Virtue or Vice?

Yet another headline on “Why we beat the Neanderthals!”  It reflexively followed the common assumption behind most people’s view of evolution, especially human evolution – even from those who claim to fully “buy-in” to Darwin’s implications.  – They all still seem to see evolutionary success as a way for good to be rewarded.  They may couch, “good” as crafty, or violent, as easily as others may use terms that describe more conventional virtues; but in the end, evolutionary success is still seen as a reward.

You know?  It’s not.  The variables involved in any extinction, including ours when it comes, are so many and varied, so intertwined, and so heavily influenced by chance and sheer luck, that no such judgments can be supported.  Over wide time-frames and across disparate families of life, we may be able to say that some narrowly chosen parameters were best met – in the abstract – by a more “advanced” species rather than by a more “primitive” one; but then again, only by selecting which factors to measure and which to ignore so as to make the resulting judgments meaningless.

Any life-form is tied to the fabric of its ecosystem.  If it continues for a time then it has met its conditions.  If it dies off, it no longer meets the prevailing conditions it would have had to face if it had continued to exist.  There is no virtue or vice involved in either case.

The boy who survived the Titanic to become Nova Scotia’s first automotive traffic fatality.

My cousin recently mentioned this story.  It goes against all our notions of fairness, but it rings true, evolutionarily true.  A similar headline/obituary could be written for every twist and turn of evolutionary history.  Tremendous effort and unique good fortune combine for a while to allow success, even triumph; then a turn of events meets up with internal resources that for whatever reason are not at that moment capable of meeting the challenge ahead, and…

“Poof.”

Is this reason to despair?  Reason to fall back on toxic denial and fantasy?  Those were the responses of the twentieth century.  Those were the two major drifts that underlay the dramas of that time, growing out of the implications that came to light upon the end of the nineteenth century.  Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg’s discoveries countervailed by those of Maxim and Nobel and Lucian B. Smith, who first twisted barbs onto a wire.  Those implications were fully visible no farther into the twentieth century than we are today into the 21st, don’t let anyone kid you.  The sensitive and intelligent of that time, not merely clever and ambitious, saw what was there and what was coming, just as some of us might see ahead today.

The tragedy of the twentieth century was that everyone gave up.  Granted the implications of what had come to light, what continued to unfold and grind through the decades that followed, were immense.  This was an Enormity of the highest order.  Also, the shock of this awareness was devastating, in different ways to different people; but it devastated everyone in the way they were most susceptible.  Authoritarians entrenched themselves in visions of fear and control.  Emotives were paralyzed, turning to escape and fantasy.  Both of these branches of humanity ended up living out their preferred form of denial with a nihilistic abandon of our fundamental human responsibilities.

Short-circuit:  When a potential, a force, jumps from the desired, useful path and discharges noisily, and possibly dangerously, to the most convenient opposite pole.  Human striving has suffered much from the short-circuit, especially if not uniquely in this past century.  As understanding has spread beyond its earlier bounds, it has brought an awareness of difficulties beyond what earlier systems of belief had allowed to intrude.  At the same time, the erosion of naiveté at some levels removed the virtuous palliatives of those earlier beliefs and left a brooding, petulant cynicism in their place.  A short-circuit. 

A short-circuit that fed a cascade of short-circuits.  The kind of thing that brings down a grid.  A vicious cycle compounded of vicious cycles, that perversely broadened and deepened our potential understanding; while they gave us the necessary experience we needed to grow and mature; they simultaneously stripped us of our earlier coping mechanisms, and left us with habits of thought and reaction that have made us increasingly less-able to cope, increasingly stunted and immature.

This dynamic has surrounded us with sparks and flashes.  We are blinded by furies that in themselves are meaningless except for their power to blind us further, to deflect us from what matters, to obscure the few quiet surges of conductivity around us that might lead us to a better place.

Navigating this world today is like walking through some manic version of a fevered Tesla laboratory.  Sparks flying and electrocution only a tiny miss-step away.  We remove the numbing gauze of insulation we wear, at our great peril.  It’s easier, almost a necessity, to avoid the most viable currents since they tend to induce the strongest short-circuits.  This may be a unique identifier of our time, or it may have always underlain the situation of anyone pushing against the barriers of their time’s common view.

Yet is an awareness and acceptance of our tragic condition such a horrible proposition that it is better to march off into the abyss maintaining our denial?  Is this really a better alternative?  I don’t see how that can be true.  Every example of development from simple to complex, from potential to actual leads us to the opposite conclusion.  It is only by facing our realities that we can grow, mature, develop, find traction in our circumstances, and achieve some expression of the meaning we hold within us.  Like-wise every excuse given for the opposing views smack of rationalization, the whimper of the defeated caught up in the dramas of their addictions, surrendering to their immaturity.

What this does not imply is an acceptance of any form of short-circuit.  As much as our hair may tend to rise, our vision shimmering in fields of potential energy, ozone sharp in our nostrils.  There are dangers at every step along this way.  Hubris and judgments of self-superiority among the most obvious.  We have the urge to see ourselves as anointed, to have answers to be sold wholesale or retail.

