In my last post, I wrote:

The vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

And I noted that our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media indoctrinates us with two misguided notions: 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

In a 1968 interview in The Paris Review, John Updike alluded to the locales that tended to engender his best writing.

A few places are specially conducive to inspiration — automobiles, church — private places.

It was an offhand remark, not especially unique for its time. But in today’s cultural context does it not sound practically … eccentric? Private places? Anybody remember those? The phrase today tends to conjure one’s bathroom or boudoir, for it may be presumed that in those two places most of us still prefer technological chastity.

But I digress. My point is that today the intangible realm which increasingly claims our waking hours, the Internet, serves to drain our lives of private psychic space, and consequently of solitude, for the Internet is not and never can be a private sphere. (Concerning the irony of blogging about this stuff, see part one of this post.)

Firstly, of course, it is the Web’s connectivity that precludes privacy, but there is another reason we cannot be alone online. It is, quite simply, because we cannot “be there” at all.

In a prior Soul Shelter post, Tim has pointed out that the Internet is not an industry.  Following that line of thought, we discover that the Internet, in a critical sense, does not “exist.” (Stay with me now. I realize this amounts to a modern heresy. ) What I mean is that the Internet is not properly a realm, a sphere, a space or a room. It cannot be “entered.” It is a word, an abstraction, a concept, a fancy — albeit a marvelously impressive and even useful one.

Neil Postman, in his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, traces the important distinction between ideas and things, and shows convincingly how in our information-saturated present day we tend to mistake technological notions and processes for actual, material absolutes. This profoundly alters our understanding of the nature of reality, and brings us to do immense damage to ourselves, each other, and our culture.

The isolated components which create what we call “The Internet” may be physical and tangible, such as a keyboard or screen, but a computer terminal is not the Internet, nor is a fiber optic cable or a modem. The Internet itself is immaterial. It cannot be touched, let alone inhabited. It is an idea — and by its nature it is unitary; i.e., collective.

Thus, you cannot “sit inside” the Internet as Updike sat in his car or upon his church pew, and you most certainly cannot “sit inside it alone.”

Remember “Virtual Reality”? Why is it that we hear this term less and less these days? Might its scarcity signal our total conversion to the ideology of the Internet — the belief that the erstwhile Virtual now constitutes Reality itself? If so, this would signal that we live in a veritable Technopoly, as Neil Postman argued seventeen years ago:

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

One thing I feel for certain: the Internet has produced in our culture a connection-addiction, a constant being-elsewhere, a daily transplanting of the self from its real, palpable world into a virtual reality, a hive life, a maze of information stimuli — and all of this threatens to deplete our efforts to sow personal, psychic, and spiritual independence. A primary benefit of being solitary, after all, is that it facilitates being, that natural state of the soul in which you find yourself “in the moment,” as they say. Right here, right now.

“In Technopoly,” writes Postman, “we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to ‘access’ information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented.”

He continues:

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed; i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

So, predisposed as we are to move our thoughts, our inner lives, our reading habits further online — and thus further into the public sphere, where collective technology dissolves and annuls our personal solitude — we ought to pause and ask:

• Whither goes our sense of self, our ability to be alone, think alone, believe alone?
• Whither goes our propensity for discipline and self-reliance, for doing a thing solely because we believe, down to our human core, in the thing’s intrinsic value — even if it should never be seen by anybody else and thus never elicit praise, profit, or prestige?

On the rear flap of an old edition of J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny & Zooey I recently discovered the following impish testament, penned by the novelist himself, and well worth framing above one’s desk:

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

Today we may ask: What if Salinger’s proverbial writer faces a compromised anonymity, a lack of solitude precluding the blessings (yes, blessings) of obscurity?

Say the young writer is — if not famous in a societal way — then “socially famous” on Facebook or MySpace; say he’s got 662 “friends” whose irresistible avatars dispel his focus hourly; say he’s engaged by thirty-seven e-mails daily; or say, instead of recording his thoughts and imaginings in the privacy of a paper-bound journal, he blogs these things to the world and then spends his days patrolling reader comments?

