and neurology interweave. Also significant in this ongoing inquiry are non-Buddhist researchers into mind-body issues and brain science, such as Antonio Damasio, Vilayanur Ramachandran and Jeffrey Hawkins.

Dan Siegel’s book, The Mindful Brain, published in 2006, begins with an overview of the emerging field of contemplative neuro-science. Siegel then focuses in on how negative emotional experiences get hard wired into the brain, and how this wiring restricts our freedom and insures neurotic suffering. He presents a new explanation for how specific social and emotional circuits in the brain can be harnessed to transform our experience through basic meditation practices such as mindfulness. Here, I note in passing, are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths – suffering, its cause, its cessation, and the way to achieve its cessation – in modern dress.

Change comes hard, but it can come, is the message. Affective Anxiety disorders, like the one that sends images of the cement stairs reeling through my mind, can be addressed through concerted effort. When somatic emotional charges are fully felt in the present they release their grip. We no longer confuse such strong emotions with who we are in any real sense, and after a while the conditioning ceases to express itself in neurotic behavior. Engaging with experience in this kind of non-dual mode begins to cultivate within us a sense of inter-connectivity with other beings, and an authentic concern for their welfare. And over time the momentum of practice calls upon us to engage with a larger effort to ease suffering in the world.

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On our first day together the group of us visit Santa Fe Institute which overlooks Santa Fe on a hilltop just outside of town. Founded in 1984, SFI is devoted to the study of complex adaptive systems. This study of “emergent” phenomenon widens the scientific gaze to include those complex processes that arise out of the interactions of much simpler elements. SFI’s Nobel-winning patriarch Murray Gell-Mann has summed up this view with elegant concision: “you don’t need more to explain more.” Whatever mystery there is in the universe resides below, in other words, in the basic particles and forces and how they interact, giving rise to miraculous complexities such as Gell-Mann’s intelligence.

At the Institute we gather around a very long table to hear Omidyar fellow Tanya Elliott talk about her current efforts to construct a model for sustainable development. Elliott is an inter-disciplinary researcher with a doctorate in theoretical physics and an on-going interest in language and cognition. The subject of her talk is how patterns of dysfunction have been hard-wired into the economic and social structures that are reducing our chances of survival. The coordinated, sustained effort required to undo this collective “wiring” clearly echoes the efforts we make as individuals to liberate ourselves from neurotic patterning. The tension between reductive patterning and expansive opening holds true across different scales, including the one where we live and breathe.

In his TED talk on Beauty and Truth in Physics, Gell-Mann points out the remarkable fact that beauty is actually a very successful criterion for choosing the right theory in physics. By beauty, Gell-Mann is talking about the distillation of complex phenomenon into equations with an elegant simplicity to them, E=MC2, for example. Our gradual approach toward a unified theory is like the peeling of an onion where the successive layers resemble each other. The equations derived to make sense of the last layer come close to explaining the new one: approximate self-similarity holds true across the different scales.

Listening to Tanya Elliott I wonder again what self-similarities underlie the long elaborate drama Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Psychologists often act as if emotional trauma were the exception to the rule, but perhaps trauma is, quite literally, our birthright. More so than any mammal we are dependent on our mothers for survival. The huge neocortex that provides our capacity for awareness is to blame. We can’t stay in the womb a moment longer than we do or our heads would grow too big to emerge. And so our sensitive brains are immature when we enter the world. A colt can get up and run at the end of its first day, while we must cling for dear life to our mothers into our second year. Whenever this external life-support system is unresponsive, even for a brief interval, we are viscerally traumatized, literally in fear for our lives. As they form, our brains are flooded again and again by this intense emotion, which shapes our neural pathways. Our sense of being an independent self is infused from the start by anxiety, and is perhaps entirely an expression of this anxiety.

Unflattering though it may be, embracing this view allows us to understand how the pursuit of “normal” happiness might lead to the collection of ills – nuclear proliferation, peak oil – that currently darken our horizons. Perhaps we need to redefine the paradigms of what constitutes “normal” if we are going to gain any traction over the large scale imbalances that threaten us. Perhaps it is this “background” anxiety hidden behind the “normal” self that is expressing itself in environmental degradation and our addiction to unsustainable levels of consumption.

