Not Something to be Grasped

So, I finally got around to reading Leisure, the Basis of Culture.  It didn't quite have the content I would have guessed, but nevertheless it helped me pull together some things I had been reflecting on.  The question, my friends, is one of outlook.  How are we to approach the world around us?  Last summer and indeed last fall, I struggled with a certain restlessness.  It's hard to describe, but is this not in any way the 'good' kind of restlessness I associate with the sublime, with that yearning for still something more found at the very heights of human experience.  No, this was something more akin to boredom, probably having its proximate cause in not having enough to do.  I had all this time to do what I wanted, and yet I wasn't happy.  In the worst moments, I didn't really even want to do anything.  It took a visit to Carmel, a nudge from St. Thérèse, and a blast of autumn air to draw me out of it, although I don't think my recovery was completed until recently (assuming full recovery is even possible, "inquietum est cor nostrum" etc.).  What Joe Pieper's book did was help me to understand that experience.  You see idleness and its fruit restlessness are so far removed from the leisure and true rest, they are its very opposite.  Idleness is marked by countless diversions, designed simply to kill time.  The only point to them, if there is one, is to distract from work and to take a break from being 'productive.'  The person who is idle doesn't really have a goal in mind, except perhaps to snatch little bits of pleasure while he can.  I suppose what such a person is really going after is happiness, but there is a certain aimlessness to idleness that makes this pursuit impossible.  So there I was, filling my free time with countless diversions.  At the same time, I was concerned with gathering up all the pleasant experiences I could.  I was grasping after good things.  And this attitude of grasping is directly opposed to true leisure.  This is related to the difficulties I've always had with trying to hoard into my mind good ideas or good memories/experiences.  This very act of mental possessiveness often prevents me from enjoying the things in the first place.  An analogous thing happens when you put a camera into my hand so that I can document experiences, which often leads to an obsession of getting photos of good things, rather than enjoying them in the moment.

The very opposite of this attitude or grasping is one of opening up or of letting go.  Consider how restlessness and sleeplessness are related.  To fall asleep you must let yourself go.  The same is true with true rest or leisure.  You must let yourself go.  It is this posture of receptivity, or openness that allows for one to enjoy good things, to receive them as a gift or a blessing.  Just as, in the words of the psalmist, God gives good things to His beloved while they sleep, in the same way, as Pieper writes, "greatest, most blessed insights, the kind that could never be tracked down, come to us above all in the time of leisure."  Truth, goodness, and beauty cannot be seized.  They are more to be passively received, just as one passively perceives things with the senses.  And where does this receptivity, which allows for good things to be enjoyed, come from?  It comes, first of all, from a sense of wonder.  Philosophy, poetry, art, and love all begin in wonder.  It is this sense of wonder that goes beyond scientific rationality, the empirically verifiable, what can be 'proven.'  Wonder transcends this, and breaks in with the intrusive question "why is there anything rather than nothing?"  To wonder is to see the world through the eyes of innocence, the eyes of a child.  To wonder is to be amazed that things exist at all, to see all things as new, and to delight in each as it comes into view.  To wonder, above all, is to recognize everything as a gift.  We could also say then that wonder is the beginning of morality.  It is by looking at humanity with wonder and looking with at nature with wonder that we lose all desire to misuse these good things, to grasp at them, to bend them to our own will, to make them means for our selfish ends.  This sense of wonder is the essence of fairy-tale morality.  This is why Chesterton said "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders.”  This, my friends, is why mooreeffoc is so valuable.  Mooreeffoc is all about reclaiming this gaze of innocence, which allows us to receive things as gift.

This, then, is the way to enjoy life and to head towards that ever elusive goal of happiness.  It is to experience the present moment as a sacrament, as a gift.  It is to reclaim that sense of wonder so that you can to stand with a posture of receptivity to the world.  It is to let yourself go, to give yourself over to the good things you experience, without trying take hold of them.  To put an image to this, life is to be approached not with a fist tightly closed as if to hold on to something, but with arms wide open as if ready to receive an embrace.

