Prime Passage: Libra by Don DeLillo

(Here "He" = Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history."

Prime Passage: Art as Experience by John Dewey

"Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.

To grasp the sources of aesthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense and sense into motion -- constituting that animal grace so hard for man to rival. What the live creature retains from the past and what it expects from the future operate as directions in the present. The dog is never pedantic nor academic; for these things arise only when the past is severed in consciousness from the present and is set up as a model to copy or a storehouse upon which to draw. The past absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward."
(From Chapter Two, "The Live Creature," Art as Experience by John Dewey, 1934.)

Open Letter to The New York Times

My letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review appears in this Sunday's edition (May 3, 2009). They've elided my text in places (most tellingly in the opening achtung), tweaked it in others. Still, I think they're dignified to print it at all.

Here's the letter (with links added). Text omitted by the Gray Lady is restored in brackets. Bold text signifies Gray Lady additions or changes.

[ Earth to New York: ]

Michael Meyer’s essay [piece] “About That [Book] Advance…” (Sunday, April 12, 2009) discusses fiction publishing in terms that hardly ever apply in reality, or terms more relevant to the publishing of non-fiction. While advance payment is the rule for memoirs or informational books, only the minutest fraction of published fiction writers command up-front cash for work still unfinished.

The wildly lucky Audrey Niffenegger and her ilk notwithstanding, most fiction writers—even those with one or more novels to their credit—must labor, often for years, sans payment. What’s more, in our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among them labor sans all guarantees of eventual publication or income; one could argue—and demonstrate persuasively—that the greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism and status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. Laboring slowly, unhonored and unpaid and bound toward an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as New York parlance would have it, these writers have destiny for incentive—and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, they sing, and reap rewards that more than mitigate the annoyances of obscurity. Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed, and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy denounced [decried ] by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

[In the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Proust—and more recently Cormac McCarthy and the late Andre Dubus—our unsung have their forebears. It shall be said we did not know them at first. Meanwhile, they worked. ]

Rather than discuss contemporary literature or even contemporary publishing, Mr. Meyer’s article does little more than survey the New York Cult of Success. The art of language and story lives elsewhere, sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.

M. Allen Cunningham

Portland, OR

Prime Passage: Rabbit, Run by John Updike

"He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly, he loves the ones dressed for church: the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest walk in Rabbit's eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief. He could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, God, Rebecca, thank you, bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. People who know God rustle and stir about him, upholding him in the dark."

Prime Passage: At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag

From the book's title piece, "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning," the Nadine Gordimer Lecture delivered by Sontag in South Africa in 2004:

"... And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature."

My Kid Could Paint That

-- Creativity and commerce collide in the form of a four-year-old genius --

"The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality, everything which is made, is made to satisfy a demand artificially stimulated by sales propaganda."

The English poet Stephen Spender wrote these words in 1949 following a visit to the United States. By "spiritual goods" Spender was referring to works of art. It was true more than half a century ago, and it's true today: works of art and sales figures, creativity and commerce, rarely jibe (unconventional entrepreneurship excepted)

We all know American culture is consumer driven. By and large, Americans live in, by, and for the marketplace. And in today's age of global business, the effect of the marketplace is a great leveling out of culture, a homogenizing of experience. The marketplace likes broad appeal, it likes high sales figures, it likes a mass audience. It does not thrive on slow contemplation, individuality, eccentricity, or introspection. All of these things, which are at the core of real art -- both creating it and experiencing it -- are in fact a threat to the happy clatter of the cash drawer.

Thus, strange things happen when that which is spiritual, personal, and irrational meets that which is profane, collective, and statistical -- in other words, when art meets commerce.

This phenomenon is explored beautifully in the transfixing 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev. The film focuses on Marla, a four-year-old girl who loves to paint. Marla lives in upstate New York with her parents and her little brother, and her life is much like that of any other healthy, delightful four-year-old who loves to paint -- except for one thing: Marla's colorful creations have made her famous.

Where most child artists stick to butcher paper and fingerpaints, Marla creates large vibrant canvases using fancy acrylics, brushes, and a variety of application techniques ranging from smears to splatters to complex overlays of colors. Marla has exhibited her work in exclusive shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Her works have sold for upwards of $20,000.