That we need to guard against the precariousness of judgment, of ourselves or others; does not imply that there are no judgments to be made, or conversely that all choices are equal, or that in reverse again, that only certain judgments are valid.  This shimmering complexity seems dizzying, but dangerous mostly for the potential short-circuits this moment exposes us to, not for any underlying falsehood of this insight.  That it puts us in the difficult position of having to navigate between self-delusions either of grandeur or of nihilistic abandon, only clarifies our actual position, removing the insulation we normally wear to cover our potentiality, as if hiding from this constant of our reality somehow gains us some benefit.

We are always on the edge between self-serving platitudes and anxious, soul-sapping doubt.  There is no shelf on which to rest, at least not in this life.

I chose to limit my concerns to this life.

Short-circuits!  Everywhere!

I’ve called this forum, soapbox mostly so far, Horizons of Significance.  This term captures for me the scene of action I find to be where the struggle for our future plays out.  This term covers a habit and practice of searching, seeing, doubting and analyzing whatever appears over myriad horizons, so as to come to grips with them.  Not pronouncing, not solving, not despairing, or ignoring, simply coming to grips with them.  A perpetual and necessarily contingent set of operations going on into the future until I lose the power to continue.  A metabolism as essential to living as breathing or eating, no more right or wrong, no more virtuous or vicious, it simply is. 

It’s interesting, or can be, as are all of life’s necessities.  Engagement combined with awareness, carried out in a spirit of respect for what it makes possible.  This process helps us maintain our continued existence on this stage where we can act and carve out meaning for ourselves.  Our second imperative after mere survival has been met.

To me, the worse tragedy comes from abdicating possibility, not from realizing life’s tragic condition.  Hiding in fantasies, whether passive denial or  actively chasing after chimeras; from the wish for immortality, “do-overs,” either here or on some other plane, or finding refuge in burning anger, resentment and fear.  These I find to be worse than tragedy, although the existence and persistence of these attitudes is firmly part of our human condition and cannot be wished away.

At best we can carve out a shifting, imperfect and often occluded awareness of our conditions.  No-one is immune to falling for these traps.  Any claim, can so quickly transform itself into its opposite, a claim of humility has its own special dangers, along with any striving after “perfectibility.”  For myself, one major implication of these reflections has been my need to abandon any pretense of codifying and popularizing any strain of human “improvement.” 

The lure of this hope has been strong for me.  It has led me along a way I now find untenable.  I can’t be party to any system that claims to lead others to a better place.  The task is beyond me.  It is sufficient, and at the limits of my capacities to simply follow the craft of writing and attempt to do what I can; to think and write and communicate wisps of what might be true.  I do not see how I can do anything more, or different from that without doing violence to myself and to anyone I come into contact with.

I have made changes.  I want to focus on what I choose to affirm.  I claim no rights beyond the right to be my own agent and maintain as much autonomy as I can manage in this world.  For me, claiming any ability to do more than that has been a mistake.  Not something I regret, but something that once recognized I am compelled to change.

I am aware of what I am aware of, mostly because I’ve had a life of dealing with my own fallibility.  My propensity to short-circuit is no less than anyone else’s.  If I am to feel as if I am proceeding towards greater self-awareness and potential synchrony with my surroundings, then I must follow and trust my own counsel when I’ve engaged it, and have found a foothold from which to move forward.  A foothold, not a shelf, not some lasting verity that withstands the ages, a foothold that might not have been there yesterday, or if it was, that remained hidden, and that might crumble away and be gone again tomorrow.  I’m not here to pave a highway, simply to pick my way through what amounts to a life and leave whatever record I’m capable of in case anyone might be interested in one who passed this way.

This represents a loss for me, there is comfort in numbers.  It will require strengths I’ve not been able to master before to proceed.  I’ll need to rely on myself more, and in a way, open myself more fully to the consequences of engagement with others.  I won’t be embracing solitude, the opposite. I’ll be pursuing more connections than ever.  But whatever connections I make beyond those already the accumulation of family and long history, will be made in the light of my conditions.  I will strive to maintain an honesty growing from a realization that I can’t help anyone unless I can first help myself.  Beyond that, I can only help others by hewing to my tasks and providing a record of my passing steps, as much a cautionary tale as a source of direct enlightenment.  I can’t expect any better outcome.

To attempt to be clear, – A great ambition of mine, even as I seem to continually obfuscate. – I will be focusing my efforts on my own work; reading, writing, talking and listening, learning and teaching, looking for outlets, and looking to find a living at what I do.  I just won’t be trying to complicate this difficult task by trying to do anything more.  I’m aware this means I will need to rely on others even more than I had thought.  As I do this, I will also strive to be more clear for myself and those I interact with; on what that reliance implies, what the give-and-take amounts to, and what its ground-rules are.

I’m not here to tell anyone what to do or think, just to wrinkle out whatever finds its way into my thoughts and metabolize it into my writing.  For now, I don’t limit myself to fiction, although I am tempted to think that essay-writing smacks of pontification by comparison.  At least for now, I find it useful.  Perhaps the same fault could be found in limiting oneself to fiction and abandoning direct address.  I don’t know.  I’ll continue to grope about.

For the foreseeable future, a time-frame that gets shorter and shorter in duration as change accelerates, anyone interested in my efforts should look here.  These “pages’ are my primary outlet, and on these pages I will announce any future turns-of-events.  I hope to, in a phrase I heard a few days ago spoken by a musician opposed to the miss-use of her songs by those who would coerce and torture,

“I hope to inspire, at least to entertain.” 

I can see no higher or more deserving ambition than to follow this dictum.