Ineffable Beauty

Obviously, I can't explain this to you.  I just have to trust you know what I'm talking about.
































I sometimes wonder if all art, all literature is simply an attempt to express what is ultimately inexpressable.  Words just can't do some things justice.  But this raises the question: why do we try at all?  Also, why do we listen to other people try?

Maybe reality itself is trying to express something (a deeper reality?) that is unexpressable.

Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School

I recently finished watching this film for the second time.  If you get a chance to watch it, I highly recommend you do so.  (You should be able to instantly watch it on Netflix.)  It's sentimental and a little sad, while weaving together a number of different threads, making for a thought provoking movie.  To provide a bit of context, I had to watch this film for the first time as part of Professor David O'Connor's wonderful Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love class.  One of the themes which comes through in the movie's thoughtfulness about love is the connection between romantic love and art (specifically dance).  My intent is not to summarize the plot, but rather to take a quick look at some interesting thematic elements.

A chance encounter leads the protagonist Frank Keane to Marilyn Hotchkiss' dance class where he is at first unwilling, hesitant and uninspired on the dance floor.  However, in what I take to be one of the most striking scenes of the movie, Mr. Keane, asked to demonstrate the lindy hop, loses all his inhibitions and lets the dance take control.  This is a powerful moment, one of deep emotional expression for Frank.  At this moment, Frank in some way is able to move past his grief, and is opened up for what is a budding romance.

Here, Mr. Keane learned an important lesson about dance.  "Dance is a very powerful drug Mr. Keane," says the Marienne, his instructor, "If embraced judiciously, it can exorcise demons, access deep seated emotions and color your life in joyous shades of brilliant magenta that you never knew existed."  Throughout the movie, we see how dance helps characters to channel their feelings and to exorcise their demons.  Yet, dance is not something meant to be unbounded.  In this moment of abandon Mr. Keane must be reproved and called back within himself.  He is disrupting the dance class.  This is why dance must be "embraced judiciously."   Marienne continues: "One must shoulder its challenges with intrepid countenance if one is ever to reap its rewards."

You see dance, just like anything else of great power, has a right way it is used.  If there were not rules for dance, it would no longer hold its form and degenerate into something disorderly.  This is not only true of dance.  Marienne admonishes another character: "There are rules, Mr. Ipswitch, in life, just as there are rules in dance. Those rules may seem arbitrary at times, they may seem impossible at times, they may seem unfair or onerous, but they are rules nonetheless. And they must not be broken."

This connects to another aspect of the movie which involves the flashbacks to 1962 when another key character, Steve, is twelve and is unwillingly signed up for Marilyn Hotckiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School.  Steve is at the age when he is starting to be interested in girls, but hardly knows how to express it.  The closest he gets is giving Lisa Gobar a black eye.  What Marilyn Hotckiss is doing, though her students hardly realize it, is teaching these young men and women a way of expressing these new feelings appropriately.  The boys learn, though it is at first full of rigid formalism, how to ask their partner for a dance.  The girls then respond with the formulaic "I'd be enchanted.."  Then the two begin a rigid boxstep.  If you've tried to learn how to ballroom dance, you know that this process of learning how to dance can be kind of awkward.  You try to avoid stepping on your partner's feet as you count your steps (hopefully not out loud) and pretty much just stick to the basic formula.  It is only after learning the basics that dance can become a creative, beautiful, flowing thing which takes on a life of its own.  But it still must stay within the bounds of what makes it a dance.

I reckon that one of the things we are missing in our society today is ballroom dance.  How many of us were really taught how to show our feelings of love and affection properly?  How many of us were taught how to show proper respect to members of the opposite sex?  I'm not here to pine away for a bygone era, but there was a reason for the rules of etiquette, and something is lost when many of them have fallen away.  Sure they may be rigid and awkward to get used to, but it is within those guidelines that true love and respect can be given direction and allowed to flourish.  In the same way, the rules of dance allow true expression and creativity to be realized.  This leads me to the Chesterton quote of the day: "Don't ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up."

