Are We There Yet?

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Anyone who has driven small people from point A to point B, whether across the country or around the block, has heard this plaintive wail countless times.  My parents twice packed the 3 of us kids into the back of a 1954 Chevy Belair and headed off from central Ohio to Southern California where Dad taught a couple of summer school sessions at colleges in the LA area. The back of the car had been arranged so that the entire area was a “bed-in-the-back” during those seatbelt and airbag free days. Games, books, cow poker, and our tireless "sing alongs” passed the days. In my memory they were wonderful days. And I choose to believe that Mom and Dad felt the same. Though there were, no doubt, many iterations of the eternal "Are we there yet?” refrain. It seems that few of today’s families would attempt similar voyages without a wide variety of digital traveling companions - video, audio, gaming, who knows perhaps virtual reality. It is quite likely that these 21st century devices soothe the long road, but only so far.  We seem to have an innate need to get where we are going. The notion that "life is journey, not a destination” [apparently not Emerson] is a lovely and oft used quotation that, nonetheless, we have a hard time living up to. We. Want. To. Be. There. NOW. 

I am often struck by the similar dissonance between belief and behavior. We seem to have little trouble asserting what we believe. The behavioral path from belief to "belief made real" is less often articulated. I worry that I fall victim to that failing.  I often assert that Distilled Harmony parses the major components of what I believe. Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm.  However any declaration of belief rings hollow if it is not coupled with how those beliefs are manifested in our lives. It is far too easy to spin fine speeches, to beat our chest while pontificating our adherence to lofty ideals, and yet still find ways to behaviorally “dance a little side step” around belief when doing so lines our pockets or raises our Q score among those whose favor we seek to curry.

While I often allude to the behavioral relationships that should resonate between the tenets of Distilled Harmony and the conduct of our everyday, it strikes me that I have too long neglected an attempt to address those relationships directly in what I will initially call my Roadmap for Life.  One disclaimer must be made at the very beginning. In the academic world we seemed to be continually asked to draft “a strategic plan.” Essentially we were asked to create a roadmap that will take us from where we are/were as a department or university to where we want to be in the future. During the process we tried to identify two types of comparable institutions; first our “peer institutions.” Those were the universities that we saw as being most like ourselves. If we were keeping up with them then we were alright. However, there was another group of institutions called “aspirational peers.” These were the institutions we would lIke to be “when we grow up.”

I see my Roadmap for Life in much the same way. As we find ourselves immersed in an election season, apparently co-scripted by Lewis Carroll and George Orwell, perhaps a political analogy will best serve my current task. The four tenets of Distilled Harmony are the major “planks” in my “platform,” defining my existential “aspirational peers.” In the Roadmap for Life, I will attempt to sketch the behaviors that pave the path from those aspirations to reality, from belief espoused to belief made manifest. But it is important to note that being able to see the path is not the same thing as successfully negotiating the path. Stumbles are common, and finding my way back to the path is often neither easy nor direct. Furthermore, my Roadmap for Life, is just that, My Roadmap for Life. It is intensely personal, based on the equally personal notion of Distilled Harmony, and the supporting tenets of Foster Harmony, Enable Beauty, Distill Complexity, and Oppose Harm. I would be delighted if y’all find yourselves in complete accord with this post. But that is about as likely as a full season of college football.

In my current reality, “discovering life in retirement,” each of the tenets finds their expression best in a variety of creative, yet admittedly solitary, activities: drawing, photography, writing and reading.  The solitary tone of these activities may be a reaction to a professional life spent continually interacting with literally thousands of young people, all with legitimate claims on my attention and concern. Once I grow more accustomed to a life without classes and meetings perhaps I will grow more amenable to “playing with others.” Time will tell. For now let me restrict myself to examining how the tenets of belief in Distilled Harmony find expression in my behavior.

It seems best to treat each tenet separately and in order of their primacy. So let us begin.

Foster Harmony.  The belief underlying this plank is shared by all the world’s major faiths and philosophies. Simply stated, Foster Harmony demands that we behave towards others as we would have other behave toward us.

