Dreaming is Believing

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I mentioned in a recent post that my internal clock had acquired a glitch. I am confident that it has nothing to do with the current coronavirus. I say that because first, we don’t really seem to have a clear notion of when and where the virus started and second, my clock has been wacky for at least months, if not longer.  And yes, wacky is an official diagnostic term, check your list of Social Security Disabilities - OK, maybe I saw it somewhere else.

Anyhow, the symptoms are these: the darkening of the sky is no indication that sweet sleep is tiptoeing over the doorstep.  This, rather, is the calling card of the “relentless wakefulness” phenomenon I mentioned in an earlier post.  I have a previously effective nighttime ritual. About a half hour prior to the moment of desired unconsciousness I do a Reike meditation - noise cancelling headphones, mellow music of some type. Thereafter I switch to calming natural sounds curtesy of the Naturespace app, and I fall asleep.  At least that is how it is supposed to work. Nowadays it is most often a prelude to a few hours of tossing and turning, interspersed with grabbing my iPad and retreating to the arcane twists and turns of my current mystery. Eventually my body gives up and somewhere around 3 or 4, I fall asleep. Those of you who have been following the Wall through any part of its two decade or so history know that posts from the tiny hours of the morning are no rarity.

The second wacky symptom is the one I referred to as “daylight’s somnolent assassin” in the futile hope that giving it a fancy name would blunt unconsciousness’s attack on my afternoons. It has yet to work - and, at 2:00 PM, I see it lurking a mere hour or so away. This symptom is characterized by much of my body mass becoming concentrated in my eyelids. "Close your eyes, you are getting sleepy, very, very, sleepy.” You know  what I mean. We have all had the experience, and in the workaday world we have found processes or products that allow us to carry on, or sneak a nap behind closed doors. Being mostly retired these days I find my couch or guest bed and check out for 90 minutes or so.

OK, here is the weird thing.  The “wake-sleep” part of my brain is so scrambled that I sometimes have a hard time distinguishing between waking-world and sleeping-world.  A very Carlos Castaneda, mystical, shamanesque space. No doubt I am obsessing over the whole issue. But I have, I think, come to a partial solution: I only dream when I am asleep. So when I find myself staring around, supine, - having just been deeply involved, usually as a younger version of myself, in intricate scenarios with either total strangers, or people who no longer inhabit my active reality, and who have just vanished - I soon realize, “Whoa, that was a weird dream!” I had been dreaming, hence, I had been asleep, and I am now awake. 

I am not really sure why I find being able to make that distinction comforting. But I do. 

Well, I can see by the clock at the top of the screen nudging up towards 3:00 pm, that it is getting close to time for me to check out of this world for awhile and see what is waiting for me on the other side of consciousness.  

Be safe. Practice social distancing. Wash your hands.  Remember, red and raw is the new beautiful.

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It Didn't Start Out This Way

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When I began this post several weeks ago none of us were wondering about how to avoid going stir crazy as we hunkered down trying to maintain “ social distance” as we tried to “ flatten the curve” of the spread of coronovirus-19. But now it seems a good way to make “hunker down time” a little more tolerable!  So here is how it went originally:

The Pen Must Pause for Poetry

Which is simply another rephrasing of the golden oldie “you’ve got to stop and smell the roses.” But just because we already know something, just because we already believe it, doesn’t mean we don’t need to dig a little deeper into the idea.  Creativity is like that.  We all know that creativity is a good thing. We look at the works of great artists, past and present, painters, dancers, musicians, writers, and are often simply stunned by the power of their creative vision. “Awesome, amazing, astonishing!” And other similar A words. “How do/did s/he/they do that?” “I wish I was that creative!”

Well, don’t be so quick to write yourself off. I’m not saying that we can all paint like Tintoretto, sculpt like Michaelanglo, rise on point like Pavlova, wail like Janis Joplin, or whip out a sonnet like the Bard. But what I am saying is that there is a precious spark of creativity that burns brightly within each of us, but one sure way to smother it is to compare our creative efforts to the luminaries like those I mentioned above.  There is a better, saner, healthier path to releasing and enjoying your own creativity. It should come as no surprise to you that I will assert that the path begins in Distilled Harmony.

The first two tenets of Distilled Harmony are Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty. And it is in those two tenets that we find the headwaters to the river of our own creativity. In this current exploration of the role of Distilled Harmony in creativity, I am going to shift our focus just a tad. Often when we consider Foster Harmony we think of an harmonic intention moving from within us outward toward others. We seek, in our behavior, to create a harmonious relationship with others - as advocated in most extant faiths and philosophies - the traditional golden rule, do unto others notion. But when we examine the relationship between Foster Harmony and creativity we need to explore internal intention. By that I mean testing the relationships between our beliefs and preferences and our artistic articulation or representation of those beliefs and preferences. That assertion may seem a little nebulous, and rightfully so, since I’m still working on it. The uncertainty comes in part from the fact that implicit in the notion of creativity is product. The meme “maker” is quite popular in my discipline (communication) these days. That is hardly surprising since the discipline comes to the attention of the general public almost entirely via media messages the construction of which, back in the 1800s when I was a student, was taught in “production” classes. A producer makes messages - hence anyone engaged in the creative production of a message is a “maker.” So if we are to understand and enhance our creativity, we need to understand what it is we wish to create. And here it is vital to note that, within the framework of Distilled Harmony, we would naturally seek to create “products” that draw upon a philosophical disposition inclined toward compassion and human kindness. 

