I hate that scene in Anne of Avonlea, when she goes out to the milking pen, sees her cow still in it, and realizes that she has sold Rachael's cow to Mr. Blithe by mistake. I hate it, because I know the feeling.
There is nothing I loathe more than being in a scrape. Loathe it. Absolutely L-O-A-T-H-E
I detest being embarrassed, and trying to save face, and trying not to cry in public... I am not the "brush it off" type of girl. It will not be brushed. Believe me, I have tried. It will not be brushed.
Every time I feel that, "I want to crawl under a rock and die" feeling... I keep feeling that feeling. (I started typing that sentence with the hope of it ending profoundly... no such. Alas!)
I had that feeling today, and I suspect I'm not the only one who has ever felt this way.
As I pondered about it tonight, I thought...
THESE ARE THE MOMENTS IN LIFE THAT I CANNOT STAND.
A friend, upon trying to help me feel better, said,
"I have a saying, Katie. A saying for when I think life is super difficult or things look grim. I think to myself, 'At least I'm not being chased by mastodons'. And, next time you're in this situation, think of your ancestors who were being trampled by mastodons everyday... [problems like this are] not so life ruining then."
He had a point. I won't argue with him. But what is it about being trampled by mastodons that always seems appealing in "Crawl under a rock and die" moments?
There is something about the little things that hurts the worst.
My dear friend Joanna Newsom, in her song "Only Skin" probably puts it best. The song is 16 minutes long, but right in the middle, the music boils down for a moment, and she sings,
"Scrape your knee: it is only skin."
Now, I recently scraped my knees (funny story about that, ask me sometime) and it hurt. Bad. That's the thing about scrapes. They hurt like the devil. Maybe it's just a myth, but I've heard that many times when someone is stabbed (especially when they don't see the knife) they have no idea they have been stabbed. 30% of stab wound victims die. I am guessing 0% of knee-scrape victims die, though I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a knee-scrape victim who wasn't fully aware that their knee was scraped.
It's as though human beings are equipped to deal with the hefty things (shock, for example, probably plays a huge role in the obliviousness of stab-victims) in life. The little things... they hurt. REALLY hurt . But, they won't kill you.
Look at that. We were built for greatness. Who would have thought it?
Everyone has scraped their knee before. There are literally billions of people on earth right now who should be walking around in T-shirts that say, "I Survived ~Knee-Scrape 20__". But they, like all of us, got up, brushed off, and got back to work.
If you're reading this, and you need to hear it, I'm sure it's not helping. That's the thing about "Crawl under a rock and die" moments... if you're anything like me, they can't be brushed off in .2 or less.
But hear this: IT WILL GET BETTER. IT WILL.
Scrape your knee: it IS only skin. And it has a way of healing up nicely, if you give it enough time.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-" -Robert Frost "The Road Not Taken"
If only it really were TWO roads that diverged. If only it weren't a proverbial web, spreading out in all of those directions. Incomprehensible, Without bounds, Overwhelming in its multiplicity, Paralyzing in its possibility.
If only it didn't always have to be told with a sigh.
Years ago, I sat on the couch of a familiar little apartment in Provo, UT and had the following conversation with my best friend:
Me: Sometimes I wish that life were less like life and more like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Her: So that you could go back and put your thumb in it.
Did you ever do that, reader? I put more than a thumb in it. I would keep one digit between the pages of every decision I made. It always seemed as though it would be so easy to back-track if I became dissatisfied with the ending of my story, (eg if I fell down an old well and was never heard from again) so painless, so possible.
Sometimes, in my adulthood, I almost feel that same sense of possibility. Just imagine me! I still have ten digits between my two hands, and I still assert that I can recognize when an important moment is transpiring. I still have the urge to put a finger here, a finger there, to mark pivotal points, as if marking them can save me from the consequences of them.
