You Are Always More Than You Think You Are

How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 12

Chapter 4: Me, Myself, and I
Part 3: What Is the Self?

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What Is the Self?

The human self is incapable of being defined. Am I a body, am I a certain set of capacities, a certain set of memories? …You are not definable…. You share with the [divine] attribute of keter [crown] this lack of being definable and determinable. Therefore you are always free to transform your life, to be different than you have been up until now. —Rabbi Nathan Glick, The Song of the Ten Sefirot  *

The late-nineteenth-century philosopher William James writes that your self is synonymous with your thoughts and beliefs about you and, at the same time, with comparisons of yourself with others gained through social interaction.**

This definition is useful but, in my view, flawed by doubling back on itself where it should move forward. The “comparisons of yourself with others gained through social interaction” are continually influencing “your thoughts and beliefs about you,” and vice versa. So James’s definition becomes, “You are who you think you are.”

But we have already seen the weakness of this definition in Carrie’s experience and in mine.

The Sefirot in Jewish Kabbalah

If you’ve been told all your life that you are stupid, it’s quite likely that you’ll behave unintelligently. You’ll have no confidence in your academic ability. You’ll probably accept uncritically what you’re told by people in authority—teachers, for example—and you won’t ask the questions that occur to you, believing them to be stupid questions. People who observe your intellectual clumsiness will also think you’re stupid, reinforcing your low opinion of yourself. From your perspective, these people will seem much smarter than you. 

So one day you take an intelligence test and your IQ turns out to be 149, much higher than any of your fellow students’ IQ. The administrators and teachers at your school are sure there’s been a mistake. They give you other kinds of intelligence tests. On each of them your score indicates that you are a near-genius.

Several outcomes are possible here:

1. The teachers and administrators are finally convinced of what you yourself have come to believe after the first few tests: You are indeed very bright. You will begin to exhibit your mental strength, in response both to your new understanding of yourself and to your elders’ and the other students’ new respect for your intelligence.
2. The teachers and administrators will remain unconvinced, and everyone will continue to treat you as if you are stupid, but you will believe. In your certainty that you are truly smart, you will behave intelligently, your grades will improve, and you will win over the school personnel, unless they are exceedingly stubborn or unless someone is paying them a lot of money to make you appear stupid to yourself and others, probably because you have a secret trust fund worth billions in your name and your guardians want you to be declared incompetent by the courts. Or something.
   

   Dr. Oliver Sacks, by Erika Hall

3. The teachers and administrators will remain unconvinced, but you will believe—initially. You have not thoroughly tested your newly recognized intelligence and, because everybody continues to treat you as they always have—as if you had the mental agility of dryer lint—they will eventually wear you down, things will return to “normal,” and your ephemeral moment of brilliance will fade and be forgotten, much as in the wonderful 1990 Robert DeNiro–Robin Williams film Awakenings (directed by Penny Marshall), based on the true story of Dr. Oliver Sacks (Williams) and his experiments with the drug L-dopa. Sacks used L-dopa successfully to “awaken” a group of catatonic patients, some of whom had been virtually unconscious for decades. If you have seen the movie (and if you haven’t, skip to the next paragraph), you will recall the heartbreaking outcome: L-dopa was tragically unable to fulfill its early promise, and the awakened patients had to watch themselves and each other slide back into oblivion.

But for you, the student victimized by everyone’s persistent certainty that you are stupid, the story is not over. As we have seen, the self will protest, and you will either reassert yourself or become physically or mentally ill, or both.

You are always more than you think you are

Basic Training

Almost all who serve in the U.S. military start out in boot camp and usually find their physical capacity to be greater than they thought possible. Indeed, when circumstances force you to stretch beyond your comfort level, there is almost always a euphoric moment when your self-image grows along with your ability to meet the new demands.