That inclination toward compassion and human kindness necessarily follows us into our consideration of the second tenet Enable Beauty. Creativity within Distilled Harmony’s dual tenets of Foster Harmony and Enable Beauty by definition excludes any concern, other than disinterest, with the creation of products that reflect discord and/or meanness, cruelty, etc. No doubt that seems a tad arbitrary, but a cursory glance at the current mediascape sadly reveals that such discordant, abrasive messages run no risk of extinction. They will continue to thrive without our help.

So how do we enhance our “compassionately inclined creativity?”  In 1854, scientist Louis Pasteur said, “Chance favors only the prepared mind.”  What is true for science, is at least equally so for art. To give our creativity a chance to take compassionate shape we must prepare ourselves to nurture such creations. I suggest three creative spaces and/or habits that you can begin immediately. First, the one from which this post takes its title:

The Pen Must Pause for Poetry.

This notion grew out of an assignment I used to give when I taught photography. I would assign my students the “single snapshot” assignment. The assignment was simply to take a “good picture.” They had to stay within the classroom building and they could only snap the shutter once. Then we would reassemble and discuss why they took that particular photo, why they framed it the way they did etc. How the image made them feel, and what response they hoped the image would awaken in a viewer. “The Pen Must Pause“ idea is a verbal version of that exercise I do for myself.  Several times a day, I try to force myself to stop and write down a word or phrase that would enhance a poem. I know, I know, that is every bit as nebulous as a “good picture.” But it is also one of those “I know it when I see it things.” You are reading along, or listening to the lyric of a song and a word or phrase just hits you as beautiful or perfectly expressive. Those are the words I am trying to capture. Sure, I probably miss more than I catch, but I think just making the effort is worthwhile. My circadian rhythm has been turned upside down recently. The hours between midnight and 2:30 AM seem immune to sleep, while between 3 and 5 PM I have to fight for consciousness. I don’t know why, but I have thought about it and from those reflections captured these two phrases: “relentless wakefulness,” and “daylight’s somnolent assassin.” They have yet to claim a poem of their own, but they are ready to hop in should an appropriate ditty arise.

The Single Snapshot Exercise.

This is a personal version of the classroom exercise I mentioned earlier. I hesitate to even mention this exercise in this smartphone era, when we are inclined to take a picture of anything that remains still for even an instant. Then we try to figure out how we can capture our own face along with whatever it was that caught our eye. No doubt there is a macabre dark web site somewhere that collects “selfies” that resulted in something terrible happening to the photographer; “Oh, let me get a selfie with the cute grizzly bear!” Or “Let me capture a selfie with the Hogwarts train as it comes into the station!" or “Here by Niagara Falls.” You get the idea. I am NOT advocating that kind of photography. Rather I suggest trying to take a picture every day that is beautiful. It is probably best to try to avoid cute and sweet. Hopefully your life presents you with a lot of cute and sweet. In this exercise we are looking for beautiful. Remember the tenet is Enable Beauty - not enable cute, and certainly not enable myself. I worked on this exercise for several months, diligently printing out the photos, slipping them into plastic sleeves and saving them in a big three-ring binder. Now if I could only find the binder. I suppose this is a good time to point out that in both of these two exercises the process is more important than the product. It is the capture of the phrase, it is the taking of the picture that is shaping the prepared mind. It is the prepared mind that unleashes our creativity, and it is that unleashed creativity that, often unexpectedly, leaps out upon the page, the stage, the keyboard, wherever your muse calls home.

The Bibbity Boppity Boo Exercise

As we learned from Disney’s Cinderella - “Put them together and what have you got?  Bibbity,Boppity, Boo!” So you take one from column A - the words or phases you have captured, and one from column b, the snapshots, and put them together and see what you have got, bibbity, boppity, boo.  The creative intention is not to bind you to those somewhat arbitrary pairings. Rather it is to get you playing - and yes, that is the right word “playing” - with elements you have collected because they are beautiful, because they make you happy, make you smile.

Creativity is really all about freedom. Letting words and images, shapes and sounds, jumble up together. Sometimes it is just fine to let the jumble stay a jumble that just makes you smile. However, there are other times when those seeming random jumbles find a deeper and more consistent structure, a structure that your prepared mind gently and precisely pulls together into a truly beautiful construction that makes one inhale with that soft realization we so often encounter in the presence of beauty.

And moving through those three steps while staying indoors, maintaining social distance, and washing your hands after each step is how this initially unrelated Wall post can morph into a virus fighter! Stay well. Keep smiling, and wash your hands! Red and raw is the new beautiful!

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Acts of Loving Kindness

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It would be irresponsible for the Wall to ignore the COVID-19 crisis sweeping our world. So let me try to Wall it in. To manifest the primary tenet of Distilled Harmony - Foster Harmony - in a world in which all forms of human contact are frowned upon is, to say the least, tricky. What is more harmonic than a touch, a hug, a kiss? Probably nothing, but apparently we need to try to find some options.