"The paintings are incredible," says gallery owner Anthony Brunelli in the film. Brunelli was the first to curate Marla's paintings in a solo exhibition. That show, highlighted by the New York Times, sparked widespread interest in the petite genius's work. Soon TV networks began calling. Marla became a media darling. "Even if a four-year-old didn't do [the paintings]," says Brunelli, "you'd like ‘em. The fact that she is four makes it really incredible."

The kid's canvases are gorgeous, to be sure (see the online gallery at MarlaOlmstead.com), and there is something indescribably moving at the thought of such beauty flowing so easily and unselfconsciously through the brush of a girl yet to lose her baby teeth.

"When I am in Marla's presence," says Brunelli on Marla's website, "there's a weird feeling ‘cause I know there's something inside this girl that many artists look for their whole lives and never have."

Marla's paintings vibrate with the mystery of childish wonder, of magical freeness and unhampered creativity, and this mystery is the lyrical heart of My Kid Could Paint That. The film makes us linger on questions like:

-- Where does such purity and ease disappear to later in life?

-- At what point do we surrender the productive freedom and harmonious accidents of play for result-driven work -- and why can't we retrieve what we've surrendered?

At one point in the documentary, New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman comments:

There's a spiritual element to it which appeals to people ... People could read all sorts of things into her pictures. That there was some force at work, something larger than even Marla. That this child is speaking almost as a medium. And her innocence also says something about the ultimate cynicism of the art world.... [where] probably the worst thing you could say about an artist is, ‘Everything this artist does is joyous and wonderful and openhearted and just simple and great.' ... Some of the appeal ... of the Marlas of the world is that it seems pure innocent joy, no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm, none of that kind of stuff that goes along with modern art. Nobody's saying ‘f---- you' in this picture. They're just saying, ‘I'm a happy girl who loves painting.'

With increasing media attention came a fervor for Marla canvases in the art market. Her prices soared. As of February 2005, after less than a year in the limelight, wee Marla's work had earned her more than $300,000. But that same month brought a blow that sent the family of this miniature master reeling.

Though Marla herself was the embodiment of innocence and spirit, her bright canvases -- those reverberant spiritual documents -- had nevertheless become commodities. And the commodification of a thing, given the unavoidable cynicism that attaches to money, is necessarily a cynical process. So with widespread commercial attention came a qualitative shift in the public's fascination. The clamor surrounding Marla went from adoring to suspicious when TV journalist Charlie Rose hosted a 60 Minutes segment examining the Marla craze.

He interviewed Marla's first curator, Anthony Brunelli:

-Charlie: So what do we have here?

-Brunelli: You have a genius.

-Charlie: Genius?

-Brunelli: Yes.

-Charlie: (leaning forward, bearing down) Is there any other explanation?

Rose also interviewed a child psychologist, an expert in gifted children who'd observed Marla painting. The pyschologist's remarks were a mother lode to a primetime program lusting for an exposé:

I don't see Marla as having made, or at least completed, the more polished-looking paintings, because they look like a different painter.

The art world was unnerved. Major media hungrily took up the possible scandal. Was the kid a fake? Were her parents pulling the wool over the eyes of art aficionados? Was this four-year-old girl no more than a public stand-in for her dad, a brush-wielding trickster?

If it was all a fraud, the stakes had become very high. Large sums of money had changed hands, after all. People got nasty and Marla's parents were harangued with hate mail.

Personally, I believe the girl's for real (what kind of four-year-old could pretend to be a painter without, at some point, spilling the beans?). But whatever the truth, a peculiar thing had occurred. While in the wake of the 60 Minutes bomb people still appeared to be talking about Marla and her work, the engine of the conversation was no longer art and beauty, it was money. The market had intervened in Marla's creations, and people had begun to buy -- not Marla's paintings themselves, so much as the story of Marla's paintings. And as buyers began to suspect that they weren't getting the story they'd paid for, trouble ensued.

Recall Stephen Spender's words: "Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality." Was the art still beautiful? Of course. But money had muddled that truth. The "value" of the paintings had become an exclusively monetary matter. Aesthetics were suddenly irrelevant.

