You may think this post is misaligned; that it belongs in "society," or maybe even stretched to put it in "politics." Nope, it is rightly placed.
Whereas Picasso left us with an intriguing message: “Art is not for decoration; it is an instrument of war;” da Vinci left us with a more contemplative tone. He taught a concept he called saper vedera, meaning “knowing how to see.”
Volumes have been written about what that means, but, as usual, things that appear complicated are usually solved by Occam's razor. We assume anything profound is a puzzle of consequential difficulty when it is really so simple, we usually stumble over the meaning while trying to solve it.
Let me try.
Knowing how to see transcends art; it is to be applied in all our efforts. The Balinese, for example, have a saying: “We have no art; we do everything as well as we can.”
This scratches the surface of “knowing how to see.” In a nutshell, knowing is simply a matter of finding beauty and organization in everything we see and do. We tend to shun that which is ugly; but who decides what is ugly? Anyone who refuses to look deeper, look wider, or look with unbiased eyes.
I hope you are beginning to see that I am far beyond the realm of typical “art;” but it is an art to see a glimmer of what the Balinese, and Leonardo, are saying. Art is not the sum of our beauty, nor the totality of our best endeavors.
We, ourselves, in all our conditions, have beauty, regardless of our skin color, eye, nose, and lips shapes, body type, hair color, clothing style, etcetera, etcetera. Rather than criticize and denigrate these differences, we are meant to celebrate how different we are at skin level, then associate with one another to discover that beneath the skin, we all have joy and sorrow, feel pleasure and pain, rejoice and disappoint. It is the human condition. All of it is worthy of investigation and respectful celebration.
It does little good to segregate whose life matters more than another. Just see all of us and everything and refuse to say that any of it is ugly.
I think that is what Leonardo meant. I recognize that often, in this Forum, I see and comment on “ugly.” Such is the political, geographic, still-learning man. Mea culpa.
