Gratitude

Among a host of other significant things and ideas, I remain particularly grateful today for my wife, my parents, my friends, my dogs, and my work.

“For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” — James Joyce

The Weight of Others

The best definition I’ve yet heard of the distinction between an Introvert and an Extrovert is simply that the former gains energy from time spent alone, while the latter tends to recuperate through direct involvement with others. It has nonetheless taken me a fair bit of time to really comprehend that an individual’s particular tendency one way or the other is not related to his or her relative like or dislike of people in general. An Introvert will just as easily love spending time with his friends, though he may simply be unable to engage with them in the same way or to the same degree as his extroverted counterpart.

Milan Kundera christened the “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” principally in reference to the idea of the “lightness” of existence. Through his novel’s title, the Czech author was alluding to life’s eternally transient quality – the perpetually fleeting and un-repeating nature of this present experience of being alive. In Kundera’s version, however, this transient aspect seems to render all that we have and are and do as consequently insignificant. Conversely, I don’t believe that impermanence implies insignificance. Additionally, I imagine that this larger notion of “lightness” could be extended and expanded to include a variety of metaphysical “weights” within our lives – the weights that keep us from floating away, from vanishing. These are the relationships, people, things, loves, rules, and so forth with which we actively maintain connections. Positive weights in appropriate amounts help keep us grounded, in touch with others and with living, and connected to a functioning concept of reality. Too little weight or too much or the wrong kind, however, and one can ultimately recede or suffocate, respectively. Given this, the lightness of our existences and the particularities of our needs require us each to engineer individualized counterbalances toward a healthy progress forward.

While balancing relationships with others may come easier to some Extroverts, Introverts carry with them the definitional handicap of possessing a particularly limited allotment of time in which they can be a good version of themselves around other people. As a result, Introverts may need to exact special care in choosing the human weights that are allowed to inhabit their lives and demand their attentions: Simply, time is limited, and for an Introvert around others, it remains even more so. Consequently, in order for Introverts to assure that time spent with their real friends and family is optimal, it seems particularly crucial for Introverts to make deliberate and sometimes brutal choices regarding their respective time investments. Freedom means being able to live life the way you want. Ironically though, as easily as they can be detriments, in so many instances it’s the weights within our lives that give us our real freedoms, that allow us to live the life we want and as well as we can. In fact, I cannot imagine my life worth living were it not for the various positive weights in my life – my family, my friends, my work, and so forth. Nonetheless, it will always remain a delicate balance for Introverts in particular, a struggle for each of us to choose and cultivate and maintain the best within our own lives – ideally binding ourselves to the most fantastic version of existence that we are presently capable of having.

— For my father: Happy Birthday.

A Study in Theater

No matter what an individual does or desires to do for a living, it’s rarely a bad idea to engage in at least a little marketing – meaning that it’s generally smart to try to get the word out about you and your work. This includes informing audiences or potential customers about how your product or service is unique and why they should be interested. Varying professionals tend to command an array of traditions vis-à-vis where and how their particular kind of commodity should be marketed. However, the basic need for some level of public announcement seems fairly universal, whether one is engaged in mass commerce or experimental art.

Words like “marketing” sometimes come shaded with mistakenly negative connotation, and various sectors of non-commercial art can consequently tend to consider themselves above the need for self-promotion. However, it is not wrong to look for improved mechanisms of honestly informing others regarding one's work, and it is unfortunate when good craftsmen let their goods go unnoticed. When a problem with marketing does exist, it is due only to the intention and product behind the particular campaign, and the honesty with which the message is delivered.

So I would certainly not begrudge artists or musicians their various marketing strategies. In a world composed principally of mediocrity, lovers of great quality indeed need to work hard to get the word out. However, a tremendous danger continues to exist in the righteous maintenance of this balance for those professions that fundamentally claim art before profit. Much of modern marketing seems concerned with the regular maintenance of attention, which consequently tends to incentivize an environment in which more is synonymous with successful. Unfortunately, this is not particular to the commercial sector. Strong reasons exit for those we unquestioningly believe are engaging in pure art to create works with the principal goal of marketing themselves, as opposed to marketing themselves in order to promote their good artistic work. And while it’s not bad to be smart about the jobs one takes, it seems that a fundamental principal of true art would that it be inspired first by a good idea, and not by the cash or popularity it promises to garner.

The ubiquity of this threat among the true arts was illustrated for me recently in the context of a theatrical production in Los Angeles. My wife just finished the run of a small show at a local independent theater, where she energetically helped support a fairly esoteric script. Unfamiliar with the inner workings of theater, I was surprised when she informed me that one of the principal actors in this black box production would suddenly be missing two nights out of an already fairly short run. With no understudy, the rest of the cast was simply excused for the evenings. It turned out that the protagonist in question had simply been offered better opportunities, and when I expressed my naive exasperation at such disrespect for his fellow actors, let alone the art, my wife (who was involved for free and for the love of it) explained that it is in fact not uncommon for actors to engage in art house productions principally for the purposes of self-marketing. With the priority centered on collecting attention instead of the art work at hand, artistic integrity ceases to be a motivating force, and consequently nothing can ever be depended on to keep the work alive in the event of a more exciting opportunity.

And with a wink, the once true artist transforms himself eagerly into a dancing monkey, his art now merely a shrink-wrap display case for agents, managers, producers ...(...Gould must be rolling in his grave). If art is indeed the soul of a culture, what hope do we have when even the independents won’t hesitate to put cash and career ahead of a previous commitment to some simple, good work?

Aquarium

Albert Einstein once declared that “the most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical,” proceeding to state that “he to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

I have often wondered at the tendency toward a general blandness exhibited by many people’s choices. How does one become a person who chooses the most ordinary thing possible in almost any given circumstance? Conversely, what is the lifestyle that breeds a general childlike curiosity and openness, the only point of departure for any real newness?

More macroscopically, as a created landscape tends to reflect the sensibility of its resident culture’s dominant paradigms, it seems that one can’t help but also wonder at the populaces whose histories and cultures have over time consistently led to one extreme or the other. What is the situation that cultivates a childlike curiosity? And alternately, how does a culture mange to produce largely identical choices even in the midst of a relatively free society? In the latter instance, I’m not speaking of Soviet imposed monochromaticism, but of a free culture outright choosing the least imaginative options available among a spectrum of possibilities.

As one universal trait of children tends to be a natural tendency toward curiosity and creativity, how do ennui-dominated cultures ultimately come to be and how do they remain that way? How is it that a given culture can so consistently manage to quash a general tendency toward originality, so that it ends up being the inborn trait of childlike curiosity that becomes the real endangered species?

Unfortunately, it’s the simplest thing in the world, and even more tragically, it seems to most often result from an unconscious authoritarian tendency (Soviet achitecture again being a notable exception in its deliberateness). The process of creating a lockstep mind in the midst of a free society is in fact as simple as something I witnessed the other day:

While visiting the breathtaking Monterey Bay Aquarium, Redhead and I were enjoying ourselves in the tide pool area, trying to steal a feel of the velvety sting ray. A little boy was doing the same, enraptured in the undeniable mystery of the ocean, when what must have been his mother scolded him harshly and abruptly pulled him away - and clearly without any regard for the value of the activity in which he was involved (and at the aquarium!). This is the precise instance of devaluation, the same as the moment in which the sad, lost teacher instructs her precocious preschool student that coloring the duck purple is actually somehow incorrect. Over time, this is how we stop bothering to explore.

How strange to realize that remaining a creative individual can in fact be one of the most difficult and rare activities in which humans engage.