The story of Marla's quasi-scandal epitomizes the clash of commerce and creativity, two often uncomplimentary forces. For anybody seeking the fulfillment and spiritual enrichment that comes of art or creative work, the crucial trick is to remember the natural opposition of spirit and commodity -- and perhaps to rebel quietly against the American mindset author Morris Berman calls "the reduction of values to commodity fetishism," a mindset so money-warped that it can fail to behold the still evident beauty of a painting regardless of its authorship.

Toward the close of My Kid Could Paint That, journalist Elizabeth Cohen observes:

The whole story, really, is about grownups. It's really not about this kid. She's just a little girl painting in her house.

Marla's art did not begin from the base concerns of the dollar. No child's art does. We start from joy, exuberance, inquisitiveness, and serious play. And to the extent that we maintain and cultivate these attributes as creative adults, the more life our creations will possess -- and the more readily we will recognize beauty and be inspired by it.

The dollar is a different matter altogether.

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter.)

Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?

– And by the way, are you getting the Expressive Life you’re entitled to? –

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal cultural initiatives and endowments, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. --Denis Donaghue

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

“Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it is inspired by values that we uphold because we are terrified and preternaturally obedient; because we have been anesthetized into believing that they are natural, perhaps even God-given; because those around us are in thrall to them; or because we have grown too imaginatively timid to conceive of alternatives.

“Philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognized by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honorable, these five entities have endeavored to remold our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.

“In doing so, they have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or unwilling to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorized under something other than the brutal epithet of ‘loser’ or ‘nobody.’ They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way—and more than just the judge’s and the pharmacist’s way—of succeeding at life.”

Prime Passage: Arts Inc. : How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights by Bill Ivey

"Artists feed an important part of our expressive life, the world of ideas, sounds, and images that greet us every day. These individuals dedicate themselves to employing their talents, bringing insight and invention to life. Artistic vision makes a special contribution to the quality of our society. If citizens have a right to a broad engagement with artists across the spectrum of public life, what elements must be in place for artists to flourish in American society? I believe three things must be present. First, conditions must be conducive to originality; artists need to be able to find a way to enter and function in our complex arts system. Second, they need respect for their ideas and their approach to problem solving, and respect in the form of sufficient compensation to maintain a creative life. Third, artists, must be free to draw on—to synthesize—the work of contemporaries as well as creativity from the past. Respect is critical in securing the benefits of a vibrant arts community. If society sees artists as irresponsible eccentrics, if the arts system is shaped by big companies that value only the big-hit superstar, and if a writer, composer, filmmaker, or even classroom art teacher must pony up a stiff fee every time he or she needs to reference the work of others, then we are a long distance from fulfilling the right of every citizen to the imagination and understanding of the most talented among us."

Buy Arts, Inc here.

Prime Passage: Minghella on Minghella

The late great screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella in conversation on the topic of generating a screenplay:

"I play the piano a lot when I'm writing. I listen to music a lot. But just as you have to make peace with your voice, you have to make peace with your process as well. When I look at the madness of the way I write, it would be very easy to get enormously irritated. Even if I did one page a day, that's only 115 to 120 days of work. So, why does it take me a year and a half? What is going on with me? But I realize that the time spent reading the Book of Job for a day is not specious. It's because that's where my own particular journey requires me to be. Or when I'm spending two days examining the Smithsonian collection of early American folk music, it's not just indulgence. I know there's going to be a clue there somewhere that's going to feed the film. When I was writing The English Patient I walked into a record store because I wanted to listen to Hungarian music, and found a disc by a band called Musikaz. I put the disc on and the second or third track I listened to was called 'Szerelem, Szerelem' and that became the voice of the film for me. And I listened to that music repeatedly throughout. But I have to give myself permission to do that. There have been times when I haven't and I got very exasperated with myself and with everybody, and I didn't work well."