My “ Roadmap for Life" seeks to infuse this notion into everyday behavior. How we drive, how we shop, how we converse. In all these fundamental behaviors, confrontation is the opposite of Harmony. Discord, argumentation, bullying all stand in opposition to Fostering Harmony.  We cannot control how others behave, but we alone are responsible for our behavior. We really do need to concentrate on how Harmony, gentility, can be infused in these everyday basic behaviors. I choose to believe that the now rarely used descriptors, gentleman and gentlewoman - culture wars notwithstanding - at one point in time placed the emphasis on the first two syllables: gentle. The current pandemic, and the unprecedented social separation it has engendered, should emphasize the precious nature of human interaction. Foster Harmony becomes real when we approach all our interactions gently.

For me, more personally, I hope that a commitment to harmonic gentility is evident as these letters march across our screens constructing sentences that gently draw us together. And, I further hope that those sentences here on the Wall, demonstrate the persuasive power of gentle language. Sadly, much of contemporary public discourse is framed by, or is peppered with, language that was initially intended to shock. Profanity has become so commonplace that it now seems merely a form of punctuation. Once it was intended as an expression of deep, almost uncontrollable, emotion. A dear friend, and fellow lover of language, once opined, “More than anything else, profanity is an indication of a limited vocabulary.” Amen. So, in part, Foster Harmony becomes real for me through gentlewriting, and sending same out to you. 

This not a new endeavor for me. I have toyed with both poetry and prose since my childhood. The first work I ever had “published” was a poem in the school “literary magazine.” I was in 5th grade. It was maybe 1960? I was in school in Vienna, Austria. In the faulty cultural memory of that pre-digital darkness, the poem is lost. I do however recall that it depicted a conflict between good and evil, and, while routing for good, I left the result ambiguous. In my current writings I make a conscious effort to avoid anything that requires ALL CAPS - the digital equivalent of confrontational yelling. I automatically discount both the source and the content of such messages when I encounter them, and so seek to avoid the practice myself. Though admittedly I do occasionally err in the use of multiple exclamation marks.

The place of reading in this tenet is more oblique. I would often advise my younger colleagues to “winnow their bookshelves” every couple of years. Academicians are loath to let go of their old books, or at least were so back when books were a dominant form of information storage. I would encourage them to take any book or journal they had not opened in the past 4 or 5 years and put it on a table outside their office with a sign “Free Books! Help Yourself!” (I am pleased to note that just such a table has become a permanent fixture outside our departmental offices.) I fully realize that even with the best of intentions we cheat in this process - unable to part with dear favorites from our past, and that is fine. At least we eliminate the silly stuff left by book reps that made the merely semi-conscious leap from our mailbox to our office shelves. Clearing out the dross and leaving the precious metal that keeps us focused on Harmony - that’s the idea.

My professional library has been reduced to a mere handful of works - mostly sentimental favorites. But my personal library, while larger, is the result of much the same winnowing process. I retain those seminal works that underscore the notion of harmonic existence and behavior. Bits of poetry and prose, novels and weightier tomes that I can return to when in need of a chat with old friends. But I also use reading to hold off the discordant world that often surrounds us. I read mysteries - rather obsessively I must admit. An affliction I share with my sister. But now that I think of it, the link between reading mysteries and fostering harmony is not as tenuous as it might appear at first glance. In the mysteries I choose to read, while the behaviors are often not gentle, the protagonist usually prevails and makes the world a safer and more admirable - essentially more harmonic - place. So contemporary mysteries can rest comfortably next to Gene Stratton-Porter’s romances from the late 1800s and early 1900s. I remember a song one of my daughters - I think the elder - learned in Girl Scouts “Make good friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other gold.” So winnow carefully. Then read again, mining nuggets of behavioral harmony.

The while photography and drawing find space in Foster Harmony, they are more clearly evident in the second tenet; Enable Beauty.