But Oh! how those moments eat at us in the days, weeks, months, years to come: those momentous moments we mark as having transpired right before everything came crashing down. It is very probable that these "moments" are not even related to specific personal decisions. Maybe they were the products of elemental circumstances, or the decisions of someone else. In cases such as these, must we trace back further to avoid undesired consequences? Where is it then? That wrong decision? Where can we find the moment in which the stupid decision was made that led to all of this insanity?
In the seeming impossibility of tracing the genesis of the "mistake", which moment do we pin as the fatal one? If you could only go back once, trying to avoid ultimate tragedy, which moment would you choose? What if the turning point really comes in your reaction to the choices, or in your reaction to the set of circumstances, (which reactions become little choices that accumulate over time)?
What moment do we save so that we can re-visit later? Do we mark all of them and then choose once the final blow has been administered, or is that when it is already too late? Which choices only feel important, and may end up having little bearing on the outcome? Which ones seem insignificant but may rock the very foundations upon which we have built our everything?
In the final few paragraphs of what I consider to be one of the most moving novels I have ever had occasion to read on the subject of love, author David Levithan writes the following as a sort of definition for the noun Zenith:
"I'm standing in the bathroom, drying my hands on your towel, and you're hovering in the kitchen. I am happy from dinner, happy the day is over, and before I can ask you what's going on, you tell me there's something we need to talk about. This is it, the moment before you tell me the precise thing I don't want to know. Is this the zenith? This last moment of ignorance? Or does it come much later?" -David Levithan "The Lover's Dictionary"
The truth is, however much we want to protect ourselves, at the end of the day, we only have ten fingers. That is not nearly enough to keep a marker on all of the potentially-life-altering moments. As if this realization is not dis-heartening enough, it is also true that the more fingers you have marking pages, the less you have available to use to turn new pages forward, the more frazzled you become, the more confused.
There comes a time when you have to take your fingers out of the page, when you have to acknowledge that no one is allowed to live outside of circumstance. No one is allowed to live non-linearly. No one is allowed to take every path, wish as we may, try as we might.
"I wish we could take every path. I could spend a hundred years Adoring you. Yes, I wish we could take every path, Because I hated to close the door on you.
And I have never known the plan. It's been a long, long time. How are you? Your eyes are green. Your hair is gold. Your hair is black. Your eyes are blue. I closed the ranks, and I doubled back-- but, you know, I hated to close the dog-gone door on you. -Joanna Newsom "Baby Birch"
Home.Home is a fire, a burning reminder, of where we belong, love. With walls built up around us, the bricks make me nervous, they're only so strong, love. Plates they will shift, houses will shake, fences will drift, we will awake, only to find, nothing's the same as yesterday. -Death Cab for Cutie "Home is a Fire"
I have been slightly homeless as of late. Not that my family isn't taking care of me, that's not a problem. In fact, the problem has less to do with a lack of a physical center as much as it does a lack of some emotional centrality. Allow me to give a bit of back story. You see, I am currently living between two cities that are about an hours drive from one another. Seeing as how this particular epoch is following one of bumming off of some friends on their couch, in their home office, etc, for a few weeks, it gives a particular sort of ambiance to my life that I find both liberating and dissolving, diluting--depleting, perhaps. What a paradox. As I come to know my own self, and find respite in 'doing my own thing', I almost have a sense of a dissolving, diluting, and depleting of the things that once held a great deal of value to me. It is like pouring liquid from one vessel to another. One fills while the other depletes. There is no replenishing effect at work.