In books such as A Buddhist History of the West, historian David Loy unpacks the issue of “lack” as a historical and cultural force driving human history. The history of the West, to Loy, is defined by our ongoing attempt to escape or explain away our experience of groundlessness in the world. We are not “real,” in the way we long to be, Loy writes in a remarkable essay titled “Self Transformation and Social Transformation” (Tikkun): “the sense-of-self is a psychosocial construct, it is ungrounded and ungroundable—hence always insecure… we try to bolster an illusory construct by focusing on something outside ourselves, which cannot provide the grounding we seek from it…no matter how much money I may accumulate, it will never be enough. The same is true for fame, power, beauty, and so forth.”

The foundation of Western political thought is the recognition by the ancient Greeks that political systems were themselves social constructions. Loy points out that this is, in fact, an invitation to rearrange our collective life so that it works better for us. Surveying our current situation Loy laments the mass suffering that arises when the “three poisons” of greed, ill will and delusion provide the foundation for social interaction. “Today,” he writes, “our economic system has institutionalized greed, our militarism institutionalizes ill will, and our corporate media institutionalize delusion.” Such a situation might seem daunting and unworkable, but, as many of us know from direct experience, change truly is possible if we first have the courage to look at dysfunction in all its lurid glory.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Disposable Plastic
by Guy Zimmerman
At a party at the Edendale Grill in Silverlake shortly before Christmas I learned about the five vortexes of disposable plastic, vast as continents and indestructible, that swirl continuously in the world’s oceans. I was talking to a woman named Sara Bayles who, in the hope of drawing attention to the problem, collects plastic trash choked up by the sea each day on Santa Monica beach. The image of the vortexes seemed to echo, dreamlike, the armada of environmental alarms that have circulated below the surface of my emotional life since childhood. And yet, at the Edendale, I noticed that something had shifted. Confronted with new evidence of environmental degradation the familiar cocktail of resignation, sorrow and species-shame did not taste quite so bitter. I have come to connect this shift to a concept that first bubbled up into the mind stream of pop culture only in the last decade or so: emergence.

Tibet Fractels

A central idea in new arenas of scientific inquiry with daunting names like “complexity theory” and “integrative levels”  emergence is tricky to capture in words, much less experience directly. The Wikipedia definition reads: “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions.” Hurricanes, the world wide web and the architecture of termite colonies in the Kalahari desert are commonly cited examples of complex emergent systems. But your ability to read this sentence (and my ability to compose it) could also be viewed as an “emergent” property of the hydrogen, oxygen and carbon atoms that, arranged in a very specific way, make up our bodies. That the material world has the capacity to generate surprising new forms in this fashion makes emergence something close to a theory of miracles, reconciling the material and the mysterious.

At the Edendale Sara Bayles and I were surrounded by practitioners of yoga, which is all about balancing body and mind, material and mystery. The party was a send off for a mutual friend named Tara Judelle, a teacher of asana practice who happens to be particularly focused on these issues. And so, at the Edendale, the idea of emergence reminded me of the embodied process of learning yoga, and how that process is not linear at all. Your body initially fights a pose… you make a series of micro adjustments…and then one day the pose simply reveals itself and you shift into a more refined alignment. It’s this sudden leaping into a new level of order that connects this experience to the concept of emergence. And there’s a correlate in meditation practice too – breath by breath you rest your awareness on a challenging thought or emotional pattern and after an eternity has come and gone you are surprised to experience an abrupt shift. A transformative insight emerges; you are drawn back more fully toward a non-dual experience of the present moment.