Enable Beauty. Foster Harmony is the most pervasive tenet in that it touches both how we behave, and our reactions to the behaviors of others. Enable Beauty is more tightly focused on our own creative behavior. I suppose my perspective would differ were I a trust fund baby or a tech billionaire. In such a scenario I could both Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty by endowing projects like the Genius Grants to encourage harmonic and creative behavior. In lieu of great wealth, I focus instead upon my own creative efforts. Serving as my own biographer I might write something like “Schrag’s creative interests were often, and early, obvious. Evidenced most clearly perhaps in his interest in the theater. Active all through high school, he went on to major in theater at Kalamazoo College and was occasionally heard to declare that his career plan was to be ‘God’s gift to the American musical theater.” But, niggling bits of reality led to my turning my back on Broadway’s Great White Way, and instead following my father into the academic world, which delightfully provided a wealth of creative opportunities. Many of which informed my current focus on writing, addressed above in Foster Harmony, and photography and drawing which I will explore here.

I would be hard pressed to name my favorite author. There are simply too many lovely and talented voices - current and past - out there to single out one as ultimately exemplary. I do not have the same problem with photographers, perhaps because the medium is comparatively young. Ansel Adams is my photography “go to guy.”  I am tempted to say he has no close competition. His contemporary, Margaret Bourke-White, was perhaps equally skilled. But she turned her lens most often to the constructions of humanity - the deserving products of architecture and engineering. And her photographs are wonderful. Adams, following my personal inclinations more closely, reveals the wonders of nature, and never fails to turn my attention to the beauty that flourishes everywhere in the natural world. I just needed to point the camera and look. 

We now just point our smartphones and push the button. A blessing and a curse. This tenet asks us to enable beauty, not to stumble upon beauty. These days we “point and shoot” our way through the day or days, and then - sometimes - shuffle through the shots looking for something beautiful. That is stumbling upon beauty.

Adams suggests an alternative. Take a notecard, or a simple square of cardboard and cut a “picture sized” rectangle in the middle. Maybe 1x1.5 inches. Carry this card around with you and use it to frame your picture. Hold the card close to your face and you see the “wide angle” shot, hold it away and you see the “close up.” Compose the image. Think about it. Only then should we pick up the camera, or your smartphone, and take the picture. If we use this process we learn to become an artist, not simply a recorder. And enabling beauty is really about becoming an artist. 

Adams again. “It is easy to make a photograph that has scenic beauty. It is far more difficult to make a photograph that has artistic beauty.” Like everything, photography is a learning process. And Adams talked about his “composing card” in the context of teaching a course on photography at the University of Arizona. It is a technique I blithely stole from him years ago while teaching my own courses in photography and video production. The end result is not really to train photographers and videographers to walk around with composing cards hanging around their necks. The objective is for us to think before tripping the shutter. What kind of image do you want to capture? And currently I want to capture a photograph that turns into a good drawing. Let me explain.

I have a friend in his mid-eighties who has been a practicing artist since he was too young to either drive to the gigs where he played the accordion in the band or buy a beer once he got there. Through a seven-decade career he has been a sailor, a potter, a painter, a musician and a luthier. And has taught university level courses in all those disciplines. Had he been born a few hundred years ago across the pond he probably would have ended up in the court of some duke or duchess, count or countess, king or queen. As it is he lives down the street, painting in his backyard studio and building guitars in the basement. The Renaissance’s loss is my gain. The point is he paints from photographs. But to a great extent he transfers the images from the photographs to canvas. “Ah, ha!” you say, “That’s Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia!” or “That’s Ocracoke!” “ Bermuda.” For him the link between the photograph and the painting is recognizable. That is not what I mean when I say I look for a photograph that makes for a good drawing.

Truth be told, I can’t draw. I have tried, and can keep pace with modestly competent 8 year-olds. But recognizable people, pets or places? Ain’t gonna happen. In clay, maybe. On paper? Nah. I will however claim to being a rather accomplished doodler. I mean think about it. I spent years and years sitting in classrooms listening to lectures. What’s a guy to do? Assuming you want to at least appear to be attending? You keep your pen moving across the page. You doodle. So when I say I am currently focused on taking photographs that lead to drawings, I really mean I am focused on taking photographs that lead to good spaces for multi-colored doodles.

