Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer
Often, people who study philosophy can retell the stories and quote philosophers, but they can seldom actually “do” philosophy, since they are instead historians of the practice but not practitioners of the art. This is sometimes true of writers and other artists in college.
Although in art school or creative writing classes we may talk about “freedom” as a pathway to response, we hardly ever discuss, if ever, the impetus for having a response that would prompt us to be creative. It stands to reason that we get pretty creative when we go into crisis. If we don’t end up biochemically mood stimulating, and we learn to honor our darker moments, as Robert Johnson might say in his text, “Owning Your Own Shadow,” we may not just simply ritualize our tragedies, we may learn to honor them in a singular ceremony of spiritual awakening, an expression of gratitude and/or grace as they pass through us, and this is “doing art.” It takes knowing and understanding what we feel and what we don’t feel; it’s cathartic, heart wrenching, and hand-wringing. We are both freed from and freed to.
The issue is that we want to stay in that space, create a religion around our transcendental experiences, and then try to recapture the starlight from their temporal expression. This is where we become addicted to how the process occurred, the one that revealed such depth and inner-awareness. We try to re-capture that moment, and it usually takes more and more heightened drama and further and further trauma to do so.
This is how we gain 300 pounds, wreck our livers, bungee jump to our deaths, or overdose trying to get that extra high that we will bring back that feeling of unconditional awareness, insight, revelation, or sheer beauty.
Religion can be its own drug, abusing the message for the sake of experiencing the gratifying moment of release from our own inner demons, the revelation of a righteousness that is not encumbered by our own foul smell. This is why art electrically conducts its way through us and that artists are more like shaman dancers whose powers pass through them in fading luminosity with the brief ill-glance of dying moonlight on a twinkling night.
Art for the sake of art, being an artist, performing year after year, requires a constant unveiling, a renewing that is an ever-unfolding and unmasking of the inner layers of subconscious subterfuge and died-in-the-wool defenses. A vision quest into the inner-sanctum of our own souls, something musically accomplished by someone like “Jorge Reyes,” occurs only rarely for the average person, who most likely depends on others to bring the work of the soul to his attention. Concerts, parties, church, school, legal proceedings, car wrecks, medical emergencies, abuse, trauma, car races, romantic break ups, falling in love, the train wrecks of life, are all our teachers. It is prohibitive to walk the very edge of oblivion, and yet some people manage to do something very close to it, day after day for their entire lifetime, as long as that lasts.
The real quest for us all is for an authentic experience that can then be translated into a personal expression that will serve as a template for a universal expression that will allow us to communicate to our fellow beings of all times and nations the wonder and depth of our lives. On some level, this will ceremonially bring upon us a sort of eternal life, yes, so it is an expression meant to transcend death, for sure. Wealth, fame, power, avarice, greed, bullying, becoming superior, being number one, any number of concepts that are referential for the metaphor of becoming immortal, these are all a part of it, yes. But, barring the artificiality of immortality, the point in the moment seems to be intimacy.
The one overwhelmingly obvious characteristic of universality is that it touches everyone, and we are known as ourselves in that one nanosecond; we have arrived at a place for our 15 minutes of fame, if not for just a few mere seconds, and we have had a grounding experience of direct communication that establishes our true nature, our open soul, and our elemental task is completed. To say that we have lived and to have that acknowledged is very freeing since it establishes the fulcrum of our identity as a person who has done what he came to do. Some do this in infamy; I will not give them their recognition, but we know who they are. Others have done this in silence, and we will never know the great sacrifice of their lives as they passed through the living realm uncelebrated but nevertheless leaving us all the better for it; God bless the inventor of the wheel.
But let’s not then forget the task before us here in this moment: How can we help to provide the backdrop for those around us such that they can learn to speak from an authentic experience, relating the gravity of their lessons to us, and thus expanding us all with their validating wisdom as an update for universal consciousness and human wisdom? Many times it is not the fact of the originality, uniqueness, or strength of the performance; it’s the validation we get at not being alone in the world that makes the quality of a work the most important to us, not that we had not thought of it but that someone else did also.
