The Beauty Cure

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“I love it when I discover data that confirms my biases.” Departmental faculty meetings were rarely a hotbed of genuine levity, but I got a fairly good laugh with that one in a meeting a couple of years ago. You see, academicians are wired the other way round. Briefly, you are supposed to settle on a question, design a study that allows you to examine the question from an objective perspective, do the study, examine the data and only then draw the conclusions warranted by the data. Bias has no place in scholarship. All questions are open to unbiased examination. True, that becomes more difficult these days when the deep government pockets, upon which major universities often feast are insisting that researchers commit to a certain range of conclusions before conducting their studies. That calls for increasingly creative grantsmanship. But while climate change may be off limits for the time being, last time I looked government-funded studies can still proceed from the assumption of a round earth and an expanding universe.

However, truth be told, my own research often started from “You know, I bet that .  .  .  and so on and so forth.” So while I tried to design inquiries from a “null hypothesis” objective, deep in my heart-of-hearts, I was leaning towards my bias. Hence, the unintentional jest mentioned above.

And now damned if it didn’t happen again. I was reading the New Scientist, January 25, 2020 article A Radical Idea Suggests that Mental Health Issues Have a Single Cause. If the general area is of interest to you, I suggest you track it down on the Internet, since I will, as usual, condense for brevity. (I’ll try to paste a link to the article in here, but if that doesn’t work, send me a message, and I’ll send you the link.) The article begins thus; “The discovery of a link between anxiety, depression, OCD and more is set to revolutionize how we think about these conditions - and offer new treatments.” The article eventually includes PTSD, bi-polar disorder and anorexia among the relevant conditions. It then goes on to explore this possible link among the various mental health conditions through a variety medical, psychiatric, genetic, psychological and sociological avenues eventually arriving at what, for lack of a more precise term, I will call IITBBO - Inheritable Inclination to Being Bummed Out - which we could further shorten to ITBO. 

Don’t let the tiny acronym fool you. ITBO can wreck your life. Even if you have never strayed over the line into some official diagnosis you have either known someone who has, or have flirted with the line with “blue days,” or “that outfit makes me look fat,” or “I had that dream again.” Those stinging little bummers from the down side of life. When the little bummers swell up and start to fill too many of your waking and sleeping moments, they can suck the joy out of life.

The article does discuss a number of possible treatments, but since the implicated conditions are traditionally seen as “separate,” the work seems a little thin here on the amelioration side, especially since the title clearly primes us for “new treatments.”

To which I respond, “Well, duh? Have you never heard of Distilled Harmony?” To which I’m sure the authors of the article would universally respond, “No. What’s that? And what does it have to do with ITBO?” (They wouldn’t really use the ITBO acronym, but you know what I mean.)

“Well, now that you ask . . . .” I reply.

As long-time readers here on The Wall know, Distilled Harmony is a way of thinking about, and behaving in, the world. Over the last decade and change, its tenets have become my mantra, my rosary if you will; Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, Oppose Harm. As I read the article that laid out the pervasive grey depressive cloud that encompasses ITBO, it became increasingly obvious to me that, particularly in light of a seeming lack of other options, Distilled Harmony seems tailor-made to combat ITBO.  

Ordinarily I present the tenets of Distilled Harmony in the order given above with the mandate to Foster Harmony leading the pack. But when confronting ITBO the second tenet, Enable Beauty, pulls up alongside. It is important to note that when I consider Distilled Harmony, I often conflate Enable and Create.  Enable Beauty can be Create Beauty, switch hitters of equal power. And the simple truth is that it is very difficult to give in to the morbid music of ITBO, if you are actively engaged in making something beautiful.

As Saul Leiter, photographer and artist, wrote in his book, In No Great Hurry, “I may be old-fashioned, but I believe there is such a thing as a search for beauty—a delight in the nice things in the world. And I don’t think one should have to apologize for it.” Obviously this puts Leiter on the other side of the creative table from the iconic Heironymus Bosch work Garden of Earthly Delights, or Picasso’s Guernica. Those are ITBO classics and, like much currently popular dystopian “art,” seem more inclined to wallow in the despair that permeates ITBO, than to free us from its clutches. I’m on Leiter’s side.

