Questions or Booking Travel?

Now through June 8 MoMA is exhibiting about 150 works of Paul Gauguin. On MoMA's event website is a handy map and chronology of his life and work. The time line leads to a moment when in 1895, forty-five year-old Paul Gauguin traveled to Tahiti, leaving his wife and five children behind forever. Native of France, he grew up in Peru, sailed the world with the merchant marine, and worked for years in the French stock exchange. In 1879 he began to paint and exhibit with the Impressionists. When France's economy collapsed his business failed and after that painted full time. He became intrigued with Rousseau’s theories of the Natural Human and experimented widely with artistic materials and forms. In Tahiti he painted his masterpiece, "Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” The title, as you can just see in the link, is written in the upper left hand corner of the painting.

Suppose Gauguin painted today. The context is fairly similar: poor economy, debts and responsibilities, and a nagging sense we were made for more than this. Of course Tahiti today would feature fewer natives and better hotels. And I think his three questions would probably morph into our texting shorthand, WTF? Interestingly, Gauguin didn't use question marks in the painting title. His “questions” are rendered as statements– statements of the existential angst that he reported feeling to the point of attempting suicide after finishing the work. Likewise, our WTF is usually rendered, not as a question, but a malediction. It is intended as a judgment, a confession of helplessness and tacit defeat. It separates us from the world, and more insidiously, it becomes a ticket to pursue life as we please – a self indulgence that books travel to our imaginary lives that lie outside the reality of suffering.

While I write this my neighborhood is a cacophony of leaf blowers and my cat keeps pawing my arm. I have a boatload of work to do, bills to pay and time bears down. Forget war and poverty. What good are these few words? Am I mocked? Maybe so, but I have a choice in how I will respond. I can manifest an impossible version of life and escape to a convenient “Tahiti”, or I can speak into the chaos, join with others and help make a new world of this one.

One day soon we'll hear the shorthand curse again. Suppose instead of giving it form we affirm that life is hard, that suffering is a common bond, and then re-imagine our goals? What if we begin to answer the big questions a little at a time? What if instead of checking out we keep watch for those on the rocks and come alongside? In doing so, might we be transformed from cursing sailors to traveling agents of peace?

Self-Made Monsters

Rolling Stone recently published an interview with Dong Nguyen, creator of the viral hit game "Flappy Bird". The interviewer, David Kushner, writes about Nguyen’s experience as his app surged in popularity:

He hands me his iPhone so that I can scroll through some messages he’s saved. One is from a woman chastising him for "distracting the children of the world." Another laments that "13 kids at my school broke their phones because of your game, and they still play it cause it's addicting like crack." Nguyen tells me of e-mails from workers who had lost their jobs, a mother who had stopped talking to her kids. "At first I thought they were just joking," he says, "but I realize they really hurt themselves." Nguyen – who says he botched tests in high school because he was playing too much Counter-Strike – genuinely took them to heart.

Nguyen’s intention had been straightforward: build a fun game for mobile platforms, easy to play and hard to master. But as his app went viral, it garnered a darker reception. People attacked Nguyen. They designated him an author of evil. Their vindictive reaction peeled back the app’s popularity to reveal an addicted and infuriated world where guilt was eschewed by appeals to ‘distraction’ and ‘addiction’.

Wrapped up in low-fi, Nintendo-esque graphics, Flappy Bird is a feathered fiend for the modern disposition. Its simplicity is infuriatingly addictive, and its difficulty chafes against impatience and demand for easy victory. It’s easy to love, but even easier to hate. And the app’s fallout, directed toward Nguyen, shines a spotlight on a basic human proclivity: our readiness to shift the responsibility for our destructive impulses onto anyone or anything other than ourselves.

Mike Carey and Peter Gross write in the fantasy series The Unwritten (Vol. 1), “We make our own monsters, then fear them for what they show us about ourselves.” For many, Flappy Bird provided that insight.

What’s your monster?

Oh, my binging!