I hope you will join me.  Participation is quite easy, join as a reader, subscribe, post a comment, or make a rating.  If you find anything of value or interest, take a moment to pass it along to someone you know.  I ask that you do these not out of any obligation, the obligations are on my side and self-imposed at that!  Just don’t leave it to some unknown others to spread the word if you do find anything here you care about.  The dual responsibility of finding meaning and passing it along belongs to each of us and can have no proxies.

At this point of reassessment and renewal of my commitment, I’d like to say,

“Welcome!”  and,

“Thank you.”

I’m compelled to a post-script,

This moment of heightened awareness of the precariousness of my conditions, of ours, seems special.  It isn’t, other than in the realization.  We are all like the boy who survived the Titanic, at least for now, so long as we are still here, the finality of our tragedies not yet having overtaken us.  There is nothing special in this.  There is no virtue in such an awareness, no vice either, its just the way it is.  It's what we do with the time we have that matters.  Why? Because we chose it to matter, no more, no less.  We have a choice.  We live when we exercise that choice positively, affirming something true about ourselves.  In so doing we affirm all of life and counter – for a time – the inevitability of decay and entropy.

Meaning, satisfaction, they are ours to forge from the scraps we find within us and around us.  There is no reward for good behavior imposed from outside.  It’s hard enough to achieve what matters to us, even to recognize what may be possible.  Distractions and mis-directions only compound those difficulties, raising the chimeras of validation and paradise imposed. 

These only keep us from holding onto the only validation possible, the only paradise we can know; that of our own striving and making, held within a conception of security that is certain there is an end.  This isn’t reason to despair.  Along with an awareness of our stage, we are nothing without an awareness that we are on it only for a limited time, a time not to be wasted on repenting, or waiting for rewards; but a time to act and think and live, for ourselves and whatever and whomever we find of value around us.

Rob Wigsten, In memoriam

This is the text I read yesterday at Rob Wigsten's Memorial Service.  I will be writing more about Rob, and what he means to me; but for today, I wanted to get this post up.

One of the amazing little surprises I've had recently has been the number of people who've been drawn to this site by my simple mention of Rob, in the post I made just after his death.  It's another of the many ways Rob continues to help me.  I can see him shrug if I had the chance to tell him about it, or about the number of people at his service, the sheer size and quality of the community that had this man at its core.  I know I'll have much more to say.  For now, here's this.  I'll be adding links to sites that are planned to honor him.  I'm honored by my connection with him, and the way that seems to be continuing in this virtual world…

To write is to attempt to put words between ourselves and our own mortality.  It is to affirm again and again that we have something to say, something worth hearing, and something worth keeping.  Something that might outlast us and continue to reside in people’s minds, in people’s hearts, even after we are gone.

Rob taught me that.  Not in so many words, although he did use so many words!
That’s part of the point.  Rob liked to talk.  There I said it!  But he talked because, for him, life was interesting, full of import.  He burst with life and had to share it.  He did share his life through an outpouring of words.

This was a key understanding for me.  To learn to love Rob, I – I think each of us has had to come to grips with this in our own way.  Many people who talk a lot, do so out of ego.  They like to hear their own voice, they don’t care a whit about what others may think or feel so long as they have a stage.  Rob wasn’t like that.  Not at all.

His exuberance might carry him along in an extended monologue, but at the slightest hint his listener might feel excluded, he would apologize and he would listen – really listen – at least until he could no longer contain his exuberance and off he’d go again!
There was something similar about his temper.  Yes, Rob had a temper!  But underlying his quick anger was a genuine and deeply felt humility.  He wasn’t one to hold a grudge, and he was the first to laugh at himself, at his own foibles.  Beneath his anger was an instinct for justice, an impatience with pretense and hypocrisy.

I can’t think of Rob, talk of Rob, without remembering the first time we met.  Some of you know the story.  There aren’t many people I can say I can picture precisely how I first saw them?  For me there are very few and Rob was one.

We didn’t meet exactly, Rob marched into my life one day.  His big, old, ratty truck, with Emma riding shotgun, pulled into my driveway and there he was!  Everything I came to love about Rob was there in that first exchange.  His decisive action, his generosity, his open nature, his expectation that if he extended his hand in friendship it would be reciprocated in-kind, or to-the-devil with you!

I needed a friend then, don’t we all?  He didn’t know he was there to give me so much, he was just being Rob, looking for someone to have an adventure with.  He had a cause, a burning desire to achieve something excellent.

We think of Rob as impulsive, but with this boat model project we shared he was patient, methodical and long-sighted.  We took a year to prepare, and he accomplished his mission.  He was always so proud of what we had done, and how his adversaries had been so thoroughly flummoxed that they had changed all their rules to defend their self-righteousness; giving Rob and me another victory, one we laughed over year after year.

Not enough years.  How could they have been enough.  Four years ago, I remember that day distinctly as well, Rob told us he was ill.  He seemed to be taking it better than I did.  The crisp, wintry air, my young friend, his young wife, his young family.  How would any of us manage?

Over these last years Rob showed us.  He faced his condition head-on.  He worked steadily to stay as well as he could for as long as he could.  He dealt with all that life sent his way and prepared for his family, pushing ahead the renovation of their home, dealing with the aftermath of his mother’s death, seeing his girls through those critical years of transition from childhood to becoming young women.