We have all heard it said that people generally operate at about five percent of their potential, or some variation on that idea. I once attended a meeting at which a seminar-leader opened by having everybody take a partner and examine the partner’s appearance. Then he told us to turn around, change five clearly visible things about our appearance, and turn back to our partner. Each of us was supposed to discern the five things that our partner had changed. People did things like move their watches from one arm to the other, roll up their sleeves, loosen their ties, and ruffle their hair.

Then he had us do it again. And again. And a fourth time. The exercise got pretty silly, but people devised, on the spot, ingenious ways to change their appearance. They rolled their socks down, turned their skirts around, used lipstick to make “freckles,” wiped off their eye makeup, placed their socks on their heads, spilled coffee on themselves, blackened their teeth with mascara, and put Kleenex in their ears, straws in their noses, and forks in their shirt pockets.

It was a great way to begin a seminar. Everyone’s creative juices were flowing, they were in high good humor, and they were a mess, so nobody cared what he or she looked like. Most important, they recognized capacities within themselves that they hadn’t been aware of.

At this point we might tentatively say that you are who you think you are, plus the projected parts of yourself not reclaimed, plus your unthought-of potential, which is infinite….

__________________

* Rabbi Glick is a scholar and teacher of Kabbalah in Israel. The Song of the Ten Sefirot is an audiobook available free from LearnOutLoud.com.

** Aronson, E., Wilson, T. & Akert, R., Social Psychology (6th edition) 2005

Photo, “Basic Training,” courtesy of http://www.list.co.uk/article/4084-basic-training/

Next: Growth and self-knowledge

Sidebar

Metaphors Can Cause Headaches

Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

I read this morning that Barack Obama had named Senator Joseph Biden as his running mate, and that Senator Obama had done so either before or after (I don’t remember which) “unleashing a fusillade of vitriol” about his opponent, John McCain.

Writers and speakers of the English language—especially journalists—slip into metaphor-ese automatically, disregarding the literal meanings of the metaphors and throwing various symbols together any which way. That’s forgivable, usually. A language is built mostly on metaphors whose original definitions stopped mattering long ago.

Unleashing a fusillade of vitriol, however, is just plain nonsense. Fusillade and vitriol are startling words that call attention to themselves, and since the writer was bold and foolish enough to combine them in this way, I feel justified in picking that combination apart.

What we have here is three words, actually, used metaphorically with feckless indifference to the metaphor’s integrity:

• unleashing, which means “letting go of”; but to be “unleashed,” a thing must first have been “leashed,” or restrained. It’s common, and appropriate, to speak of “unleashing one’s anger,” which has presumably been pent up. Unleashing a fusillade doesn’t make much sense, really, because it’s hard to picture a fusillade as having its own impetuous energy.
• fusillade, which is a rapid discharge of gunfire. It isn’t the bullets themselves, or the guns, or the people firing them.
• vitriol—sulfuric acid, a highly corrosive chemical, often used as a metaphor for “abusive language” or “invective.”

We native speakers of English know what the writer means, which is that Barack Obama harshly criticized John McCain. But someone who is just beginning to understand the English language might easily be flummoxed. She sees unleashing, and pictures a dog straining at and perhaps breaking his tether. She sees fusillade and thinks, perhaps, of the action of a firing squad. Then she reads vitriol, which she knows to be a particularly nastily corrosive liquid that she has read about in detective or crime stories, where it is thrown in the face of an enemy, usually for vengeance or retribution.

Add it up and you have, what, impatiently frisky rapid-fire emissions from squirt guns? I don’t know. I can’t think about it any more. It gives me a headache.

No Prozac

How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 11

 

Chapter 4: Me, Myself, and I
Part 2: Your Self Is Irrepressible

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Get depressed, learn to knit

Prozac (fluoxetine)

In 1970, when I was twenty-two, I was hospitalized for depression and anxiety. I was so depressed I couldn’t tie my shoes. What was the point? They would just come untied again.

Worse yet, I was depressed about being depressed. I had a two-year-old daughter to care for and a husband to try to hang on to. I didn’t have time to be depressed.