Yesterday morning I boarded a plane in San Francisco that was bound for Long Beach with a connection to SLC. As the plane taxied around the runways, I decided to listen to Death Cab for Cutie's latest album "Codes and Keys" in its entirety. I bought that album a while back, during a very different time in my life, and have connected with the album a very distinct and vivid set of memories. As the music and then lyrics of the first song (quoted above) came through my headphones, I let the rhythm drive the words into me, and began to think about the concept of "home". What does "home" mean? Really. What does it mean? People have been writing about it, speaking about it, singing about it for centuries, so what has anyone actually learned? A few contemporary music examples that immediately come to my mind follow here:
Another summer day Has come and gone away In Paris and Rome, But I wanna go home MmmI've got to go home. -Michael Buble "Home"
Well I'm going home, To the place where I belong, Where your love has always been enough for me... These places and these faces are getting old, So I'm going home. -Daughtry "Home"
Peel the scars from off my back. I don't need them anymore. You can throw them out or keep them in your Mason jars. I've come home. -Radical Face "Welcome Home"
Of course I cannot forget what is, perhaps, the most personally poignant of all of the songs dealing with the concept of home. It has particularly been on my mind as of late for various reasons:
And I have torn my soul apart from pulling artlessly with fool commands. Some nights I just never go to sleep at all, And I stand, Shaking in the doorway like a sentinel, All alone, Bracing like the bow upon a ship, And fully abandoning Any thought of anywhere But home, My home. Sometimes I can almost feel the power. And I do love you. Is it only timing, That has made it such a dark hour, Only ever chiming out, "Cuckoo, cuckoo"? -Joanna Newsom "In California"
For Buble and Daughtry, home is the place that surpasses everything else that once seemed more interesting. It is the place we never ultimately tire of, and where we find the love we need. To Radical Face it is a place where we take off our baggage (in probably a literal, but mostly a psychological sense) and abandon the harmful things we picked up on our travels. "Scars" that we thought, perhaps contentedly, were permanent parts of us. Death Cab paints home as both powerful and dangerous, comparing it to a fire that pulls us in. Ben's song is uncharacteristically (I should specify that I mean uncharacteristically for this album) somewhat pessimistic. I say that it is pessimistic because it suggests that home cannot last. It pulls on us, and then it falls apart, or threatens to fall apart "[the bricks] are only so strong, love." For Joanna (and this whole song should really be included here to get a definitive idea of her full and complex feelings on her home, California) home is like a gravitational energy that we cannot escape. Her home is both wonderful and awful in that it holds and comforts her, but takes her away from the other things she loves--things that are incompatible with home (e.g. in this song as well as others on the album, the narrator shows a great deal of reluctance to bring any non-native love into the sanctuary). Thus she feels she cannot leave her home, but "Must stay [there] in an endless eventide." Paradoxically, she suggests that once we have been outside, we are forever changed, even in trying to return. Her narrator states that "I am no longer afraid of anything, save the life that, here, awaits." We go out, we see the world, we overcome all fears, and then the only thing that scares us is returning to where we were before this happened. We only fear the life we knew and loved so purely in childhood, and the near-emptiness of those memories when we return.
I have learned from my own experience, as well as the experience of artists, that home is infinitely more complicated than we wish it were. Kitschy phrases like "home is where the heart is" have so little meaning for me now, in this odd stage of my life.
Ingrid Michaelson seems to agree with me on that point:
They say that home is where the heart is.I guess I haven't found my home. We keep driving round in circles,afraid to call this place our own.Are we there yet? -Ingrid Michaelson "Are We There Yet?"
How am I to use my heart as a compass when I am not even sure where my heart is? I guess I am learning the hard way that you're never really lost until you've lost your compass. Is that irreparable? I'd like to think that it can be redeemed. I'd like to think it could be fixed, but I do not know where to begin. I will illustrate with a story.
Last Sunday I attended a church meeting to support a friend of mine who recently completed an LDS mission in Latin America. Her house happens to be close to the house where I lived when I started high school. When my family left that place, we put in a lot of renovation work, so I take a certain pride in the off-beat beauty of it. I would describe it as a quirky house; blue with an interesting slanted roof, but there is a small wrap-around porch and a lovely three-paneled white door. I drove by the old house on my way out of town; drove around it several times as a matter of fact, circling the neighborhood, listening to "In California". Those brief minutes were filled to overflowing with thoughts, feelings and emotions. I pondered the very musings that are finding public voice here, as well as a more concrete realization: how can you say a house is just a house? I don't think it is. That wood is in my blood. I worked for that place, so many long hours, and I cried and cried at the thought of beautifying it just to sell it and leave it. It isn't 'just a house', for as I drove by, I saw a little piece of myself in it.