Briefly, here is the process - which I call PingPongPainting, featured in a previous post. I take a photograph. I open the photograph in Photoshop or Gimp or some other graphics program. I decide what part of the image would make for interesting doodles. I remove that part of the image, leaving a blank space. I print out the image and fill the blank space with black and white doodles that sort of look like coloring book images. Then I color those portions of the image with markers or pencils or whatever, creating a version of the original photograph whose relationship to the original photograph is somewhat ambiguous. I’m going to give you a link here to the PPP post I sent you a bit ago to avoid a long further explanation. https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2020/08/schrag-ping-pong-painting-introduction.html

The point is that we stay actively engaged in the creative process. But with a proviso: the product of our creative endeavors must be in concert with the first tenet - Foster Harmony.  While I do read mysteries, I do not write them. Neither do I read or watch or participate in the creation of narratives in the horror genre or those that are gratuitously violent. I am aware that of a broad school of thought - sometimes called “counter attitudinal advocacy” - that asserts that the creation of narratives that run counter to your “aspirational self” will actually move you toward your aspirations. To me that sounds a lot like offering an alcoholic a martini to combat their alcoholism. In any case that is not what I mean by Distilled Harmony. There can be a place for adult beverages in Distilled Harmony, but only in the context advancing camaraderie, of fostering harmony - as in a barbershop sing along or string quartet. So let us focus on creating gentle, harmonic compositions.

Unlike Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty which guide our own behavior, the 3rd and 4th tenets - Distill Complexity and Oppose Harm - are more prone to address the ways in which we respond to the world around us and the behaviors of others. Both tenets get a workout in today’s hectic world, but we need to remember that Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty are paramount. Everything is focused through those two lenses.

Distill Complexity.  The world seems to always be a step ahead of us.  We start out as babies, held in awe by our parents who assert “ I hear babies cry, I watch them grow, They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.”  But once we clock through our three score and ten, we feel no more ahead of the curve than did our parents, despite their original optimistic assumptions about our potential.  Which is a rather awkward way of saying that the world always seems just too complex, that “the good old days” were somehow easier to understand.  That is certainly the case here in the midst of the 21st century. Never has the complexity of life seemed so blatant, especially when we must more actively consider the fact that for many in our world the “good old days” were anything but good.

Remember that old movie “You’ve Got Mail”? when the “bong, you’ve got mail” tone announced something unique and potentially interesting? OK, I just did a quick test - 35 messages in my inbox. 2 of which seem to be from folks I actually know. The rest are dunning me for contributions to causes for which my immediate support is needed least the world as we know it perish. So how do we distill meaning from the seemingly impenetrable complexity of the world around us? I suggest the “one thing at a time” test. It is of particular benefit now in the midst of the pandemic when the world does seem to flow to us through our digital media.  The idea is to examine all input as though you needed to deal with only one thing at a time.  Let us deal with the digital first. I know there are ways to do this automatically - setting up special places to route particular sources of information to particular places, etc. But this is one of those things I am trying to do for myself.  So family stuff gets top priority.  These messages I attend to. Being retired I have the luxury of being able to ignore previously “top drawer” messages from “the office.” Next, come messages from “people important in my life.”  Outside of family? - gosh, maybe five sources. 7 maybe if I am feeling positively giddy. Next come issues of cultural interest - newsletters from various organizations, Artsy, Adobe, National Geographic, New Scientist, Quora, etc. who cover information that interests me. Then comes professionally necessary folks. Far fewer than pre-retirement days - doctors, banks, stuff like that. Finally, stuff “in the news.”  COVID-19,  social movements, politics, etc.  If I “pre-sort” all the information knocking of my electronic door using those categories - and stuff the “in the news” bits into its own subcategory, my 30 to 40 daily digital inquiries quickly drop to single figures. Just ran the check and my 35 messages dropped to 7, with a couple of duplicates that bring me pictures of my granddaughters. So there is complexity that we choose, complexity that we allow, and complexity that we can eliminate.

The complexity category that feeds most directly into the final tenet, Oppose Harm, is the “in the news” category.  Three major divisions catch my attention: politics, social action and covid-19. When deciding how these slices of reality inform my personal choices regarding ways in which to Oppose Harm, I need to again remind myself that examining paths to opposition need to be guided by my personal adherence to the two primary tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty.

Often extremes make the task easier. In the area of politics, if we have learned nothing else fro these past four years of the Trump presidency, we should have learned that an inflexible, cult of personality, “my way or the highway” presidency can have a huge impact on every aspect of society. And never before has the assessment of a government perspective - in the US, anyhow - been so completely an assessment of a single person who brooks no deviation from his perspective. First, I needed to examine the impact of "Trump the man" on the notion of Foster Harmony.  As with all politicians there are many faces of Donald Trump. And his identity shifts radically depending upon what sources of information you choose as legitimate and dependable. But the Donald seems more chameleonesque than many in the political arena.  When playing to his base, he lets the “no mask, no covid, no climate change, send in the troops, take no prisoners" Donald out of the barn.  But on the last night of the Republican convention, the “Hey, I’m almost a democrat” Donald got a few bits of screen time. 

But both versions fall far short of a man for whom gentility and harmony are important concerns. Loyalty to “ Trump the man seems to guide his polices. Nowhere is this more obvious than his political appointments -  a head of the EPA who isn’t sure that climate change is real or that the environment can’t just heal itself. A head of the Post Office who is looking for ways to shut it down. A head of education looking for ways to advantage private schools at the expense of public education. It doesn’t stop there, but even if it did, that would be, for me, enough to disqualify any support for the current administration on the basis of goodness of fit with Foster Harmony - there isn’t any. The man’s consistent advocacy of violence and force to solve complex issues further affirms his inability to move even slightly within the boundaries of the first penultimate tenet - Foster Harmony. 

His record is, if anything, worse in the area of Enable Beauty. Virtually every government initiative in the area of the Arts, National Endowments for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, have faced elimination under this administration. Fortunately the legislative branch has failed to roll over in this area, and Enable Beauty, though damaged has managed to stumble along.

When it comes to the treatment of the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to nail down Trump is like trying to hop onto a rollercoaster running, twisting and looping at full speed. He has occasionally tried to counter his initial “it’s just one guy in China” and “It will just go away” reactions.  But his failure to provide any kind of national policy, simply tossing the issue to the states has been disastrous.  His leadership in the area of social justice movements and related issues has been equally amorphous, except in the area of providing troops in various “democratic cities.”  “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” is a great John Wayne kind of sound bite, and as we watch the scene from the perspective of a news helicopter seems logical from an action movie perspective. "Shoot that one, get her!”  

But as we soon learn, it isn’t really that simple.  Who is shooting whom and why gets much more complicated on the ground.  Shooting, it seems, puts everyone in danger: protestors with legitimate issues, police striving to serve and protect, youngsters caught up in what seemed to be a lark, and yes, perhaps you get a couple of thugs and hate mongers.  But does that justify letting the “law of the bully on playground” drive public policy? Probably not. These violent and discordant actions, which seem to often be the President’s first choices, should be seen as repugnant actions considered only when all discussions aimed at fostering harmony have been throughly explored.

Admittedly, Biden, has been no shining star in the areas of Foster Harmony or Enable Beauty, but at least he has avoided following Trump's ventures in the dark side. Despite having spent much of his recent career in the shadows of a charismatic democratic president, Biden appears to be a gentleman of the old school whose policies would most likely seek to counter the discordant legacy of the Trump White House, veering more toward those positions with which I would be more comfortable.