In those days when you were depressed they put you in a room with other depressed people and taught you how to knit. It was called occupational therapy. You sat around with these people and exchanged misinformation. There were four middle-aged women who played bridge all day, every day. They were so chatty and cheerful that I assumed they made clumsy suicide attempts every so often just so they could spend a week or two in the hospital playing bridge.

There were no drugs like Prozac in 1972. Psychiatrists were people who tried to help you figure out why you were depressed and then, when you figured it out, stop doing whatever it was and go on with your life.

My psychiatrist was a family friend whom I’d known all my life. He wasn’t the kind of psychiatrist who asked you about the trauma of potty-training or about your sexual fantasies. He was the kind of psychiatrist who explained things and gave advice.

Liberating my inner bitch

“Know thyself,” was, in effect, the advice he gave me. He said that I was angry and didn’t know it—that I had “projected” my anger onto the world and therefore perceived the world as hostile. I was also diminished by having projected my attributes—intelligence, wisdom, sense of humor—onto other people and things, so that I had lost confidence in my abilities and my judgment. (See figures 1, 2, and 3.)

The essential I will assert itself. It will not be ignored or subjugated. If I deny it, it will flap its wings in my face. “Claim me,” it squawks. “Use me. I’m the reason you’re here.”

Mine was a quick recovery, followed within just a few months by separation from my husband and ultimately by divorce. I spent the next few years, yes, liberating my Inner Bitch but also gleefully gathering other scattered bits and pieces of myself and just enjoying the hell out of my life, my daughter, my family, and my friends.

Figure 1. Unworthiness

Figure 2. Anxiety

Figure 3a. Personality in Balance

Figures 3b and 3c. Out of Balance

 

Next: Defining the Self Made Simple

Who Are You?

How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 10

Chapter 4: Me, Myself, and I
Part 1: Knowing Thyself in One Easy Lesson

Join now! Find details about this free E-course at Lesson 1.

God Creating Adam, Michelangelo, c. 1510, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is! —Anne Frank, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl

♦

I am a divine idea of a loving God, created for a divine purpose, which finds its greatest satisfaction in expression of its uniqueness, in harmony with God’s other divine ideas, which make up the infinite universe. Perhaps the universe produces what is needed in every place, at every time.

All of the millions of tiny needles on a fir tree are necessary for the perfect functioning of the tree. You and I are like those needles — we are right here, right now, because the universe requires it. The difference between us and the fir tree’s needles is that we can choose (a) to follow our inclinations—doing what we love, fulfilling our destiny, and perfecting the universe — or (b) to deny our talents and be diverted from our purpose. —Anonymous

♦

[Knowing who you are] does not even require your realization, since you already are who you are. But without realization, who you are does not shine forth into this world…. You are… like an apparently poor person who does not know he has a bank account with $100 million in it and so his wealth remains an unexpressed potential. —Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61)

♦

Who am I? What am I? How did I get here? Now that I am here, what should I be doing? No kidding? All that? Can I have a nap first?

These are the kinds of questions most of us ask from time to time — for example,

• During or after a crisis
• During or after a long summer evening at the campsite drinking beer and saying to virtual strangers, “I love ya, man.”
• When we have way too much time on our hands (see also [b])
• When we’re not struggling for survival; that is, when our basic physical needs have been met
• When we’re tired of struggling for survival and we’re wondering if it’s worth it
• When we’re living in a dorm and a lot of us are taking Philosophy 203: The Mind-Body Problem (with a focus on the nature of our mental life in relation to the brain)
• When we’re depressed; when we doubt our value; when we discover that other people’s perceptions of us are less flattering than our own
• When, in short, we find that we’re not who we thought we were, which is just as well, because we’re never who we think we are, and we’re just as likely to be as uncertain today as we were yesterday

As in Chapter 3, however, I’ll put forth a few operational definitions so that we’re all speaking the same language, or nearly so. These definitions will be incomplete but useful answers to the questions

What is the self?