Prime Passage: The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner

From a letter written June 4, 1979:

"As for the book business, God knows. The Dalton Book kind of merchandizing demeans books and reduces them to merchandise like aluminum siding. But there are occasional bookstores -- there are three in this area, thank God -- that still like books, hire clerks who read and love books, and make every effort to get a customer the book he wants whether the merchandiser's computer says it's popular or not. So maybe there's hope. Tell me the struggle naught availeth, and I'll ask you what alternative to struggle you can think of. The big hard one to get around is why, in literature as in economics those that have, get, and those that have not get not. I could devise a fairer and more equitable system, but nobody has yet called me to the throne and given me the commission."

The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, edited by Page Stegner, Shoemaker & Hoard 2007

Prime Passage: The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

"Breckenridge Lansing brought up his son according to a method widely advocated at the time. Its purpose was to "make a man" of him. It consisted of ridiculing the child in public and private on every occasion of his falling short in manly exercise. At five he was thrown into the water and commanded to swim. At six he was invited to play catch with his father ("The best father in the world," but all fathers are wonderful) on the lawn behind the house. Coordination of hand and eye is not fully developed at six and is further troubled by the boy's passionate and despairing attempts to be adequate. The genial games ended in tears. At seven he was given a pony; when he had fallen off it for the third time his father sold it. At nine he was introduced to the rifle. At each new trial he was overwhelmed with sneers and his failures were recounted to neighbors and postmen and delivery boys. Eustacia [the boy's mother] attempted to intervene only to be covered with similar sarcasms. Little Anne endeared herself to her father by shrieking "Sissy! Sissy!" Woeful scenes took place. Felicite paled but did not speak. When George was elected vice-captain of his school's baseball team -- only vice-captain; Roger Ashley was everywhere captain -- his father refused to speak to him for three days. Nature came to George's aid too late. At sixteen he was as tall as his father and far stronger. He was given to murderous rages. The day came when he advanced on his tormentor, holding a chair which he slowly broke in mid-air. From that hour his father loudly washed his hands of him. George was the product of his mother's mollycoddling. He would never be a Lansing."
(page 328)

Prime Passage: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924)

Hans Castorp, the twenty-something protagonist of The Magic Mountain, descends to a subterranean examination room where he has his first x-ray taken. (Translation by John E. Woods, Everyman’s Library 2005)

“Once again the director peered through the milky pane, but this time into Hans Castorp’s interior. … In response to much begging, he was kind enough to allow his patient to view his own hand through the fluoroscope. And Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness – and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him: a hard thing, this ore with which man adorns a body predestined to melt away beneath it, so that it can be free again and move on to yet other flesh that may bear it for a while. With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear – penetrating, clairvoyant eyes – he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die. And he made the same face he usually made when listening to music – a rather full, sleepy, and devout face, his head tilted toward one shoulder, his mouth half-open.

The director said, ‘Spooky, isn’t it? Yes, there’s no mistaking that whiff of spookiness.’ ”

Prime Passage: Resistance by Barry Lopez

... Now we believe that without love our homeland -- perhaps all countries -- will perish. Over the years, as we have learned what it might mean to love, we have generally agreed that we've better understood the risks. In our nation, it is acceptable to resent love as an interference with personal liberty, as a ruse the emotions employ before the battlements of reason. It is the abused in our country who now most weirdly profess love. For the ordinary person, love is increasingly elusive, imagined as a strategy.

We reject the assertion, promoted today by success-mongering bull terriers in business, in government, in religion, that humans are goal-seeking animals. We believe they are creatures in search of proportion in life, a pattern of grace. It is balance and beauty we believe people want, not triumph. The stories the earth's people adhere to with greatest faith -- the dances that topple fearful walls; ethereal performances of light, color, and music; the enduring musics themselves -- are well patterned. And these templates for the maintenance of vision, repeated continuously in wildly different idioms, from the eras of Lascaux and Shanidar to the days of the Prado and Butoh, these patterns from the artesian wells of artistic impulse, do not require updating. They require only repetition. Repetition because, just as murder and infidelity are within us, so, too, is forgetfulness. We forget what we want to mean. To achieve progress, we've all but cut our heads off.

