Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Island Time

Karen and I visited Ocracoke Island for a few days, the reason for my Twitter absence and the late blog post this week. I intentionally “unplugged” for several days, even to the extent of turning off my mobile, as we needed some serious decompression time. Of course, our trip down was marked by our usual punctuality…that is, we were late. We were made later by the fact that you cannot drive straight to Ocracoke…a ferry ride is involved to get to the island. This means you line up your car in the boarding lane, wait for the next ferry, then wait the 30 minute ride across as the ferry chugs through the water. The first time was maddening. I paced. I made numerous phone calls to make certain our room reservation would survive our tardiness. I groaned and yelled at the slow traffic in the same way I would during rush hour, and bolted out of the car door when we finally parked where we were staying.

After settling into our room, we walked to find a restaurant for dinner, because you don’t drive a lot in Ocracoke. It’s a small village, and almost everyone walks or cycles everywhere. We sat on a screened-in porch over dinner with a guy playing blues and Southern rock with an acoustic guitar on the patio, in the notable absence of street lights. This, combined with a pleasant void of neon or digital signage, is significant, because no chain businesses exist on Ocracoke. Every restaurant, every shop, every business is owned by locals. The seafood is typically freshly caught that day. The closest thing to “big business” that I saw while we were there was a UPS truck.

Add this to miles of beaches that are protected by the National Park Service as a nature preserve and thus completely unpopulated by hotels and timeshares, and you have a blissfully natural and slowing experience.

During one of our outings, Karen and I waited nearly an hour for the ferry. I noticed a guy on the front with a t-shirt that read “I’m on Island Time,” and it made me smile. Karen made the comment that I wasn’t paying as much attention while driving at one point: that I’m normally a very vigilant driver, but that I wasn’t noticing cars braking in front of us as quickly as usual, or reacting as quickly. Nor did I seem stressed about anything.

Just a few days of being completely “unplugged” and worrying about nothing led me to a feeling of physical and mental….slowness, a slowness matched by, and indeed necessitated by, the island culture around me. What might have been sitting in my inbox held no concern for me. The television was on maybe twice, and then only for entertainment purposes. I had no clue what was occurring in the rest of the world for those few days. And I didn’t care. And I was so relaxed. And as I sat on the sparsely populated beach, and wandered out into the ocean to let it embrace me while I stared out at the far off point where it made introductions with the sky, I thought about the rest of the world…the other countries and peoples that were on the “other side” of that ocean…in a different way. I thought about how alike we all are, and about this stunningly beautiful water, a symbol of our life in motion, that is given to us all, and how Providential everything seemed in that moment.

And even today, even surrounded by Virginia drivers again, I’m calm and serene.

I certainly hope to stay that way for a while.

After the Fact

Assigning Value?

I was so struck by this discussion when I read it this evening that I think it warrants a second post this week. The students, artists, and theologians over at Transpositions opened this discussion on the importance of art in culture, based on the current controversy in the UK over cutting government funds for the arts. The question is, is art essential to society? That is, when things become critical, should the arts be cut before (to use the specific example used in their discussion) healthcare? What should come before art, and what should come after art, when funding is cut?

Unfortunately, we exist in a world that requires these pieces of paper with arbitrarily assigned values to make anything happen. Since at least the Renaissance, artists have frequently functioned by having wealthy patrons fund their work. Or, they do what I and many others do, and have the bittersweet “day job” that pays the rent while pursuing what we love (a poet once said that the only thing worse than having a job is not having a job).

I have an inherent dislike for assigning monetary values to works of art, or, even worse, to an art form in general. I think the value of good art is inherent. Of course, as humans don’t create ex nihilo, artists must have supplies, and thus receive money from somewhere. Having recently experienced funding cuts for the arts in Virginia, I know how critical some public sustenance is to the art community at large. Yet, as much as any artist will insist on the necessity of good art for a healthy culture, I think the conversation on Transpositions asks an important question: is art absolutely critical for the survival of a culture? When the worst happens, and humanity enters “survival mode” (as in times of war), how critical does art become in Maslow’s Hierarchy? Dare we reduce it to make sure people are fed? Dare we not reduce it to make sure people are fed?