When I think about the various ways in which one can foster Harmony, they all share one characteristic - they are all, in one way or another, acts of loving kindness. Whether we are seeking to create beauty in some artistic medium, clarifying a path to Harmony, or seeking to reduce discord, we are trying to express a love of all mankind and trying to behave in ways that manifest that love.

As we, as a global community, seek confront this bizarre event, it may be somewhat comforting to know that some simple acts of loving kindness are available to us all. First we need to lose the “me first” attitude that tends to permeate much of our competitive culture: We tend to feel that other people need to practice social distancing, other people need to adjust their use of paper products, other people need to stay home and deny themselves the regular company of friends and family. No, it cannot be just other folks, we too need reassess how we carry acts of loving kindness to those around us.

Through my daughter’s Facebook page, I have seen neat, joyful, compassionate activities being devised by and shared among the parents of young children. Also, there has been some excellent outreach in the academic community to keep courses moving along. Art galleries and museums are rushing “virtual rooms” online to bring digital versions of their collections to our various screens. These things that perhaps we should have done have finally come to life because we have to do them. If there is a silver lining to this nefarious covid-cloud, perhaps it is that we will discover and begin to utilize new positive ways of sharing our lives that reach beyond our neighborhoods, cities and states to a truly global village.

Still, there are at least a couple of areas where I remain confused. First, there seems to be some lack of clarity when it comes to family interactions. Some sources say it is good to maintain normal family interactions. But what does “normal family interaction” mean when the “normal family” means a dozen or so people across generations who live in four different houses with ages ranging from 91 to “one’s on the way”? How does “normal family interaction” mesh with social distancing? In this era of COVID-19, does loving kindness lean more toward the emotional comfort of the family, or toward the medical prescription of social distancing? Is a puzzlement! Hopefully ongoing research will guide us through these and other complex issues.

And speaking of complex issues, that older age group, of which I am one, presents it’s own issues. I mean, as cute as Daniel Tiger may be, he doesn’t lend much insight to issues of say, “Retirement in the age COVID-19” or “What sport will make my knees hurt the least?” or “Are there really no good new artists over 60?” Or “What novel do you remember from your own 20-something years that seems to have retained its legitimacy and impact and why?” (OK, I’m a college professor, I can’t help it!) Anyhow, I’m thinking that some digital face-to-face around senior friendly topics could spread a nice bit of loving kindness among the golden set. Perhaps I need to take my own advice here. Your suggestions are most welcome!

So, as we continue to figure out this new reality, we can probably make better decisions about life in general if we remember to foster harmony guided, in all our actions, by the common sense dictates of loving kindness.

Oh, and in closing, I should point out that I think a sense of humor is essential to staying focused on acts of loving kindness.  So - 

A guy walks into a bar.

Bartender: What will you have?

Guy: Gimme a Corona.

Bartender: You sure?

Guy: Positive.

Bartender: Sorry, we can’t serve your kind in here.

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And Since We Are Talking About Memory and Metaphor

Let us not forget about “losing your train of thought.” It seems to grow increasingly germane. I’ll be cruising along in my mind, cooking nicely, one thought leading to the next, occasional interesting leaps and cross overs. Then, wham, like a figure skater catching an edge, or Zion blowing out a sneaker, I jump the tracks - I mean completely. It’s not that I just lose track of what I was thinking about a few minutes ago over coffee up in the dining car, or who was ahead in Arlo’s card game with the old men in the club car, or what the Gambler was telling Kenny about holding or folding. No, nothing that simple - the whole freaking train is gone!  Empty rails behind me and leading forlornly ahead out to the horizon. 

If I stop cold and consciously think about nothing at all, I can sometimes catch a faint rumble vibrating up from the tracks. Maybe the shimmering of a phrase or the fragment of an idea. And if I’m really lucky I might glimpse a stray boxcar or a deserted caboose pulled off on the siding. But truth be told, that train is pretty much lost.

It is both frightening and frustrating. I mean it was my train. So, to guard against these disconcerting derailings, I have taken to carrying a spare brain with me. And by that I do not mean my “i”s - phone or pad - though both are usually close at hand. I mean a pocket-sized analog notebook with a pen clipped to it. Unlike its digital brethren, when I use these pages to scribble down notes regarding a few cars of a rumbling train of thought, the notebook brain neither corrects my punctuation nor suggests other tangentially related trains of thought that its algorithms indicate I might find equally intriguing! 

For example, last night, in a dream, I had written a couple of poems about chickens that my older brother - who fortunately remains quite alive in my dreams - found delightful. But when I tried to recite them for him, bam! Off the rails! Well, that might not be the best example. But you get the general idea. .  .  . So, damn .  .  . Where did I put my brain? Chickens, they were definitely about chickens, or maybe turkeys, Geese? Something with feathers. Or something we eat. Maybe beef?  Pizza? Where the heck is my freaking brain?

Thanks for the Metaphors

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Memory is a strange thing. It is universal and yet unique. Universally, memories are little pieces of spacetime that when knitted together, create the picture of our life gone by. Yet, we experience them uniquely, and since, as my sister recently pointed out to me, we cannot see inside each other’s heads, the only memory we can experience is our own. In this attempt to come to grips with this unique yet universal phenomenon, I find myself falling back on my old buddy, metaphor.

