Art for Life's Sake

This month's Harper's magazine has a pair devastatingly effective essays that knock flat whatever thin vestiges of superhumanness our presidential candidates had clung to.

Devastating, not just for them, but for me. It dawned on me today how few individuals in this world actually deserve our emulation and attention--and how few of the deserving actually receive it. We are surrounded by billions of fellow nobodys. We work jobs in literal or figurative assembly lines, performing small tasks in large chains that contribute to engineering, healthcare, education, agriculture. For the vast majority of us and our mindless minions, our particular chain has some negligible effect on the world. If we're lucky, it's a marginally positive impact. It saves a few lives or helps a few folks escape pain or meaninglessness.

The vast majority of our chains' true purpose is to further the ends of a small group of rich and powerful men and women (mostly men) who play the hands to millions of marionettes who dance, sing, and perform the daily rituals that maintain that cabalistic status quo.

Sad history has shown that the rich and powerful are incredibly adept at molding whatever system they encounter into new, shiny arrows in their collective quiver of tricks. Communism, capitalism, Hollywood, the Olympics, Whole Foods, and Rock'n'Roll. I don't know if there's a way to slough off the chains of their greed and megalomania. At least not right now.

But there is one thing that seems to elude their grasp. One thing that maintains its independence, that manages to elude, if only now and again, the grasp of the rich and powerful.

Art.

Real art.

In a world where so many of us spend our days as cogs and our nights as media zombies, art is the light that brings meaning to our shining moments and schools us in our emotions. The artist is a revolutionary figure able to create something that has no primed and studied demographic waiting in the wings. It has no discernible purpose in the hands of governments, companies, clergies, or cults. It cannot be twisted, for at the slightest manipulation it ceases to be art.

The artist deserves our emulation because she creates art.

Art deserves our attention because it shows us how to find meaning. It is something worth spending one's life experiencing.

Meaning is something that everyone must find in this life if it is to be worth living.

I believe meaning comes from a Heavenly Father who loves and knows each one of and is ready to teach us how our time as a cog in the great wheel of perpetual life motion is part of a greater purpose. But I would not have found this meaning without art.

So find something beautful, terrible, tragic, or comical. Read it, watch it, listen, gaze. Then take the lesson you learn, apply it to your quest for meaning, and bring your wisdom back to your brothers and sisters. Then one day, and it will be a good day, the world will contain enough wisdom to collectively see how we can make the world a better place much faster than one person at a time.

But until then, pick up a good book, pull up your neighbor who falters, and find a little light to share with those around you.

Dead White Guys Cheering Me On

A little more than a month ago, I dubbed this 'the year of the essay' as I looked in that ugly stepsister of a genre to find academic, personal, and ideological redemption from what continues to be a taxing year.

Update: Politicians are still idiots, my job at a software company still turns my brain to mush, and I'm not sure if I want the cost of gas to go up or down (such ambivalence about long- vs. short-term good!).

However, in one pivotal instance, the essay, or rather the pretentious aristocrats who wrote some essays in England during the 17th century, helped save my sanity just a little bit.

I had come up with a brilliant plan. I won't go into details, but I was certain that I had found a way turn my life around in a way that both supported my family and my ambitions with a new job that I would have loved. One small issue: the job no longer existed. I'm not sure what little chasm of mischief in my mind convinced me that it was ok to fantasize about a dream life without first inquiring about the job's availability, but I did. And I was somewhat crushed when the prospects didn't pan out.

Enter Ben Jonson (1572-1637 [according to Master Norton]). Always a comfort to those of us who lack the instinctive or hereditary abilities that seem to appear spontaneously in others ("For a good poet's made as well as born"), Ben gave me some perspective on my difficulties. You see, I don't find much joy in my job, and it requires long hours. The fantasy job, while still requiring much effort, would have been within my comfort zone and used skills I've already spent a fair amount of time honing.

But Ben said to me, "And though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all. For as in an instrument, so in style, there must be a harmony and consent of parts."

And I said, "What the heck does that have to do with anything, Benjamin?"

And he said, "My name is Ben, and it's not short for anything. But what I'm saying is that if this aspect of professionalization is not of your taste, then all the more reason to embrace it for a time, knowing that you'll be more balanced in the long run."

To which I said, "Cool, thanks Benjamin," and promptly stopped talking to the Norton Anthology of English Literature because my wife came in the room.

Life is hard. And you want the best job and best situation you can get. But sometimes, you need to be patient and embrace the less palatable steps in that ladder, realizing that (at least for me) true happiness in the world is being able to act confidently and efficiently in it to help others and do good work. And today, tomorrow, and the next day will all push me in that direction as long as I keep a balanced and positive 17th century bourgeois attitude.

So in sum (for those of you just waiting for pictures):

This guy:
 

Helped turn me from feeling this:
 
 To this: