Heading Home to Harmony

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I have mentioned to some of you my intention to do a sort of 2nd edition of the God Chord.  It is beginning to feel like it will be a whole new book, maybe Finding Harmony or Home to Harmony or something like that.  Either way there will be numerous drafts, outlines, ruminations, etc.  And while I do not have much faith in crowd sourcing, I do put trust in "small group sourcing,"  and you are the small group I trust.  So here are some initial thoughts on what will be four of the major sections of "that Harmony book"  Feedback, as always, is welcome :-)

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Heading Home to Harmony

There is a hierarchy to the construction of a harmonic life.  The four principles are, in order:

Foster harmony. 

This means that in every human interaction seeking harmony, seeking a mutually beneficial path, is our first obligation.  The difficulty inherent in this first mandate is obvious in the fact that many common synonyms for seeking harmony, such as compromise and win-win solutions, are often read as code for weakness. The cultural roots for this strange moral inversion are many and deep.  Anthropologically speaking they probably reach back into the mists of time, to our earliest ancestors, for whom dominance over stronger creatures meant food, clothing and survival.  I find it most ironic that as species we have managed to forget that successfully hunting the mastodon hinged on cooperation.  Yet, as Aesop's fox taught us long ago, we disparage those grapes which seem beyond our reach. Hence we paint our most difficult task with derision: Seeking harmony, pursuing the mutually beneficial path is a sign of weakness. Wimp. Geek. Chicken. Nothing could be further from the truth since nothing is quite so difficult as finding in your heart the solution that benefits your antagonist as it benefits you.  So if you would truly reveal your strength, foster harmony.

Enable beauty. 

Similarly it seems currently déclassé, artistically speaking, to represent beauty.  Angst, alienation and a healthy dose of self-loathing seem to be all the artistic rage these days, as is rage.  I will be the first to admit that I am something of a traditionalist when it comes to art.  I lean toward representational works, and ones that make me happy, slow the pulse rate, calm the soul, infuse me with harmony.

Hence, you can understand my concern when I walk into an upscale gallery or a more informal installation and encounter a ten-foot tall rusted metal construction, splashed with lavender paint entitled #432.  Mind you, I have no objection to abstract art per se - I dabble in it myself on occasion.  But it strikes me as only fair to let the observer know, via a title, which corner of the universe you are playing in.  So I looked at #432 for awhile, making sure that others were looking at it too.  It is important to appear hip at these kinds of installations, and I remain haunted by the memory of the time in the National Gallery when I spent ten minutes gazing thoughtfully at what appeared to be a pile of trash.  Then the maintanence staff came and swept it into a trash can.  I need to trust my first impressions. 

But there seemed to be a fair sized crowd looking at #432, and some were still there - as was #423 itself - when I left awhile later.  So the current adage still seems to be if you do representational work keep it edgy and uncomfortable. And if you can't manage that, create something abstract that is angular, jarring and discordant and name it as ambiguously as possible.  Numbers work, but words like Encounter, Leaving, and Adage are good too.

I find this current fascination with the ugly interesting because it requires the artist to work in an incredibly limited focal plane.  A peek at the Orion Nebula through the Hubble telescope, or at a butterfly's wing through a telescope reveals the universal dominance of beauty.  Yet many of our current artists seem obsessed with the discord reflected in the narrow experiential plane of humanity's inhumanity.  Of course that reality exists - but do we resist or confront it by relentlessly representing it?  It seems more likely that our excessive representation of the discordant only draws our attention away from the overwhelming, transcendent beauty of existence. It also defies the first, preeminent mandate: foster harmony. There is no harmony in the ugly, so enable beauty.

Distill Complexity

This is the concept that I have been calling the fourth pillar, but only because it occurred to me after the three original principles.  Yet, it goes here in third place. Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty predominant because they are "all in a day's work." Everyday we can do something to foster harmony and reduce discord even if it something as simple as putting your dishes in the dishwasher, or telling the people you love that you love them. Enable beauty as well need not entail hours before an easel or pushing images around in photoshop, agonizing over the perfect poem. A $3.00 stem of flowers from the grocery store, a $1.99 track from iTunes, a haiku on a napkin, all these enable beauty.

Distilling Complexity, though, is a bit more difficult.  As you know I often fall back on similes, analogies and convenient paraphrases to make my points. Today is no different. Aristotle is credited with the phrase I will distort today.  In Metaphysica 2 he says "The whole is more than the sum of its parts."  Since he is not around to disagree, I am going to stand that on its head and assert that "the meaning of the whole is less than the sum of its parts."

Let's begin with an analogy.  Consider a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  You open it up and dump it out on a table.  But the table must be three times as big as the final puzzle you wish to construct since the pieces spread out higgeldy-piggeldy across the table.  It is only after you figure out how the pieces are designed - how they fit together - that you can distill the complex chaos of those thousand pieces and place them so as to construct an image that makes sense. And, low and behold, the image is less than, smaller than, the undistilled, complex, spread out, sum of its parts.

It has, of course, to do with the process of distillation. Distillation reduces complexity to its essential core. Despite my own inability to mimic Hemingway's sparse prose, I have always distrusted the philosopher, sage, prophet or scientist who requires a library the size of Alexandria's or a specialized language to reveal truth. I am always suspicious that there really are devils lurking down there in the details. There are movements in a variety of notoriously arcane areas - the law and medicine to mention two of the worst offenders - to "speak real English."  They are distillation movements to be praised and supported.

In our own lives we need to seek articulations, expressions of our own beliefs, that do not hide behind rituals and inflexible generalities.  We need to parse our worldview precisely: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity - and, Oppose Harm.

Oppose Harm.

You may find it strange that I leave this for last as it is the rallying cry that has sent us off to kill each other for millennia. And that is precisely why I leave it for last. In his work Foundation, Isaac Asimov asserts that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."  It is a glorious pronouncement and I wish it were true.  However, violence is also the first choice of the desperate, the disenfranchised, and those who have fallen for the devil words in the undistilled complexities of their "great books."

Harm must be opposed or the bullies, at home and abroad, will destroy the world through armed conflict, environmental neglect, or unimaginable greed.  Still I place it fourth.  Why?  My reasoning is hopefully distilled and not merely simple: If we can, in significant numbers, bring the first three principles into the world: Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty and Distill Complexity; we will create a world that is increasingly toxic for those who turn at first blush to violence.  A world that rests firmly on the first three principles will undoubtedly be called upon to Oppose Harm; but hopefully less often, and with less virulent results.

A concluding passing fancy:  We have read much in the past few weeks about how governments - our own and others - can seemingly eavesdrop on our most private conversations at will.  Still at night we glance up at the myriad of stars above, and realize that that myriad is but a tiny fraction of the stars that inhabit the multiverses. Any notion that we are the best and the brightest kid in the room swiftly falls away. And it doesn't take an Asimov to imagine entities out there with skills far beyond the NSA's, monitoring our behavior.  Maybe a prerequisite for contact with those advanced cultures that live beyond our feeble glances toward the stars, is the ability to demonstrate - like a mentally ill patient - that we are no longer of any danger to ourselves or others.
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