I think good art is indispensable to the emotional, spiritual, and psychological health of any society, as well as for influencing the positive movement of a society (L’Engle once said that only writers with something to say are censored). In both the UK and the U.S., there is an entire industry for creative professionals that will be heavily impacted when funding for the projects that employ them is reduced. During the Hollywood writer’s strike of 2007, many freelance support professionals were out of work for an extended period of time. I understand that a similar situation recently occurred in New York City when a CSI series stopped production. Many similar instances could occur when theatres, symphonies, and other venues are unable to maintain their volume of seasonal offerings.

Another question posed in the original post (for my readers of faith) is: what are the ecclesiological implications of this? In the West, I cringe at the idea of the Church influencing the arts until it becomes better educated about them, lest we end up with more Thomas Kincaid. Yet, historically, the Church has held an important role in the arts that it should reclaim.

Head over to Transpositions and read the post. There are many questions posited there that I haven’t even mentioned. Let them know your thoughts. And I’d love to hear them, here, as well.

Revelations in Cardboard

I took Karen to a nearby museum to celebrate our anniversary this weekend…the museum has only opened in the last two or three years, and it was one of those excursions that we had been planning to take and never quite gotten to. Being a relatively new museum, there weren’t a great deal of exhibits. One installation, however, was really fascinating. It was a sculpture of Poseidon and several sea nymphs and dolphins charging forward, entitled the Corrugated Fountain. What was striking was that the installation nearly filled an entire room, such that you could walk through it, and was sculpted from cardboard. I learned about the sculptor that the piece was modeled after, an artist with which I was previously unfamiliar. I also refreshed my European history a bit during an exhibit of paintings commissioned by the Medici family. One of the reasons I love museums is because you learn. They are a place where art (or science, or whatever the medium to which that particular museum might be dedicated) and history meet. There are even museums of history, of course. The point is that it is an interactive learning experience, from which I always walk away richer.

In my free time, I’ve been reading back over some history of theology to get my brain back in gear for PhD research proposals (go ahead…yawn). I look back over the four or so years since finishing grad school, and think about the things I’ve learned, and it’s surprising how many new discoveries have occurred since I finished…that is, while I wasn’t in school. On our first real date, I loved how challenged I was by Karen’s intellect. She has forced me outside of my own perspectives, and pushed me into new areas of discovery.

Call it being enrolled in the school of life, or the university of hard knocks, or whatever you like. I just find it ironic that both grad school and my undergrad were more catalysts than complete and self-contained educations: they forced me to think and explore, and those thoughts and explorations solidified once I had finished and was back in “the real world.”

Now, its no secret that I have enjoyed being a student much more than I have enjoyed the “real world” to date. However, I think I needed to be free of the stress of assignment deadlines and research paper edits to let things process through my brain. After a certain point, any student knows that you reach critical mass, and nothing else is going to make it in for a while. Similar to eating a delicious meal, you have to give it some time to digest before taking in anything else.

Karen is the educational theorist of the two of us, and she tells me that this is how education works: that you are presented with and work through the subject matter, and then you must give it time to “sink in.” This is apparently not a short process, or at least it has not been for me. I’ve only recently arrived at some idea of how my myriad interests connect, and even still the ideas are in the process of solidifying rather than being a finished product. This is a journey that I have been on for years, and continue to travel.

Even from a purely “book smart” perspective, though, I find that only now can I truly connect many of the concepts that I crammed in for exams or projects while in school. Now, those ideas and theories meld and make sense. Then, they were more information that I needed to be able to reproduce mechanically or write about with some coherency. This is not unlike the way a technical education (which I had studying theatre technology) requires some time after learning for one to become proficient.

I made a comment a few weeks ago that I had to go back and learn the things I should have learned when I was in school. I don’t think that’s really accurate, though. I think that I’m just experiencing the full digestion of the meals I’ve eaten, and am beginning to be ready for the next.

So, tell me: what have you learned after years of letting something percolate? I don’t believe for a second that this is confined to the classroom. “Real life” lessons are a long time in the learning, as well.

If It Isn’t Broken…

Shhhh. Be vewy, vewy qwiet. We’re hunting the wabbit of normalcy.

I guess that’s easy for me to say because I would be, by some standards, sort of deviant. After all, I’m riddled with angst, most especially every time I schedule myself to write. I had serious anger outbursts as a freshman while practicing piano (imagine flying sheet music). I have unprofessional moments of expressing intense verbal displeasure with obvious stupidity that fits in just fine backstage, but tends to not be received all that well in most office environments. Thus, try as I might to meet enough societal expectations to keep my day job, I am emotionally unbalanced, I question authority, I am a proud nonconformist, and, by our culture’s definition of the word, not entirely normal.