Optimism

"Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasn’t hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning he had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen. … And yet I was aware that this was only a moment, that the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and that trouble stretched above us, longer than the sky.”
– James Baldwin, "Sonny’s Blues"

Last week’s election was an event of such exultant transformation for Americans everywhere (and even non-Americans in countries all over the globe) that I, like most who witnessed it, experienced a rare emotional mingling of passion with politics.

Here in Portland, on the moment the election was called, a crowd of strangers downtown erupted into a spontaneous chorus of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” From the looks of it, most of these celebrants were too young, as am I, to have ever witnessed such a grand and exuberant historical moment, or to have been inspired to such emotive patriotism by a political event. Like me, most were too young to have lived through the blood-bright tangle of tragedy and social progress that was the 1960s.

I was born during the Carter administration and came of voting age just in time to cast my ballot in the Clinton/Dole contest of 1996, whose outcome sustained an era of blasé prosperity and kept the partisanship pendulum swinging for years. They seemed, those years, to be all politics, little more. Aside from silly extramarital scandals besetting the White House, it was a period almost ahistorical in its uneventfulness. Bombs fell in Kosovo, and important things happened in Ireland, but those were overseas events, and did not substantially reverberate in our national character. Here at home we hummed along — or maybe droned.

So during my lifetime I’d never had the pleasure to witness how the national political stage can, on rare occasion, furnish a scene of monumental drama and beauty. I had never — I might as well admit — experienced that glorious swelling in the breast which some of my elders proudly referred to as “American optimism.” Quite the opposite, sadly, for the true defining national events of my lifetime were all squeezed into a single fatal day early one September. The world-splitting consequences of that day — ideological wars within wars at home and abroad — only degraded my faith in the course my country was taking.

But now, after years of allowing the box-cutters of the 9/11 terrorists to scar our hearts with divisive fear, after years of accelerating our aggressions abroad instead of nurturing optimism and coming together in spirit at home, we Americans have finally embraced renewal. And I have learned, for the first time in my life, what the old proverbial American optimism feels like. At last, I understand it to be profoundly alive. Cynical politicking, lobbyists, or a disaffected citizenry cannot squelch it; despite such corrupting influences, optimism is implicit always in the self-correcting genius of our democracy. While it may lie dormant in certain periods, still, even after the gloomiest epochs, this fundamental spirit can be revived. It awakens through the people whenever the people give sway to their higher instincts. And how refreshing, now, to think that our new president may strive to govern much the way he campaigned — by inspiring the people to rise to the beckons of their better selves.

Here’s part of what he said in his speech in Grant Park on election night (the whole remarkable speech merits close reading):

Let us summon a new spirit — of patriotism, of responsibility, where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look not only after ourselves but each other. … In this country we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that have poisoned our politics for so long. … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, ‘We are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection.’

To those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too. And to all those watching tonight from beyond our shores, from parliaments and palaces to those who are huddled behind radios in the forgotten corners of the world, our stories are singular but our destinies are shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.

To those who would tear the world down, we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security, we support you. And to all those who have wondered if America’s beacon still burns as bright, tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

That’s the true genius of America: that America can change. Our union can be perfected.

We all know Obama ran a masterful campaign. But perhaps “Hope,” “Dreams,” and “Change,” despite being politically serviceable, despite their repeated, calculated deployment from the campaign stump, really are more than mere buzzwords. Perhaps they are genuine emblems of a spirit that America was once celebrated for — and which it may yet personify.

On NPR’s Fresh Air on November 5th, journalist Bill Moyers reflected on the events of the previous night:

Joseph Campbell, the popular scholar of mythology once said to me, ‘Moyers, if you want to change the world, you change the metaphor.’ And yesterday America changed the metaphor. It was a symbolic moment for a country whose whole history has been pinioned by race. I just felt a great stone lifting from our neck. … Now, yesterday did not end issues of race in this country. … The realities are going to be with us, but …symbolically, metaphorically, and politically, I think race is not going to have us by the throat the way it has for so long now.

I was struck, too, by these eloquent words in an Oregonian editorial on November 5th:

Every president takes office promising to make the United States a different country than it was. Few succeed, and Obama’s White House plans, like those of any other president, deserve to be viewed through the prism of improbability. But through this historic campaign, and his impressive, once implausible triumph, Obama has already done something that few presidents manage during their entire term in office. He has shown us that we are closer to becoming the country that we hope to be.