In recent months, Tara has been giving special focus to the organ body – being aware, for example, of how your kidneys align during trikonasana, or how your liver curves against your back ribs during a seated twist. Unlike muscle and bone, the organs are formidably complex entities. It can be unsettling but also enlightening to contemplate how these astonishing tissue-matrixes we lug around evolved over eons to do what they now do for us, which is to support the awareness that allows us to reflect on our experiences, question the meaning of our lives and engage with each other in a chaotic world. In a standing pose one day I had a visceral (literally) sense of the furious busy-ness of evolution, the constant, bubbling creative activity – trying this, shifting to that, juggling this, abandoning that to move over here and try this – that has animated our long evolution, and along with that recognition came the sense that darker energies must also be a part of this tapestry; that this creative activity needs some destructive capacity too or things would get too locked in and static, and while there may be no way for that destructive aspect to be pleasant or positive in-and-of-itself it remains still a part of this larger creative unfolding. And so on balance we human beings should feel honored to be the vehicles (one of them at any rate) through which the material universe can turn and look at itself, contemplate and praise itself, and that many of our emotional and psychological challenges stem from the sort of jury-rigged, boot-strapped, emergent nature of the operation, where this creative principle managed to arrange the carbon molecules in such a way that they formed into complex nucleic acids that then lined up in the astonishingly complex arrays of RNA and DNA  and then somehow, down the line, these strands of DNA gave rise to things called synapses and neurons which then gathered into brains and the whole rickety contraption continued to build on up through the different life forms until finally, with a certain species of mammals called primates, the brains reached a size where the skulls that contained them could barely squeeze out through the hip opening of the female, giving birth to an awareness that, still in the process of forming, was sensitive enough to be deeply scarred by the trauma of birth, and then again by the trauma of its extended dependency on unreliable adults, and then yet again from all the other traumas that follow birth such that human beings tend to experience themselves as separate, apart and terminally embattled, threatened and insecure and defined by a sense of lack such that collective life tended to ignite frequently into the most bloody conflicts imaginable and history became a sequence of wars, and of incessant conquest and domination, a cycle of violence building in ferocity until finally, in the name of survival, the species learned how to sublimate the violence into economic systems such as Capitalism that generated the technologies of convenience that have left vortexes of plastic swirling in the middle of the gorgeous deep blue oceans.

And yet something new is emerging in the human realm and many of us sense it. The material sciences are everywhere bumping up against phenomenon that undermine the top down nature of their own inquiries. One of the scientists most engaged in unpacking this aspect of emergence is the biologist Stuart Kaufman. Kaufman views emergence as a challenge to the reductionism that has defined the scientific view since Galileo. To explain reductionism, Kaufman quotes Nobel laureate Stephen Weinberg: “the ‘explanatory arrows always point downward’, from society to small groups to individuals to organs to cells to chemistry to physics…” With emergence scientists have started looking back in the opposite direction, working outward from the smallest particles to the complex structures that arise out of them in unpredictable ways.

Galileo Before the Inquisition. 1847

In a move that is sure to tweak a few goatees in the citadels of science, Kaufman, an atheist, proposes appropriating the word “God” and applying it “not as transcendent, not as an agent, but as the very creativity of the universe itself.” “I want God,” Kaufman writes, “to mean the vast ceaseless creativity of the only universe we know of, ours.” While I’m not sure we need to befog ourselves all over again with a lot of symbolic baggage (and I would argue that this creative force should be embodied as a female rather than a male deity), I do appreciate Kaufman’s sense of urgency. As Sara Bayles underscored for me, smiling, at the Edendale, there is no quick fix for problem such as the swirling vortexes of plastic. Despite my new year’s resolution to forgo plastic bottles, the vortexes will continue to grow for years and probably decades to come.

To survive the patch of environmental “bumpiness” that is surely coming we will need something to pray to and we will need all the miracles the universe can provide. We certainly can no longer afford to view ourselves as disembodied minds separate from experience and the exclusive authors of our own actions. The emergent view underscores that even our ignorance is an inseparable part of a larger story defined at every turn by surprise. It might be that a new capacity for non-dualistic experience will emerge in time for us to respond to the mess we are making of the world. The reductionist view of Western science has managed to give us an array of potent technologies and knowledge, and perhaps now, under the gun, we will locate the wisdom to use these tools effectively.  While optimism and pessimism are equally beside the point, why not embrace the idea that we are about to emerge as a wiser species? We’ve already broken the eggs, we might as well cook up the omelette.

