Taking our Lumps, Pounding Them, Too

Art, like nature, is full of object lessons. That's not the primary function of art-- to exist as a homily or a message. As a finished piece, art can cause a reaction in us that leaves us to consider the subject matter. For the artist, the one in the creative process, there are many valuable insights that arise, and often they occur by everything going wrong. But first, here is a fine example of everything going right for a sculptor, displaying the jaunty feeling of satisfaction when that happens.

Kent the Sculptor, Kent Melon http://kentmelton.blogspot.com

When I was in high school, my art teacher pounded into our heads that we needed to pound on our clay. If we didn't work out all of the air pockets and tiny bits of stone, these pockets and bits would cause the piece to crack or blow up in the kiln. So we pounded. And pounded. Pound and fold over and pound and stretch and pound. Then we rolled it inside plastic bags to make sure that we hadn't inadvertently pounded air into it.  The point wasn't to flatten it, but just to get it uniformly solid and less likely to explode.

The reason why you would have seen our class pounding that clay like our lives depended on it, was because our social lives did. As a teenager, your social standing feels like the same as your day to day survival. If our finished piece blew up in the kiln, that would be disappointing for us, and result in a bad grade. But our pieces weren't fired individually. There wasn't time for the teacher to do this, and so he would do several at a time. If one piece were to blow up, then they all would be ruined and come out baked in the form of the blast. It would be obvious whose was the offending piece, and none of us wanted that to be ours. Imagine the faces turned toward you. My hands would be aching and red by all of the abuse I had landed on my slab of clay. But the worry would still be nagging at me until we all received our shiny, funny little formations, intact.

There was a memorable explosion that did happen, once, and it was memorable because the art teacher fired his own piece, along with another student's. He had been teaching the seniors how to sculpt parts of the human form, and created a lovely delicate hand with loving detail along with them. Probably trying to save time or to return everyone's pieces back to them by the next class, which would have been his job, rather than sculpting for himself, he was perhaps hurried and definitely careless. He impulsively forgot how valuable his work was and didn't protect it. The idea that I wouldn't see that finished hand that had seemed so real sickened me. 

He, himself, seemed sheepish and red-faced about it, but didn't say anything publicly to the class. It might have been a teaching moment for us, but I don't blame him for not trotting out his loss for all to see. I also don't know how much the work meant to him, so I also can't judge how much he had hurt himself, other than his pride. I hope he didn't decide that it wasn't important, just because he allowed it to be damaged.

All of us are valuable and also somewhat damaged. You just can't avoid someone else's pockets of hot air that seem to be safe. We all have tiny stones that can crack us when pressure is applied. By a certain age, most of us have felt pounded on from all sides, and it really does feel like a punishing "creator" is getting us suitable for his uses.

Portrait of a Sculptor, El Greco

Yet, as handy as they are, I'm not really a big believer in object lessons, a priori. Clay and fiery kilns never fail to make a good one. But, I don't believe that all of life is existing just for someone to become enlightened. I don't believe that the things that happen to people are sent to them from anywhere or anyone. I can't know this, of course. But I feel that someone else's misfortune or suffering or tragedy is just that, and I respect that it's enough for us just to endure it, survive it, bury it, or emerge from it changed or not. The clay was doing just fine on its own, until it got scooped up by someone and sold for my purposes. I could believe that clay is worthless until it is processed, because that benefits me. But in all honesty, I fancifully wish that I could hear the clay's side of things. Another teacher of mine said, "Survival alone is cause enough for celebration." And that I believe with my whole heart.

But still I can't help being fascinated by the kiln. I understand much more about the pounding and shaping process because I'm the one seeing it and doing it. But the kiln is out of my hands, closed up and mysterious. So, of course, that's where the magic is happening. But magic burns, and that is certain.

Exceptional Excerpts: Victor Frankl

"In Vienna, the coffee house isn’t just a hangout: it’s an institution. Lingering over a newspaper with a pastry and a strong espresso drink is, according to UNESCO, officially a Viennese cultural pastime."

           -- Trip Advisor

Reinhardt Vӧlkel, In Café Grienstadl 1896

Today's post is in honor of two friends who are vacationing right now in Vienna, that great birthplace and bastion of modern psychotherapy. How could one not think about how we think with a good dose of caffeine, sugar and daily reports of both random and organized human behavior at hand? So here is an excerpt about the widely beloved Viennese, Victor Frankl, concentration camp survivor, innovator of "logotherapy" and author of the globally renowned Man's Search for Meaning.

