Grokking it

Robert Hein­lein is one of my favorite authors. In his sem­i­nal sci­ence fic­tion novel, “Stranger in a Strange Land,” the main char­ac­ter is a human who has been raised by aliens. Cen­tral to their way of look­ing at the world is the verb, “to grok.”

Grok means to under­stand so thor­oughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, inter­marry, lose iden­tity in group expe­ri­ence. It means almost every­thing that we mean by reli­gion, phi­los­o­phy, and science—and it means as lit­tle to us (because of our Earthly assump­tions) as color means to a blind man.

The novel was pop­u­lar and the word grok has come to be part of the Eng­lish lex­i­con, to the point where it is included in many dic­tio­nar­ies. I think it is a valu­able con­cept in think­ing about rep­re­sen­ta­tional art. In order to rep­re­sent some­thing, you need to grok it. I some­times look at a paint­ing, scan­ning each pas­sage, think­ing about how it feels. Does it feel as if the art grokked the thing rep­re­sented? The paint­ing can be tight or loose, exact or painterly; that doesn’t mat­ter. Did the painter grok what is being rep­re­sented? Does it evoke the thing? If the painter did that, then that sec­tion works, at least at one level. You have a sense of being there; being able to step in and touch the thing. If the artist grokked it, then when I look at the paint­ing I learn about the artists rela­tion­ship to that thing. If not, then there’s just some paint there.