I can truthfully say that I am never depressed, or even mildly bummed out, when I am drawing, or coloring, painting, sculpting, taking beautiful photos, writing a poem or a song, or sharing thoughts with you here on The Wall. ITBO may be snarking around in the dark outside, looking for a chink in the armor of beauty, but it will hunt in vain. Beauty, especially when snuggled within the arms of Distilled Harmony, has no weak spots. 

So if you would blunt ITBO, create beauty. Paint, draw, sing, sculpt, write, whistle and dance - and do it all as if no one was watching. Because, and this is vital, when we create beauty, we are the final authority as to what is beautiful. The products of our hands and hearts need not reside in the great museums and galleries of the world. Our songs need not be on the lips of millions. Our poems and paintings need not attract “followers” without number. There is but one critical objective to the art we create in the pursuit of beauty, it must make us smile. Just us.

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To Binge or Not to Binge

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Binge viewing seems all the rage these days.  Apparently the idea is to spend hours ingesting junk food while mainlining Downton Abbey or Game of Thrones. Mind you, I have nothing against junk food but I lost whatever taste I ever had for non-stop video viewing in the autumn of 1971. Two events and one technological reality converged that fall to sour me on marathon video viewing. The first event was that I had to select a topic for my Master’s thesis in Communication Arts and Sciences at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The second event was that I decided to measure the amount and type of content that aired on the four available TV stations in the area - ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS. The relevant technical reality was that the home video recorder was still just a very expensive gleam in the eyes of the video engineers at Sony and Philips. The result was me, perched bleary-eyed before my TV, stopwatch in one hand, pen poised over a legal pad in the other as I monitored each station from sign-on to sign-off [another ancient concept]; on four successive days.

So, no, I don’t do binge viewing.  But least I get dizzy and fall off my high horse, I do need to confess to the bingeing that I do indulge in.  Back in the olden days - like 1971 - to go on a “binge" was to lose a few days by over-indulging in alcohol or other mind-muddling substances. My own particular binge preference was, and remains, to lose a few days by over-indulging in serialized print fiction. I have written elsewhere here on the Wall about this addiction that I share with my sister and my older daughter. I blame my mother. It was either 1954 or 1956, as those were the two summers that we spent in LA area while my father did an “exchange teaching” summer school stint. My mother would cart we three kiddies off to the library where we would hoard the maximum of books allowed and head out into what I now realize was the then relatively unpolluted Southern California sunshine. We would loll about on the lawn that surrounded the library, lost in the pages of our personal never, neverland. My first serialized addiction from those early summers was the Mother West Wind stories by Thornton Burgess.  My sister and I never looked back. Our big brother, Jim - now sadly gone - was several years older and I’m not sure if he was ever bitten by the serialized fiction bug, but I do remember dipping into his stash of Albert Payson Terhune canine books, Lad, the Story of Dog, etc.

Still, I digress. I am not sure when or where I first encountered Louis L’Amour.  But it must have been a few decades ago when I first read the 18 books that constitute the Sackett family saga. The series follows a fictional family from Elizabethan England through immigration to “Raleigh’s Land” and eventually, across the continent and over a couple centuries, to the American West.  I have kept my eye out for the books ever since. However, there must be some restrictions on the series, or L’Amour’s works in general, as they are conspicuous by their absence in the ebook world.  So, I finally bit the bullet, and bought the series in paperback from Amazon.  They arrived four days ago, so I have finished the first four. I know, I know, it’s a sickness. "My name is Robert and I’m a bookaholic.”

But a strange thing has happened. It has been a long time since I have spent so much time with a physical book in my hands.  I read almost exclusively on my iPad or my phone. It is just so convenient. I can carry hundreds of books around with me. Pull them out when the line at the grocery store is too long. Whenever or wherever, and ta da, there’s my book.  But not really, or at least not completely. A book is a conversation - author to reader. Rarely back again, but still a conversation. 

I am beginning to think that digital texts can mute part of that conversation. As I read the Sackett books I can literally feel the flow of the conversation. The pages in my right hand decrease as those in my left swell. As they do so my heart rate increases, a strange mixture of joy and sorrow. Joy that resolution grows closer and closer. Sadness that the conversation is coming to end. A beloved friend will soon rise from the table and leave me alone. The comfort of a series is that they will return. A glance at the Amazon box reveals 14 more books. Pristine, spine smooth, unbroken. Calm returns.

