Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

Close Harmonies

I listened to a fantastic conversation with Bobby McFerrin over the weekend, in which he discussed how music has the ability to take us to these amazing places. As is typical when Krista Tippett interviews a musician, there were numerous tracks of McFerrin’s music interspersed with the interview. Interestingly, McFerrin has a background in Episcopal choral music. One of the tracks that played during the interview was of a piece that McFerrin wrote adapting Psalm 19 to music. The harmonies were very choral, lending to a liturgical atmosphere. What also struck me in listening to the harmonies, which were extremely close together, was that they were not dissimilar to barbershop.

Far back in the mists of time, I sang in a barbershop quartet. I was a bass. The harmonies are extremely difficult, because they are so close and so complex. I remember that year…it was great fun, one of the highlights of an otherwise dim career as a music major. I’ve performed with various choirs in my life, as well, but I’ve never connected how closely related the compositions between the two genres can be.

I love it when music styles fuse…when classical walks alongside rock, or when an Eastern jazz riff is interrupted by a distorted guitar solo. Or, when a liturgical, choral piece is complimented by barbershop harmonies. One could argue that this is a very post-modern preference, which is interesting, because I’m not an overly post-modern person. I think, though, that these fusions bridge gaps in generational preferences, in perspectives, in thinking. McFerrin, in the interview, said that music can open us up to grace. If this is true, and I think that it is, then part of the beauty of a fusion of musical styles is that it, at least, helps us see that we have more in common than we have differences…and that we’re not as far removed from each other as we might otherwise think. Despite the fact that our harmonies are complex, they can work when they’re woven closely together. They sound better that way, as well.

Photo Attribution: Theoddnote

Talk Back

I hope this revelation speaks more to the amount of technological progress that my generation has witnessed than to my age, but I’m going to throw it out there anyway. I completed my undergrad in the days when email was in its infancy. Students did not have email addresses issued to us from our schools. I’m not sure professors all had email addresses. In fact, I was a senior in college before I had my first personal email address. Did I mention that I was a communication major?

In that age of yesteryear, I remember one of my professors having a humorous cartoon on his office door. The cartoon detailed the rise of communication from Neanderthal man to the present, and suddenly took an enormous plunge back to where it began when voicemail entered the picture. I didn’t truly understand the humor then…

I had a conversation with someone on Twitter a few days ago after mentioning (during one of those days) that I really shouldn’t have been answering my phone at that point (the end result was that both myself and the person calling were both hopelessly confused by the time we hung up…like I said, one of those days). He commented that he far prefers email over voicemail, and I agreed. My reasoning is that I can take the time to say exactly what I want to say in an email…the variables are removed, and I have time to edit. To a large degree, that reasoning can be applied to social networking platforms, as well. For one thing, I don’t type messages while in a moving vehicle, whereas I easily leave a voicemail while driving. Thus, I’m more likely to ramble or mis-speak something. When I’m writing that message, even in SMS, I glance back over it before sending. The odds of miscommunication and subsequent embarrassment (or flat out unprofessionalism) is significantly reduced.

I think its important to say, though, that all of these forms of communication are secondary to face-to-face communication. Hierarchically, I always place speaking with someone in person above all of the previously mentioned modalities of communication. For that matter, I would even prefer video-calling in an important situation (I’m defining important as moments of human interaction that affect who we are as people…not business transactions). The reason is that human interaction has nuances of non-verbal and paralinguistic elements that can completely alter how a message is transmitted from the sender to the receiver. Someone’s tone of voice or facial expressions make a message a thousand times more expressive than the same message in written format. In person, we instinctively interpret body posture and other clues that complete the message. Written communication does not replace this, because it can’t communicate the full message.

I think that is why live performances in theatre are more powerful than film or television. Partially because the entire person (in character, of course) is present to communicate his or her message to the audience, and, equally as important, the audience is there to respond. A play isn’t complete without an audience, because there’s a feedback loop created in which the actors feed off of the audience’s reactions. That’s why no two performances are ever exactly the same. Similarly, the same conversation will never be duplicated between two people, because those people react to each other in a unique way at that moment in time.

If I’m communicating an extremely simple personal message (like “Happy Birthday”), or a list of information or business detail, then written communication is certainly my preferred mode. Whenever possible, though, seeing and being physically present with the person to whom you are speaking is the only communication that is truly whole, that truly permits human beings to completely interact with each other at the deepest level.

Do you think we’re losing that whole communication? Replacing it with something inferior, something that was only intended to augment, and not substitute for, the real thing? Sometimes, I’m concerned that we’re doing just that.

Photo Attribution: Ed Yourdon

Compromise: Inspired by Rock and Roll

A photo of the Hard Rock Cafe that I took in Washington, D.C.