Afterwards, have your own official pastime and enjoy a lyrical reminder that it's perfectly normal to doubt your sanity from time to time, and doing so can be, perhaps, the highest sign of human self-awareness.

The following excerpt is from:

Victor Frankl at Ninety: An Interview 

by Matthew Scully, April 1995

One story reflected Frankl's conviction that many psychotherapists are themselves mad. It was in the forties, he recalled, here in Vienna. He read a quotation from a noted modern philosopher and another from a schizophrenic patient, and asked his listeners to match quotation with author. Overwhelmingly, he said triumphantly (as though the results of the experiment had just come in), "the majority of listeners got it wrong!"

What philosopher and lunatic had in common, Frankl went on to explain, is the certainty that happiness can be attained by furious pursuit and a consequent rage at the unsatisfying results. His useful word for this is "hyperintention," a tendency that only inflames what is usually the real problem, our own self-centeredness. "Everything can be taken away from man but one thing-- to choose one's attitude in a given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." The sane are those who accept this charge and do not expect happiness by right. Thus Frankl's own "logotherapy," which views suffering not as an obstacle to happiness but often the necessary means to it, less a pathology than a path.

Logotherapy amounts in nearly all situations to the advice, "Get to work." Other psychologies begin by asking, "What do I want from life? Why am I unhappy?" Logotherapy asks, "What does life at this moment demand of me?" Happiness, runs a favored Frankl formulation, "ensues." "Happiness must happen." Life should find us out there in the world doing good things for their own sake. Even "if we strive for a good conscience, we are no longer justified in having it. The very fact has made us into Pharisees. And if we make health our main concern we have fallen ill. We have become hypochondriacs."

At the time of his deportation, from a train station just blocks from where he was now speaking, Frankl was putting the final touches on a book advancing these same points. He had a chance before the war to go to America to write his books and build a reputation. "Should I foster my brainchild, logotherapy . . . or should I concentrate on my duties as a real child of my parents" and stay by them? He arrived home from the American consulate, visa in hand, to find a large block of marble sitting on the table. Recovered by his father from a local synagogue razed by the Nazis, it was, Frankl recalled, a piece from a tablet bearing the first letters of the Commandment, "Honor thy father and mother that thy days may be long upon the land." He let his visa lapse.

Frankl is the rare intellectual called to live out his theories, and then rewarded against staggering odds for his faithfulness. Man's Search for Meaning itself attests to his notion of hyperintention. Had he used the visa and the excuse of professional obligation he would not be the same compelling witness. The camps, he wrote, reveal man much as Freud and others had described him-- a creature driven by ego and instinct and sublimated drives. But they reveal something even more fundamental-- our defining "capacity for self-transcendence." "Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips." Frankl-- who in the early thirties coined the word "existentialism"--is the man who reminded modern psychology of one detail it had overlooked, the patient's soul.

Succeed at Failing

Because failure is an inevitable in every life, we have to get good at it. We have to respect it for what it is and what it is not. When successful people are asked to talk about their success, they are rarely providing a secret to it, or a recipe. They mostly talk about a process that they have witnessed and are testifying to it. It comes across as a spiritual epiphany, even if the person isn't religious. They may not be religious, or even spiritual, but what they are is devoted.

Failure is not an end, in either sense of the word. It is not an end as a goal, and it is not an ending. That is up to the individual to decide that either situation is permanent and all-defining. An aphorism made popular by John Lennon, and again recently from the film the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is "Everything will be all right in the end. If it's not all right, then it isn't the end." 

But when we experience or witness hardships, major cataclysms, senseless violence and death, those sorts of aphorisms don't always come to mind or help substantially in the blankness of despair. People do end their lives when they are in the depths of perceived failure. Depression is a real illness. Accidents occur to people when they are minding their own business. Sometimes, hearing a celebrity wax poetic about their success can feel Olympian, alienating and even discouraging.

"I thought that if I just gave my heart to what I was doing, I would automatically be a star."

 -- Merry Clayton, Twenty Feet from Stardom

It's important to remember that we usually don't hear from people during a period of "unsuccess" or "improsperity" or "dystop-of-the-world". They are being interviewed because they are promoting a completed project, or they have just received an award, or there is buzz going on about their work or life history. Many times a person's career gets the most attention after they die. In retrospectives, the valleys are filled in and the peaks are piqued even higher. Their successes are amplified to justify so much discussion of them as a news topic. Their times of struggle or social withdrawal are presented luridly, with a badly focused snapshot projected across the screen and magnified, as if they are caught in the act of privacy.