My college student daughter is on season three of Breaking Bad. Sometimes, late at night, we hear her moving around downstairs---studying, working on her laundry, perhaps, but always with her laptop at her side and Walter White on her mind. My youngest daughter is working her way through One Tree Hill; I’m hopeful that she’ll be bored before the end of season one. Over last year’s Christmas vacation, I started my love affair with Downton Abbey. It was late afternoon on Christmas Day. Worn down from the grind of the semester and with Christmas behind me, I settled in for a long winter’s nap on the sofa---compliments of Netflix and our newly-acquired Wii. After thirteen and a half hours of viewing time and several lengthy naps, I emerged from the fog. It was December 27, dirty dishes and chip bags were piled around the sofa, and I had somehow lost two days. I sat up, surveyed the living room, and did what any thinking person would do: I found something else to watch. Daniel Deronda, Wives and Daughters, North and South, Bleak House, Wuthering Heights---four more days passed and it was New Year’s Eve.

Binge-viewing. It has a name and lots of people (61% according to a recent Netflix poll) are doing it these days. Perhaps it is a product of our busy and chaotic lives. In an era when families can hardly make time to eat dinner together at night, sitting down every Thursday at 8:00 to watch The Waltons seems ludicrous. We have to catch up when we can! And there are physiological reasons why TV binges appeal to us. We long for the resolution of the narrative. Exciting and interesting questions arise about the impact of binge-viewing on the way television shows will be made. And there is a great case for thinking that this shift is similar to the move from the serialized Victorian novel to the more pithy twentieth century model. I’m in! Binge-viewing is the binge for me.

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I keep a calendar. Mainly I use it as a diary to record ordinary days---lunch with my daughters, a walk with my friend Susan, a high school choir concert, an appointment with the dentist. My calendar is blank for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

So I wonder about binge-viewing. Is it harmless? Or does it compromise the ability to live a disciplined and orderly life? How will we set acceptable limits on TV when Netflix makes it possible to always know what happens next?  Wendell Berry observes that “we must have limits or we will cease to exist as humans; perhaps we will cease to exist, period…in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.”

Gender Bending in Shakespeare’s“Twelfe Night, or What You Will”

Broadway’s all-male production of Shakespeare’s comedy of gender confusion closes in February.  One critic says, the “. . . performance brings to funny and delicious life the play’s message of the power of love and desire to transcend the limitations of gender.”  Wait, what?  Is that what Shakespeare’s point was? 

It is simply the Bard’s genius to create a love triangle that serves as a love circle.  Viola loves the Duke, the Duke, Olivia, but Olivia can close the circle and love Viola because Viola appears in the guise of a man, Cessario.  This makes for some wonderful comedy onstage and off, that is, among the critics.

It is popular now in universities to think in “politically correct” terms about classics.  A feminist perspective (that women have no significant power unless it is through a man) finds traction in this play as Viola is powerless and insignificant until she takes up the livery of a man.  Olivia lends support as an empowered woman, head of her household, who scorns the Duke’s proposals and resists the attempts by Sir Toby, Sir Andrew, and Malvolio to tame her to their wishes.  With her newfound freedom of choice, however, she pursues Cessario, not knowing that Cessario is really the girl Viola, and this aspect of the plot lends credence to a popular homosexual perspective, that men and women have latent erotic tendencies toward their own genders.  To further this notion, there are  the sparks of attraction the Duke seems to feel toward Cessario (again not knowing she is a girl), and the love of Antonio proclaims for Sebastian (Viola’s twin brother) without any mistaken identity.

However, while Viola may gain some power and position when she is taken for a man, her decision to dress and act like a man was for security not power. She thought it was dangerous for a woman to go around in an unknown territory alone, a problem that is timeless.  While she IS a man, pining for the Duke and avoiding Olivia’s advances, she wishes she were NOT a man, and we know that she won’t be satisfied until she can again safely appear in public as a woman.

Sad is an “empowerment” that grants security but makes love impossible.  The homosexual argument falls apart by simply recalling the biblical distinctions between erotic love and brotherly love.  Olivia’s attraction to Viola is humorous only when it is taken as misguided eros, and the Duke’s attraction to Cessario is likewise funny when it is seen as misguided philia.  If either had known what both Viola and the audience know, these pursuits would end.  Additionally, the love of Antonio for Sebastian is proper philia (as is that of Jonathan and David in the bible) and, if mistaken for eros, spoils the happy ending we want for Olivia with Sebastian.

These feminist and homosexual interpretations are not only invalid (in that they fail to account for the play as a play), but they turn out to oppose the clarity of the biblical categories of love and gender which are the very things that make the play funny.  The comedy in Twelfe Night is lost on those who refuse to take such categories seriously.  Just another example of how political correctness has no sense of humor, and, if taken seriously, tends to rob the rest of us of ours.