Was it enough?  We all miss him, but I dare say I don’t feel cheated at this loss.

Instead, I feel honored, and lucky, to have had the time together we did share.  Grateful for the lessons in living, and dying, Rob has given me.

Rob wanted to write.  He did write some, just before and after he got sick.  It’s too bad he didn’t get to pursue it.  But then, he did fulfill that goal of writing I mentioned at the start.  He used words, and they wedged themselves firmly between him and his mortality.  He won’t be forgotten.  His words, and the spirit behind them, live on in our hearts, in our memories, in the way we will all go forward in our own lives, and hopefully, as we approach and face our own deaths.

I’m sad that Rob’s gone, but mostly I’m grateful I knew him.  I think we all share that gratitude.  It’s what I hope we all take with us as the best, most lasting, truest memorial for our friend, Rob Wigsten.

Drawing Distinctions,

The following is an address to be given at the first session of a class at a school that, as far as I know, does not yet exist.  Nor do I know who the students might be, or their circumstances.  What I do know is that I’d like to be there, at the front of that room, confronting their eager or timid faces, with the prospect of a long series of sessions to follow, and more after that.

As with anyone else, it’s dangerous for me to tie my sense of self to a single occupation or type of activity.  I’ve trained as a painter, worked as a designer in disparate fields, and I’ve become a writer.  While these activities have, to a certain extent been sequential, serial points of focus; they are all aspects of me, parts of me that I have no wish to permanently renounce while I pursue others.  If there’s anything I’m happy to renounce it’s my previous reluctance to pursue them all in whatever avenues present themselves.

In that light, listen to what I would say to this inaugural class on that inaugural day…

Drawing Distinctions,
Learn to Draw, Learn to Think!

a hypothetical address to the first class…

We tend to think of drawing as what artists do, or as a means of self-expression.  We cannot afford such a limited view of such an important activity any longer.  When an artists draws, or a designer, when any of us doodles, or scratches out a map or a simple chart; we’re thinking.  We are making decisions, we are positing assumptions, and making judgments.
 

In a world in which we need, more and more, to deal with whole systems, to leave behind outmoded, linear thinking; we need to adopt habits and methods that promote seeing things whole, even as we deal with details; deal with the fine grain while not losing sight of the big picture.  How is the part integrated into the whole, not statically, but within a living, breathing, dynamic engagement with our surroundings?

Drawing is an ideal medium for approaching, learning, and practicing these habits of mind, and of the body, developing a set of practices that can unlock our potential. 

My proposal,
Drawing for the Rest of Us!

We all learn to read and write.  We don’t just reserve these lessons for those who intend to be novelists, poets or journalists!  Why do we admit such a narrow view on learning to draw?  Why do we, even for ourselves, see this crude assumption that drawing is for artists, or for those interested in dabbling into their “feelings?”  This is not to disparage any of these groups or activities, without the so-called professions into which these kinds of basic human talents and skills have been shoe-horned for so long, we might have lost the accumulated practice and wisdom of millennia within the short span of the last few centuries.  We owe the profession of art much for this, but we need to bring such basic human practices as drawing, molding, sculpting, and return them to wider use.
 

Even as an aspiring artist, if one is true to those aspirations, true to all that this can mean, it has been essential to begin by putting aside notions of preciosity and talent while exploring the foundations of the practices of eye, hand and mind behind the universe of activities that fall under the simple term drawing.  Even more so, and hopefully more easily since we begin without the baggage of expectation of an aspirant intended for a great career,  we need to put such vanity out of the way right from the start.  We are here to learn to draw, not show off.  We’re here to celebrate humility in front of one of the greatest humblers there is, a blank sheet and a stick of charcoal!

Drawing, the italian word desegno from which our word design descends, points at the direct connection between drawing and distinction.  Not distinction as a call to empty cultural superiority, but distinction as the fundamental human act of choosing this instead of that.  This sense is best captured in english when we say, “Drawing a distinction.”  That is what we do when we draw.  It relates back to that primordial act symbolized in Genesis, separating light from dark!  We touch the paper with our stick and that’s what we do.  We wipe with the back of our hand, a rag, an eraser; that’s what we’re doing, separating light from dark.  Before moving on to the whole gamut of actions and their imports, this is our fundamental action when we draw.

This truth, if we allow ourselves to absorb it, and let it inform our actions, presents us with the underlying power of drawing.  By taking the ephemeral mental processes of looking, deciding, acting, responding, and repeating this array over, and over, from first, this line of attack, then that one, from within the heat of a passionate engagement, then again from a cool place of detachment and hard-won outside views – what used to be called an “objective” view before we realized there was no such thing. – By letting us experience this full panoply of what it means to see, think and act; and placing the output of this range of present moments upon a surface, preserving the tracks of our actions and placing them where we can see them, learn from them, and potentially even communicate with them; this is the true miracle of drawing.  This is the purpose behind  this program, the reason we are here in this project.

This is a call for a sweeping change in how things are done, but one that only requires that we gather with a few scraps of paper, sticks of carbon, and an open attitude of mind.  We can recapture what was long the case, beginning when humans first raised a stick and drew it across the sand, took a lump of colored earth and dragged it across a rock-face, or pulling a slender, blackened reed from out of a dead fire, ran it delicately across a skin.  We can take joy, certainly, for that is one of our greatest treasures, but even when the output doesn’t “look like much,” even when we are struggling, and the tracks we leave are clotted, apparently confused; we can take ownership of this grand connection between our minds, our bodies and the reality that surrounds and infuses us.  We can do so with confidence that although our means are meager, they are up to the task.  The results are to be formed within each of us, will continue to inform and inspire how we live our lives despite what may happen to the artifacts we’ve produced to get there.