Cells are not the building blocks of life, nor are the atoms and molecules that cells can be broken down into. The body is built on invisible abstractions called information and energy–both of which are contained in your DNA. —Deepak Chopra, The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want

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In what sense can you know yourself?

Is it possible to “reinvent” yourself? (Reinvent is the buzzword du jour for “adapt” or “change.” None of these words says precisely what I mean. “Adapting” is passive and gradual. “Changing” is too general. “Reinventing” implies that you’re starting from scratch.

(“Participating in your own creation” or “co-creating yourself” are cumbersome but are more to the point—which is that, when things aren’t going well, or when what has worked for you in the past doesn’t work any more, you can either change your approach or rant about the unfairness of everything. “Participating in your own creation” conveys both intention and acceptance of an essential, divinely created self.)

There are tomes dealing with each of these concepts. Take self-knowledge, for example. Most would agree that since the self is never static, it can never be known. By the time you figure out who you are, you’re someone else. *

By the time you figure out who you are, you're someone else

I have only a casual observer’s understanding of Buddhist ideas about the amorphous self—personal identity without boundaries. But Buddhists don’t want everybody to walk around bumping into things all the time. The Buddha himself emerged from his transformative meditation believing in the “Middle Way” between an ascetic life and a worldly one. To learn more about what I call “practical Buddhism,” which I hope is not an oxymoron or an offense to actual Buddhists, I highly recommend the book The Joy of Living, by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (Harmony Books, 2007).  

Let’s assume for the moment that it’s possible to have a working knowledge of ourselves through information gained from three sources: (a) self-observation, (b) a more-or-less accurate understanding of others’ perceptions of us, and (c) revelation (or, if you prefer, intuition). Now consider the story of my friend Carrie, a widow, who had an electrical problem.

The Buddha

Who is Carrie: Tramp, chemist, pathetic widow?

Several aspects of Carrie’s surface identity are easy to describe: She is

• a widow
• a charming woman with a firm handshake and a good memory for names. When she says, “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she means it. She asks friendly questions about your family, your work, your beer-bottle-cap collection. If you rebuild transmissions for a living, Carrie can’t think of anything more fascinating. “Now, how is it that my automatic transmission knows when it’s time to shift into overdrive?” she wants to know.
• a neatnik. Carrie is one of those people who dust beneath and behind the sofa daily. She can see bacteria and viruses with the naked eye. Hospital sterilization personnel salute her as she walks by. They name autoclaves after her.
• not an electrician. Carrie doesn’t know an amp from an alligator. She breaks out in hives when she has to change a light bulb.

Thus, when the electrical outlet next to her bed stopped functioning, Carrie called in a professional. Al the electrician would arrive at 8 a.m. the next morning, Carrie was assured.

In the perverse way of such professionals, Al arrived at 7:15. Carrie was discomfited because, though she was dressed and halfway through her second cup of coffee, and though her little house was always spick and span, she hadn’t yet made her bed.

She greeted Al at the door, offered him coffee (which he declined), and ushered him into the bedroom. The electrical outlet was situated near the floor between Carrie’s bed and her nightstand. There were four items neatly arranged on the nightstand: an alarm clock, a lamp, a book, and a jar labeled (in letters that, to Carrie’s horrified eyes, appeared at least two feet tall) “Sexual Enhancement Cream.” As Carrie told me later that day,

Al was here for half an hour, fooling with that electrical outlet, reaching over the table checking this and that, at one point even elbowing the jar aside; and he’s talking to me, explaining electrical things, and I don’t remember a word he said because I was trying so hard to be nonchalant, while this jar, before my very eyes, is inflating to four or five times its original size and also changing from white to neon orange with flashing purple letters, and an actual human voice, like at a carnival, is shouting “Sexual Enhancement Cream! Getcher Sexual Enhancement Cream here, on Carrie’s nightstand, next to her unmade bed!”

Carrie used the word mortified several times. She could have said embarrassed or humiliated. Mortified, really, is overkill, so to speak. Mortify enters the English language from the French mortifier, which in turn comes from the Latin mortificare: “to put someone to death.”