On the night of Tuesday, November 4th 2008, I learned first-hand how an external, seemingly remote political event can become internal, emotionally relevant, and even intimate to the masses. As Anna Quindlen observes at the back of Newsweek’s special Elections Issue, Obama has, if only for a moment at the start of his presidency, “made the political spiritual.”

For me, that’s the astonishing essence of this turning point in the history of our nation: The collective soul of a people truly can be transformed. I don’t mean to say it happened all at once last Tuesday. It’s only beginning, and it may take generations. But it’s possible. Call that American Optimism.

(P.S. Take a moment to check out the President-elect’s new web-page soliciting your vision for America.)

Scenes From the Author's Head (Illuminating His Novel-in-Progress)

Prime Passage: This Morning, This Evening, So Soon by James Baldwin

"The Americans on the boat did not seem to be so bad, but I was fascinated, after such a long absence from it, by the nature of their friendliness. It was a friendliness which did not suggest, and was not intended to suggest, any possibility of friendship. Unlike Europeans, they dropped titles and used first names almost at once, leaving themselves, unlike the Europeans, with nowhere thereafter to go. Once one had become "Pete" or "Jane" or "Bill" all that could decently be known was known and any suggestion that there might be further depths, a person, so to speak, behind the name, was taken as a violation of that privacy which did not, paradxoically, since they trusted it so little, seem to exist among Americans. They apparently equated privacy with the unspeakable things they did in the bathroom or the bedroom, which they related only to the analyst, and then read about in the pages of best sellers. There was an eerie and unnerving irreality about everything they said and did, as though they were all members of the same team and were acting on orders from some invincibly cheerful and tirelessly inventive coach. I was fascinated by it. I found it oddly moving, but I cannot say that I was displeased. It had not occurred to me before that Americans, who had never treated me with any respect, had no respect for each other."
(Going to Meet the Man, Stories by James Baldwin; 1965)

Prime Passage: Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination

From the introduction to Falling Upwards (2006) by cultural critic Lee Siegel:

"... The arts are losing their capacity to create an original experience, though no one has been able to say why. It seems harder and harder to make a work of art that does not conform to the dictates of the trivializing media, or that does not follow the lead of marketing experts...

"It's often the artists themselves -- novelists, painters, filmmakers, television writers -- who seem to believe that art is exploitable for nonartistic purposes. They seem to have given up on the idea of art as an autonomous end. Making art now often serves as a means to advancement. ...

"Art has become more, as the people in the personnel department like to say, 'goal-oriented.' ...

"This has a terrible effect on art-making. The general anxiety now is that if you don't have a gallery, or a movie about to be released, or a six-figure advance for a book soon after college, you have bungled opportunities previously unknown to humankind. ...

"Learning to make art takes time. But instead of the artist patiently surrendering his ego to the work, he uses his ego to rapidly direct the work along extra-artistic shortcuts, toward the success that seems to be diffused all around him like sunshine."

Prime Passage: Blue Highways

From William Least-Heat Moon's Blue Highways, a description of the land and sky outside Pioche, Nevada:

Calm lay over the uncluttered openness, and a damp wind blew everything clean. I saw no one. I let my speed build to sixty, cut the ignition, shifted to neutral. Although Ghost Dancing [the author's car] had the aerodynamics of an orange crate, it coasted for more than a mile across the flats. When it came to a standstill, I put it back in gear and left it at roadside. There was no one. Listening, I walked into the scrub. The desert does its best talking at night, but on that spring evening it kept God's whopping silence; and that too is a desert voice.

I've read that a naked eye can see six thousand stars in the hundred billion galaxies, but I couldn't believe it, what with the sky white with starlight. I saw a million stars with one eye and two million with both. Galileo proved that the rotation and revolution of the earth give stars their apparent movements. But on that night his evidence wouldn't hold. Any sensible man, lying on his back among new leaves of sage, in the warm sand that had already dried, even he could see Arcturus and Vega and Betelgeuse just above, not far at all, wheeling about the earth. Their paths cut arcs, and there was no doubt about it.