I mention my sister because we have been discussing memory. My initial inclination is to say that her’s is much better than mine, and by most traditional measures it is. However, for the moment let me quibble just a bit and merely assert that it is different from mine.

You see, her son and his wife “gave” her StoryWorth. The quotes are there because StoryWorth is an Internet-based gift that presents the recipient with topics about their life, topics that are generated by the givers. The recipient then creates a response; a story, essay, photos, copies of documents, etc. For example, “Who was your favorite childhood friend? “What was the “best” place you ever lived?” Stuff like that. Then, when the “subscription” is complete, the collected responses, which were shared with a small circle of friends and family online, are then compiled into a real, analog, "hold-in-your-hand” book. Margaret brought a copy along when we had dinner recently. I have only now had a chance to sit down and really spend some time with it. Oh. My. Or as digispeak would have it, OMG!

I had read the individual “chapters” online, but the physical book was a radically different experience. Margaret’s responses were staggeringly thorough and insightful, gracefully sketching a decades-long mural of a life that evolved in parallel to my own.  Sometimes achingly similar, other times totally alien. But always detailed to an extent that far surpassed my ability to recall. “How did she do that?” I wondered. And with the zeal of the almost fully retired, I set out to find out. Being still a media-guy, I turned to texting. I include the follow exchange with Margaret’s permission:

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ME: Hi. I have been looking at the StoryWorth books, and a question comes to mind. Where did all the content come from? Obviously you have some journals and stuff, but there seems to be an incredible amount of “memory” going on. I’m playing with a Wall about memory and was curious about yours. We have both read mysteries in which characters with photographic memories play a role. Mine doesn’t even approach those heights, quite the contrary on occasion! How about you?

MARGARET: Well. That’s a great question. Bill (Her husband - RLS) and I have talked about our vastly different abilities in remembering things, trying to tease out the differences. I keep saying “Don’t you just have a picture of x in your mind?”  And he says “No, only you have that.” Do I have a photographic memory? I don’t know. The only memory I know is mine, lol. It’s very visual and detailed and apparently quite different from his. I have trouble putting myself in his head, trying to imagine what his memories look like if they don’t look like mine.

Yes, I apparently have an excellent memory. I’m constantly saying “just a minute, let me picture that” and then I can find the sought after object, or remember the event or conversation, etc.Did I have source materials for a lot of the book? Absolutely. And I also found that just looking at some of the photos triggered a cascade of other very vivid memories. Some of them seemed as real as only yesterday. I guess if there are degrees or levels of photographic memory, then I’m definitely on the spectrum (haha) and I guess pretty far to the positive side. It would be fun to sit and talk about our memories sometime. If that doesn’t answer your question, shoot me more probing questions and I’ll answer them. But email would be easier on my finger.

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“Wow,” I wondered. “Why does she get to be on the eidetic memory spectrum, while I have trouble recalling the names of my college suite mates?” But then my battered self-confidence resurged and I thought, not necessarily better memory, perhaps just different. And that was when I began to think about the various metaphors for memory that might begin to explain the different “memory styles” manifested by my sib and I.

First, I had to wrestle with the notion of what is a “memory” other than an incredibly over-used meme in popular musical theater? It is, I decided, a slice of spacetime, unique to our existence, which led, naturally, I thought, to the flip book metaphor for memory. In a recent post I admitted to the fact that there were times - probably in 4th or 5th grade - when my attention was not actually riveted upon what was being discussed in class. One way I passed the time was to create little cartoons on the corners of the pages of my text books. You know, you draw little frame-by-frame stick figures on the corner of the pages, and then when you flip the pages you can make the little figure run off the page.

In David Baldacci’s books featuring Amos Decker, an FBI agent with an eidetic or photographic memory, he describes Decker’s memory this way, a sort of flip book on steroids, but his analogy is more 21st century - Decker replays things he has experienced like “playing back a DVD, frame-by-frame.” You get the idea. Everything you have ever experienced in your life is stuck up there somewhere between you ears. Folks who are, to use my sister’s phrase, “on the photographic memory spectrum,” apparently can access those experiences, and intentionally examine each frame, or clusters of frames and hence “remember” what happened in great detail.

Let me be clear, my memory works nothing like that. My memory works more like driving west down the largely undeveloped Route 66 back in the sixties with “roadside rests,” featuring single picnic tables usually next to a motel with a two word name like The Pines or Easy Rest. You accessed each unit directly from the parking lot. One door. One window. Sometimes with an air conditioner. Often there was a postage stamp sized swimming pool and a breezeway with a Coke machine. And there was this time just before sunset with the sun directly in your eyes, when driving became painful and you would find yourself pulling into the parking lot outside an Edward Hopper or Norman Rockwell painting. My memory works something like that.

OK, While that metaphor makes perfect sense to me, I realize I need to unpack it a bit. The "driving west just before sunset” part comes from the retina resurfacing experience that accompanies driving west at that maddening time of day when the sun is sitting on the horizon, below the spot where the sun visor can block it.  The blacktop starts to shimmer and you are reduced to driving along one-handed while using your other hand to block the sun.  But then occasionally when you do manage cancel the glare, all the stuff that was lost around the edges of your compromised vision creeps back in again, but somehow muted in pastels. Eventually those images gradually return to hi def when the sun drops below the horizon and ceases its frontal attack. Exhausted, you turn off the highway, pulling over a cracked concrete parking lot to a Hopper/Rockwell world. You get out, rub your eyes, arch your back, stretch your legs and look around.  

