I remember a friend offering me a Zen maxim. It went something to the effect of: once you point at an object, it disappears. Or something like that. I vaguely remember how he put it. I vaguely remember the conversation that led up to it. But I think we were talking about the tendency to over-intellectualize things that are not meant to be an intellectual experience.

For instance, you might see a skyline that is beautiful. And because it’s beautiful probably the best thing to do, is shut up and enjoy the beauty. The worst thing you can do is attempt a description of it. Words probably won’t do it much justice. In fact, they’ll rob it of whatever magic was there. In short, you pointed at it and it disappeared.

I’m pretty sure we were relating that little adage to art. Or rather we were talking about how everyone is pointing at art. Talking about it. Analyzing it. Turning it into an intellectual exercise. Even artists do it with their own work. The average artist’s statement reads more like 19th Century literature, than a simple statement of process and purpose. A friend who studies Art History told me that they have to write it that way. They have to sound like the creative process was as much intellectual as intuitive, even if it wasn’t…especially if it wasn’t. There has to be a theory. Unfortunately, this is the same theory that instantly abducts whatever “whatness” about the art that was to be appreciated in the first place.

Designers do it too. I’ll see something that looks good only to have the designer ruin it by talking about it. And maybe it’s not the talking that bothers me. It’s that you can tell that all the intellectualism and strategy was convientely shoehorned in well after the fact. They probably saw some book on art and design and were impressed with how the work was pondered with academic language and seeping with exclusivity. “I want my work to be pondered too!” They say to themselves, and commence to curate and critique their own work, borrowing all the museum jargon they can get their hands on. That’s the irony with academic jargon: Even the most expensive terms somehow manage to be accessible to the most impoverished minds. Before you know it you have a bunch of half-wits turning their mediocre art into something highbrow.

And it’s not just the arts. Scientists point at nature with numbers and terms that later become lifeless explanations about life. Their conclusions about nature never feel natural. They feel sterile and contrived. And while sometimes I’m fascinated with understanding “how things work”, I’m often suspicious that humans will never feel comfortable until we’ve reduced the entire universe into our tiny circumference of understanding. What nature creates, humans surgically disassemble and reassemble resulting in the whole no longer being greater than the sum of its parts.

I’ve never been able to get my arms around why we do this. My guess is that intellectualizing a thing somehow gives us more power than the thing itself. Kind of like movie critics, who have empowered themselves with the right to speak conclusively about someone else’s work. Just like that they become the authority on something they had no part in creating.

Maybe that’s what happened to God, when religion and philosophy both tried to gain ownership of him through a process of personification, projection and finally psychoanalysis. In other words, the first thing we did was made him human. Than we gave him all of our human flaws, and then interrogated the hell out of him for not being perfect. At some point during that interrogation somebody pointed at him and – *poof* – he disappeared, never to be seen again.

All of this makes me think of the old saying, “when your work speaks for itself, don’t interrupt.” Not only is the work capable of speaking for itself, but that is what it’s supposed to do anyway. If we shut up and listen, every thing made by man will tell us something, be it good news or bad news. When I think about it, it’s a weird twist of the Midas touch. Whatever we touch turns to gold. But when we point at it, the gold disappears.