The Look of Love - Or Something Else

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The eyes, we are told, are windows to the soul.  Hence, a long gaze into the eyes of any other might be quite revealing - could we but overcome the embarrassment.  It is an activity fraught with social implications and, at least in Western culture, restricted almost exclusively to lovers.  Yet, there are other acceptable recipients of long and seeking gazes; among them are babies, pets, portraits and, of course, the mirror.

The object of every gaze is discovery.  Lovers seek the reassurance of reciprocated affection, a promise that what one feels for the other, is likewise mirrored in their lover's eyes. In babies we project as much as we observe. We feel we glance, in those guileless orbs, the memory of past generations; the correction of bygone errors and the promise of futures full of joy and wonder. In the eyes of our pets we glimpse wise and sentient beings, untouched by human frailties, who love us unconditionally. And why not? What's not to love?

Portraits and mirrors move us into a more mysterious realm.  I admit to being fascinated by portraits. The often denigrated aboriginal belief that a camera could steal your soul may not be as naive as we portray it. I am not asserting that a photo or a painting steals something from a subject, but rather that an exceptional representation fashions a harmonic connection with the entity portrayed. I will also admit to being an unabashed fan of the photographer Yosuf Karsh. You may think you are unfamiliar with his work - but you are not.  Click over to www.karsh.org and you will realize that you know him well. Look at Einstein, Humphrey Bogart, Castro, Hemingway and Mother Teresa. Not only do you know Karsh's work, but his portraits play a large part in our perception of the people he photographed. Yosuf Karsh is to the human face what Ansel Adams is to Yellowstone, what Georgia O'Keeffe is to New Mexico. We look into the eyes of a Karsh portrait and see, not a soul stolen, but a soul reflected.

And the idea of a soul reflected leads us, naturally, to a consideration of mirrors. Despite the recent boom in skin care products for men, the make-up session before a mirror remains primarily a feminine occupation. It appears, at first blush, an acceptable lingering manifestation of the patriarchy. On closer examination I would assert it is much more.  Having been an undergraduate theater major, I have had a more than passing acquaintance with "the man in the mirror."  At 19 I rarely played a character my own age.  Freshman year I played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Sir in the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint - The Smell of the Crowd.  Both characters were men in late middle age, one beaten, the other bombastic. Neither bore any resemblance to a fresh-faced kid from central Ohio.

We were expected to do our own make-up; and occasionally - depending on what theater class we were taking at the time - we were graded on our ability to transform our faces into a believable representation of our character.  And so began my personal travels into the looking glass. For hours I would stare into the eyes of the face before me, looking for the person it was supposed to be.  A shadow here, a wrinkle there, the inevitable blush of dissipation, a sag of age, and gradually Willy or Sir would appear. But I was rarely "finished." Having, as always, chosen the chair furthest from the door, I would remain - staring at the person I had become. Looking for the history behind the visage until it was time to walk him out onto the stage.

Now, of course, I wonder if this is what women do everyday. Beginning with what is there in the mirror, then artfully creating the idealized person they wish to present to the world - or perhaps crafting the face that the world they have chosen demands of them. 

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Oppose Harm

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The admonition to Oppose Harm seems, at first blush, to be embarrassingly simplistic.  A decade ago it would have triggered a "Well, duh!" from anyone a few years either side of 20.  Today an "eye roll," that must eventually do real damage to the optic nerve, would not be a surprising reaction. Yet it is an "obvious" tenet to which we give more lip service than actual support.  Bullying remains a social cancer in America's schools.  Globally, entire cohorts defined by race or gender, belief or sexual orientation, are singled out for state-sponsored bullying, imprisonment or worse.

It is far from being an "eye-rolling, no big deal." If we don't commit to Opposing Harm, bullies will run the world. Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, and Idi Amin are but four of history's many bullies who came to terrorize and murder millions because, as cultures, nations and individuals, we failed to Oppose Harm. So, we should go kick some "bully butt!" Send in the drones, right?

Well, certainly sometimes; but not always. When you stop and think about it for a moment - or even longer - the charge to Oppose Harm is really not that simple.  Rather, on further consideration, Oppose Harm swiftly reveals itself to be half of the most complex dynamic within Distilled Harmony.

Remember, the first - and preeminent - tenet of Distilled Harmony is Foster Harmony.  When Distilled Harmony requires us to both Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm there seems an obvious tension, an unavoidable discord. Opposition is, by definition, discordant and hence cannot Foster Harmony.  No argument. But, when a single situation pits Foster Harmony against Oppose Harm, the objective is to find the harmonic resolution resulting in the greater good.

Defining a "greater good" is always a daunting task, but we can approach it more successfully if we, as the tenet Distill Complexity suggests, avoid getting mired in fruitless complexities.  Albert Einstein asserted that seemingly complex truths about the universe could be distilled to concise explanations because "God does not play dice" with the universe.  Einstein was also a pacifist who would have whole-heartedly supported Isaac Asimov's assertion in Foundation, that "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

But Einstein was no ordinary pacifist; he was a radical pacifist who was also the most famous man of his era. His public statements drew immediate and worldwide attention; and those statements made it clear that he believed that there was no legitimate justification for war; that the only way to put an end to war was to refuse to participate in warfare in any way. To express Einstein's belief system in Distilled Harmony terms, Foster Harmony, with its inclination to pacifism, clearly trumped the warfare common in extreme examples of Oppose Harm.

Einstein, however, shared the world stage with a man quickly growing as infamous as Einstein was famous: Adolf Hitler. The swiftly evolving technology of modern warfare allowed Hitler to spread a wave of pathological murder and hatred across Europe and Northern Africa with unparalleled speed. And as it struck at Einstein's own family and colleagues, Einstein's moral fulcrum shifted.

Einstein, who also said "make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler" realized that radical pacifism's plain tautology of "war is always bad" over-simplified life in the real world. Hitler became the mandatory exception to Einstein's radical pacifism, and it became necessary - in Einstein's mind - to violently Oppose this unique Harm. So Einstein, much to the chagrin of the radical pacifism movement, withdrew his universal opposition to war and fled to America where his indirect participation in America's war plans hastened Hitler's fall.  In Distilled Harmony terms, the need to Oppose the Harm of Hitler's virulent pathologies trumped the compromise seemingly advocated in Foster Harmony's support of radical pacifism.

And that dynamic points out an important concept in the natural tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm.  Foster Harmony does advocate fair and compassionate compromise. It does not, as a complete understanding of Oppose Harm reveals, advocate acquiescence to bullies.

Therein lies a balancing act of some sophistication.  You see, a common error is that in our righteous opposition to the harm perpetrated by bullies, we become bullies ourselves, taking arms against the "bad guys."  I am always mystified when I read about wars in which I would think it would be hard to identify the enemy.  Given the lack of uniforms among the civilians, I wonder how during "the Irish troubles" the combatants were able to distinguish a Catholic from a Protestant? On the smoke-filled battlefields of our Civil War, how, at a crucial moment, did you tell a Yank from Johnny Reb? In Vietnam, if there were no uniformed regulars around, how did the locals tell friend from foe?

Those who fought in those conflicts would probably be amazed at my naiveté.  But the point is this - the difference between the bully and the bullied is often simply power, pure naked power. And when that power shifts, often the bullied swiftly seize upon the roll of bully. The desire to carry "opposition" to your adversary to account for previous "harm" overwhelms the mandate to Foster Harmony.

And therein lies the most challenging aspect of this tension between Foster Harmony and Oppose Harm. Robert Burns wrote - translated to the contemporary vernacular - "Would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us."  We often wonder, from a personal, social or political perspective, how others can so misunderstand us.  I didn't say that!  I didn't mean that! That isn't me!

The tenets of Distilled Harmony don’t require us to accept the negative attributes heaped upon us by aggrieved others.   Certainly, as Americans, where each election seems - if you believe the media - to pit The Devil against Evil Incarnate, we realize that perceptions can be easily manipulated and distorted.  But a first step in the first tenet - Foster Harmony - is to try to "see ourselves as others see us," and in turn to re-examine how we have come to see the other. Such an examination may well reveal a path to Fostering Harmony that allows us to avoid this ticklish business of Opposing Harm.
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Distill Complexity

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Faith is a funny thing.  We often think of it in the context of religious belief.  As a matter of fact, the words faith and religion are often used interchangeably - he was of the Christian faith, she was of the Islamic faith, those of the Jewish faith observe Yom Kippur, and so on.  But that really is a kind of semantic theft.  More broadly speaking, faith refers to our confidence or trust in something or someone.  It can be fairly prosaic: She had complete faith in her dog's ability to find the way home. He had complete faith that his battered old Chevy would make it through the winter.

So in the context of our ordinary lives, our "faith" is our belief about the way in which the world works.  And it is our faith in that belief that, ideally, shapes our own behavior.  Sometimes that is an organized religion, sometimes it is a series of scientific laws, sometimes it is a personalized combination of religion and science, philosophy and politics.  Faith - belief and experience - governs our everyday lives.  We behave in ways that experience has taught us will obtain the results we desire; we have faith in those beliefs.

But Faith - writ large – stretches beyond our daily scrambles and challenges here on the third rock orbiting a minor star in a very ordinary galaxy.  Faith writ large is our understanding of the universe, of our place in it and how we should behave in accordance with that understanding. It is similar to, but far greater than lower case faith.

I place my Faith in something I have called by various names over the last couple of decades, Chord Theory, Universal Resonance, and now Distilled Harmony.  But while the name has shifted, the core theory doesn't change as much as it evolves.  It began with the three main tenets of Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, and Oppose Harm.  But I was always been bothered with a feeling that something was missing.  It was as if I was walking around a four-cornered gazebo. It looked quite solid, but I couldn't shake the feeling that there was a column missing; that some swift Escher-like stage hand kept shifting the back pillar to the front, so three pillars took on the appearance of four.

I spent more than a little time thinking about the missing pillar. It seemed fond of teasing me awake in the little hours of the morning - 2, 3 and 4. Like a familiar face to which you just cannot connect a name. Almost there .  .  .   and then it finally came to me in the form of the tenet we are currently discussing - Distill Complexity.

Funny isn't it, piling all those words up before a phrase that essentially says, "simplify."  I knew for quite some time that the missing tenet was somewhere in that general “simplify” ballpark.  But I was always afraid of seeming to condone  simplicity, of conflating simplified with simple-minded.  

But, then came that night - or that very early morning when Distill Complexity popped into my mind.  It felt very, very right.  Distillation, as all good tipplers realize, concentrates the essence of that which is being distilled.  But the concept reaches far beyond the brewery.  A good outline precedes a moving speech or a brilliant novel.  A symphony winds around a simple melodic theme. E=mc2.  At the heart of every mind-blowing complexity lies an essential simple core.

Consider Picasso.  You stand in front of some of his late work, particularly his line art, and one is tempted to say "I could do that."  And, in a way, maybe so. But when you look at his very early works – works that can easily be mistaken for the Dutch masters - we suddenly realize that the path to Picasso's line art was far more complex than would be our attempt to create a "Picasso-like" line.  His line is distillation, ours, more likely, imitation.

I recently offered a toast at my younger daughter's wedding rehearsal dinner that dealt with Distill Complexity.  Part of it bears repeating here:

I said:

"Despite the seemingly unchanged lake outside, the world has changed a great deal since your older sister and her husband held center stage here just four years ago.  The good news is that much of what I said in my less-than-brief remarks to them is now available on the Distilled Harmony website [distilledharmony.com], where you can watch me say it over and over and over.

But lest you think you are going to escape totally unscathed, I must point out that I have added an additional "rule to live by" since I played the professor for them.  The new rule is "Distill Complexity," and I wanted to share a couple of ideas about that notion with you.

It is, you will not be surprised to hear me say, all Mark Zuckerburg's fault, a nice Jewish boy gone terribly astray.  It was Facebook™, after all, that gave us the notion of relationships that are "complicated."  Relationships are really not terribly complicated.  If we distill that particular complexity we often discover that when folks describe their relationship as “complicated”, they actually mean "it's scary."  You two are about make the simple but scary declaration that the other is to be the center of your life - mutually donning a pair of "I'm with stupid" T-shirts.  Another bizarre manifestation of how scary our culture finds this ritual of pair-bonding.

Distill Complexity asserts that we counter the scary notion of a "complicated relationship" with the old KISS design principle - Keep It Simple Stupid!  As you move forward in your life together, life will get complicated.  Career decisions, current data say you'll face quite a few. Families? Nuclear?  Extended? Children? Yes? No? Homegrown? Store bought? Dogs? Cats? Health challenges, etc. Yes, life will get complicated.  Life may even get scary.  But your relationship need not get complicated and scary if you remember KISS and keep it simple. 