The problem is, that is not a piece I can retrieve. It does not belong to me any more than any part of that house does. The family that lives there now seemed, judging by the outside decor, enthusiastic about the ensuing holiday. They were probably inside, listening to music, surfing the web, making lunch. They were blissfully unaware of my small agony as I circled, as I thought, as I wished.
And so it is with many houses, and people, and situations, and dreams, we leave them and they take little pieces of our hearts with them, and we hope that in our generosity we do not deplete the essence of who we are.
I retract. It is not born of generosity, but of necessity. The necessity to be a part of that which is around us. The necessity to give of what we are to what we are not, in the hopes that what we are not will become more like we are and what we are will become more like what we are not.
You say you're not interested in that sort of an exchange? To that I would reply that we can try to keep things from changing us, but we will find that in doing so, we are a great deal more than simply selfish, we are delusional. We come to this world to change, and to be changed. There is no place for holding tight to everything that we feel we "are".
I am changing. Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes (like now) I feel that I have given away too many bits of myself, and that in my inability to reclaim those pieces, I am somehow rendered un-whole. I am still waiting on redemption. I am still waiting on a reciprocation that will make up for all of the missing pieces. Perhaps home is where the very most of you is collected. Perhaps home is your head, where all of the memories are stored. I do not merely want to look at home as a concept, more than a place. I have to. I have to see home non-conventionally in my present circumstances. Home as a state of being. Home as a little box of all of my most treasured memories. Home as a place of personal and powerful worship.
I want to experience a new level of worship, of love. A love that allows me to pour my heart out and find it filling to the brim in return. I want to change in the holiest of all avenues of change: the give and take, the ebb and flow, the exchange, the barter between a human being and that someone/something they love, that someone/something they dedicate to, in every moment, waking, sleeping, breathing, fighting, living, dying...
And when I come up for air, and glance around, I want to find that the object of that love is Home; and know that I have found it at last.
As in TRULY hate. I mean, sometimes my stomach hurts with the mayhem of it all.
I have begun this habit of gallivanting about. It is quite enjoyable, and so easy. I simply get myself in my car and I drive to a town that has an interesting town center. Then I park the car somewhere and start wandering the streets, in and out of shops: antique stores, boutiques, bakeries, book stores, whatever the town/city has to offer that appeals to my aesthetic, and-- occasionally --my taste-buds. For the most part I merely window-shop, but every now and again I'll buy something that catches my eye.
Perhaps in the schema of good/better/best, there are other "better" and "best" things that I could do with my hours off in the afternoon.
Yet, that depends on how you look at it. I think that good/better/best varies greatly depending on what time of life you are in, and your circumstances. I think that considering my current short-term employment (that of a nanny, rocking a small child most of the day) getting outside is probably best for me. Well. Better. Best would probably be if I went outside and gave homeless people peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches.
I digress.
Let me set up a scene: Friday afternoon. Me: roaming about American Fork. Rain is falling, I have yet to purchase a $5 umbrella from Wal Mart. I have just left lunch with some dear friends and I wander into a new boutique. The store is quite pleasant, yet I can't help but notice how unpleasant it is that they are playing the radio, from which is emanating a... how shall I say this?.... HIDEOUS piece of cacophonous trash. Music? Annoyingly catchy. Lyrics? To translate from dumb to dumber "sex, sex, sex, you and me, sex, sex, stupid 1960's/70's music reference that we're using to pretend to be smart in some way, sex, sex.... that's all we care about... and if that's not carnal enough, we don't even have the decency to talk about it in some meritorious/adult/reverential way...."
