Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

What, When, Where, and the Lack of Anything Else

This post runs the risk of not letting well enough alone, but I just can’t help myself.

America’s public education system requires an extreme overhaul. The damage done by No Child Left Behind has been extensive, and is obvious to me even from the outside. My observations have been confirmed by several friends who are actually in the profession of teaching. The quality of public education, however, leaves me baffled. History is taught selectively, English is taught only for technical purposes and thus without a true love for the language, and math and the sciences reign supreme.

As I’m looking at doctoral programs and preparing to take the GRE, I’m abruptly struck by just how little math I actually remember. I’m also struck by the inaccuracy of every teacher through my early college years who claimed that I would use these skills every day of my life. I’m scratching my head as to why, with technology available to take care of things like balancing our checkbooks and calculating tips and splitting tax on receipts (the only things I use math for as a someone who is not a scientist or engineer), that such enormous emphasis is placed on numbers.

Yet, our students are required to become proficient in mathematics that at least half of them won’t have any constructive use for after college, and the sciences…well, all must fall before the altar of science, as it has become the new religion.

What leaves me bemused here is the gradual shift, based on a desperation to be competitive in the industrial world, to worship the “how” while ignoring the “why.” I’m not saying that math and the sciences aren’t important, they certainly are. They are important because they explain how things work, and give us a greater insight into the functions of our own bodies, our own psyches, our environment. They provide avenues for creativity by which new ways to master our environment are invented.

They stop, however, at the “how.”

As to the “why,” that is answered by the disciplines that are relegated to the background and barely given any educational attention because they don’t make money or produce industrialized goods. “Why” is for the realms of spirituality, the arts, and philosophy. These are the disciplines we at best tolerate as necessary for those unscientifically gifted, and at worst (in the case of spirituality) condemn as living in an unquantifiable fairy-land. More frequently we give those dedicated few who choose to seriously pursue these disciplines a nod of appreciation, and look forward to consuming the entertainment value of their work and study, while the rest of the world goes about the “important” work of furthering our industrialized progress.

In worshipping the “how” in this way, we’ve all but forgotten the “why.” We’ve replaced our search and innate desire to find the “why” with the material goods and so-called progress that our industrialized ventures yield, and believe them to be the “why,” failing to see that this industrialized obsession is exactly that which has cost us our ability to perceive the value of humanity.

Still, progress must be made, and so the “how” continues to be emphasized in educational reform legislation. The banner flying above the political slogans for educational reform invariably includes technology, math, and science, so that our students will grow to adulthood with the ability to solve complex calculus and apply it to engineering problems successfully, while being illiterate to Faulkner or Steinbeck or Salinger, and being unable to recognize the purpose of valuing poetry instead of technical manuals. As such, history will become suddenly malleable, able to be re-written with each new textbook revision because those who are well-read enough to know the difference will be such a small minority of a voice.

The past will be whatever they say it was, and we’ll be reduced to robots that are valued only for what we produce, not for who we are.

Oh, wait. We’re already there.

………..

Untitled #3

The first pause happened on my way to work this morning, about halfway down the four flights of stairs that I take to the parking lot. Rain fell on Central Virginia overnight, and had just cleared away by around 8 a.m. A single strand of dark cloud cut the sky in two, with fire burning from either side of it to bring heat to what would be a beautiful Autumn morning. The sight was absolutely breathtaking.

The second pause happened shortly after lunch. Significant wind gusts were at play, the kind that make your shirt sleeves flap briskly as though you were about to take flight. The sun was perfect, accentuating the beginnings of auburn, rust, and golden colors that are just beginning to insert themselves into the leaves of certain trees, moving repetitively back over the rolling hill-scape to the horizon. This was the sort of Autumn day that I actually don’t mind.

The third pause came this afternoon as I saw this. Is it just me, or does thinking of what we see in our spheres of activity during the day in comparison to something that astronomically massive really have a mind-blowing effect on perspective?

There was a fourth pause, immediately after that, as I stopped to connect the three. We’re catching a glimpse of this phenomenon of life, both from the ground up and from the sky down. And I don’t intend to use the word “phenomenon” in a flippant way, here…the rain, the clouds, the sky, the sunlight, the gargantuan ring circling the 6th planet in our solar system…that sort of perspective dwarfs our concept of huge.

I’ve become aware…and hopefully I’ll become more aware…of this pulse around us, this energy of sustained life. Not random collisions of atoms spinning us into existence, but intentional, breathing, life…the same sort of life I try to create in the fictional realm with words, and that the musician creates with sound, and that the painter creates with images…taking the life that was there and molding it into signs and symbols of itself.