We lean to draw the same way we learn to live, by example, by a give-and-take, both within ourselves and between us, looking to those who came before, while also quietly looking within to see how our natures respond, and what they tell us we require.  This is learning stripped bare.  This is learning that could be done in pantomime, although it can be fed by a fountain of words, read, spoken, written.  It’s a learning that draws from all we know and recasts how we see and how we think and how we act.  Look at it this way, then can you see why we need to take this back from the specialists?

We each begin where we find ourselves, and we are, in-the-end, the only arbiters of our ultimate progress.  There is great freedom here, but as with any freedom that is fully embraced, there is great responsibility, although again it is directed towards ourselves.  We do not look to impress, we do not look to collect, or to acquire, we look to learn and develop.  Great things only come when people take on such tasks, accept such responsibilities and take seriously their desire to strive, while putting their interior rewards ahead of any outward trappings.

We will be cavalier with the physical output, but not contemptuous of it.  We learn from what we’ve drawn, what the other has drawn, but beyond their ability to communicate something felt and thought and acted upon, the sheets themselves have no inherent value.  They are also ephemeral.  Newsprint and charcoal are cheap, they embody our humility, give us the opportunity to be profligate when we need to, but they fade and die easily like flowers once picked.  They can be collected and pressed dry in a folder, but they will wither away no matter what we do.  But in our minds, especially as we develop our abilities to see and retain what we see, they will live on, also in our hands, our arms, our bodies.  The physical memories, the traces in our nerves and muscles and sinews of the actions we’ve taken to make them will stay with us.  They will build up within us, and maybe some of us will find the need and the opportunity to work in more permanent mediums outside these walls.

We will begin with ourselves, a stick of charcoal and a sheet of paper.  Later we will add props, things arrayed in space to be captured on a surface.  Later we might move on to what’s been called, “Life Classes,”  an apt term for facing a living body and attempting to capture something from its physical existence and wrestle it onto a sheet.  While this might imply a progression, in the most meaningful sense it isn’t one.  In the end, you are back where you started, you and a marker and a sheet of white.  At every point along the way, there is a dynamic, a tension between what is added, complexity, and what is a given, the constant need to return to the basics, to practice, be mindful, and act as though for the first time.

You may have inklings of what this implies, what is in store, but no preconception will prepare you for the power and wonder of the first time you make a leap and discover something new, something hard and intractable, but something true about yourself, about your situation, about the world.  You will find in these moments great satisfaction, as well as a sense of strength, an ability that has grown in you that will call out for wider application.  You will also, I hope if you are to really learn from any of this, learn a deep humility.  This humility will come from your increasing awareness of both how difficult it is to wrestle with reality, and how little overt control you have over the outcome of your troubles.  The slippery qualities of inspiration, the accidents that conspire to bring about your greatest achievements, achievements that you participate in, but can never own.

We’re forever striving for great things here, but forever caught up in the realities of imperfect attention, distraction, and the intractability of physical things.  It’s just like life.  It’s just like life too in that we choose to give it meaning beyond the mere physicality.  It differs from life in two ways.  It does not matter, outside of the meaning we give to it.  This might be strictly true of life, but that truth is hidden behind layers of instinct and habit that present us with such levels of fear and dread at the mere contemplation of such a thing.  It’s also different in that it is outside of us.  In life we are trapped, it often seems, within our subjectivity, with few means to step outside, to learn from other views.  Through our simple acts of decision, and the practices of drawing, we create an opportunity to work in a laboratory of life, where we can externalize what we choose to, what we are capable of discerning, of delineating, and then hold it in our hands, look at it, share it with others, and communicate our perceptions about it in ways that can be incredibly concrete, while remaining ineffable, retaining their mystery.  These “either AND or ’s”  are the deepest potentials inherent in drawing.  They provide the medium for the value within the practice, and they provide the medium for retaining and communicating these lessons to others.

While we hold these promises in front of us, we need to strip ourselves of much that we seem to hold dear.  Along with that amour propre, that wish to be satisfied with ourselves, and to impress, that is tied up into our notions of ego, and pride; we will be stripping away assumptions, stripping away the very habit of resting comfortably within a cocoon of assumptions as we hide away from the realities around us.  To be perfectly clear, one of the first and most basic assumptions we will be dispelling is that you “know how to see.”  This will be followed in quick succession by the assumptions that you “know what you mean,” and that you “mean what you say – or in this case what you’ve drawn.”  Wrap all of that in the dissolution of your assumptions to know “Why, you do what you do,” and you’ll see that the so called “practical” difficulties of learning to draw are really nothing!

Awe, wonder, fear, dread, confusion and moments of joyful transcendance!  These are what we’ll be experiencing here as we proceed.  And at this point, perhaps it’s time to  begin to do just that!…

Squidoo

In my last post I used Seth Godin as a fall guy, the bearer of “bad news.”  My views are in a dynamic tension with his, but he cannot be discounted lightly.  In this short post, I’d like to lay out why I’ve joined his latest venture by creating my own presence on Squidoo.  As with most, all?, successful web ventures,  Squidoo has a cute name, and a simple concept, well articulated and well established.  It provides a platform for “user-generated content” where people can build their presence on the web.  This all seems safely, innocuously, so web 2.0!  Trendy and light….  But it uses its internal parameters as a learning tool.  It subtly, and at times blatantly, leads us to appreciate an underlying ethos.