Our ideas cannot be that stupid if others are thinking them too. How many of us saw the single serving coffee bag coming a decade before it arrived? We knew it, and others know “it” too. However, we cannot go around further traumatizing our fellows for the sake of stressing them into an identity crisis for the sake of sending them on a vision quest, although in some ways this is exactly what universities are called to do with the long hours of intense study and the ubiquitous all-nighters. Back to the pot of coffee, right?
Sometimes the art department will have all night drawing sessions, meant to wear students down, make them forget their training and defensive restraints. In “The Blair Witch Project,” the actors stayed awake so long they seemed all the more psychotic because they were sleep deprived. Art does have its outtakes. William Burroughs tried unsuccessfully to shoot an apple off of his wife’s head. It was written in the furrows of his weather beaten face. But we can’t always depend just on odd moments and accidents, nor can we depend on whether or not students may get what we are trying to set up.
We must discuss it straightforwardly. The drama department may need to get involved. The lighting people, the techies, the film department, the music department. The writers in the language departments could write the scripts. What we need is a vision of how we can take students through the entire array of the human experience, multi-dimensionally, using all the senses, pulling on all of the schools within the university, such that we have an explainable immersion experience that we can use as the basis for our art. It seems criminal to get a BA and to have never even looked up the word “art.”
The greater problem is that we have no real American mythology or rite of passage from childhood into adulthood. We buy a car, graduate from high school, have sex, get married, have kids, do drugs, leave our parents, but there is no over-riding cultural story that lays this out as a series of passages and our young people don’t get it. Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day: One indulgence after another. They muddle through without a book that allows them to see the path of becoming themselves in the largest sense of the words. Some will say that the Bible does this, and that may be, for Jewish culture 2000 years ago. Maybe we want to see western church history as the precursor, but we have not bothered to teach it as such. For the most part, our youth know pop culture and commercialism in a way that precludes an authentic experience that is not merely a consumption of the trite and the readily available brand name products.
We are like a lost tribe that has forgotten how to drum or make fire. We don’t read tea leaves, count coup, or even know how to understand what it means to honor the “7th generation.” We do, however, understand the significance of derivatives as a process of building future consumer evaluation of non-transparent values; in short, we know how to BS our way past the guards so that we can take a free shot.
I would like to offer up this tidbit of potential insight. We can’t take it with us, so we are going to have to leave it all here. That being said, we could stop for a second and look at that inheritance. “What are we leaving behind?” If I consume more than I produce, then I leave the world worse off. I cannot produce more elements, although I may have some hand in helping to stretch what we have out into the future. Beyond this round of conservation, what then about my increasing the sum total of understanding about who we are and what it means to be alive? I can’t make more of what there is in the outer world, but I can use what I have to create more of an inner world.
Here are three beginning points:
1. My unique experience has its own insights and can enlarge the sum total of all experiences if I learn to communicate myself and my valuable experiences.
2. It is my personal quest to learn how to communicate well enough to be able to share who I am.
3. It is in the best interest of all beings that we all learn to become ourselves, freely, openly, and without posturing, so that we can share our vision with the world, and so therefore it is in my best interest if I take time to teach others to do the same.
If the best of our culture reveals our weaknesses to ourselves and supports the freedom to express our unencumbered identities, then it is the worst of our culture that seeks to shut others down. Is hate speech to be allowed then? Will the Christians collect $10 per person and create the first billion dollar movie? Will the life of the Prophet Muhammad become a house hold understanding? Will we see the “Wealth of Nations” as a mini-series on TV? In the market place of ideas, they all need to come forward. The dark side of our culture has its own lessons for us. Certainly we see plenty of scary news clips that make us flinch, weary of opening our eyes any further.
Maybe this is where art school can help. Instead of our treating education as a series of disciplines that are combined together class hour by class hour, we could seek to combine the disciplines as an inter-disciplinary experience, the whole human being immersed in the whole human experience. The reason we do art is that we feel something, know something, become aware of something, and we want to, have to, document that moment of surrender to it, to being one with it, to our being more ourselves because of it.
This is worth talking about. This is necessary. This is the reason we create in the first place, to resolve the mystery of what it means to be fully human. When can we take this class?
runningturtle87
Having completed 33 years of public school service, Chris Herrington lives, with his wife, in Appleby, Texas, and his writing consists of blogging and essay writing concerning an array of topics including education, mediation, self-development, and human interests.
Chris Herrington can be reached at herrington@everythingnac.com