That’s something that I don’t think we could do if we stopped being aware, stopped noticing, the life that is in motion, not only around us, but through us…life of which we are a part. Life that’s always, always worth more than possessions, or wealth, or productivity. The life of our environment and of us. Life of immeasurable value.

And then, I see how eager we are to take that life, both criminally…

…as well as in ways that are considered acceptable…

…and I hope that, if we take a few extra moments each day to appreciate life, that perhaps we would be more interested in giving it than in taking it.

Untitled #2

After my post yesterday, I went for a walk. For a moment, let us a put aside the fact that I’m only 34 and am perfectly capable of going to the gym, and that going for a walk is a lame excuse for exercise. I just needed to get away from a screen and clear my head a bit. Karen was whipping up one of her culinary masterpieces in the kitchen, and our apartment just isn’t that big, so, in order to get some quiet, I needed to escape for a few moments.

As I’ve recently mentioned, I like walking at dusk, experiencing a sort of thin place. Its sort of like mobile meditation for me. I usually notice people first…vehicles coming and going, college students returning from the gym, the sounds of enthusiastic football fans screaming out through their windows, people walking dogs. From there, I usually notice different kinds of cars for a few minutes. By then, I’m usually rounding a corner and walking up the back parking lot of our apartment complex, which is less populated, and my attention will turn to the sky. I eventually move around to a better view of the sky, and I can see its final fiery burst as it turns dark behind the visage of the Blue Ridge Mountains off in the distance.

Last night there were more cars coming and going than usual (some in a bit of a hurry), and I was well around my normal circle when I realized that my head still just wasn’t “clear.” So I stopped. I found a bit of decorative ledge on the edge of the parking lot and sat. I let my gaze drift over the street a few hundred yards to my left, one the major arteries of traffic in the city. At that point, a beautifully commonplace thing happened.

There’s a computer repair store opposite our apartments on the other side of the street. The signs of this store, like most, are on some sort of timer, and backlight at a specific time each evening. That time happened to be just as I was looking at it.

Somehow, there was something absolutely profound in the illumination of that sign.

Don’t let yet your mind run away with you…I’m not about to draw some light vs. dark metaphor…that would be trite here. I just mean that I’ve walked that circle of our parking lot a dozen times in the last two months, and I’ve seen that computer repair store each time, and I’ve never noticed the sign, lit or unlit. Had I not stopped and sat down yesterday evening, I wouldn’t have noticed it then, either. I quite possibly would never have seen that sign light up.

Ultimately, watching a computer repair store sign illuminate isn’t something that alters my perception of reality, or even something that I’ll likely remember at all by next week. What impacts me about it, though, is the appreciation of that moment, because I think its symbolic of a thousand moments that brush by us as we’re rushing from point A to point B trying to accomplish…something. In my aforementioned pressure to reach goals and to accomplish my dreams, I am missing critical things in life…not just my life, but the life going on around me…that would be important to those dreams. And more important than that, its just life…teeming, substantive life, life from the Divine, life that I’m fortunate enough to encounter every day.

I wonder: how can we live if we’re missing life?

And all that because I needed to get some air and clear my head.

Untitled #1

I may be having a “pity party.”

No, actually, I’m pretty sure that I am. I have good reason to be, though. You see, it began about three days ago when I realized that I had written anything on only one day out of the last week or so. It began as taking a bit of a break to re-charge after moving two major writing projects from the “new” side of my desktop to the “working/awaiting revision” side of my desktop. The re-charge stretched into a week, though, with no words being tapped out on the keyboard. I’m not saying “no words of substance,” mind you…I mean no words.

The pity party didn’t stop there, though. Oh, no. Once the ball is rolling, its not so easy to stop the momentum, after all. I watched Yes Man with Karen this afternoon. The movie, in case you haven’t seen it, explores the theme of quality of life by propagating an odd pop-culture metaphysical approach that essentially breaks down to cost/benefit analysis, and packages it with some crude sexual humor…you know, like most Jim Carrey movies do. The sad and immediate result of the movie is that you leave asking the question, “am I really living, or being a slave to my day-to-day?”

I suppose that you could confront that question in many ways. A self-empowerment approach would be to push yourself to take charge of your circumstances. A faith approach would tell you to be content with where you are. An reckless approach would tell you to run. A prima donna approach would lead to you say, “I’m a (fill in the blank), and I have too much talent to be confined to this servitude!”

The correct answer, though is (cue drumroll)…umm…you tell me?