That ethos is powerful, and refreshing.  Fundamentally, it celebrates passion, asking us  to do things because they are meaningful to us instead of merely acting out of narrow perceptions of self-interest.  It’s a bold concept, one that has been behind everything I’ve tried to do, and one that is best entered into in an environment where the stakes are apparently low. 

I had a similar idea, although not so sparely put, in Designer & Client, when I posited that imagining, and then creating, a pleasure boat was an activity outside of normal questions of necessity and expedience.  That if this concept were embraced, and the process appreciated to its potential, it could bring about transformative change.  “Go through deciding, designing, building and sailing a boat with no other purpose than to satisfy yourself, and you will change, for the better.”  That could have been the title….

The intervening years have pushed even small, humble pleasure boats out of the reach of many, and few of those who can still afford it are looking for enlightenment in the process.  What had been a quixotic exercise is now?…

Squidoo brings these ideas into a field that has much wider scope in our day.  Many people around the world have internet access.  Everyone has something they care about, something that matters to them, deeply, for whatever reason, or no articulated reason.  With Squidoo, they all have a place where they can showcase their passion and share it with a wider world.

Many tend to see the desire to forge a web presence as a narcissistic urge, a desire to say, “Look at ME!” and have the world take notice.  This is a cynical view, I fear.  Cynical because it ignores our fundamental need to connect, and feared because for so many, this stream of electrons seems the most viable conduit to making viable connections. 

This is a basic human need, human drive.  We cannot live in isolation, in a world where our cares, the things and people we care about most, are ignored.  We are more and more isolated, atomized, surrounded by strangers in our everyday circles within the real, not virtual world.  Ideally, we would not need to bend this basic drive to fit down the thin reed of an internet connection, but there we have it.  Realities are ignored at our peril.  Denial only hurts the one hiding from facts on the ground.

That brings up another positive, laudable initiative behind Squidoo.  A refreshing overturning of what marketing has meant for a century, that outgrowth of Nazi social science more damaging ultimately than rocketry, less obviously deadly, but much more pernicious.  Seth is part of a movement looking at the changes new media have brought, searching out what these changes mean to the dynamics of broad-scale communication.  The era of scarce media and pushed messages is winding down, crumbling not only due to the availability of cheap internet, but wider forces, the kinds of things I fill most of my posts with.

Without restating their case here, imperfectly, I want to stress the kernel I find so laudable.  Seth maintains, insists even, that economic value can be found – I’d like to hope can ultimately only be found – by doing what you are compelled by your inner passions to do, communicating whatever that is with all the authenticity you can muster.  Muster, not fake, “Effective advertising is all about sincerity kid,”  you can just imagine a character on MadMen saying, “Learn to fake that, and you’re got it made, buster!”

I’ve written on this before, authenticity, authority.  What I like about Squidoo is that it is a tool to practice authenticity, and develop a true authority, developing a voice of your own that carries a truth in it.  One might start by creating a fan page for some celebrity, fully immersed in pop culture’s destructive web, and proceed step by step towards discovering for oneself what is good about having a passion, how it gets better as one hones the what of it, the how, and arrives at a why.

Enormity

 In a recent mini-blog post Seth Godin makes the following observation:

Enormity,

Enormity doesn't mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible. 
The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn't work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won't get a bigger donation, you'll just get averted eyes. 

If you've got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you've got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won't pan out, we're going to move on in search of something smaller. 

Not fair, but true.

I thank Seth for bringing this to my attention, this is a social reality, something we need to deal with, something we need to take into account. As I’ve thought about it, after first being angry at the messenger, “Those damn marketers!” I realized the problem goes much deeper. Sure marketing, a profession built up over the last four or five score years, has become a leading force in shaping how we see the world and orient ourselves to it.  It has long been busy finding ways to usurp basic human drives, and sell the resultant insights to those who want to take advantage of us; but even that is just another human drive, an expression of humanity prevalent during a particular kind of extremis.

Enormity. It doesn’t “sell.” Yet enormity is what we’re facing, on many levels and from all sides. That’s what happens at the end of an Era, at the start of a new one. No one likes to have to accommodate to unpleasantness. It’s like getting bad news from the doctor,

“I don’t have time for that now, I have plans!”

If we haven’t been there yet, we can all imagine it, have seen it happen to relatives, friends…. It does no good to demonize people for this kind of reaction, placing blame, working up guilt will not help the situation. No one is at their best when they feel attacked. How do we expect ourselves, or anyone else, to rise to Enormity if in our desire to motivate we pile on layers of bad-feeling, remorse, atop the, well, the Enormity we face?

Of course, marketing has long used a similar cycle to manipulate us for their bosses. Point out reasons for dissatisfaction with the status quo – within very narrow and lucrative parameters – and develop a sense of crisis, make us feel that without an answer – the answer they’re selling – our lives will be tragic, shallow and meaningless. This last part has been abbreviated into expressions like “relevant,” “current,” even simply “happy.” By placing us in ever-heightening cycles of dissatisfaction, an ever-more hyper search for an easily purchased appeasement of our anxiety, exhorting us to buy something! A soda? A car, A war? These habits have left any normative sense of harmony by the wayside, and made this dynamic perhaps THE driving social force today.