I was incredibly annoyed, and by that I mean, it made my stomach hurt.
Why do we as human beings listen to stuff like that?! Why does that disgusting music video have five trillion hits on YouTube?! What do people see/hear in such heinosity? There is nothing of merit or interest there. Even worse is the pseudo-art craze in music, where people think that there is something of art in something just because it is weird. I mean, since when do diamond-studded-skimpery, meat dresses, and telephone hats NOT mean art? (sarcasm alert!). Lyric translation of 95% of such music: "sex, sex, sex, or, How Many Times Can a Girl Type that Word in One Middle-of-the-Night Rampage?"
Perhaps a better question is: why do images of the roman Colosseum and centuries upon centuries of prostitution come to mind when I rampage on this topic?
Entertainment in debauchery. Profit in the marketing of the otherwise sacred. What moments in life are more sacred than sex and death? Why do we think we can make mindless entertainment of them and call it art?
Have I mentioned I HATE the radio?
I hate it.
HATE.
This rampage brings to mind a beautiful bit of lyric from a true musical prodigy:
"You spend your whole life trying to fall behind. You're using your headphones to drown out your mind." -Regina Spektor "Eet"
Why do we listen to music that dulls our senses instead of enlivens them? Why do we treat it as a drug instead of an art? Oh yeah. Because it is about a million times easier to not think than it is to think. Forget trying to catch meaningful references to literature/other music/art in general/culture/politics/history, thereby joining the conversation about life/the human experience/what it means to be us/etc. that has been going on for centuries. Forget trying to improve the human condition and trying to better human life through uplifting the mind and elevating it to make connections/inferences/syntheses and find, well, for lack of less frequently used terms: Beauty and Truth.
Which, of course, leads to a usual quoting of one of my favorite passages from one of my favorite Romantics:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
-John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn"
So why do so many "artists" create such mindless, not to mention, degrading products? Perhaps some of them really don't have what it takes to create something that appeals to a higher aesthetic. Or, perhaps they simply don't want to. I think that in many cases, it is because the masses do not want it. People want "easy". People don't want to have to think. I have been there, I know how that feels. Sometimes you want to stick your favorite "Veggie Tales" jams in and just have a good time.
That leads me to an interesting point. Is "Veggie Tales" wholesome entertainment? Well, I don't know. It is a mildly morally uplifting show. It's probably a bad example. Ok, and AHA! The "Christmas Shoes" song. worst.song.ever. Do you want to argue it? Just show up at the next family Christmas party my brother will be throwing this December. We will undoubtedly argue about the merits/non-merits of that song, which will undoubtedly lead to someone pulling it up on their phone, which will undoubtedly lead to us haters deciding to make a cover.... next year. The cover is always going to happen next year.
Ok, forget about stupid examples. I had the opportunity to take an art philosophy course from a man I admire. Dr. Travis Anderson in the BYU Philosophy department. He wrote a paper some years back on the question of the word "wholesome" when it applies to entertainment. Is something really WHOLESOME if it is merely devoid of questionable material? Are rice cakes really wholesome? Ok, I said I was going to be done with examples.
When I think of "wholesome" (thanks to Dr. Anderson's pointing it out), I think of enriching. Full of good, not just devoid of "bad". So veggies are wholesome, but maybe "Veggie Tales" aren't necessarily that wholesome.... oh yeah. They do have their veiled way of teaching morals. Ok, we'll let them stand. Wholesome. Fine.
But creativity is so rarely encouraged anymore. The public has told our "artists" what we want. We have commissioned the hideous work that now blares over our radios. If consumers didn't consume, producers would not produce. They would catch on. Or they would sing their debauchery to themselves in the comfort of their own homes.
There is a story, I heard it told in a TED talk I found on YouTube. It is by Sir Ken Robinson and is entitled "Do Schools Kill Creativity?". So said story is about a girl in a drawing class, who is uncharacteristically paying very close attention one day. When the teacher lets the kids loose to make their art, she walks up to this little girl and asks, "What are you drawing?" to which the girl replies, "I am drawing a picture of God." The teacher, bewildered, responds, "But nobody knows what God looks like." Confidently, the girl rebuttals with, "They will in a minute." That is a true artist. It doesn't matter if one isn't "supposed" to "know what God looks like." This brave little soul was going to show us God as she saw him, and it didn't matter that an authority was telling her she wasn't doing it right.
That is what great art has always been about. That is why Jackson Pollock will always be a genius, even though it's not too terribly hard to replicate what he did (well, that's debatable. People actually say that it is harder to replicate than one would think, which I am inclined to believe). Unless you have a time machine and can go back in time to beat him to it, you can never really replicate what he did, because what he did was so far removed from that paint-splattered canvas. It was a comment on art at the time. It was a comment on his life (a sad one, we are to understand). Who knows, but that he was drawing a picture of God. Perhaps that is what all true artists are doing. They are playing mini-gods in their own way. Gods who can control the sphere that they create in their art. As they create a world, they simultaneously construct a sort of commentary on that world. Thus, they are drawing pictures of God (the higher forces they see at work in the world), gods (themselves, the way they perceive the world/their lives), and character (animate or inanimate, a view on the things around them, other human beings, human nature, etc.). Oh, and I will say as an aside that if Pollock was drawing a picture of God, God cannot have found it to be incredibly flattering. Not in a literal sense, anyway.
So what I mean is that the whole "be true to yourself and your art" cliche is cliche for a reason. When someone with talent and ability is brave enough to do what is not being asked for, they often show us glimpses of the God we would cut ourselves off from (I happen to believe in a very literal God, the father of our souls, but if to you God is nature, or some other-worldly force, or the human intellect, etc. then that still fits in here) with all of our bars, prostitutes, and Christians being devoured by hungry lions. Not that great artists don't take us through some difficult places in the meantime. It's not always sunshine and bubbles. Sometimes we are led to where we would rather not trod. It is difficult, sometimes painful, but rewarding.
I need to get off of my soap box, I know. Some people actually like to let loose and have a little dance party.
And some of us just like to think, and over-think, and blog until 3 am.
Oh, I left myself in the boutique. Excuse me. I'll get back to that. I take my leave of the shop keeper and walk back out into the rain, and back into my car.
Then to recover I listen to this little beauty: (Joanna reminds me very much of the little girl in the story.)
Every time in the last few weeks I have clicked the fateful "New Post" button, the window has sat open and unused on my desktop until the urge to write has leaked away and I close it again. I am not entirely sure what has kept me from writing since this fateful month began. Something about the overwhelming sense of trying to complete one horrific chapter of your life, and the feeling that you cannot write about it until you've finished living it.
It has not exactly been a secret that I recently quit my job. Hmmm... "Quit my job". I feel that is not strong enough. I didn't recently "quit my job", I recently escaped a 2-ton death trap rolling down a steep embankment at breakneck speeds.
Ok, that is overly-dramatic.
And so is THIS, only, it's beautiful:
"So enough of this terror, we deserve to know light, and grow evermore lighter and lighter. You would have seen me through, but I could not undo that desire." -Joanna Newsom "Sawdust and Diamonds"
I know, that song is getting to be more and more frequently quoted here. One would think I was obsessed. One would KNOW I was obsessed. Ok. I am obsessed.
But aren't those words....just...? Well, there are no words. Just feelings. That feeling of an absolute determination to find happiness, that will not rest no matter how hard we try to be content with current circumstances.
I went to church with my parents this last week--having been a vagabond for quite some time, appearances at random church services is becoming a more frequent practice in my life. One gentleman there addressed the congregation and focused his remarks on desire, and what shows true desire in our lives, thereby proving our sincerity. Action proves sincerity. Words mean so little. It is something life reminds us of time and time again, urging: do not listen to what people say as much as you watch what they do.