The immensity of sky and desert, their vast absences, reduced me. It was as if I were evaporating, and it was calming and cleansing to be absorbed by that vacancy.

Perils of the Internet

"After several generations of ‘technological improvement’… we have become a people who cannot think about anything important.”—Wendell Berry

The Internet is widely celebrated as a democratic, informational, and connective blessing. But what if it also exacerbates the “American malady” that the poet Stephen Spender bemoaned back in 1949?—“The commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized.”

What if the Internet poses a threat to the cultivation of a rich, reflective inner life? What if Internet-mentality endangers Art—its creation, its place in our culture, and our ability to appreciate it?—or the cultivation of real knowledge?

Ridiculous! you say. The Internet as a cultural negative?! You’ve gotta be crazy!

Well, I do see the self-destructive irony of using the Internet to blog about the potential damage the Internet is wreaking on our spiritual lives. But here goes anyway.

I’ve recently sunk my teeth into three books that deeply and compellingly question the real nature of online culture, and the price we may be paying in our eagerness to embrace the Internet as a godsend. (Don’t get me wrong: I want you to keep reading the words on this screen).

1. Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob by cultural critic Lee Siegel. Published earlier this year, Siegel’s volume makes the most curmudgeonly arguments of the books I’m discussing today—but Against the Machine also advances a number of salient points. The most arresting, and hard to dispute, is Siegel’s assertion that culture on the Internet—that is, the ‘cultural offerings’ most readily available to browsers through Google rankings, etc—is often qualitatively of the lowest common denominator.

Though the Internet promises freer access to information or culture than older mass-culture media, Siegel contends that it does so by using the same mass-culture formula used by network TV: Popularity = Value. And a trawl through mainstream primetime offerings will immediately show the cultural folly of such a formulation.

Siegel is not alone in complaining that the Internet as we know it actually lowers the cultural bar, rather than raising it to accommodate a refined cultural hunger in the American public. It’s a concern being echoed in numerous places these days.

The effect on American youths of prolonged Internet use is a point of special worry. Recently the Los Angeles Times featured a prominent review of writer Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Bauerlein argues that the intellectual atmosphere of the Internet is one of information detrimentally streamlined. Consequently, instead of nurturing real curiosity and undertaking real inquiry, students reared in the Internet age adopt a kind of intellectual tunnel vision fixated on results and indifferent to substance. They “seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort. … Going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits.”

Similarly, the cover of the current July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly bears the bold words, Is Google Making us Stoopid? Affixed to the article is the telling subtitle, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains. Writer Nicholas Carr begins the piece with a confession:

"I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. … The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online. … And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away at my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles."

Carr’s article is interesting and well worth taking in, but his insights have their antecedents in an eloquent book which receives nary a mention in the Atlantic article—the second in this three-book profile...

2. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by Sven Birkerts. Published in 1998, well before Internet addiction became a societal norm, Birkerts’ book was astonishingly prophetic—and hence destined for the honorable obscurity allotted to things well ahead of their time. A decade ago Birkerts foresaw the ominous consequences of our rush to move our existences online—the many dangers the Internet posed to the spirit, and correspondingly to the rich stuff of the spirit, such as art:

"Our lives are busy, distracted, multitracked, stressed. We may have altered our cognitive apparatus—speeding up, learning to deal with complex assaults of stimuli—in such a way that we can no longer take in the [printed] word [of literature] as it is meant to be taken in. …

While circuit and screen are ideal conduits for certain kinds of data—they are entirely inhospitable to the more subjective materials that have always been the stuff of art. That is to say, they are antithetical to inwardness. …

Being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations. …

What I fear is a continued withering-away of [artistic and creative] influence. … My nightmare scenario is not one of neotroglodytes grunting and wielding clubs, but of efficient and prosperous information managers living in the shallows of what it means to be human and not knowing the difference. I fear a world become sanitized and superficial.

Digital/Internet culture is collective or ‘horizontal,’ says Birkerts. It is a world of disembodiment, fragmentation, and abstraction, predicated entirely upon instantaneousness. And though it was not yet so at the time Birkerts wrote The Gutenberg Elegies, the Internet has since become a realm of rampant commercialization too. It therefore stands opposed to the real culture, creations, and relationships which give meaning to our lives.