This genie has been let out of the bottle. The corrosive effects of this mega-dynamic have led to the failures of governance, of most of our institutions, we  experience today. We've all developed such deeply infantile habits that we’re unable to see our own deeper self-interests, even our own self-preservation, as of greater value than being continually condescended to.

I keep thinking what it would have been like if Paul Revere, on stepping into the saddle, had stopped to wonder if he’d worded his message properly. “The British are coming!” “Hmm… is that a bit harsh?” “I mean, how will people take it?” “I don’t want to be a downer….”

Neither did he feel the need to couch his warning as a chance for his “audience” to vicariously feel part of some stirring fantasy from some relentlessly hyped mass-entertainment. He didn’t say, “I’ll be back!” or “Do you feel lucky?” He simply warned a citizenry of a fact, “The British are coming!”

Countless examples could be taken from any slice of world history that show a similar disconnect between the way people have faced threats before and the way we now expect to be treated. Perhaps in the past, people on-the-whole were no more or less realistic, they've always had myths and fantasies to insulate their self-image, their sense of vulnerability, and cope with forces beyond their control. But rarely did these coping mechanisms fail us as badly as they are failing us now, certainly never on such a broad scale?

The Aztecs on meeting Cortez; countless native North American Nations on meeting the British, French and later Americans; had similar melt-downs. The Aborigines in Australia… But all of these were long standing cultures facing challenges to their circumstances far outside their previous experiences, leaving them precious little room or time to adjust… Hmm…

How did they respond? Briefly, and with brutal abbreviation, the Aztecs decided they were meeting one of their gods come-to-earth, conveniently a god of destruction. Cortez was eager to accommodate. Many native North Americans faced catastrophic epidemics leaving them reeling as they retreated against overwhelming odds. In the end, too many had too few resources left to do more than retreat into fantasies of a physical return to their spirit world, or just short-circuited into alcohol and drug abuse. This has become a tradition in North America for displaced and marginalized peoples ever since; a tradition now extending to many of those one would have thought of as among the privileged classes, as a look into suburbia with its locked down schools, meth labs, and chronic alcoholism will attest.

As with the list of dead rock & rollers, this list of marginalized and displaced cultures, unable to cope and adapt, all met fairly banal, stereotypical ends; apathy, and a retreat into displacing, self-destructive behaviors.

An irony may be that as we enter the new age dawning, members of these earlier displaced groups might be more likely to find hope, and a recognition of the connections with deeper realities, than will those who've prospered on the graves of their ancestors.

The reason for this might be that they were overtaken by the same storm now about to ravage us all. A storm that was able, temporarily – yes a few centuries count as temporary, even fleeting, in a human experience spanning many hundreds of thousand years – to roll over their more modest, and sustainable, accommodations to reality; but this juggernaut has lost its ability to continue. The historic coincidence of a virulently exploitative culture fueled by a copious, but one-time, abundance of accessible energy; allowed it to drastically, dramatically overshoot the fundamental planetary economy – the planet’s abilities to sustain any particular set of circumstances, given the limitations of its resources and systems.

Enormity again. I feel like someone trying to help a victim of overdose. They just want to nod out. Why must I keep bothering them? They probably chose this path to oblivion anyway. Why can’t I honor their wishes to be left alone?

Why indeed. First, let’s make a few distinctions. None of what I’m talking about is a call to survivalism, or some desire to wallow in apocalyptic visions. This isn’t about hunkering down, one against the many, or about raining down fire-and-brimstone on sinning masses. Those are variants within an array of stereotypical, symptomatic reactions to societal collapse. They’re not useful responses, just aspects of the pathology that got us here.

Like the drunken “Indian,” the freaked-out rocker, or even the furious and fed-up Weimar German, we are all in some state of toxic shock, and in need of a path through the painful symptoms of withdrawal from the addictions that got us where we are today. We need to be careful not to exacerbate the difficulties of withdrawal, difficulties that could lead us into even weaker states, states that lead us farther and farther from being able to face reality as it comes up to meet us. “The last thing I remember was a rush of air past my cheek, as my face hit the floor…”

This discussion has taken us around the conditions we need to be aware of. That this is a circuitous route is one of its virtues, as surprising as that may seem. We are so accustomed to having experts take us succinctly to the “cause of our problems,” and deftly lay out “solutions” in some “Bold Initiative!,” or Twelve Step Plan.” This kind of self-limited, linear thinking led us here, allowed us to ignore the warning signs,

"Ugh, let’s see, Is slavery a bad thing? Is it OK to wipe out whole swaths of the earth’s  flora and fauna and native populations? Does it make sense to spray poison on our lawns, fertilize-the-hell-out-of-them, and then cut them with a gas-mower once a week? Did I forget about the sprinkler? In places like Nevada?”

A small, skewed sample of the litany of warnings we’ve blithely ignored on the advice of those who’ve been so adept at compartmentalizing the world, so able to combine unprecedented abilities to make things happen with mind-boggling faculties of self-blindness to the "unintended" consequences. As a vaunted economist now spearheading our “Recovery” only recently said in answer to whether it would be prudent to consider the earth’s physical systems, and their limits, when making decisions about our economy smugly pronounced, “That’s not the right way to look at it.”