Below are organizations that bring awareness to the problem of plastic vortexes in our oceans:

5Gyres
Blue Ocean Institute
Plastic Pollution Coalition
Green Peace-The Trash Vortex
National Geographic

By Guy Zimmerman

In various spiritual traditions it’s common to hear the feminine identified with some version of open-ness or space, while the masculine is identified with form or substance. In Buddhist iconography, for example, wisdom is viewed as a quality of open space and as a feminine attribute. The womb, with its potential for birth, is evoked as an image. But in certain esoteric tantric disciplines Shiva, the masculine principle, is identified with root awareness – the ground out of which experience arises – and his consort Shakti is identified as…well…everything else. The feminine here is the profusion of all that can be experienced. A recent encounter with two sculptures by Richard Serra underscored for me what this shift is about.

In search of inner peace a few weeks ago I paid a visit to the Broad collection at LACMA and spent time with the two massive Serra sculptures that occupy the two wings of the ground floor. Sequence, in the Western gallery, involves two hundred and thirteen metric tons of steel rolled into twelve foot high sheets that wind along side each other in graceful nested curves you can walk through. Doing so, for me, was a potent experience. The Paleolithic steel walls rose up in narrow canyons that seemed to resonate dissonantly with hidden energy centers in my body. Overwhelmed, I staggered out the other side and had to find a bench. But as powerful as Sequence is Band, in the Eastern wing, is the truly remarkable work of art.

Standing in the Eastern gallery with Band you have the feeling that there is no valid reason to be anywhere else. Composed of the same twelve foot high steel walls as Sequence, Band somehow ennobles the space it occupies (this, of course, is what sculpture is supposed to do.) The curving walls flow up and back with the grace of a dance move, but without surrendering any of their convincing weight. You become aware, as you walk in and out of Band’s circular, heart-like chambers, of time slowing and then accelerating again. If you’re like me you imagine, if only for a moment, that you are not walking at all and that it is the steel walls that are in movement, flowing past and around you. Other polarities that typically animate Serra’s art – hard and soft, simplicity and extravagance, mystery and blunt physicality – here seem to achieve a new harmony of purpose that lightens the heart. It’s as if Serra’s work is showing us how to contain our own opposites.

Emergence, emergent form are juicy but also slippery concepts used in various scientific disciplines to describe how a simple process suddenly up shifts to a radically higher level of order. Various random air currents in the Gulf of Mexico suddenly begin to reinforce each other and the “emergent form” of a hurricane slamming into New Orleans is the result. Emergence is certainly a useful idea when thinking about the evolution of an artist’s style over the course of a lifetime. As they struggle against the resistance of the material in which they work, significant artists often reach a stage where an entirely new kind of harmony becomes possible. Their work from that moment forth becomes about ringing the changes on that new set of possibilities – Jackson Pollack and the first drip paintings…Rothko and his color fields…the sudden appearance in Phillip Guston’s work of cartoonish, hooded KKK figures. I’m tempted to believe this kind of emergence is what you encounter when you wander from the highly dynamic and overwhelming Sequence to the equally dynamic and overwhelming, but also utterly sublime, Band. Out of the same elements Serra has been working and re-working for years a radical new expression opens up.

But this begs the question: what specifically is at work in Band? My gut tells me that the root polarity in Band must be discussed in terms of male and female archetypes. Serra, certainly, has always registered strongly in this arena. A hyper-masculine figure seeking dominance with hard hat and cauldrons of molten ore, Serra early on adopted a minimalist stance that excluded anything hinting at softness. And yet here, in Band, what Serra seems to have been aiming at all along was the creation of an undulating container for everything that surrounds it, as if the masculine, at the final degree of its austerity revealed itself to be an altar for feminine abundance. The walls curve and flow the way they do because constant change is the nature of what they seek to contain and support. At rest in this masculine container we inhabit the profusion of the feminine. Band is a devotional act toward the feminine. It will be interesting to see if Serra continues to mine what feels to me like a very rich vein of artistic gold.