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.
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.