Look at Everything Close Up

In Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby, journalist Carl Streator is just getting by. He copes with the stress of his job. He copes with his finances. He copes with the accidental death of his wife and his child, whom he killed with a culling spell. He copes with his mission to find and destroy every copy of the spell. He copes with the fact that he can’t stop thinking about it.

He copes.

Most of us feel the need to cope, to escape our big picture. Work is stressful. Money is tight. Cholesterol is too high. Deadlines are approaching. There’s an illness in the family. There’s a fire. Or a flood. The electricity has just been shut off. We agonize over the minutia of our schedules, the humdrum routines that give structure to our daily lives. Everything is spiraling out of control.

“The trick to forgetting the big picture,” Streator says, “is to look at everything close up.”

So we bury ourselves in the latest game to top the iTunes charts. We throw ourselves into the dramas of the latest group of Housewives. We obsess about sports. We count calories. We distract ourselves.

But if we change our perspective a bit, looking at everything close up can be an exercise in meditation and mindfulness, instead of a distraction. Looking at everything close up can be a powerful way to see the big picture. We come to  understand that our big pictures -- the bills, the jobs, the finances -- are really only tiny details in our collective Big Picture. Close up we see things that are quintessentially human, actions that tie us to generations of men and women through millennia. We knead and bake bread, just like we have for thousands of years. We steep tea. We fall in love. We worry about our children. We sow seeds and pull weeds. The tiniest details of our lives and our routines and our habits bind us to an innumerable host of people who worry just like us. These ubiquitous activities place us in the framework of a shared humanity.

Perhaps if we look at these daily responsibilities close up, if we squint, if we work really hard, we can avoid many of our daily stressors.

So go ahead. Try. Look at everything close up.

Until We See Their Faces

When Howard died, we staggered. Any death would have felt huge to the small college where I worked then, but Howard was a very popular, well-known-and-loved senior, the star goalie of our remarkable men’s soccer team, and a warm friend with tremendous character and humility. He was fine, we were all fine, when the Fall semester ended and Howard went home to Jamaica for Christmas break. But then he was tired for no reason, tests were run, a rare and strange blood disease was diagnosed, and by the time classes were starting up again, he was too ill to travel. And then we heard what none of us could stomach or quite believe: he was gone. That was four years ago last month. I miss him, and still cry when I think of him. I want very much to see his face again, have another hug, hear his voice and laugh.

In a culture where most of us have nearly instant and constant access to virtually everyone we know (or have known, thank you Facebook), some of the ordinary and universal experiences of missing people are now gone. For years I have been convinced our ability to hope or long well is atrophying with every video chat or text message. But now I wonder if humans have ever hoped or longed well. Is this because our fallen incompleteness makes us feel deficient no matter the degree of longing and hope? For some it’s “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” but for others it’s “out of sight, out of mind.”

So the question remains: Does Facebook, Twitter and texting make us better or worse at hoping and longing? I don’t know, but it does seem I’m less likely today to find a friend with the time and desire to sit and talk about these things.

Make It New

I recently watched Justin Timberlake on Saturday Night Live sing “Only When I Walk Away.” Multicolor laser lights flashed in geometric shapes and cast net-like patterns on the blackness of the stage. My 19-year-old son watched, too, and while he’s not a fan of Timberlake, he appreciated the fact that he was willing to try something new. The last time we saw Timberlake, he appeared on SNL singing “Suit & Tie.” It sounded like the Sinatra songs my dad sang around the house when we were growing up. What a contrast!

On one level, Timberlake’s diversity reminds me of the modernists’ creed to continually “make it new.” It also reminded me of Henri Matisse who, toward the end of his life, shifted from painting to making paper collages. Having survived surgery for cancer, he considered his last fourteen years “a second life” and he pursued his new medium with fervor. Matisse’s desire to try something new lead him to create what are often considered to be his greatest works. Matisse reinvented his craft. He made it new.

Jack Kerouac described how the jazz greats continued to develop their music. “They sought to find new phrases...They found it, they lost, they wrestled for it, they found it again, they laughed, they moaned.” But what makes all that effort, that pursuit of the new, meaningful? Is newness, along with beauty, an end in itself?

God told Moses that Aaron’s new garments should be made for beauty, but also for glory (Exodus 28:2). As image bearers we have the responsibility to pursue newness and beauty. But what of God’s glory? Do we pursue it? Is His glory worth the wrestling, the laughing and the moaning?