Connection, interaction has become the raison de vivre of our time. We rate our technologies first by the efficiency with which they allow us to reach another person and gather data. And quick, even instant measurability of that efficiency is a chief advantage of online media. Send an e-mail, get a response. Build a Web Site, then tabulate “unique visitors” and hits per day. Set up a Facebook page, count your friends. Within this hyper-social, data-driven ethos, does it not follow that endeavors failing to serve the ultimate utilities — i.e., connection and measurability — call for abandonment?

How, in such a culture, can one still conceive of spending three to five years writing a novel in the quiet of one’s study?

“The gods are just,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear, “and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.” (Aldous Huxley was so fond of the line, he included it in Brave New World.)

Here’s our friend Montaigne talking about solitude again:

Remember the man who, when he was asked why he took so much pains in an art which could come to the knowledge of scarcely anyone, replied: ‘Few are enough for me, one is enough for me, none at all is enough for me.’ He spoke truly: you and one companion are an adequate theater for each other, or you for yourself.*

The Internet, TV, and mass media in general promise to save us from ourselves. Solitude is now completely avoidable. But what do we lose when we lose solitude? What is the cost of trading in our anonymity?

“We are not merely social beings,” says William Deresiewicz in a dynamite article entitled “The End of Solitude,”

We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it. …No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

The spirit of the age notwithstanding, we possess in our solitude, our anonymity, our inwardness and interiority, the precious resources that have produced and sustained the best and most enduring cultural creations of the ages.

No matter how popularly devalued these resources become, no matter what suspicion or scorn each may arouse, we ought to hold them dear. The health and wellbeing of citizens, society, and culture depend upon it.

So I write this offline, after slow and fruitful days in real time, in silence, alone with my thoughts or in the company of printed books authored by wide-eyed souls, each of whom, in turn, studied and wrote alone.

And I post this as a reminder to myself above all, before logging off to seek more of where this came from.

…If we have thus deconsecrated ourselves — and who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to re-consecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane [temple] of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. — Henry David Thoreau

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

(This post comes from the Soul Shelter archives)

You may also enjoy:

“In Defense of Solitude (PartI)”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“To Recharge, Unplug”

“A Song for the Unsung”

“Presenting … the Intravidual”

“When Connectivity Breeds Loneliness”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“On Slowness”

“Soul School”

“In Defense of ‘Aimless’ Learning”

A friend just sold her single-person company for a multimillion dollar sum, less than three years after founding it.

Many onlookers would be astounded by this unannounced transaction (only insiders or those who scour SEC filings would know about it).

“It’s just a Web site,” they might say.

Just a Web site. Yet everything more.

For behind the Web site lies 20 years of striving in the online world, from the forums of CompuServe to the mailing lists of the early 90s to today’s Web sites, blogs, and social networking media.

Nor would surprised onlookers know about the 70 hour + workweeks, the marathon weekends, the vacations not taken, the sacrifices made during the lean years, until, finally — and in a most natural way — her efforts were recognized and rewarded by a skyrocketing user base.

Popular perception holds that stunning success, especially in the online world, takes place overnight and involves as much luck as skill.

And, in fact, many of those who experience such success modestly attribute it to “luck.”

But what it really involves is, as my old man used to say, “elbow grease.” Hard work, sustained over many years.

Herein lies life’s number one success principle.

Are you ready for it?

Are you sure?

Because the truth is a disappointment to many success-seekers.

Okay, here it is:

Effort determines results. Average effort produces average results. Good effort produces good results. Extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results.

That’s it.

I can almost hear you groaning. “C’mon, Clark, tell me something I didn’t know.”

But do you really know it? I didn’t. Not really. For years.

But my wise wife casually let this slip one day, explaining some minor success on my part: “Average effort produces average results. Extraordinary effort produces extraordinary results.”

Drafting these words on Independence Day 2009 amid the boom of fireworks, I recall how her words jolted me like a string of bursting firecrackers.

Effort determines results. How could it be otherwise?

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“Three Lessons My Students Taught Me“

Me: So tell me again, what was it like?

Resident Baby: The place I came from?

– Yeah. Like, was it dark back there or full of light?

RB: You don’t remember? Didn’t you come from the same place?

– Well, yeah, everybody did.

RB: But you forgot what it was like?

– Everyone does, after a while.