But there is a sense — a poetic sense — in which Carrie was indeed “put to death” during that excruciating half-hour and for a while afterward. Carrie’s “death” is, of course, metaphorical.

The self she knew, the tidy widow, mortified
By nothing but a jar, was stricken, died,
And what was resurrected wasn’t she at all,
But something hard, dispassionate; so small
And wretched, so pathetic, it seemed barely worth
Its rations—water, air, a bit of earth.

During that excruciating half-hour, Carrie saw herself as she imagined Al must have seen her. Since Al had given no sign of having even noticed the jar (“but he couldn’t possibly have missed it!”), her imagination ran wild. In Al’s eyes, she was (a) an oversexed spinster, (b) a brazen hussy, or (c) a purveyor of phone pornography.

I suggested (d) a chemist, and anyway, (e) why did she care what Al thought? But for some reason, in Carrie’s mind, Al’s perception of her had become more important than her own, which, it appeared, was a little on the fuzzy side. “Widowhood” was still a strange and shadowy place for Carrie. Her identity as “Phil’s wife” had been well defined. Without Phil, she wasn’t sure who she was.

_______________ 

* My research on the physics of observing and understanding a system (in this case, the self) when you, the observer, are embedded within the system, came to an abrupt halt when I learned that it would involve “fractals,” which—being statistically self-similar to their substructures and, further, generated by an infinitely recursive process—are clearly wicked, and possibly radioactive as well, and should be avoided at all cost.

 

Lesson 10.1: Assignment
How ‘Conscious’ Are You?

Eckhart Tolle writes in A New Earth that “nothing you can know about you is you.” We are not our titles or our roles. When my children were still living at home, I was so enmeshed in the role of “motherhood” that I became very ill when my youngest left the nest.

Eckhart Tolle

Meditation is one way to encounter your “essential” self—the you that isn’t plastered over with ego: roles, ambitions, relationships, other people’s perceptions, even your own measurement of your worth. Tolle calls these things “content… the inner and outer circumstances of your life, your past and your future [as well as] … events.” The more you identify with “the inner space of consciousness”—which, unlike content, is not transient—the less likely you are to be buffeted about by emotions and the freer you are to live poetically.

If you are young and competent, you probably have experienced little tragedy and you are confident of your ability to manage your life. I remember thinking, from time to time, that I “couldn’t bear it” if “X” happened, and I would do everything in my power to prevent it. And then “X” happened anyway (my first big “X” was the death of my mother at age 62), and I suffered, and survived, and grew in compassion. Since then, there have been lots of “X’s,” and there is little left to be afraid of, and much to celebrate.

Your assignment is to answer the following questions in a paragraph or two (about fifty words):

What makes you unhappy or afraid? What do you have or do that, if you couldn’t have it or do it, would seriously disrupt your sense of self?

It’s important to be honest here. This is the first step in “knowing thyself.” I will not ask you to send me this assignment, but it is important to write down your answers and save them for use later in this course.

Next: Chapter 4, Part 2: Your Self Is Irrepressible

 

Art and Beauty

How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 9

 

Chapter 3: Art, Poetry, and Beauty
Part 2: What Is Beauty, and Is It Optional?

Cubism: Still Life with Fruit Dish and Mandolin, 1919, Juan Gris

 

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♦

Many will object to the word beauty in any definition of art. I doubt if most people seeing a Picasso cubist work for the first time are struck by its beauty. Many artists paint or dance or compose primarily to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their talent, or to innovate, or to shock people out of their complacency, or to reflect what they perceive as “reality.”

I read this anonymous posting to an artist’s blog: “Art is an attempt to objectify the world as the person sees or knows it”  (http://www.artnewsblog.com/2005/10/crazy-paris-art-work.htm).
I submit that “the world as the person sees or knows it” is not very different from “the person as she sees or knows herself.” I think that to improve or beautify the world, or oneself, is more worthwhile than to “objectify” it.