See, I’m not writing this boasting of an answer. I’m not writing this to provide any amazingly witty or thought-provoking lucidity into the problem at hand. I’m writing because I haven’t written in a while, and I feel I might go a bit crazy if I don’t silence my day-to-day noise and let some words to come out.

That’s difficult, though, isn’t it? Silencing the noise of our daily lives? Breaking free from responsibilities long enough to pursue what you want to do? I want to brush up on my French and my Greek. I want to earn a PhD. I want something I write to be the next Great American Novel. I want time to ponder and contemplate and think. In short, I want to live my life as though I weren’t confined as an adult. Sometimes, the daily things we enjoy so much stop being enjoyable, and the success we achieve stops being all that important. Those are the times you’re left with exactly the question that Yes Man asks, albeit poorly: am I really living, or am I just existing? Am I creating or just consuming? Am I trapped by religious ethics, or experiencing a spiritually vibrant life?

Am I writing a legitimate blog post, or just a whiny stream-of-consciousness on which I really shouldn’t click “publish” at all?

That last one’s tough. Its probably the latter, but I’m clicking “publish” anyway, because having words out there is more important to me right now. Those of you who managed to read this far: have you ever experienced this? How do you move forward? I’m interested to know.

And no more whining, I promise…well, at least not for the immediate future.

LP’s, EP’s, and MP3 Brevity

Remember when men were real men, women were real women, and albums were…well…not singles?

For that matter, remember when singles and EP’s were released in specific distinction against an album? In days of yesteryear, there were a few albums by intentional artists that were not just a collection of many songs, but a musical and lyrical journey that had a definite beginning, middle, and end…a plot, if you will. Albums by the likes of Bob Dylan or U2 or Pink Floyd, or any number of amazing musicians and lyricists that aspired for more than pop fluff, whatever their genre, to make a complete work. You didn’t just listen to a group of great songs with those albums…you went along for a ride that had a departure and an ending point.

I think we’ve lost that in our current mode of a la carte shopping. Recently I was browsing iTunes upon a recommendation from a trusted blog to check out a new band. I liked some of the tracks, and some had too much of a folk feel for my taste, so I purchased the tracks I liked and left the rest. Don’t I have the right for that? Certainly. Is it a good idea? Not necessarily. I have a feeling that the entire album might be a story, that it would take me on a specific journey were I to have purchased all of the tracks and listened to them from beginning to end. My excuse was that I didn’t want to spend the money on an entire album…yet I would spend money on a novel, knowing up front that I won’t like every chapter, simply on the principle that a plot takes us places we don’t like to go in order to weave a complete story. I wouldn’t just buy a few chapters from a novel…I wouldn’t get the entire experience.

Yet this is the sort of consumerism that drives our perusing of art. I choose music as an example partly because it is (arguably) the most dominant and easily accessible medium available today, but the ramifications extend far beyond this. Continuing with the example, though, I think that many artists surrender artistic merit for the sake of a business model, focusing on releasing individual tracks that will hook a listener, because that individual track is more likely to be purchased than an entire album.

I suppose, however, that there could be something said for the discovery. I’ve ended up purchasing albums from artists that I discovered through Starbucks free “Pick of the Week” program, albums that I likely wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Similarly, I wonder if the reader of Salinger’s chronicles of his fictional Glass Family, reading them as individual short stories, would have made the immediate connections that were more accessible to me reading them collected in Nine Stories.

Of course, the immediate literary answer to this is the poem, which is often meant to stand alone, at least when printed in literary journals. Yet, even here the poem is often a “chapter” in a larger story when read in the context of the collection in which it was intended.

A friend recently referred to Twitter as “a 160-character literature sniper.” His comment, while perhaps a bit over-stated, leaves me to ponder the result of our “sound-byte” culture, where one of the reasons for independent, briefer snippets of art removed from their context aren’t always just to serve as samplers, as it were, but often the recourse of those too impatient or too distracted to read an entire book, or to listen to an entire album by one artist (remember those friends that used to incessantly change the television channel or radio station?). At least full length movies can still hold us, although the descriptor of “epic length” is enough to keep some from the theatre.

What stories do we miss by not taking the time to take in the journey in its entirety? Is this perhaps metaphorical, indicative of our tendency to compartmentalize ourselves away from experiencing anything at its intended depth in the name of experiencing many things in the same time frame? Does this pose a warning to a mindset of quantity’s perceived supremacy over quality? Perhaps it does.

Or, perhaps I’m just over-analyzing.

Perhaps.

(Photo Attribution:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timbobee/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 )