Caravaggio to Dowd by way of Kathryn Harrison
Before critical thinking can begin, impressions form. It occurred to me today as I read four book reviews in rapid succession that these impressions are the antecedents of coherence, that prized state where argument and reason clear the path for expression. This involves a very private, unspoken process of discarding certain bits of information in favor of others. The brain performs this task without much active input from its owner, the way it causes a person to duck when an object is thrown. I’d like to spend a few minutes scrolling backward through the image and text that my brain processed for me, the same brain that causes me to duck and reminds me that hey, we don’t like Velveeta, Renaissance Art, The Red Sox, and we don’t like scrolling backward through an odd assortment of predispositions we’ve worked so hard to cultivate.
The four reviews left the retinal impressions of Carravagio’s Christ in the Garden, Maureen Dowd, a lurid retro book cover set on the subway, the demise of the Y chromosome, the precise prose of Kathryn Harrison, four centuries of artistic flux, and lingering impressions from John Harr’s previous work, A Civil Action. Dowd has a book out called Are Men Necessary? to which my initial response was to be pissed off, the very response her publisher was hoping for. My brain wants to buy the book in order to disprove the suggestion that it, my brain, has backed the wrong horse on the evolutionary scale. My brain knows that I’m a man. If I’m not necessary, guess who is out for work for the duration?
Like most people I’ve been necessary and unnecessary enough times and in enough circumstances to know which is which. My brain was relieved that Ms. Harrison didn’t jump on the Dowd bandwagon, and was eloquent in her critique. It is interesting to note that glamor and fame carry some magisterial powers like a court of good looking people deciding traffic fines. That Carravagio is now all the rage among art historians provokes the thought that critics are four hundred years late to that party, although that’s not the point of Harr’s new book.
Now, with a strange new craving for Velveeta, and six million years of Y chromosome stability as our guide, I return control of these meanderings to my brain. With a flip of the switch we’re ready for some football, some Coors Lite, some insightful commentary from the booth.