When someone is depressed or desperate, they aren't asked questions as to how they got there. They might be told how they got there, or insinuations are thrown around. They might talk about a past struggle or how their circumstances became reduced materially. They might see themselves as a cautionary tale or a mistake that should never have been born. Even Job, the most ancient of sufferers, spent the last portion of his life pondering the troubles that had befallen him, even after all of his valuables, progeny and reputation had been restored to him. Even after his friends explain his troubles to him, he rejects their formulas for failure. He doesn't come up with a summation that fits into a quotable verse. He lets it remain a mystery that he accepts, but can't comprehend.

Job's nonconclusion feels right. Success is easier to define and failure is easier to judge from the outside. We like to celebrate success immediately, and we have every right to. But failure is so much harder to navigate successfully. There are some that do fear success and all that comes with that, and so they stay stuck in a failed state where all the known devils reside. Ideas for improving one's lot are met with "but…" until that word becomes a mantra. Devotion to a passion-- in Job's case, his faithfulness to Jehovah-- can feel like a friend who's long gone.

"I think that if I'd have 'made it' as the world defines 'making it', I wouldn't be sitting here talking to you now. I would have o.d.'d somewhere along the way."

-- Merry Clayton

Listen to Don Henley sing of one poor Harry who was "too much in this world", which reminds us that the road to success and the fall into failure-- the yearning for one and the horror of the other--  is never a good enough exchange for your life or well-being.

The ending of Job is curious and has staying power as a story of devotion. Job could have decided, "I thought I was devoted to Jehovah, but then he let all of these terrible things happen to me." Or he could have decided, "I have all of these wonderful things restored to me now, but I won't forgive the terrible losses." Either way, his final state would feel empty of meaning or solace. However, it seems he chose to refrain from commentary, remained silent, and had no aphorisms, platitudes or secrets, because he was only devoted to one reality, one that existed for him apart from external success or failure. His reality was still his devotion to Jehovah, regardless of his circumstances or how that devotion expressed itself. He put no conditions on it, nor did he stylize it to make it easily recognizable to others. He remembered everything that had happened and and yet refused to define either Jehovah or himself by those remembrances.

When failure hits, you may not be able to take decisive action in the devotion to your passion, but you can stay devoted with your mind. I believe that most of devotion is made up of remembrance. Failure may be the time to curl up a little if flexing your success muscle has gone on too long for your own good. Failure may help you reflect, regroup and reset. But use failure successfully, as an important time to re-member. To put your members back together. To put your memories back into your life, breathing with the same mysterious inconclusive air that inspired Job through the rest of his days.

These many members are all of you: your experiences, the stories you tell yourself and others about your past, both exhilarating and painful, memories of your early ideals, your fantasies, your flops, your leaps of faith, your challenges, your humiliations, your victories, big and small. 

The members are also people you have known, have lived with, have shared your true self with, and have allowed to witness your successes and failures as you see fit. They are all the dissimilar ones who are supportive, the ones who are critical or judgmental, the ones who believe you to be a nobody, the ones who look up to you, the ones who give to you, the ones who try to exploit you, the ones who love you, the ones who want you to fail and prove their own superiority, the ones who have changed their lives for you, and the ones who would sell you up the river.

Allow all that you remember to pour into whatever you want to devote yourself to, like a drink offering. Then watch the process of how that devotion finds its way to its desired end. Your devotion will fill up your days and your days will remember you.

A uniquely personal example of devotion to writing with typewriters:

Philip K. Dick's Olympia SG-3, Tim Youd Photo Credit: Joshua White

Performance Photo of Tim Youd

Typing Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely: Santa Monica Pier, Santa Monica, CA January 2014

http://www.timyoud.com

Photo Credit: Summers McKay

An American Tune

Please skip whatever long or silly ad comes up before this performance by Paul Simon nearly 40 years ago. Enjoy, and Happy 4th of July.

Many's the time I've been mistaken

And many times confused
Yes, and I've often felt forsaken
And certainly misused

Ah, but I'm all right, I'm all right
I'm just weary to my bones
Still, you don't expect to be bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

And I don't know a soul who's not been battered
I don't have a friend who feels at ease
I don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to its knees

Ah, but it's all right, it's all right
For we've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help but wonder what's gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly

And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call The Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age's most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune

Oh, and it's all right, it's all right, it's all right
You can't be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow's going to be another working day
And I'm trying to get some rest
That's all I'm trying to get some rest

written by Paul Simon