And that was when it struck me that another obsessive binge had to lie on the other side of the conversation. The obsession of the artist. The mandate of the muse. I have heard an apocryphal tale about L’Amour. I don’t know if it is true. I choose to believe it is. It goes like this: 

L’Amour rarely lingered over breakfast. He would slurp down his coffee and rush off to his study to write. One morning his daughter asked him why his was in such a hurry to get to his writing. L’Amour’s reply: “I can’t wait to see what happens!”

I am stunned when I consider the sheer number of pages in the Sackett saga, especially when the dust jacket informs me that this is just a small portion of  L’Amour's output. I glance over at the Harry Potter books on my bookshelf, same feeling of awe. Some masochistic inclination makes me do an internet search for “books by David Baldacci.” Ouch.  The Great Bridge by David McCullough is sitting on the coffee table across the room. I am not going to look him up. I sit back and take a sip of now cold coffee, yech. My first, and foolish, thought is “How fast can they type? How do you - in the course of lifetime - put that many words down on paper?” And that, of course, completely overlooks the essential variable: these are really good words, often beautiful and inspiring words. Words that make us smile, laugh, think and cry. Words that weave narratives that keep those of us on our of the conversation enchanted. 

I realize that counting the words or pages in great writing is like pricing art by the square inch. Go to an art show and find the booth that has, in your opinion, the absolute best paintings or photographs in the show. Eavesdrop on the shoppers. I guarantee you will hear some version of this conversation:

“Do you really like it?”

“Yes, I do. But that seems like a lot of money for such a small painting.”

The public's inclination to count pages and measure paintings are a couple of reasons that I tell my students that very few artists choose to be artists, their art chooses them, and rarely lets go. The incredible volume of work provided by the authors I have mentioned is without doubt staggering - but that is, at best, a coarse measurement.  We do not go to see Michelangelo’s David because it weighs 12,478 lbs. We go because those 6 tons of marble enable beauty in a way that helps us to better see the beauty of the world.  

We do not binge on the works of L’Amour, Rowling, Baldacci and McCullough because they have spewed out millions of words. We binge on their words because their obsession to create has made our world more fun, interesting, livelier, more beautiful.

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More Than One Way to Skin a Cat

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Back in 1854, when humorist Seba Smith coined that phrase in  "Way Down East; or, Portraitures of Yankee Life” he probably did not have to worry about irate Internet messages from PETA members, because there was neither PETA nor the Internet. But lurking in this earthy, politically incorrect, aphorism is a valuable message for the 21st century.  

The 20th century, including as it did an unprecedented number of armed conflicts - including World War I, which acquired unintentionally ironic moniker "the war to end all wars” - demonstrated what happens when individuals, nations, faiths and philosophies follow the antithesis of the inclusive cat skinning style controversy. That being that there is only one way to skin a cat: my way. And if you try to skin a cat some other way, I, sadly, will have to kill you. 

Theodore Seuss Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, tried to warn us against this short-sighted view of the world in his lovely The Butter Battle Book, in which the Yooks and the Zooks swiftly approach mutual self-destruction in a war that hinges on a disagreement over the right way to butter one’s bread. Perhaps the book’s publication date, 1984, is coincidental, perhaps not. 

Still, it might be worth our while to follow this path of prescient chronology a little further. We have just rung in 2020. For many of us 20/20 is synonymous with perfect vision, the ability to see clearly. Perhaps it is not too much to ask, that as fellow passengers on what appears to be an increasingly rickety spaceship Earth, we realize that there are probably many different, perhaps even some painless, non-lethal, PETA approved ways to skin a cat. 

Obviously, my concern is not with cat skinning. Rather, I am hoping that in 2020 we can back away from the arrogant “my way or the highway” mentality that so ravaged the world during the last century and seems to have only grown more virulent in the opening couple of decades of the 21st. So, in that compassionate ecumenical spirit, let me wish you a happy, harmonious, and peaceful 2020.

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