And I believe that art works both ways. It is not just something that the artist imposes on the medium. Creating the work is part of the perpetual creation of the artist. And the artist can choose the path of that creation: toward life, energy, beauty, love… or not.

Intellectually, we may try to justify the layering on of ugliness and chaos. Intuitively, in everyday speech, we equate beauty with art. We hear the phrase “poetry in motion” used to describe someone who moves gracefully. A person whose voice is charmingly melodic is said to “speak musically.”

Elizabeth Taylor

You have ordered a custom-made chest of drawers from a skilled woodworker. When you see the finished piece, it takes your breath away. The grain of the oak, the craftsmanship, the carving, the proportions — all are lovely and elegant. “Do you like it?” the woodworker asks anxiously. “Do I like it?” you echo. “It’s a work of art.”

Beauty is in the eye of the baby

If we agree to create and evolve beautifully, can we agree about what constitutes beauty? There is too much variation in cultural programming and personal history for beauty to be recognized universally. On the other hand, humans do seem to share a core aesthetic sensibility. (If this were not true, there would be no supermodels or movie stars.) Visually, we find characteristics such as luminosity, color, and symmetry to be aesthetically pleasing.

Numerous studies have investigated the way adults and infants react to sounds, sights, and scents. Researchers at the University of Texas and elsewhere have found that babies look longer at people who are generally considered beautiful, regardless of ethnicity (Langlois Social Development Lab, the University of Texas at Austin, 2006. Cited from this page on the Langlois Social Development Lab website).

In any case, inasmuch as we will never agree completely about what characterizes a chair or an ocelot, how can we expect to reach a common understanding about beauty? When I say “chair,” an image of a chair pops into your mind. It might be an upholstered chair, a desk chair, or a captain’s chair. In my case, the word chair invariably brings to mind my father’s Morris chair.

So I think that we will not turn ourselves inside out trying to define beauty in a precise way. Let us agree, for purposes of our current endeavor, that something is beautiful if it stimulates the best within us… if it makes us feel peaceful, inspired, loving, or joyous… and especially if it arouses our own creativity.

Lesson 9.1: Assignment
Examples of Beauty

 

Examples of Beauty

 

Please submit your assignment via e-mail to Mary@LifeIsPoetry.net. Assignments will not be graded but will be returned to you with comments.

♦

Next: Chapter 4—Me, Myself, and I

Belching Doom Kangaroo

How to Write Poetry and Live Poetically

Free E-Course Lesson 8

 

Chapter 3: Art, Poetry, and Beauty
Part 1: Leftover Pizza Is Not Art

Join now! Find details about this free E-course at Lesson 1.

Cradle of Ptomaine

In philosophy, as in many other disciplines, good definitions are the product of lengthy debate…. Children talk, and know what they are talking about, although they cannot define even one of the terms they use. Using and understanding a language does not involve being able to define its terms…. Definition allows us to improve our use of language….  —Norman Swartz, “Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meaning”  Copyright © Norman Swartz 1997
This revision: September 27, 1997. Department of Philosophy, Simon Fraser University

Art: A Definite ‘Maybe”

Now, let’s define and clarify our terms.

Art, poetry, beauty, and the self are huge ideas, not easily defined. The practice of defining is practically a science in itself, one that is rather neatly described by philosopher Norman Swartz (quoted above) in “Definitions, Dictionaries, and Meaning.” In that article, Swartz describes seven types of definitions. The type we will be using here is called “operational.” Briefly, an operational definition is one that we agree to agree on, whether or not it is strictly accurate.*

I have chosen and adapted the definitions that I believe will be most useful to us. Here are a few to get us started:

Some Definitions of Art, Poetry, and Verse

 

 

In short, art (including poetry) requires creativity, emotional honesty, originality, skill, imagination, and intention. In our current context, beauty and spirituality must also be present.