It is that fade from harsh glare through more gentle hues and, eventually, to recalled clarity that best describes the full range of my memory.

You see there are bits and pieces, faces and places, that so dominate in my memory that many other aspects get pushed into a kind of mental hibernation. You will notice that I subtly avoid the f-word, which in this case is get  “forgotten” and the various derivations of the root “f-word.” I make this distinction because in many instances I don’t really “forget” the supporting cast of my life - the strange camp counselor who taught us knife throwing, Mickey Fitzgerald, the earliest “girlfriend” can remember from first grade, the giant teddy bears that Mom made for Margaret and I one Christmas, but in an iconic Mom-like snafu, stuffed them with some itchy industrial foam, the Great Rock Show featuring two or three different types of quartz and granite scrounged from local construction sites - those smaller moments are all still there. As are many of the faces of the 20 or 30 thousand students I have taught in my 40 years in various college classrooms. 

The point is that, for me, those supporting cast members of my memories get washed out by the leads; those other bits and pieces, faces and places that burn so brightly that I still see them when I close my eyes at night, that populate the music I listen to ceaselessly. It is not that I value the supporting cast members any less - I just do not “see” them all that clearly. One of the first things any young stage actor is taught is how to “find your light.” This is different from hitting your spot in a performance designed to be filmed. In those cinematic instances, you hit your spot on the set and it is up to the director to get the camera to you. In live theater a spotlight illuminating a particular point on a stage will hit actors of different heights in different places. You want to, no, you need to, find your light. Only then do you feel that magical bloom on your face, the warmth that assures you that, yes, the audience loves you - or hates you, if that is your objective. 

The “leads" in my memories are those bright lights on my unique stage, bright, dominant, unceasingly precious.  But often it is their intense glow that allows me to peak around in the shadows for the supporting cast resting there in Hooper’s poignant cafes or Rockwell’s impossibly resonant scenes of everyday life. And there they are, not as magnetic as the leads, but then without them the stage would be bare.

So, no, I certainly do not have a hi-def photographic memory. But with occasional nudging it can turn out a pleasing pastel.

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To Emily Dickinson

You kept your poems  

Secreted in a drawer. 

Of a desk, or a dresser. 

I forget which I was taught. 

It was a very long time ago. 

The classroom was warm, 

I was drowsy, the window alluring. 

But I do remember being told, 

“She kept her poems in a drawer.” 

I do not think I dreamed it. 

But I never understood  

Why you would keep 

Your poems secreted  

In a drawer, desk or dresser. 

Until perhaps now. 

They were, I imagine, 

Poems to yourself. 

Desperate or simply brave 

Efforts to capture  

Those ephemeral callings 

From deep within  

Or unimaginably distant 

And anchor them  

With pen upon a page. 

Born in beauty 

Upon a second glance 

You gave in to  

Fear or reluctance. 

Perhaps they were 

Not good enough. 

And so you hid them, 

In a drawer of some type. 

Today we put them 

In a cloud. 

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The Artist's Prerogative

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Just a quick one, stimulated perhaps by a NY Times story on Banksy and his famous self-shedding painting of the girl and the heart-shaped ballon, now titled Love is in the Bin. Banksy had set the painting to “self-destruct” as soon as it was sold at Sotheby’s London in 2018, but the shredder jammed, and the half-destroyed painting was subsequently sold for more than the original undamaged work. Profit assured, no foul? It made me wonder about ownership and art. Does either authorship or ownership entitle one to destroy or alter an artwork that could be argued to be of such cultural value that it “belongs to the world?”  Mind you, I’m not arguing that Love is in the Bin is such a work, or that Banksy is a world class artist. World class marketer, maybe. But that’s not really the point. The question is what prerogatives attach to the creation or possession of an artwork? 

Salvator Mundi is perhaps a better example. This depiction of Christ attributed to Leonardo Da Vinci was sold for 450 million dollars in 2017 and disappeared. A couple of years later it was reported as being housed on the yacht of an Islamic Saudi prince. Strange context for an iconic image of Christ. Yet, nobody seems terribly put out about this - I mean he did, we assume, pay for it, and art often transcends theological fealty. Had the prince, however, opted to destroy the painting - something copyright law would allow - I assume the public reaction would have been quite different. I mean when the Taliban blew up two of the world’s tallest standing Buddhas in 2001, no one - or at least no one not in sympathy with the Taliban - said, “Well, spoils of war. They “owned” them they could do what they wanted.” So, the complexities of copyright law notwithstanding, there appear to be lines you aren’t supposed to cross. You can destroy your own work, or a work you own - the Banksy model. You can purchase an artistically unique work and keep it hidden away for your own pleasure - the Saudi prince model. But you aren’t supposed to blow up works of great cultural significance - the Taliban model.  I realize that copyright law addresses these issues, but like everything when you let the lawyers in, it is not always cut and dried. Each case seems to get adjudicated differently, and deep pockets are often an insurmountable advantage.