And the simple reality should be that whenever life tosses complexity at you, remember what you will declare tomorrow - that the two of you are as complicated as it gets.  No job, no career, no family, no fame, trumps the simple declaration that whatever is best for each of you must be that which is best for both of you.  And as the great philosopher F.  Gump once said "That's all I'm going to say about that."

Poor kids, I know. But how often do they have to sit quietly and listen to you?

The charge then of this tenet is to reduce that which appears complex to its purest essence. Come to know the skeleton that supports the exterior.  When I tackled the task of sculpting busts of my daughters, my sculpting mentor would not allow me to simply take a big hunk of clay and try to carve away everything that didn't look like my daughters. Rather he insisted that I first create the skull beneath the face, define the more simple planes and curves that guide the complexity of muscle, skin and hair that would eventually look like my daughters.  

Distill Complexity requires us to do the same with life.  The three other tenets ask us to Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty and Oppose Harm. Distill Complexity says reduce those tasks to the skeletal - seek the more simple planes and curves of life upon which rest the seeming complexities of existence.  Avoid moaning that it is all so complicated and Distill Complexity – just KISS.

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Enable Beauty

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This tenet is difficult to define simply because Beauty is such a subjective concept.  "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" goes the old saying.  And the discussion becomes even more complicated because any consideration of Beauty gets tangled up with the larger idea of “art,” a discipline which seems to maintain, at least in the minds of some "artists," a fascination with the "ugly" the "grotesque" - the "unbeautiful."  Consider Picasso's Guernica, Migrant Mother by Dorthea Lange, or any of the host of Pulitzer Prize winning photos from the strangely named "theaters of war" around the world.  Art? Certainly.  Beauty? Just as certainly not. 

It is important to remember that the tenets of Distilled Harmony are mutually re-enforcing. So in Distilled Harmony any definition of Beauty must support the other tenets - Foster Harmony, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  Those other tenets allow, even require us to turn away from the arcane posturing necessary to find artistry in the grotesque and pursue a less tortured view of Beauty.

Looking through the eyes of Foster Harmony, I was first inclined to define Beauty as that which induces a harmonic kind of lethargy.  Your breathing slows, your blood pressure drops, you settle into a calm, peaceful reverie.  But I soon realized that Beauty could have quite the opposite effect.  Beauty is equally prone to energize us.  Our pulse races, we feel compelled to move, to dance, to sing!  What is this Beauty that seems to call forth such wildly varying responses?

The tenet Distill Complexity urges us to seek the least complicated explanation of such seeming disparity. Or as Einstein put it, "Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler." And there is, thankfully, a simple thing that unites both the ecstasy and the tranquility that beauty inspires: Beauty is that which makes us smile.

Simple? Certainly.  Simplistic? Far from it.  Mind you, I do not mean the sardonic, self-satisfied, superior smirk that has come to pass for a smile in contemporary sophisticated culture.  Rather, I mean an open, spontaneous, and joyful smile.  The pure smile of a delighted toddler, of a lover who is loved in return, of a parent watching a child sleep.  When any stimulus - a scene, a painting, a sculpture, a dance, a song, an object, a poem, a sentence, anything - draws such a smile from us, we are in the presence of Beauty as Distilled Harmony would have us understand it.

So we have defined second half the Enable Beauty tenet - Beauty.  Let us now turn our attention to the other: Enable.

There are three broad avenues through which we can Enable Beauty: create, collect and experience.

"Create" is self-explanatory.  We all at least dabble in creative activities, painting, poetry, the piano.  You know your favorite. Often these explorations fell by the wayside when we encountered intimidating "real artists" whose efforts exceeded our own.  And we, often nudged by well-meaning teachers and parents, soon relegated our creative efforts to the closet or under the bed and set about the serious business of getting a "real job," of making a living, of raising a family, of living a life.  Enable Beauty says haul them out again, create - not to ape the "experts" but for the sheer joy of creating.  We often forget that making beauty serves not only the observer, the audience, but the creator as well. Part of Enabling Beauty is the smile inherent in the act of creation.  Who knows, the day may well come when we create something to share, something that will bring a smile to another face, but often our own creative smile will suffice.

