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Do you dream? In ancient cultures, dreams were thought to contain messages from the gods. To decipher those messages, especially those received by a tribal leader or sovereign, was critical for a community’s welfare. The role of doing so was a priestly responsibility. That it was Joseph, a slave, an outsider and a prisoner, who interpreted Pharaoh’s dreams when Egypt’s official diviners and wise men could not, is but one of Torah’s many subversions of the ancient world’s hierarchy.
In the early 20th century, another Jewish diviner, Sigmund Freud, proposed that dreams held symbolic messages not from an external source but from an internal one, the subconscious.
By the mid-twentieth century, neuroscientists had belittled Freud’s study of dreams, arguing that dreams are merely random by-products of a strictly physiological reality and have no psychological significance. Psychoanalytic interpreters of dreams, they suggested, belonged among the ranks of fortune tellers, religious clerics and other practitioners of metaphysics, not those of scientists.
Travelling back and forth between these different outlooks about dreams – that of mystery versus that of reason – is Sidarta Ribeiro, a Brazilian neuroscientist. In 1995 he moved to New York to pursue a Ph.D. at Rockefeller University. His arrival precipitated a period of several months of extraordinary vivid and evocative dreams. When they ended abruptly, he felt as if he were re-entering the world, refreshed and energized by a cognitive transformation.
In his book The Oracle of Night, Ribeiro advocates for both the mystery and the cognitive importance of dreams. He dismisses as short-sighted the view of earlier neuroscientists that dreams are merely fragments of memory assembled at random conveying no useful information for the dreamer. Instead, he argues that a dream is a “privileged moment for prospecting the unconscious” that, in Carl Jung’s words, “prepares the dreamer for the events of the following day.”
Both the value of a dream as preparation “for the events of the following day” and the critical importance of emerging from the dream in order to re-enter the world refreshed, transformed and energized provides the defining coherence of the book of Deuteronomy.
Parshat Devarim, the opening portion of the book of Deuteronomy, is in a sense an awakening as if from a dream. A dream shaped by: The departure from the abyss that was Egypt. Divine signs and wonders. The parting of a sea. Water from a rock. A stick that turned bitter water sweet. A bronze snake on a pole, the sight of which would heal anyone bitten by a snake. And the long journey itself…one across an endless expanse of life and death.
With Deuteronomy the active voice of God fades. The entire book is a declamation by Moses. In its opening verses Moses declares, “Our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying: You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Start out and make your way….”
Mount Horeb/Mount Sinai was the scene of the Israelites’ intense encounter with the eruptive presence of God. There they experienced that the exodus from Egypt was not merely a liberation from constraint. It was also a call to responsibility. To the creation of a moral society in which righteousness would be the responsibility of all. They must start out and make their way.
In their second year of journeying, the Israelites have the opportunity to leave the wilderness behind and enter into the promised land. Instead, they cower at what lies before them and refuse to enter.
Hasidic tradition views the Israelites’ pivot away from the promise not as an expression of their fear of failure. But as one of their fear of success. Suffering excessive spirituality, they preferred to live in the cocoon of dreamlife, where they were daily cared for by God, rather than to enter into the world with its problems where they would have to assume responsibility for addressing them.
Frank Stella was an Abstract Expressionist painter who challenged the dominant direction of Abstract Expressionism. The older generation of artists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning applied thick paint to their canvasses in a muscular and gestural exploration of dreams, the unconscious and human yearnings. Their work probed the human experience in order to access something sublime, something spiritual.
Stella chose instead to focus on the uncomplicated, the plain and simple. Having worked as a house painter during his early years as an artist, Stella shocked the art world by creating his first works using commercial enamel paint and housepainter’s brushes.
Pictured here is his piece The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. It is part of his Black Paintings series, completed between 1958 and 1960. Each painting in that series is mono-chromatic, consisting of a pattern of rectilinear stripes of uniform width.
The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II is made up of two sets of concentric, inverted U-shapes, each with 12 black enamel stripes. The repeated geometric pattern and lack of expressive brushwork provide a flat surface covered in paint. That’s all. There is nothing else to experience except the object before you. As Stella said, “What you see is what you see.”
Two years later Stella produced a series of six paintings known as the Benjamin Moore Paintings. Each one of those consists of precise geometric forms painted in one of six colors of commercially available Benjamin Moore flat wall paint. These he applied onto the canvasses straight from the can. Stella said he chose the paint because they were cheap and as a way to honor his father, who had also worked as a house painter.
Stella’s work opened up the way for artists to embrace “low-brow” materials and subjects. Inspired by Stella, artists such as Andy Warhol with backgrounds in design and commercial art would eventually displace the early Abstract Expressionist emphasis on complex and profound expressions with a focus on materials and images from everyday life.
Frank Stella, the son of a housepainter and himself a housepainter, reminds us that beauty and value can be found not only in the transcendent but also in the down-to-earth and mundane. And that is exactly where the Israelites must head as they emerge from the dream-like state of intense spiritual encounters if they are to fulfill the divine promise of having a place in this world.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. on Thursday August 8 as we explore down to earth.