So, as I sit here creating a - probably tertiary - digital version of photograph of myself (photographer forgotten - chime in if s/he is you) that I manipulated in Photoshop and then spent an absurd of number of hours hand-painting and am now digitizing, I wonder how does the power of digital technology intersects with the notion of authorship and the prerogative of the artist? With the issue of provenance? Of original and copy? How do we parse provenance in the 21st century? I really don’t know who took the original black and white photo. I have had it for years - 40 or even 50. Does ownership still reside with the original photographer?  [I am now thinking a guy named Alan Williams. The photo was taken, I now faintly recall by his family’s home in the Les Cheneaux Islands off the coast of Michigan’s Upper peninsula sometime in the early 1970s, ’72, ’73?]  But current copyright law certainly asserts that the derivative versions are mine. I’ll stick some copies in here.

Original B&W

Hand-painted

When we were in Venice a year or so ago I remember being fascinated watching restorers at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco working on two large paintings by Tintoretto. Also, I continue to drop in online every now and then to watch the live coverage of the restoration of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. Both experiences reveal consummate professionals with otherworldly skills. I couldn’t help but wonder “How much of a painting can be ‘restored’ before authorship transfers from the original artist to the restorer?” Especially in the case of “old masters” where the “master” may have actually painted only a small percentage of the canvas, the rest filled in by apprentices - "a priori restorers?" - from his/her studio?  

And now imagine ultra-high resolution 3D scanners and printers capable of building The Night Watch, or Michelangelo’s David for that matter, brush stroke by 3D brush stroke, chisel stroke by chisel stroke to the point where chemical analysis of the materials used in the “copy" becomes the only way to tell copy from original.  Who is the artist?  Who owns the rights to the copy? And is the copy a copy? Ordinarily one can sell a copy as long as you are clear that it is a copy. But what happens when the copy is, by most normal measures, identical to the original? We went through this when music went digital back in 1999, the Napster days. Initially the industry went nuts - this was really, the labels thought, “the day the music died.” But eventually we all became acclimated to the new reality, and artists discovered that they didn’t really need the big labels, and the music was resurrected with far more variety and flexibility.  Will the plastic arts and traditional drawing, painting, photography show the same resilience?

The potential confusion wrought by evolving technology isn’t the only problem. Reconstruction work on the Bamiyan Buddhas has been stymied by bureaucratic UNESCO regulations that require the use of “original material.” Well, the original material was reduced to dust by the Taliban, and the bureaucrats haven’t been able to work their way around that snafu, so the giant niches stand empty, save the shattered ruins. More recently, reconstruction work on the 850-year-old iconic French cathedral, Notre Dame, which the French Senate has declared should be restored to its “last known visual state" is similarly stalled by a debate between architects, cathedral officials, and UNESCO, again, officials - who apparently have a dog in this fight because the cathedral is part of the World Heritage site known as “Paris, Banks of the Seine.”

So, these are the issues that come to mind as I switch from my keyboard back to my Wacom graphics tablet. Fortunately, no one has offered me millions of dollars for either the originals or copies of my works, so I need not thrash about attempting to resolve these issues that seem to reside far, far away from the actual process of making art. However, should the odd Saudi Prince contact you with a significant offer, do send him my way. My people will talk to his people.

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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My Personal Thesaurus

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Initially I saw it as a color wheel for words. No doubt versions of it exist both online and on paper. Standard stuff, I imagine, in creative writing courses. Specific guides for writers and poets. A quick glance at Google reveals reams of candidates divided by age, discipline, audience and intent. But there is this problem. When you look at a classic color wheel for example, they all look the same: red across from green, yellow across from purple, blue across from orange. The whole Roy G Biv dominated world that tells us what colors “should” maintain “proper” relationships with other colors. Now go look at a sunset. Hmm. Seems nobody told the sunset about the color wheel. Every color on the wheel, and seemingly many that aren’t quite there, are slap bang up against each other and somehow it just comes out awesome.

I suspect that we would find the same phenomenon at work in the world of writing. The truly creepy world of AI that mimics literary greats or discerns an author from a few pithy snippets notwithstanding, I cling to the belief that the miracle of words on a page mystically link author and reader; that subtext, the heartbeat felt between the lines equals, and sometimes exceeds, exchanges born in the here and now.

To step sideways for a moment, I am currently composing what will be my last syllabus for a communication course at NC State University, where I have taught since 1981. The course is an online course, and in the syllabus I break several rules that have slipped into being for the online environment. Primary among them is the notion that videos should be brief and should not substitute for lectures. Not only are my online videos long - often over an hour - but they blatantly are the lectures. Even more egregious, they are sometimes lectures pulled from previous semesters - a few from years ago. Which brings us back to the motivation for My Personal Thesaurus.

Doing a live lecture to a large class is clearly live theater. Being an undergraduate theater major myself that never bothered me, except for the fact that you carried all those “live theater” anxieties with you when you went off stage. “Damn. I have done that bit on the influence of the Western on early film better.” “Did I make the distinction between Edison and Tesla clear enough?” One of the real benefits of online teaching is that I can, and shamelessly do, go back and pull what I hope were the days I hit a lecture just right, and paste that lecture into the current syllabus. And yes, I do warn the students that they will be seeing a number of “golden oldies,” during the course and that guy with varying haircuts etc., is really just different versions of me.