"Collect" speaks to the idea of living amidst Beauty.  Making our homes, our offices, our cubicles, yards and porches places that launch a smile. Here we often think too small, limiting ourselves to prints and posters, to a playlist on Spotify or Pandora.  We think that "art collecting" is for the 1% who can drop 30 million for a Van Gogh, 100K for a signed Ansel Adams print. We think opera and the symphony are for “old” people.  These biases allow “volume” to become an aesthetic variable in our music. They make IKEA and poster shops our interior decorators.  That kind of thinking limits our opportunities for smiles.

"Collect" says start now to surround yourself with the sounds and objects that make you smile, whatever now is for you. It matters not whether you are 15 or 85 or anywhere in between.  Remember, Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime.  Hence it stands to reason that works from artists who will be the "old masters" of the next century are for sale at art fairs right now for 50 bucks. OK, maybe 150.00 - and that's a lot of pizza, but the return on your investment may be smiles for a lifetime.  For those of you further into your lives, consider that new car you are thinking about.  Can you peel a few grand off that purchase for that awesome piece of sculpture you saw at the gallery downtown?  

For all of us, we often eat at the same table everyday - do you want to buy the one on sale at IKEA or maybe aim for something with a little more kick.  Some inlay work? A little book matched mahogany?  Remember you eat there everyday!  Which would you chose for your daily companion, a smile or a shrug?

"Collect" is about living amidst smiles, collect what you love and never throw it away. Expose yourself to old museums and new galleries, symphonies and street corner musicians, sidewalk painters and boardwalk dancers.  As I said, collect what you love and never throw it away. Being a slave to a passing fashion is still being a slave.

"Collect" also asks that we listen to sounds that are unfamiliar to us.  Classical music doesn't just mean Mozart, who, when he was the “new band in town,” was accused of putting "too many notes" in his music.  Classical music, more purely speaking, means music with staying power - music that will be making people smile fifty, a hundred, two hundred years from now. Who would have thought when the "mop heads" played The Ed Sullivan Show in February more than a half century ago, that one day The London Symphony Orchestra would play their music and the baby-faced one would become Sir Paul? As you reach out and sample the music around you, you certainly will not like everything you listen to, but you should listen to as much as you can, so you will know what puts a smile on your face. Those selections become the soundtrack of your life pairing beauty for your eyes with smiles for your ears.

"Experience" is also an invitation to the smorgasbord of life.  Theaters, 14-screen cinemas, concert halls, museums, hi-def Smart TVs and surround sound systems all announce their intention to "entertain" us - perhaps to bring us into the presence of smile inducing Beauty.  Sometimes they succeed, and we should certainly allow them to try.  But it is important to remember that the artifacts that we encounter in those venues began life as someone's personal experience, someone's observation about existence that was translated into a form that sent that moment out into the world for us to share.  And some of those efforts become beautiful, some of those efforts bring us smiles.  Two points from that observation:

          First point - while we may never see our name in lights, or "make a living" by spinning our glimpses of Beauty out for others to see, part of experiencing Beauty is creating benchmarks of memory.  We may not be able to capture perfectly, in words or on canvas, in stone or with notes the moment we first fell in love, or saw the sea, or watched fireflies lighting up a meadow. But we enrich our lives if we acknowledge those moments and mark them for a smile - in a poem, or a sketch, or a bit of prose, and keep it somewhere special.   

        That notion of "somewhere special" has become more important in the 21st century.  Time was, in the distant past, that the joy of representation was limited. The paintings on cave walls, monuments in the desert; these were the provinces of the powerful.  Their moments of significance, their smiles were noted. Ours would not have been. Today we are faced with a strangely inverted reality.  350 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook™ everyday, another 60 million on Instagram™, and there are hundreds of other sites with similar numbers. 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube™ every hour. The danger, of course, is that the treasured gets overwhelmed by the trivial, Beauty is brushed aside by rivers of the banal.  Here, for certain, is a complexity that still crys out for distillation. Hopefully wiser minds than mine will provide such a distillation and it will prove to be a smile worth waiting for.

        The second, and final point: As I have already said, the Beauty that others create and share with us begins as an experience in a life.  And while it is delightful that others share those creations with us, it is even more important that we be aware of the Beauty woven throughout our existence, in life as we experience it everyday.  In the rain and wind, sun and flowers, in the sights and sounds that surround us, in the smiling faces that in turn bring smiles to our own. And Beauty is that aspect of life depicted. So in your own way, in your own life; somehow, everyday find a way to make some smiles. Enable Beauty. 
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