Brian, Jerry and Marilyn in The Gallery  

Reflections on A Second Wind: Art Resurrected

By Cosmologist, Brian Thomas Swimme Ph.D.

  Jerry Wennstrom's greatest achievement is his discovery of a pathway into cosmological creativity. His life journey is unique, like every life journey, but there are elements in his transformation that have applicability not just for artists but for anyone devoted to living the creative life.

  Our planet discovered its own pathway into creativity when it learned to transform the molten rock of Earth's early years into the magnificence of oceans and continents and a hundred million species of life. Including us. Every entity on Earth is a moving endpoint of this creativity. Jerry's achievement was to enable this primordial energy to become his core reality. He did this through a specific sequence of steps that I will get to in a moment. The point I want to make is that Jerry's journey is isomorphic with a fundamental dynamic of Earth's creativity. Let me first indicate what I mean by speaking of a fundamental dynamic of Earth's creativity, after which I'll indicate how Jerry's process was similar to Earth's own process.

  We need to consider the pre-birth drama all mammals go through. Biologists in the 19th century discovered that in gestation, a mammal passes through the entire phylogenetic narrative. In the case of Homo sapiens, every human embryo takes on all the previous forms of life. I will use direct address in the hope of making this personal. Biologists discovered that you began as a single celled organism similar to the type that covered Earth four billion years ago; you then transformed into a multi-celled invertebrate organism similar to life six hundred million years ago; you then became a fish-like organism, then a lizard-like organism, then a mammalian organism, and finally a recognizable human being. When I say, "you became a lizard-like organism," I mean that your form was so similar to a lizard's form in its egg, that even experts in biology, when comparing the two, are not able to say which is lizard and which is human. In this bizarre sequence in the womb, you went through the entire history of life in nine or so months.

  Why? Why would life go through this long sequence over and over again? Why not just build a human body without bothering to have it exist as an invertebrate for a time, and then as a fish for a time?

  The amazing truth is that this is life's way of protecting its complex beauty. Life puts the new human being through a series of tests which are carried out by the mother's womb. As the embryo goes through all the forms of life, it has to be physiologically coherent with its mother's womb in order to survive. If this new form is too strange to fit into its mother's processes, it is aborted. Imagine the mother's womb as posing a series of questions to each form of its embryo: Are you coherent with my complex body, which has taken four billion years to evolve? If in the judgment of the womb, the answer is yes, then this new form of life is allowed to leave the womb and go forth in its wild adventure of creating, with others, the very fabric of the world.

  Let's return now to Jerry and his journey. As a child, very early on, he practiced his art and was judged by other children and adults. Their judgment consisted in whether or not his art established a connection. It is so easy to snuff out enthusiasm in a child. But Jerry's art did connect and he found a way forward. With each year, the testing became more intense. University professors and established art critics of New York brought sensibilities to their judgments that had been crafted by decades of devotion not only to the contemporary art scene but to the entire history of art. To impress them was to have Art Herself bestow its approval.

  And simultaneous with Jerry achieving their good judgments, his world suddenly became dust. All of it. At or around age 30, he became suffused with an undeniable urge to go beyond where he found himself. To go beyond via the strange act of subtraction. His whole world, including works of art he had long labored over, all of it felt like straw, like a false god. He wanted only to make it all disappear. Perhaps he saw in these works elements of seeking approval? Perhaps he saw in them echoes of art that had once been the spirit of their time but were now a dead-end? He wanted nothing to do with them. He wanted to return to zero.

  I believe that Jerry discovered a pathway into a cosmological creativity which includes not only art but also literature and music and religion and history. It begins when one works tirelessly to master what has been learned and discovered by our ancestors. Life does not want to lose its greatest achievements. So one needs to root one's thinking and creating in these brilliant forms coming to us from the past. Once they are in place, life can begin to search for a higher level of complexity, a deeper realm of understanding, for a state of creativity that can be reached only by throwing away everything one has learned. Going to zero. Going to that place where the universe is born anew, instant after instant, out of a "luminous emptiness."

  Let me end with a quotation from Jerry that captures it all: "One's creative journey offers the basic platform for the possibility of great accomplishment; however, we must be willing participants and have courage enough to break free from our personal and collective fix on what we believe art to be. This terrifying freedom from established form is where the deepest level of the journey must begin."