Back to the Personal Thesaurus; I have been doing what passed, for me, as creative writing for more than 60 years. The earliest publication, as I have mentioned here on the Wall before, was a poem in the school newspaper when I was in either 5th or 6th grade in The American International School in Vienna, Austria circa 1960 or '61. Thing is, I hope I have gotten better since then. But nowadays often when I finish a piece, prose or poetry, and think about sharing it with you here on the Wall I am often beset by those “live theater” anxieties: "I think I said that better before!" "What was that word?"

Ah, yes. "What was that word?” And hence my personal thesaurus. It is not as if I want to go back and steal a “better line” from a previous post - but a better word? Sure! Why not? So, I start this personal thesaurus. The current organizational structure is random. And that is a good thing. Something more structured may evolve, but I think I will resist it. After all I’m not really after a color wheel here - rather, more a sunset.

Harmony

Whippoorwill 

Dappled

Serenity 

Moonlight

Tranquility 

Enlightenment 

Intimacy 

Transcendence 

Gentility

Gentle

Silky

Silken

Enfolded

Thunder

Transfixed

Starlight

Shaded

Soft

Animation

Animated

Drowsy

Dozing

Dream

Dreaming

Dreamy

Smooth
Suspended 

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Weaving a Narrative in Our Personal Spacetime

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Back in the late 1980s communication scholar Walter Fisher gracefully wove together his own and other’s observations into the assertion that “we are the people of the story.” It is a theory that has stood the test of time well in the swirling, competitive arena of communication scholarship where the newest, shiniest perspective tends to garner the “buzz.” For those of you who want to explore the “narrative paradigm” in more detail, look up either Fisher or his intellectual forerunner Kenneth Burke in Google or Google Scholar. Fascinating reading but admittedly sprouting in some pretty tall cotton. After all, they did need to get published.  But in this post, while admitting that some of my rambling can be traced to the works of those to illuminaries, I am going to try to stick close to the third tenet of Distilled Harmony: Distill Complexity.

So here we go.  As we move from infancy to aged, we live one intricate story. Many times it seems that it is a story whose evolving plots and interweaving characters could put Game of Thrones to shame.  But, no, it is really just us.  Occasionally, from some high point or major crossroads in that story, we glance back over our shoulder and see the countless tributaries of our narrative Mississippi twisting and turning through the forests, wheatfields and bayous of our lives until, lo' and behold, there it is, running between our feet. We weave the fabric of that story from our beliefs and behaviors. Our choices. We often explain those choices to ourselves and others through a variety of symbolic narratives - these days often through the Internet, Facebook, emojis, etc., that whole constantly shifting panorama of the digital delta. The dominant foregrounded narrative is what we consider our “real” life.

However that “most obvious” narrative - the Mississippi between our feet - isn’t the “whole story.” Elsewhere here on the Wall I have toyed with the “many worlds” version of quantum mechanics. That view of reality asserts that every time we chose a path down the Mississippi, other versions of ourselves floated off up the Ohio, the Arkansas, or somehow even found their way over to the Nile and the Danube. 

Today I am particularly focused on the choices we make when we create narratives that  are admittedly fictional. The often playful narratives that spring from our imaginations - fanciful depictions of other “unlived” stories in our narrative. The would-have-beens, might-have-beens, could-of-beens, should-have-beens, of our narrative river. These imagined narratives are our art. We imagine a whole universe of stories that might have unfolded from the roads not taken. In these artistic imaginings we become the puppet master, deciding the script, motivation, and actions of all the players. We can even create the players themselves, from “whole cloth” as it were.

Of course, there is no “reality” against which those imaginings are measured, so they become their own reality. And as we give them life in any of a variety of forms they become literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, etc. Accepting that multifaceted notion of our personal narrative requires no great intellectual or creative stretch. Two-sides of a coin, mask of tragedy, mask of comedy, bass clef, treble clef - we do that all the time. Real world, world of the imagination; no big deal unless we start to conflate the two allowing our imagined narratives to infringe upon the harder edges of the real world inhabited by others. Wander too far down those paths and the guys with the butterfly nets show up.

But perhaps we should not be quite so hasty. The many worlds version of quantum mechanics would seem to allow for just such a conflation of the “real” and the “imagined.” According to my, no doubt incomplete, understanding of this aspect of quantum mechanics, our choices in the “real” world do determine the immediate course of our existential Mississippi, but they not simultaneously render the Ohio, the Arkansas, the Nile, etc., fictitious. Those “rivers not taken” continue to flow along carrying alternative versions of ourselves into alternative futures nestled within our personal spacetime.

Hence it occurs to me that our personal "quantum narrative" is a tapestry woven from all the lived, and the imagined narratives that reside in our spacetime, including those narratives that are the ‘unchosen siblings’ of those other lived and imagined narratives.

All of which brings me to this assertion, which may well form the opening of another, even stranger Wall post:

Spacetime can be envisioned as a onion of infinite narrative layers each part of which is contiguous with every other part. And, it would seem to follow that that which we define generally as “enlightenment" is the ability to sense, and/or make sense of, those contiguous points.   

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Prayerful Profanity

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We have always had a complicated relationship with profanity. Consider early cartoons. A character would drop an anvil on his or her foot, and a text bubble appears overhead: “#**!!&#!” The message is clear, the character is swearing, but you, gentle reader, must be protected from the actual words. “Oh, my gosh and golly!” or even “Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat!”  