Which, for me, raises a larger question. Where are the kids? Those babies we thought would "come to know more than I’ll ever know?”  I will turn 72 in a couple of months. And will freely admit that I am neither as glib nor as energetic as I was a decade and change ago. And my “job” is to simply write and draw gentle and harmonic entities to the best of my ability.  Serve as leader of this nation? Decide how to heal the current political chaos in America and in doing so recapture our tarnished international reputation? I don’t think so! Just writing about it makes me tired. Kamala might win any subsequent debates because all the old guys would fall asleep!  Where are the 70 year-olds of tomorrow? The 40, 50, 60-year-olds of today? Past time for them to step up don’t you think? Let me draw in peace?

Oppose Harm.  As I mentioned before, extremism often makes some of these choices easy, especially here in the waining months of 2020, a time sadly lacking in gentility, harmony or a renaissance of beauty.  Properly Distilling Complexity, when viewed in retrospect is often an act of genius, which shouldn’t prevent us from taking a stab it, but at the same time we shouldn’t be too terribly concerned when we miss the target. After all, most of us do.  And we should feel no shame in admitting an occasional misfire. After all, the Hallmark of our nation has always been its creative genius - if not homegrown, then at least we have provided the space in which genius is free to thrive or fail. A meritocracy driven by science and often well-meant while still stumbling social philosophy. Obviously we still have much progress to make in the realm of social justice.  But we need to remember that before the original squabbling 13 colonies came together - no one really thought much about democracy. It took the genius of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to set our feet down that path. A path from which most of  “more civilized” Europe assumed we would soon fall.  

On the other hand as we consider the complexity of our current political world, I tend to be leery of self-acclaimed geniuses.  When I think back over my list of “favorite geniuses” [omitting the art world, where - my bias - there are just too many]: Einstein, Marie Curie, Hawking, Ada Lovelace, Jobs, Katherine Johnson, etc., I don’t see any who made a point of declaring themselves a genius. So I become a bit suspicious of anyone who - like President Trump - seeks to wrap that mantle around themselves, and belittle the insight of others.  Rather, I watch what they do. For example, today I was watching Elon Musk - who certainly has the resume to make it on anyone’s genius list -  doing a live demo of his “neurolink.” What struck me most about the presentation wasn’t the sheer intellectual power and audacity of the concept, but Musk’s almost childish delight in bringing his latest brainchild to our attention. The focus wasn’t on Musk, it was on the “neurolink” and what it might mean for us.  As long as we protect those who would protect actual genius we will be on the right path.

The obvious moment of complexity for us in mid-2020 is the Covid-19 pandemic. It confronts us everyday. Via every medium. We worry about it. How it might affect us. The very young. The very old.  Here in the USA an already complex situation takes another turn as the virus arises in the midst of an unprecedented consideration of racial inequality and resultant bursts of violence. The social, political, scientific knot of current complexity seems to create an entity totally at odds with the two dominant tenets of Distilled Harmony: Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty. But no doubt every age has, at some point in time seen themselves, as the old Barry McGuire song put it, tottering “on the eve of destruction.” The Bard put in his two cents worth:

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

I choose to disagree.  We will, no doubt, have to put up with our share of idiots. But as we oppose their bigoted discordancy at the ballot box and in our offices, at the PTSA, over dinner and in our writing and painting, singing and drawing, dancing and loving; we can truly foster harmony and enable beauty, helping the “young’uns” create a world where sunlight, starlight and moonbeams can reflect the beauty of distilled harmony. 

So are we there yet?  Depends on what you mean by there.  When I read the daily gloom and doom on my various screens, I rarely encounter a “there” where I would choose to spend my time. But when the pictures of the great photographers and artists take their place. When the lovely music of just about any age tumbles out of my speakers. When the silly and enchanting images of the family claim the screen. Yeah. We are, if not there, then we are getting close. So for me, my Roadmap for Life demands that I spend my remaining years fostering harmony and enabling beauty through the works of my own hands and sharing them with you, and attending to those harmonic moments you choose to share with me.

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