Art And Romancing The Miracle

Painting by Marc Chagall

“The great lessons from the true mystics, from the Zen monks, is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one’s daily life, in one’s neighbors, friends, and family, in one’s back yard, and that travel may be a flight from confronting the sacred. To be looking everywhere for miracles is a sure sign of ignorance that everything is miraculous.”

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— Abraham H. Maslow, “Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences”
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Hillman describes aisthesis as “a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, the ‘aha,’ the ‘uh’ of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. . . . Images arrest. They stop us, bring us to a standstill . . . the flow of time is invaded by the timeless.” [The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World] While all of our senses may be involved in beholding an image, Hillman follows the ancients in insisting that the heart is the organ that perceives and feels the aesthetic impact of an encounter with an image — first the heart, then the mind. He further states: “psyche is image,” and to propose that we ourselves are images among images.
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The issue is not simply one of needing to save the world, but also of needing to solve the problem of the loss of soul throughout the modern…