Enormity, Marshal Foch, leading French troops into battle in World War I had an eerily similar certainty concerning what the “problems” were, and what the “solutions” should be. “Send them over-the-top!” We’ve had waves of this kind of deeply ignorant hubris from all varieties of leaders over the intervening century. This has been yet another symptom we've so far failed to heed. We’ve tended to make excuses. “It’s only human nature!” “How could anyone have known…?”

There's a collective shame behind our acceptance of these individual attempts to deflect responsibility. Behind all such statements, and our blushes on hearing them, lies our own sense of culpability.  Our shame re-surfacing whenever we have turned our backs on Enormity.

In the Meantime…

It's been too long since my last post.  That's a common refrain on many blogs, I'm afraid, with haunting echoes of the confessional?  Life intrudes, inspiration wanes, there can be many causes.  Let me bring you up-to-date on my situation.

Over the last weeks I've completed a short story.  I'm considering the best way to include excerpts from my fiction here, whether as written posts or as podcasts, read aloud.  Any ideas?  I've also been deep into editing Pathtree's upcoming book.  While I've continued to have ideas for posts here, I've had less and less time to devote here.  It's simply a matter of triage.

In the meantime, this other work will influence future posts.  I'm committed to this enterprise.  The manner, and matter, of what ends up here will evolve as a result of these other projects.

In the meantime, I've suffered the loss of a close friend.  Rob Wigsten, 48, the father of two teenage girls, passed away after a long illness.  He was a good friend.  He taught us all so much.  He is missed.  I hope to write more about him sometime….

PathTree holds its inaugural reception tomorrow, Friday September 25.  I urge you to join us there, info at pathtree.com.  If you can't make it, check out our web site over the coming weeks, we'll be posting frequently as things continue to ramp up.

Losing a friend, embarking on a new endeavor, looking at immense changes of all kinds looming; all this points to our common need to come together, decide what's important to us, and act on our decisions.  These are, and will continue to be, constant themes throughout this journal.

In the meantime, forgive my silences, and the brevity of this post.

While we're here, remember, any and all comments are not only welcome, but will do much to move us forward.  Add a comment, or send an e-mail.  While you're at it, pass the link on to anyone you think might be interested.  It's the best way for this circle to grow.

Response to Mark Gordon's, To Undo the Folded Lie…

My partner, Mark Gordon, in his most recent post to The Conversation at PathTree.com chose to point to the anniversary of the start of WWII.  He invoked Auden's poem, September 1, 1939.  I feel it important to link to his post here, and have appended my response below. 

There is much that will overlap between what I write there on PathTree and what I write here.  Any differences will be more in nuance than obvious divergence.  For this instance, it seems the needs of both venues are in complete alignment. 

So fitting to mark this anniversary.  There is something about early September that has always held portents, at least in my lifetime….

I tend to focus more on that other September in 1914.  It began the whole train that led to ‘39 and beyond.  That it came first, or is arguably a “first cause,” is really irrelevant.  1939 did inaugurate a new era, not only in magnitude, but in kind.  The mass slaughters that were so guilelessly, even innocently unleashed in the parades of late August 1914, became true holocaust and opened the doors of our perception to visions of man’s abilities to destroy all life by the end of that struggle’s outburst in 1945.

I grew up in the shadow of that war.  All the adults in my youth had their lives shaped and measured by their relationships to that conflict.

There is something of both 1914 and 1939 about the current climate.  A confusion of willful ignorance, an innocence too tightly held to be genuine; and a delirious slide towards appeasement, a wish to do anything, besides act responsibly if only , ”the lights never go out, the music always play…”

As certainties crumble away to show themselves as mirage – as they are wont to do in such times – I find many of the old pieties about WWII to be shimmering and beginning to lose their power to act as anchors to the way reality’s unfolding “should” follow the rules. The significance seems to remain in the lead-ups, the dynamics that played out and culminated in these catastrophes even as their fairy-tale endings, meant to console us into believing that these, and every other tragic epoch, were resolved; that we are once again safely returned to a blissful rest, the rest deserved by those who “mean well.”

It seems to take a full generation, maybe two, for the visceral feel of what it’s like at a time like that – like this? – to fade away and be replaced, not by a churning sense of recognition, but by a deep and paralyzing incredulity.  We have yet to make the transition through this, this first, and perhaps most devastating aspect of a slide from delirious innocence to engaged acceptance in the active struggles any being must constantly be willing to maintain, in a give-and-take dynamic with slippery, elusive and potentially dangerous realities.

If only there was a way to stay in that moment’s awakening clarity, find ways to maintain that wary, yet thrilling sense of really living that comes when a crisis sweeps away the platitudes and commonplace that cloud our visions, and before some “Call to Action” is usurped by the pull towards hate and violence as a Righteous response.  There are these moments of choice that open up ,and give us a chance – perhaps our only chance – to chose engagement; a real life in play and counter-play with our enfolding realities instead of the apparent ease of ignorance or anger.

This is the Gift such moments bring, as hard as it is to accept that there is anything good about such moments.  It is a Gift offered only in times of the greatest need, and a Gift that is squandered at the most precarious cost.  This cost has escalated each time in the last century that it was offered and then derailed.  We are the heirs of these conditions, can we not do any better?