For there to be art, there must be an artist. Therefore, according to our operational definition…

Leftover pizza is not art

Just as you can call yourself Arnot-Jean-Jacques Feuillette [Seventh Sanctum French Male Name Generator ] or Belching Doom Kangaroo [Seventh Sanctum Humorous Monster Name Generator] if you want to, you can string a bunch of words together and call them a poem:

I.
The magneto lurches into fetid paste
spurning the crispy scythe
on a poaching ä safari in Kenya
shadowing the uncommon solicitor.  **

II.
U Ua-Uo U (uracil) (NLM) UA UAA UAG
UAL Ubidecarenone Ubiquinone
Ubiquitin Ubiquitination Ubiquitous
UBT UDP-glucuronosyltransferase UGA
UL Ulcer Ulcer aphthous Ulcer
Buruli Ulcer duodenal Ulcer esophageal  ***

At a poetry reading, you could breathe raggedly into the microphone for precisely seventeen seconds and then pronounce the word ruction — and call it a poem.

The following “poem” consists of randomly selected html code:

<TD WIDTH=”50%”>&nbsp;<A HREF=”HistoricalDocuments.html”><IMG
SRC=”BookFeatherPen.gif” WIDTH=”70″ HEIGHT=”62″ ALIGN=”BOTTOM”
ATURALSIZEFLAG=”3″ BORDER=”0″><FONT SIZE=”-2″ FACE=”Verdana”>Historical
ocuments</FONT></A></TD>
<TD WIDTH=”50%”>&nbsp;<A HREF=”index.html”><FONT FACE=”Verdana”><IMG
SRC=”caplink.gif” WIDTH=”50″ ALIGN=”BOTTOM” BORDER=”0″ HEIGHT=”65″
ATURALSIZEFLAG=”2″></FONT><FONT SIZE=”-2″ FACE=”Verdana”>National
enter Home Page</FONT></A></TD>

If art is merely “an expression of human creativity”—a widely held belief—then anyone can be an artist. You don’t have to take classes or anything. There’s no particular discipline involved. You thought of it, you created it; ergo, it’s art.

Let’s say you have created a painting that looks something like this  (the outside border is the frame):

Dash, by You

It’s art, all right, no question about it — an “expression of your creativity.” But surely you have applied your creativity at other times in other ways that might not qualify as “art.” Like the time you told your dad you had been detained at a roadblock while law-enforcement officers searched hundreds of vehicles for an escaped homicidal maniac, and that’s why you got home past your curfew. “Creative,” your dad said, and then he grounded you “for your own protection” until the missing maniac had been returned to custody.

Notwithstanding, you take your painting, which you have titled Dash, to an art gallery for validation by a real professional art personage, but Monsieur is unavailable at present. Still, you are encouraged by the inscrutability of the other works of art on display, although, examining them closely, you wish you had thought to vomit on your work of art before framing it.

Depending on the year and the location, you might see the following examples of art in the world’s most respected museums:

• One of 90 copies of Merda d’artista, by Piero Manzoni, consisting of thirty grams of Manzoni’s feces sealed in a tin can. The Tate gallery in London reportedly paid more than $20,000 for one of these copies in 1961.
• Piss Christ, a crucifix immersed in the urine of the artist, Andres Serrano. This is one of Serrano’s more traditional works.
• Tom Friedman’s Untitled, a dead ladybug in a Styrofoam cup, which sold for almost $30,000.

Other works given the stamp of approval by critics and patrons of the arts include

• This poem (reproduced here in its entirety):

LIGHGHT

The poet, Aram Saroyan, explains that his intent was to change the word light “from a verb (the agency of illumination) to a noun that yet radiates as light does. The double ghgh seems to work in that way.” The poem was published in the 1969 American Literary Anthology [Source: Rapportage, the literary journal of the Lancaster Literary Guild, Fall 2005].

• A novel consisting of blank pages.
• A musical work by composer John Cage titled 4’33” (Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds), in which a pianist sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds without playing a single note.