In contrast to our online mentality of today, says Birkerts, our pre-Internet mentality allowed for a greater number of deep, personal (‘vertical’), and cohesive experiences. The old fashioned acts of reading or experiencing art entailed the “slow, painful, delicious excavation of the self.” Today, however, we are reducing—if not abandoning—these rich, subjective experiences in favor of constant connectivity and the light-speed acquisition of data. In other words, we’re trading inward cultivation for the collection of lifeless information.

“We will bring our terminals, our modems, and menus further and further into our former privacies; we will implicate ourselves by degree in the unitary life, and there may come a day when we no longer remember that there was any other life. …

To me the wager is intuitively clear: we gain access and efficiency at the expense of subjective self-awareness. …

We have created invisible elsewheres that are as immediate as our actual surroundings. We have fractured the flow of time, layered it into competing simultaneities. We learn to do five things at once or pay the price. …

We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of human presence."

The Gutenberg Elegies and Against the Machine share an important central message, which, for all our connectedness in the Internet Age, has been much too rarely transmitted till now. It is this:

As our personal time becomes more and more ‘virtual,’ as we become increasingly enmeshed in 24-hour connectivity, our individuality—our very identity—comes under threat, for the psycho-physical experience of staring at a terminal is the same for everyone. Individuality, personality, and independent thought are deeply conditioned by varied experience—there is no changing that. Of course, information and ideas have a role in shaping us as individuals—and these are accessible through a computer terminal—but they alone cannot sustain individuality. Contrary to popular belief, the democratization of information cannot itself liberate people. And what power it possesses to do so may well be countered, even dispelled altogether, by the dangerous flattening of psycho-physical experience produced in all of us by prolonged ‘screen-time.’

This brings me to the third book in this discussion.

3. The Twilight of American Culture by Morris Berman. Published in 2001, Berman’s volume takes aim and fires at a relatively new American culture in which “community life has been reduced to shopping malls,” and “endless promotional/commercial bullshit…masks a deep systemic emptiness.” He presents engrossing parallels between the onset of the European Dark Ages and the consumer decadence subsuming our national culture.

His societal critique is broader than the subject of the Internet, but it inherently takes up the soul-damaging aspects of the Internet Age, and sounds notes similar to those of Siegel and Birkerts.

"Mass culture [is] not culture, but entertainment, and…to believe a society could become cultured via this process [is] a fatal mistake. … [Nevertheless] the drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind, a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this—as in the early Middle Ages—we see the dissolution of interiority, and the loss or denigration of individual judgment and achievement. All this is a major factor of the disintegration of American culture, which, popular opinion to the contrary, is a herd culture, not an individualistic one."

Berman’s argument builds to an inspiring discussion of what he calls a “New Monastic Individual,” a kind of person who quietly ‘checks out’ of the “total commercial environment” and espouses habits or causes that will help to sustain our culture through its coming ‘twilight’ in the same way that a coterie of monks preserved the Western world’s cultural treasures during the Dark Ages.

"[New Monastic Individuals] belong to no class, have no membership in a hierarchy. They form a kind of ‘unmonied aristocracy,’ free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called ‘work.’ They work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. In the context of contemporary American culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. … [But] the new monastic individual is the purest embodiment of the human spirit."

Against the Machine, The Gutenberg Elegies, and The Twilight of American Culture form a beautiful triumvirate on the themes of Technology versus the Soul, Commodity versus the Spirit, Creativity versus Commerce. The reader will find valuable counsel embedded in each book.

(Against the Machine: Popularity does not equal value; Log off; Go outside; Have a face-to-face conversation.

The Gutenberg Elegies: Information is not everything, neither is connectivity; Plumb the present moment; Be cautious toward electronic devices; Protect and nourish your subjectivity; Spend more time with the printed page.

The Twilight of American Culture: The cash value of things is not their only value; Avoid mistaking the “tools of the good life” for the good life itself; Defy the “commodity culture”; Be “monastic.”)

This post also appears at Soul Shelter.