When someone has a sincere desire to do something, they do it.
As usual, such blanket statements don't work 100% of the time. Just because a blind woman may desire to drive, it does not mean that she ever will.
So how do we know if the things we desire could ever become reality? Well, we take a chance. We throw off whatever it is in life that can be deemed "this terror", asserting that "we deserve to know light", and we acknowledge that anything that is below the standard of what we desire "[could] have seen [us] through" had it not been for that desire. Desire is a God-given gift. It is a tool for change. It saves us from mediocrity and banality. It ultimately saves us from Hell.
I don't know about you, but I need plenty of saving.
There are a few things I learned about being an adult from this experience.
If you hate something about your life:
1. Decide whether or not it can be changed. If it can be changed, change it.
2. If it cannot be changed, learn to live with it. (Keeping in mind that if you obstinately say, 'It can't be changed.' when it really can, you will have a very difficult time learning to live with it.)
And then a slow lip of firemoves across the prairie with precision While somewhere with your pliers and glue You make your first incision And in a moment of almost unbearable vision Doubled over with the hunger of lions 'Hold me close', cooed the dove Who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds
-Joanna Newsom "Sawdust and Diamonds"
I am taking on more than I can handle in this post, and will not attempt to deny that such is the case. How is one supposed to say all that art is and means to them in a random blog post composed at a kitchen table in Provo, UT on a random Sunday afternoon?
Well, one isn't; and that is all just as well.
One year ago this coming weekend I graduated from the University with a degree that alleges an interest and a sort of proficiency (if you count taking a dice-sized cube off of the tip of an iceberg and sucking on it a while as proficiency) in the study of The Arts. I could row down a tributary here and go on for ages about how Universities started out with the study of Humanities and precious little else, but I shan't do so. There are many fields of study with a great deal of merit to them. Do I feel that what I did is more important than the feats being accomplished by those who aspire to be doctors or nurses? I do not. But perhaps right next to the importance and merits of living we find that only the importance of Living runs a close second.
Stay with me here, I am attempting philosophy (and preparing myself to fail miserably, I assure you.)
If one is merely living, what does that entail? Breathing, heart beating, neurons firing in the brain. One does not even need to be conscious to be alive. Horrific thought.
Now, if one is Living what does that entail? Much of the same, I suppose--breathing, heart beating, neurons firing in the brain--all still important. Perhaps the only real difference between living and Living is a little thing called purpose. It is breathing and knowing why. Everyone needs at least once in their life to experience the supernal transcendence of listening to the beat of someone else's heart. I mean the kind of experience that draws one to wordless, boundless weeping. Living is the brain firing neurons with some idea, with some inference, some connection and realization. Still higher, Living is the acknowledgment of deaf, dumb, stupefaction that accompanies transcendence, brought about for purposes of this paragraph, by pure artistic expression; almost a short-circuit of the understanding; of throwing one's hands up in the air and saying "I know not what it means, but in this moment I am moved beyond comprehension." Attempt to interpret is futile, if only for a moment, as that thrill starts somewhere inside of you and bursts out through every avenue and... I get carried away. The Mystic? I know. There she is again.
Let me re-group. My sister was a nanny for some months this summer and last. As is customary in her car, as well as in my own, the sounds of the singer/songwriter/harpist Joanna Newsom can often be heard floating out the open windows. I wish now that I could remember how old this child was, but one of the little girls asked her to play a song on the ipod one day. My sister decided to play a favorite of ours from the archives of great Newsom compositions, "Cosmia". Not the original, but the version with the Y's Street Band. She told the inquisitive child that the song was about a butterfly. Though this explanation is not true (the song is about Cosmia--moths) the little one was satisfied, and has long-since asked for the "flutterby" song to be played in the car at every opportunity. If you care to look up this song (though I don't believe that this actual version is on the internet anywhere, even in live form) or any other song of Newsom's you will likely feel slightly jarred by her style and poetry. You will not be alone in this sentiment, many people refuse to engage at all, which is, of course, their privileged.