(Art is La Lierre en Fleurs by Matisse)

Play, the basis of culture?

Play comes naturally to young things – like these piglets, equally happy playing with their Christmas gifts or with the wrapping paper.  Or children, who effortlessly play all day at housekeeping, firefighting, fort-dwelling, save-the-worlding….

When did we lose this?  Why did we lose this?

Was it way back when working the soil became toil with sweat, when the burden of childbearing came down?  Maybe occupational labor was originally occupational play – 9 to 5 of fun and games.  Did we forget how to play when, like Tom Hanks in “Big,” we permitted “important responsibilities” to make us forget who we really are?  If so, is there anything left to be redeemed?

When adults use the word “play” as in, “We played at the beach all weekend,” it sounds strange to me, although it is hard to nail down why – is it that adults don’t have the capability to play or shouldn’t be playing?  Have we simply permitted a bent and distracted world to shame it out of us?

My husband informed me that the word “play” in Spanish as it refers to musical instruments is the same word as “touch,” so that, for example, you touch the trumpet or touch the oboe.  Play implicates the physical world, but it probably comes a lot easier for most adults to play in their minds with ideas, inspirations, wonder – although most of us could probably play more in this area as well.

I liked this idea of linking play to an object – that even performance art is tactile, although in a different sense than painting, or weaving, or landscaping.  A lot goes on in the mind during such play, for sure, and is connected to the body, to movement, to the incarnate.

Could it be that just as children are learning how to become adults through play, art is a blessing that survived the curse, or maybe one of the blessings that accompanied the curse, giving us the playing field for learning to be re-creators, learning how to come into our status as image-bearers?

Is There Wisdom, Virtue and Honor in American Education?

The best American schools don’t remember why western civilization chose to build itself on education. Mostly, that is because the more we talk about education, the less we do it. That seems to be the conclusion at a recent Liberty Fund retreat I attended, after spending two days in leisurely discussion of Plato’s Republic. The conference was highlighted by the enormous revelatory power of Plato’s book and the discussion with others who have read it carefully.

Plato has much to say about the rightly ordered soul, all of it insightful and practical. For example, he describes the five types of soul – Aristocrat, Timocrat, Oligarch, Democrat, and Tyrant – each characterized by what we would call a “core value” (what he calls a “good”) leading to the cultivation of a particular virtue that will help attain that core value.

Plato called the Aristocratic soul the best soul (the Geek word “aristoi” means “the best”). His highest good is virtue itself. But humans can never quite reach that level, so in the real world we are more likely to come across the Timocratic soul, whose highest good is honor. This soul is the gentleman soldier, not out for his own gain but for the good of his community. His great temptation is to let honor slide into ambition.

Then there’s the Oligarch, the man who loves property or money above all else. He sees the Timocract lose money by pursuing honor, so fearing that loss himself, he makes money his chief value and highest good. But he’s a cheapskate. He hoards his money, and in Plato’s scenario, drives his son to bitterness. The son spends as much money as possible, giving free reign to his appetites and passions, making freedom his chief value, thus becoming the fourth kind of soul: the Democrat. Unfortunately, as a matter of practical reality, one cannot be free without money. Consequently the soul who values unrestrained freedom above all, loses it.

Finally, there’s the Tyrant who is charismatic. As people gather around him, his power increases. His chief good is control, and because his followers need his power to maintain their own version of freedom, he is able to inflict that control. Yet, because he has no friends, he becomes the most miserable of people.

It seems American education is made up almost entirely of Oligarchs, Democrats, and Tyrants.

We are obsessed with controls because, like those with too much freedom, we have become anxious. And we remain obsessed with freedom. We are a democracy. This is our most proudly proclaimed value. However, though some people have it, it tends to be a disordered freedom, a means with no end. But usually it seems to me American education is practiced oligarchically. It’s a miser’s education. We go to school to get a job after graduation. We have no time to enjoy life. Study is our life, and if we don’t study, China’s economy will top our own, and then who knows what will happen!

These are neat categories, but it seems their tidiness is a bit absurd. We are image bearers—doesn’t that count for something? Don’t each of us love honor and virtue, at least a little? And even in the worst schools, don’t some students and teachers seek wisdom, even though there’s much working against? Is Plato’s Aristocratic soul really out of reach?