I love the wisdom and the theology that comes from rock and roll. Today I was listening to the Eagles in the car. One of the lyrics to one of their songs makes profound sense to me whenever I hear it:

“Take it easy…don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy”

Sometimes we let our intensity about certain positions and ideas drive us nearly crazy. I say that because I think there’s something to be said for the middle ground.

I don’t mean being indecisive, or intentionally non-committal. Not at all. I mean that I think there’s something to be said for finding the point of common ground to ensure that we understand each other. Because when we stay intensely focused on our set positions without considering the reasons behind others’ perspectives, I think the sound of our own wheels running on the proverbial pavement can drive us crazy. There’s almost always common ground.

Karen’s great at this. Whenever I have an episode of yelling at a Virginia driver (which occurs frequently), she pauses to hypothesize what might be going wrong with that driver’s day, what they might have been experiencing, and what may have led to their making a silly decision. She always makes me feel bad that I yelled in the first place, because I can almost always think of a situation in which I’ve done something similar. And, of course, I don’t want someone yelling at me.

The reason that this is on my mind is because I’ve noticed a lot over the last few years how we’re encouraged to avoid the middle ground. And I know that this isn’t new, that I’ve only become this sensitive to it in the last few years. I’ve noticed it profoundly in politics, and also in religion: a “if you’re not for us you’re against us” mentality that leads to divisive modalities of being at best, and inflammatory and antagonistic rhetoric at worst. It seems so easy to become so angry at someone who doesn’t and won’t come to our perspective on a particular issue that we just want to fight them. Only months ago did a friend say he felt like hitting me because I advocated a political view that would be considered liberal, and was very opposite of his own.

Because I’m a practicing Christian, I find this also very true in faith communities. The concept of denominationalism runs rampant as we wall ourselves off from each other, speaking poorly of, and acting as though we’re somehow in competition with, each other.

There’s a principal in the Christian Scriptures that holds true here, and I think that anyone would recognize it as wisdom regardless of their faith. That principal is that a house that is divided will fall.

I’m worried about our country. I’m worried because instead of working together to create a civil society from which we all benefit, we’re busy ranting about how much better we are than everyone else, and even how much better some of us are than our fellow citizens. I’m concerned because we’re so willing to resort to aggressive measures to solve differences that really don’t necessitate such action. We’re so willing to permit ourselves to be drawn into a crowd mentality, because we take powerful rhetoric at face value, without stopping to analyze what is being said, to consider whether or not it is a sound argument. Factions of my faith do the same thing, resulting in horrible decisions and actions being made on the part of certain fundamentalist groups that reflect poorly on all of us, and our faith as a whole…to say nothing of our God.

I wonder why we can’t see that, if we continue to exist as a divided “house,” we won’t be able to stand. We’ll collapse ourselves, because we’ll be too busy fighting each other to see the work that needs to be done to hold up the structure, as it were. We’ll be so busy being caught up with what we’re against, that we’ll stop being motivated by what we’re for.

Focusing on the negative pushes us away, but focusing on the positive (something that I myself need to work on) gives us all something to work toward, which helps us all to understand each other. Just as I begin to understand the driver in front of me, I begin to be less angry at them. That doesn’t mean I endorse the decision that they made, and, if I were pressed to do so, I would still identify it as a wrong choice. But that doesn’t mean that I feel anger or hatred toward the person who made that choice, because, in the same situation, I might well have done the same.

Since we accept the wisdom that a house divided will fall, then we recognize that we all have some responsibility to work to keep the house standing, regardless of our differences on other issues and choices. Because finding common ground usually isn’t that difficult.

See, we accepted a common wisdom, there. We’ve done it already. Its a good start.

Distractions? Distractions, Anyone?

For something that I enjoy doing so much, its extremely easy to find an excuse to not do it.

I’m speaking of writing, specifically. One of the reasons I force myself into a regular posting schedule here is to give myself deadlines to meet, because I know you have come to expect these posts to be up on certain days. I currently don’t have those deadlines looming on my other projects, and, try as I might to set personal deadlines for them, I just don’t tend to be that successful. Setting a time limit, or a word or page count, for a day’s work on my current work in progress (a novel) seems arbitrary, and I know that I typically won’t manage to keep it. The best I can do is schedule specific days for which I am going to block off significant time to write. That’s about as (successfully) structured as I get with timing.

I sort of face a particular problem, though…and I’m positive that I’m not the only writer who experiences this. I’m an auditory learner. I’m very, very keyed into sounds, which is the reason I’m a music lover, and the reason I entered theatre by doing sound design. So, I don’t do well (even with reading) if there’s conversation going on the background. Even music with lyrics tends to be a significant distraction.

Our apartment, which I love, has an open floor plan, in which the only rooms with doors are the bathroom and the bedroom. Its an energy efficient, “green” apartment, using its open floor plan to provide a significant amount of natural light during the day. We love that. The best part of an open floor plan is the openness.