This semantic pussyfooting stems from the fact that not all profanity is the same. In fact, I would assert that it is a rather large genre of human expression. Unfortunately, we have all been exposed to what I think of as “casual profanity” f* this and f*in'  that, or that SOB and those SOBs did this or that. Long ago a dear friend suggested that “casual profanity” stemmed either from linguistic laziness when one lacked the intellectual drive to consider a more specific bon mote, or worse, was an indication that one’s vocabulary was itself insufficient to the task of expressing elegant negativity. I have come to agree.  

Additionally, there is “affiliative profanity.” This type of profanity draws upon the same lexicon, but employs it to express affiliation, belonging to an admired group. It is most common among young adolescents and their older brothers and sisters attempting to demonstrate the current version of what was once defined as “cool” or “in” or, to reach back even further, “hip.” It is also quite common among performing artists attempting to market their own version of “cool-in-hip” to a market increasing dominated by the aforementioned youngsters.  And it spirals from performer to audience and back again. Sort of a linguistic carousel. 

But, I would like to propose a third major category of profanity, and this one strays a bit beyond the more common varieties: “prayerful profanity.” Just play along with me for a minute. Say you are approaching a sharp bend in a rural two-lane highway and as you round the bend - whoa! there is a huge truck passing another car and coming straight at you! It swerves back into its own lane seconds before hitting you head on! Or perhaps you are crossing a busy intersection, and your friend grabs your arm, jerking you back just in time to keep you from being pancaked by a city bus. The exhortations that escape you in those situations, moments when you truly believe you just cheated death, may indeed be those drawn from the vocabulary of both casual and affiliative profanity. However they may also include phrases from what I call “prayerful profanity,” or what others might call “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” 

Consider this; in those life-or-death situations we are doing anything but “taking the Lord’s name in vain.” We have never been more intensely prayerful, never more truly hopeful that we are not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but rather are seriously seeking some kind of immediate divine intervention. I’m not really sure where I am going with this, maybe just re-emphasizing the old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes. But maybe it goes a bit further, maybe I am suggesting that those “spontaneous spiritual exhortations” are not really profane, but instead possibly sacred. I read Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and The Profane when a young undergraduate and while my recollections have no doubt faded over the years, I don’t think he would object to my asserting that there is far more than just a seeming oxymoron in the notion of “prayerful profanity.” Perhaps such prayerful profanity is actually a window to spirituality, a moment of insight that can be further explored as an avenue to the sacred. To steal a concept from theoretical physics, maybe prayerful profanity is a kind of “wormhole” between the sacred and the profane. Something we might want to consider after our roadside near death experience - once our heart rate returns to something approaching normal. 

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Breaking Free From Fairy Tales

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There used to be a TV show called Fractured Fairy Tales. It was part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, which aired between 1959 and 1964. Fractured Fairy Tales featured “re-tellings” of classic fairy tales that confronted some of the questionable assertions contained in those timeless narratives. We are only now beginning to fully realize the impact of those classic tales which condemned generations of men to combat in the forest outside the castle, while shackling women to the drudgery within. But the task is not yet complete. Consider this possible ending to a seemingly sanitized tale:

“So, the self-identified prince and the princess drew their nano-quantum powered light sabers and removed all the dead wood from the environmentally managed forest, and used it to build a wind and solar powered castle in which they lived happily ever after.”

Better, but still needs our attention. You see, the last phrase will never come to be because living happily ever after is an emotional impossibility. Wait, wait, least you think I am a misanthropic frog with no hope of a kiss from well-meaning princess, I am open to this slight editing of the sentence: 

Princess, prince, light sabers, forest, wind power, yadda, yadda, OK here we go, here is the edit: “in which they lived contentedly ever after.” Contentedly ever after, there is a concept we can work with.

The problem with “happily ever after” is at least two-fold. First, in “happily ever after world” or HEAW, how would you even know you were happy? Happy is a comparative emotional state that we can only recognize when we compare it to “unhappy” or, heaven forbid, “sad.” Second, once we realize that there are other emotional categories, HEAW, requires that one lives constantly at the top end of the scale. Whoa, that seems exhausting, like living life in some sort of perpetual “river dance” frantically beating our feet across the floor to traditional Irish music with a huge Gaelic grin on our faces. Furthermore, HEAW seems existentially questionable, like the assertion from Lake Woebegone, that “all the children are above average.” Is it really possible, without brain surgery or powerful drugs, to be continually, unceasingly happy? Somehow I don’t think so.

Now, living contentedly ever after is a horse of a different color. Maybe even a Pinto, yeah, I like Pintos. Gorgeous creatures. OK, living contentedly ever after is a Pinto. First of all, and most importantly, contentment isn’t really an emotion, it is a state of mind, an attitude that we control. A wise friend once pointed out to me that we really have little control over the slings and arrows that life tosses our way, but we do control our reaction to those insults. Combine that notion with Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference,” and we are well on the way to contentment. 

As we live any kind of normal life, we are going to encounter events and individuals who make us sad, even angry. If we eschew mandated happiness and instead take Niebuhr’s advice we can walk away from those inevitable encounters, perhaps not happy, but serene - and I am content with that. You should be too, especially during those moments when you realize , “Hey, This isn’t really ‘Happily Ever After.’"

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