Let it suffice to say that this film is one whose imagination very much brings out the connection between love and art about which I have previously written here.  Here, the art is a way to give expression to feelings and emotions which are otherwise inexpressible and even unmanageable.

Another interesting connection to which this film gives a nod is the connection between violence and love.  Watching it this time through, it seemed to me that violence was often an expression of some emotion and even of love that was perhaps misguided.  We see this when the girls insist on joining the boys' game of British Bulldogs, a rough and tumble version of sharks and minnows, and we see it when Steve (accidentally) gives Lisa a black eye.  This almost innocent "violence" connects with my own experience that teasing and picking on another is often a sign of affection.  For the adolescent (boy at any rate), nothing says I love you like drenching the beloved with water or decking them with a snow ball.  Indeed, I don't know if that is ever really outgrown.  We just learn other ways to express our affection as well (like hopefully ballroom dancing).

Of course there are many other things I could say about the movie, and many details that could be interesting think about.  For now, my hope is that I have sharpened and not dulled your interest in seeing this movie.  I hope you can enjoy the beauty of the movie for what it is, and appreciate the richness and depth of the film.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the some of the characters escape from civilization into what is called the Green World, a forested place of enchantment.  It is here in the Green World, away from the constraints of society where love is able to flourish.  Granted, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Green World is not quite so simple as that.  There is plenty of romantic confusion until the lovers finally end up with the right people.  But my point here is not to provide a literary analysis of Shakespeare's Green World.  Rather, I want to seize upon the basic point (or at least the point I want to make): reaching the place of true love and enchantment requires movement away from other considerations and into the wilderness.

The lesson, as I take is, is that we all need to spend time in the Green World, able to completely forget about the cares of society.  We need a chance to eschew work, school, and all the familiar places. It is the Green World, where we learn to fall in love again.  Here, we learn to love the beauty against which our hearts have been hardened.  We learn to love life itself once more.  We learn to love the people around us once again (or for the first time).  Here, we learn to love God.

In a phenomenon which may be related, I've recently experienced the desire to surround my self with beauty.  This past week/weekend I was stuck in a car for several hours I had nothing better to do but listen to Bach and read Evelyn Waugh (at the same time!).  The Bach and the Waugh were amazing, and filled me with a desire to spend all my days immersed in beautiful things like those.  Then a rainbow showed up.  Ahh!  These are the moments we live for, moments that pierce the soul.  I hope I'll remember that moment forever, just like I remember going to see Jeremy Denk and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra perform one of Beethoven's Piano Concerti (No. 1 in C Major, I believe).  It was absolutely stunning, but perhaps not as memorable as Denk's encore piece, in which he played a movement from Charles Ives' Concord Sonata.  He executed the piece so well, that the audience literally laughed out loud at one of Ives' musical jokes.  Real laughter came from my mouth because of what someone played on a piano!  Or I remember the time I was able to go backpacking in the Sangre De Cristo mountains.  One incident in particular from that trip I remember.  We were on a precipice, several thousand feet up, from which we could the place where the mountain range on which we were standing began to rise out of the plain below.  The rock on which we were standing was most unusual: it was pitted.  We're talking softball sized holes that held rain water.  There must have been hundreds of them in the surrounding area.  They were made, so I was told, by lightning which naturally strikes the highest point in the area.  And as I was standing there, staring at the beautiful scene below me, I could feel energy start to build in the atmosphere behind me, that exciting, stirring change, which signals a storm is approaching.  I could see the thundercloud swiftly approaching.  Something was so exhilarating about that moment, on the verge of extreme danger and extreme beauty.  The situation also seemed to serve as a living reminder that all things are passing away, that we have to come down from the mountain eventually.  It's moments like these which we remember most, which we are forever grateful we experienced, which shape us into better people.