And, the worst about an open floor plan is…the openness.

My writing desk sits in the upstairs loft, and whatever Karen happens to be doing downstairs drifts its sounds remarkably well upstairs, leaving me hopelessly distracted. Thus, I’m essentially in the same position going upstairs as I am sitting in a coffee shop to hope to do some writing. Earbuds and my iPod become my best friend, and I had to invest in some nice earbuds, to prevent myself from hearing all of the ambient conversation and noise. I have to play jazz or other instrumental music, though, because lyrics will seriously mess with my word flow.

None of that is a challenge in and of itself, of course, but setting it up (as trivial as it is to do so), or to travel to the coffee shop, sometimes seems so daunting when so much else is on my plate that I simply use it as an excuse to not write at all.

Fellow writers, what specific environmental obstacles do you face when working on a project? How do you overcome them?

And, I promise, I’m working on that work in progress this weekend!

Photo Attribution: underminingme

The Basics

Several years ago, Karen and I came to the conclusion that there are two types of education in our society: education in really cool and important things that contribute to the deeper direction of society, and education that earns you money. Rarely, if ever, are they the same.

When I finished a graduate degree in religion, and mentioned to a colleague that I was considering an MFA program in writing, the colleague wryly expressed something to the effect of, “You don’t like to get degrees that will make you money, do you?”

Along the lines of how, in some college towns, it is not uncommon to be waited on at a restaurant by someone with a PhD, Karen and I openly acknowledge that we have quite a bit of the first type of education, while perhaps not so much of the second. That doesn’t mean that I regret the education I have…I think that it has contributed to making me who I am, and to making me a productive member of society. Certainly, it was conducive to becoming a critical thinker. Still, I’m finding myself in a position of considering going back to more of the second type of education before I consider pursuing any more of the first. Karen went to undergrad with someone who, instead of going into college straight from high school, spent a few years becoming a master carpenter. He then used that skill to pay for his undergrad. There’s wisdom in that. Profound wisdom, I think, because he got the best of both worlds…and the personal growth that comes with both experiences.

So, as I am now pursuing some growth in area number two, I found myself particularly sensitive to this op-ed piece on CNN when I read it last week. Essentially, this is written by a member of the movement that states that college is over-rated, that it emphasizes the wrong things, that it is over-priced, and that it does little to nothing to help you acquire a successful career. This writer is encouraging entrepreneurship in the technological field, and insisting that college is not only not required, but that those who do not conform to the institutional expectation of higher academia will be the ones who change the world.

I’ve personally known some people in my life that felt the same way, and eschewed as much formal education as they could. They were still well-read and very knowledgeable individuals, however. I think, though, that they were limited in what they could achieve professionally, rather than the opposite.

This writer is arguing that undergraduate education does little to nothing to prepare one for the professional world. I would argue that an enormous amount of personal development is built into the college experience, to say nothing of networking opportunities and the opportunity to explore all of the liberal arts, to test the proverbial waters regarding potential fields in which one would like to make his/her living, and to be exposed to the foundation of well-rounded personal development: freedom of inquiry, and the resulting skill of critical thinking.

This is to say nothing of the fact that many people, myself included, find themselves able to function quite well in fields other than their college major, and performing better because of the education they received in other disciplines.

The writer of the op-ed piece, Mr. Stephens, is blindly following the emphasis in Western culture on business, and that is where he goes amiss. There is more to a successful life than business success. Earning money and making profit does not, and cannot, substitute for exposure to the humanities, exploration of the sciences, and opportunities to read, explore, and be instructed in fields in which one might simply have a passing interest. A fulfilling life is composed of infinitely more than earning a good salary and climbing the career ladder.

Similarly, a fulfilling existence for a culture is composed of infinitely more than innovation and technological progress. The progress of humanity, and the exploration of the human condition, is not dependent upon technological innovation. Rather, that innovation is a product of exploration of the human condition, and to invert those priorities is indicative of a poor knowledge of history. Need I say that a poor knowledge of history is indicative of a lack of emphasis on quality education? Stephens claims that time is often better spent in trying and doing instead of learning a theory, but he forgets that doing something well pre-supposes a knowledge of theories.

Now, I’m the first to admit that Western education is far too heavily focused on credentials instead of learning. I’ve expressed before how troubled I am about how heavily compartmentalized our education in different disciplines has become. I hate that education is operated as a business, and is thus far too expensive (again, the Western emphasis on business fails us). To avoid higher education altogether as an effort to correct this, however, smacks of a knee-jerk reaction that involves throwing the proverbial baby out with the bath water. That is the mistake that Stephens is making…a mistake that might be avoided with just a bit of education.

Innovators who avoid formal education might well alter our world. Devoid of a cultural soul, however, this would be a most Pyrrhic victory, indeed.

What do you think?