My opinion on the more mystifying or malodorous forms of art mentioned above is that they represent a variety of artists and motives:

• The genuine artist who has been formally trained, has exhibited talent, and has grown bored with pretty pictures and conventional media (water colors, for example, as opposed to the more exotic elephant dung à la The Holy Virgin by Chris Ofili).
• The person who may or may not have talent but whose principal motive is to shock.
• The artist who wants to make a social or political statement, illustrating the ugliness and depravity that surrounds us, as if we didn’t know.
• The con artist who has seen an easy way to make $20,000 and get invited to lecture at prestigious universities by creatively assembling the contents of a wastebasket using duct tape, which can be analyzed for its likeness to the ephemeral quality of substantial yet emergent flora that have been dispossessed of their progression toward ultimate decay and regeneration… which everybody swallows (figuratively) because they don’t want to admit that they think it’s stupid.
• The true artistic genius who is totally out of my league.

I repeat, art is not merely “an expression of human creativity.” If it were, then Auschwitz was art.

Art is disciplined

Few would argue that art is an external expression (a dance, a sculpture) of a spiritual or at least an intangible quality (such as love, beauty, anger, or despair). I believe, with Keats, that “beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I am unable to separate spirit from beauty, or to believe that whatever emanates from the life-force common to us all can lack either truth or beauty.

Again, beauty is essential in our operational definitions of art and poetry. In theory, however, I am willing to entertain other viewpoints.

Is found or readymade art — noted examples are Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel and Tracey Emin’s My Bed — intentional? Does it require skill? Can you just pick up any old thing and call it art?

Possibly, if the picker-upper is legitimately an artist. As my poetry professor at Stanford University explained when we wanted to let our free spirits loose on paper and he made us write sonnets instead: You must work from the inside out; examine the interior of your territory before you explore the nether reaches; know what the boundaries are before you stretch them; internalize the discipline until it is part of you; master the discipline in order to not be mastered by it.

I know a few people who have arranged every aspect of their lives so as to spend as much time as possible hang-gliding or soaring. “It is the ultimate experience in freedom,” they say. “It sounds wonderful,” I say. “I’d like to try it.”

Do they hand me their gear and say, “Great idea. Go for it”? No. They warn me about the expense and the hours of training and practice and the necessary physical conditioning and the skills, specific to the sport, they had to acquire. The cost of freedom was servitude to the goal. 

In these pages we are concerned with the discipline of poetry as a tool to realize your potential for joy.***** We are not “searching for joy” or “journeying toward joy.” The joy is right here, right now. It might be guilt-bound, fear-encrusted, or anger-suffused. It might be hiding in your gut, having run for cover from an abusive parent or an oppressive spouse. (Many people, not all of whom are modern-day snake-oil salesmen or delusional, believe that the site of a physical illness is related to the way in which you have tried to shield your core being from harm.)

NEXT: What is beauty, and is it optional?

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* “Many philosophers have chosen… to leave some terms undefined… [claiming that we] cannot define being, unity and similar concepts.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition, accessed January 12, 2008

** Assembled from numerous Random Sentence Generators on the Internet

*** MedicineNet.com medical dictionary

****  Duchamp’s urinal, which he exhibited as My Fountain (1917) created quite a fuss in the art world, as did Emin’s My Bed. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed), “the artwork generated considerable media furor, particularly over the fact that the bedsheets were stained with body secretions and the floor had items from the artist’s room (such as condoms [and] a pair of panties with menstrual period stains…. The bed was presented as it had been when Emin had not got up from it for several days due to suicidal depression…. [During the Tate exhibition] two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped on the bed with bare torsos in order to ‘improve’ the work, …[calling] their performance Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed. The men also had a pillow fight on the bed for around fifteen minutes, to applause from the crowd, before being removed by security guards.”

***** We will explore the discipline of poetry in “The Therapeutic Value of Strict Poetic Forms” in a later chapter. Gosh, that sounds so pompous. A better title might be, “When You Focus on Form, Feeling Flows.” It’s alliterative, too.