Now comes the plug for Aristotelian Ethics.  Like experiencing the Green World, experiencing the beauty described above requires a movement away from the ordinary.  It requires, in a word, leisure.  We do not recreate so that we can be a more effective production factor in our capitalist economy.  No, we work precisely for those moments of leisure so that we can nourish the soul, and learn what it really means to be human.  This is why civilization kicks barbarism's butt.  Civilization allows the flourishing of the arts.  When people are just trying to stay alive, living in a subsistence economy, the arts can't flourish.  It is only when a culture has 'left over' time, after keeping everyone alive, that time can be devoted to artistic pursuits.  We get individuals who can devote their time to nothing but creating beautiful things, and others who can take the time to appreciate them.  Here the arts flourish.

The astute reader will have noticed that I described the Green World as necessarily a place of removal from civilization, while at the same time praising civilization for giving us the arts.  Is there a contradiction somewhere in here?  I expect any seeming contradiction is resolved upon realizing that both natural beauty and artistic beauty are necessary at times to help us get in touch with that part of us which is most human, to sharpen our sensitivities, and to help us love.  Leisure is needed for both.

Thought: Philosophy is parasitic, just like the arts, coming out of society's collective leisure time.  It has a lot to do with love and beauty as well.  Lurking somewhere here might be a justification for my academic discipline.

Note to Self:  Read Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture.

Blogging and the Nature of Creative Expression

Creative expression is something which is profoundly human.  We create things.  We design buildings.  We write songs.  We paint pictures.  We dance. We act.  We write poems and books.  And yes, we write blogs.  There is something about this human desire for self-expression which is inherently outward directed.  I could write songs that no one else but myself will hear.  I could create whole fantasy worlds and commit them to paper, without sharing them with anyone.  I could draw up fantastic buildings and contraptions that no one else will see.  I could write in a journal that no one else will ever read.  There is nothing wrong if you have some sort of creative work which you hope never sees the light of day.  It is, however, my experience that we want at least some of our art to be noticed and admired.

Whence comes this desire to produce something external to ourselves that is noticed by others?  First of all, creative expression is a profound way we have of getting ourselves "out there."  It is a way we can bridge the gap between the self and the other.  We hope that our thoughts and expressions will some how resonate with others.  It proves to us that we are not alone and we are not the only ones in the world who have felt a certain way.  Perhaps on a deeper level, producing art, producing something that is external to ourselves, is a way for us to make a difference in the world.  It is a way for us to survive ourselves.  It is, in short, one of the ways human beings participate in immortality.  This happens most tangibly with things like paintings, buildings, movies, plays, books, and music which we may happen to produce.  These are things which can last long after we are dead.  However, even dancing, acting, or performing music still can achieve immortality because these particular artistic expressions shape the other people who experience them.

If art is indeed a result of the human desire for immortality, that might explain the close connection between love and art.  With certain forms of art in particular, romantic love is extremely closely woven with the art.  Dancing, poetry, and music (just think of how many 'love songs' there are), come to mind as particularly powerful examples.  What stops us from expressing ourselves creatively to others is the same thing which stops us from expressing love for another: fear of rejection.  Once George McFly can express his love for Lorraine, getting his book published is easy.  This love-art connection should not be surprising when we realize that love is something which is essentially creative.  The natural end of erotic love is the creation of new life.  As it happens, having children is one powerful way in which we humans can survive ourselves and participate in immortality.  The power to create and the power to love may just be two sides of the same coin.  This view is supported, I think, when looking at two of the primary ways of thinking about God in the Christian tradition.  One is the 'God is Love' view.  The other is based on seeing God as he is in relationship to the universe, namely as its Creator.  Creation is nothing less than an act of love.

Thus, I move to the what might be called the heart of this post.  In deciding to start a blog, I have joined with many others in an endeavor which I presume is centered on a desire for self-expression that wants to be noticed by other people.  (I do not presume people start blogs because they are in love, although one would not preclude the other.)  Should you read my blog?  In all honesty probably not.  Of all the volumes and volumes of books that are published and articles that are written everyday and have even been written, few are really worth your time.  Almost certainly there is something better than the unprofessional reflections of a college student you are reading right now.  But the hope of the artist is that his art is worthwhile, that it is meaningful, and that other people can appreciate it.  So I hope that you come back for more, as I give expression to my thoughts and try to participate in immortality in my own creative and expressive way.