Thursday, April 26, 2007

What is art for?


Thus far in my academic research have been interested in the functions of art within the human experience, and its role in recovery, service, peace and justice issues. I partly define art anthropologicially – similar to what Ellen Dissanyake refers to as a "species-centric view". This emphasizes those creative thoughts and acts that form social cohesion, and fulfill the psychological needs of human beings. Art reflects human behaviors and activities like ritual,myth, narrative creation, and play, that help us find meaning, release life stress, and help us successfully survive in life. From a contextual perspective, I consider how humans experience the world within both priveledge and poverty.

Lately I’ve wondered about the comforts of priveledge and how they often end up in spiritual poverty. Remember the words of Mother Teresa, as she visited the States in the 1990's? In comparison to poverty, she saw that the spiritual poverty of the US is a much graver problem. When I think about my own U.S. cultural expereince, I get discouraged by cultural inheritance of excess and debt, the global extensions, and Walmart, the discourses of Fox news. I get discouraged at the fact that these things are in me - in my own consciousness, habits and lifestyle. The deeply ingrained values of Individualism, secularism, and capitalism have brought me a sense of disappointment at my own embeddedness. It seems I spend so much energy trying to overcome this conditioning, and yet the personal commitment is still met with my own laziness, and apathy towards change. I feel like I’ve been orphaned by my cultural forefathers, and have inherit a dis-ease that celebrates surface over depth, abandons the blessed community, and has forgotten the sacred awareness and concern of all life and nature. What is the vaccine for an epidemic of the loss of the soul, and for the pain of the gap between the reality of the mirror, and the people we hope to become?

Art meets the crisis of life, reconstructs it, and provides a slow, but true process of transforming our perceptions of ourselves in the world. The space of creating attunes our consciousness to our deepest nature and call of being as it is ecologically related to others. Not only is it an antidote for the loss of meaning that returns us to Presence, but it is a third space that sutures the heart to an ethical commitment to life and change. In the experience of making art, we become silenced, but keenly awakened to our own potentials. It is here that illusions become transparent, and we learn to find affirmation in the possibilities of now to move energy in different and emancipatory ways.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Existential Loneliness: A Call to Care

Wholeness and broken-ness are not two separate things... and life is not just a process of becoming whole. Our truest wholeness begins when we are most broken.... The stars shine the brightest when the midnight sky is the darkest. Until we embrace this loneliness, and accept it as an essential aspect of existence... we continue to be separated from ourselves... fighting and grasping after a perfect unity -- as Tillich states, " the self separated from the self is the greatest separation there is." Loneliness is a wake up call to self; It need not lead to the experience of isolation, depression, mental illness, or suicide. The acceptance of our loneliness is an acceptance of life itself... to the impermanence of all things, and the decision to find contentment in circumstance. In loneliness we learn to BE. Heidegger would say that this BE-ING is a means to care. As my partner said.... Lonely people caring for other lonely people. So somewhere in this brokeness we find wholeness...we find resolve in connecting to the human condition. In this third space. between the the single, lonely I, and the ecological whole of the Universe, we find our place, lonely thought it is.


Thursday, April 12, 2007

Homesick

Most of my writing these days is reflecting on the idea/place/space/people of home. In fact, much of my daily expereince is absorbed by the draining feeling that I dont have one. Is home a culture? A community? Thoughts that keep us surviving in a world that has forgotten us and abandoned our deepest human needs? Years ago I began my dissertation research with the notion of cultural fragmentation and the spiritual void associated with the loss of community, family, and the emotional support of close networks of friends and collegues. I used to be ashamed to say that I am lonely... or too even come to consciousness about this hopeless feeling. Recently I told someone that the idea that we, as human beings, are isolated is an illusion...that reality reveals that we are intimately connected with the universe and each other in powerful ways. Yet, today and yesterday, and the day before that, I cant see this anymore... How is it that joy, if it is real and deep, can be drained so quickly? That life itself can seem so empty and meaningless. Perhaps it is part of the process of aging... that one day you wake up and see that things never seem to turn out the way you had hoped or envisioned for yourself. I find myself going elsewhere in my imagination to other lives I could have lived or should be living, to other people, and places, and times where my heart can sing in unity with the people that love me. Its a sign that to me that I am not content, nor fulfilled by the cirsumstances of the here and now.. and yet the greater problem is that I rarely ever have been fulfilled in life. This is the ultimate place of homelessness.

Friday, April 06, 2007

The Weaver’s Internal Knot


Upon swooping threads
In a colored landscape, snarled and frayed
Lone tightrope walkers quiver at the presence of a fuzzy bump.
Stuck in unraveling the knots,
Only to rebind them, even tighter
Only to finally see that knots
joined high, and piled up
Wait softly to press against them
To welcome them back into their web
Wait for the fall
Into their close embrace
Into the fresh canvas of their beginning..

Storied Lives on Living Landscapes




Narrative researchers Clandinin and Connelly write: "we are live storied on living landscapes". Lately I have been collecting visual data and personal narratives on bodily scars; a project I am calling Bodily Scar Sharings. I have aways been interested in the relationship between surface and depth- the illusion of ego and the transparency of truth. In Japan I experienced these distinctions as the tatemae of the outer face, and the Hone of the inner being. Just as skin clothes our lives, they reveal war wounds, the marks of being in the world. Often they reveal deeper expereinces that go unsaid, yet carry medicinal insights. Defined widely, the body scars stories I have recieved so far represent everything from accidents, surgeries, and botched surgeries, tumor removals, and self-inflicted cutting. Each story carries its own trauma and integrity. People ususally dont just email or hand me their written narrative; they want to talk. In homes, in studios, in people' s bedrooms and kitchens, they share moments in which they discovered that life itself is impermenent, and out of their control. Medical ethnographer, Gail Becker writes about the healing power of narrative she collected among patients in crisis. As they are invited to reflect on their expereinces, she found that such opportunity releases a new sense of empowerment because it allow an empatihc space in which people are listened to, validated, and embraced by an audience of listeners. Narrative becomes the thread that binds human beings to one another. It is this process that opens a THIRD SPACE to enter in and identify with the authentic thoughts, emotions and ideas of others. The POWER of story is the KNOWING that we ARE NOT ISOLATED AND ALONE individuals. In collecting the data for this project I have recognized the power of shared narratives; its work to connect human beings in common threads. With opened ears, eyes, and hearts, narrative asks us to courageously meet one another as the recognition of our responsibility to one another.