Of course, as my wife’s end of the family is fond of pointing out, “normal” is merely a setting on one’s dryer.

Here’s my defense: the very personality characteristics that brand me as not normal, different, and outside of the status quo, are what make me creative. They are what make me an independent thinker. If an industrialized society has taught us anything, its that a sanitized culture of balance and recognition of the need for treatment of such…dysfunctions…is necessary for a productive society. We tolerate an eccentric few that serve us in the “entertainment industry,” along with the occasional absent-minded professor or scientist, and the rest of us are expected to conform. Dress codes, codes of conduct…resistance is futile. Welcome to the Borg.

I had an immediately harsh knee-jerk reaction to this article when I read it last week. Moscow’s new metro rail station has been named in memory of the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. Artwork on display in the station portray scenes of Dostvoesky’s novels, which were frequently dark in their subject matter (the article cites specifically a grisly murder scene from Crime and Punishment). According to the CNN article, mental health experts are questioning whether or not this is dangerous, in essence, to the public health, because it will encourage actions such as suicide. Essentially, psychological experts desire to censor the art in the station in order to encourage good emotional health among the general population, and we are once again thrown backward into the “life imitating art” controversy.

I’m not even going to get started on the censorship argument against this, nor the point that quality art is critical for a society’s emotional health. I sincerely hope that goes without saying. I want to trace a line of thought that I’ve followed through two science fiction works over the last few weeks. I recently finished reading The Traveler by John Twelve Hawks. Hawks sets his story in a surveillance society only slightly more drastic than our current culture, controlled by a secret brotherhood that demand compliance with expectations of normalcy from citizens, and systematically track down and kill those who cross to other realms and return with divergent perspectives. All in the name of order.

Almost immediately after finishing the book, Karen and I watched Equilibrium this weekend, a 2003 movie in which society has made feeling illegal in the name of preventing war, and thus art and pets are not only illegal, but destroyed on sight in order to prevent humans from viewing it and subsequently feeling emotion (ironically, this law is enforced by violence…thus nothing has been accomplished because what makes us human is sacrificed in the name of humanity).

Good science fiction, while doing other things, presents a warning as to where we might go and what we might do with our powers of human innovation. I see the potential for us to travel the roads presented in these two pieces, and I see the discipline of psychology contributing progressively more to the problem. Everything outside of an arbitrarily defined societal norm becomes deviant. With this label, artists who express feelings and function in eccentric ways, also are labeled deviant. Professors who are so enamored with academic knowledge as to lose a bit of common sense, scientists who are absorbed in their discoveries at the expense of basic interpersonal functioning, risk being labeled as dysfunctional. Those who are too absorbed in their creativity to be bothered by the people around them provide us with some of the greatest discoveries and explorations of what it means to be human. Yet, we in our narcissism have decided that they are afflicted by a problem that needs to be “cured.”

So, have we forgotten that all humanity is somehow dysfunctional? Do we lose sight of the joy of coloring outside of the lines that brings disorder to order? Don’t we understand that a certain amount of disorder is necessary to birth new creativity in the human spirit?

I’m not arguing that all psychological ventures alienate the arts. To the contrary, very good integrations of the two exist. I think, however, that perhaps we’ve become too confident in our rudimentary understanding of the human mind. Creative personalities, passionate academics, and people of faith can all too easily be labeled as psychologically troubled people. In fact, statistically, we all can be labeled as such, as nearly all of us will experience some level of clinical depression at some point in our lives, for example. That will occur whether or not we view subway art in Moscow.

Absorbing all of mankind into a definition of normalcy is not conducive to a healthy society. If anything, the constraints brought about by this, the expectations of constant self-control, lead to even more of what psychology labels “antisocial behavior,” to say nothing of stifling a creative impulse or spiritual experience.

Not everything that falls outside of the realm of our perceived normalcy necessitates a cure. In short, not every clock that ticks differently needs to be fixed. If we truly find individuality to be beautiful and something to be cherished, then perhaps we can stop concerning ourselves with how many negative implications might result from quality works of art in a metro rail station? Perhaps there is an element of danger to it. There is an element of danger to all art, and to most of life that is worth living (ask any skydiver). We can’t be afraid of danger, or of walking outside the lines of what those around us do.

In fact, without taking these risks, we cannot move forward with what makes us beautifully human at all.

Photo Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jennerosity/sets/72157603834072650/