Yet, that is my point. Perhaps it is unfair of me to draw conclusions from this child-like appreciation of the music. Yet, I do not feel it too far off to consider her reaction to be a typical reaction for a child. We are ever-ready to appreciate pure artistic expression as young children, before we have been taught what is "good" and "acceptable"; before we have been taught that we need to understand in order to appreciate. I mean that with both our own expression and that of others. I had a professor once who pointed out how children dance in public and hang their drawings on the fridge in a most uninhibited manner. At what point do we decide we are no good? At what point to do we begin to snub the expression of others? Isn't that a tragedy of the acutest nature?
Tributaries.
Back to Newsom. Some months ago, I found the following quote of hers in which she comments on the song "Cosmia". To say that this quote "changed my life" is trite and inconsequential in relation to the actual effect it had on me. I will let the reader decide for his or herself the merits of this quote: "Like the whole record, 'Cosmia' affirms life without offering a wisp of false consolation. The thing that I was experiencing and dwelling on the entire time is that there are so many things that are not OK and that will never be OK again, but there's also so many things that are OK and good that sometimes it makes you crumple over with being alive. We are allowed such an insane depth of beauty and enjoyment in this lifetime. It's what my dad talks about sometimes. He says the only way that he knows there's a God is that there's so much gratuitous joy in this life. And that's his only proof. There's so many joys that do not assist in the propagation of the race or self-preservation. There's no point whatsoever. They are so excessively, mind-bogglingly joy-producing that they distract from the very functions that are supposed to promote human life. They can leave you stupefied, monastic, not productive in any way, shape or form. And those joys are there and they are unflagging and they are ever-growing. And still there are these things that you will never be able to feel OK about; unbearably awful, sad, ugly, unfair things."
I cannot even begin to unpack this in a single post. Perhaps I should only be quoting a portion here, but I genuinely feel the whole is necessary to appreciate the sentiment. I will focus in here on only a single thought: the idea what there are things in life that move you so far into the mode of Living that they almost interfere with living. Transcendence--(wishfully) getting above the banal and the inconsequential of eating, breathing, sleeping-- to a place that is, by description, indescribable.
That is what art is for. It is not to spark semi-interesting conversations in parlor rooms. It is not for acquiring and selling and trading on the black market. Such practices border and parallel prostitution. Yet, I am as guilty as being pretentious as the next on occasion. It is such a fine line. I want to get back to that child-like love of pure expression. Transcendent in that we do not care what others think of us or our expression--transcendent in that we are so inexplicably connected to something so inexplicably fixed outside of ourselves
C.S. Lewis, in his book "An Experiment in Criticism" mentions the relation of this "transcendence" in art to the transcendence we experience in other modes of life. In the last paragraph of this poignant, and hyper-insightful book he states, "In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do." (emphasis added)
Thus Lewis puts the experience and interaction we have with literature and other art in the same realm as love and religious worship. They are all things that require getting outside of ourselves, and outside of merely living into a higher state of Living.
I was never as interested as some in how people live, but rather in why they Live. That is why I studied what I studied. A year later, even working a job that I dislike as much as I do, I do not regret that decision. I have learned a great deal about living/Living in the last year. Life has taken me places I never thought to go, into the hearts of people I never thought to enter. I have not come out unscathed; the last year has not been easy on me, but I will continue to seek transcendence in all that life has to offer. Like the Negative Capability Keats rejoiced in, I will not try to make sense of everything, and always remember that sometimes Truth is something we experience and sense rather than understand.
I'm sure it all has a great deal to do with being mortal. For the time being, I pray that the simplicity and sincerity I find in art, in love, in moral action, and in religious worship will continue to propel me ever higher outside of myself, and into the inter-connectedness of all that is God's marvelous gift called Living.