RB: Really? You mean, I’ll forget too?

– I’m afraid so.

RB: Why?

– (shrug) It’s part of growing up.

RB: How long do I have?

– Hm?

RB: Till I forget.

– Uh, dunno. Nobody really knows when it happens. Personally, I suspect it happens with speech. A child learns language and forgets the other things. The earlier stuff. The mysteries. But that’s just a hunch. No one knows for sure.

RB: (thoughtful) Hmm.

– You look worried.

RB: What do you expect? You just told me I’m fated to forget where I came from!

– Maybe so, but you can describe it for me now, while you still remember. That way, even when you forget, I’ll remember.

RB: And you’ll remind me?

– Yeah.

RB: But wait a minute, how can you trust what I say? I mean, we’re not even really having this conversation. I can’t even talk yet, after all.

– So… what, you’re saying this is all in my head?

RB: Well…

– This discourse of ours, it isn’t even real?

RB: Well…

– Cause that hurts.

RB: Well, I’m just saying, I can’t even talk yet, so…

– You’re wiser than you know, kiddo. Can you just trust me on that? You’re a teacher.

RB: A teacher? I am?

– Yep, simply by being your bright-eyed, curious, squishable self. You can’t even help it. It’s just the way you are.

RB: (considering) Wow…

– So tell me, what was it like out there, before… You know, before the womb and all that?

RB: Well… (closing his eyes, thinking back) It wasn’t really dark, but not light either. …It was, like, all blues and pinks.

– In the womb, you mean?

RB: No, before that. It wasn’t really warm, but not cold either. There were, like, spots of light, maybe.

– Like stars?

RB: Sort of. Maybe.

– Could you hear anything? Were there sounds?

RB: It was silent. Wait, no, maybe there was, like, a hum.

– Did it all feel like water? Or more like air?

RB: Umm… It was a very settled feeling, I think. Peaceful.

– Wow.

RB: Pretty nice, huh?

– Yeah.

RB: But you know what?

– Hm?

RB: I’m glad to be here now.

– That’s a nice thing to say.

RB: No, but I mean it. Like, here we’ve got cookies, sippy cups, fuzzy blankets, storybooks, strollers, the park, the zoo…

– Mm. Simple pleasures.

RB: Yep. Those are what it’s all about. Those, and more complex pleasures when you’re older — symphonies, good novels, mango chutney. But it’s the same idea.

– So you came from where you came from in order to enjoy all those things?

RB: And to help you do so.

– I see. OK, that makes sense.

RB: Yep, but I also came to do this.

(Resident baby climbs up and gives me one of his irreplaceable Resident Baby hugs)

– Hey, thanks!

RB: I’m a baby. It’s what I’m all about.

– Well, I’m glad you’re here — and glad you’re glad to be here.

RB: Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.

– Yes it is. Happy and peaceful.

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“The Post That Never Was”

“The Rainbow Vanishes”

“Dr. Soul’s Inspirational Roundup, June ‘09”

“The One Place You’ll Always Be Indispensable“

– In the future nobody eats anymore, and nobody has sex! –

My Grandma-in-law is an eighty-four year old who cannot bring herself to accept the Internet and the changes it has wrought in contemporary life. This lady is no sourpuss, mind you. She hails from my favorite generation: those weathered WWII folks, so many of whom possess a warmth and social grace unsurpassed by subsequent generations.

Every minor transaction is, in my Grandma-in-law’s way of seeing the world, an opportunity for human connection — the face-to-face kind. She charms strangers in grocery lines. When there’s a party, she’s the life of it. She’s been known to dance with a champagne glass balanced on her white curls. She does high kicks on New Years Eve.

She cannot understand all this fuss about the presumed pleasure of sitting at a computer keyboard interacting with (or through) a machine.

Knowing I’m a writer, this lady has long been at me to create a science fiction tale about the metamorphosis of the human species as a consequence of unrestrained Internet use. We’ve had many informal “cram sessions” in which she unloads her ideas.

People’s eyeballs get sucked out from staring at screens too long! Nobody eats anymore, nobody has sex! They can’t tear themselves away from the terminal long enough. It’s like the end of the human race, see?”

She’s worked for years as a travel agent, and recently recounted a scathing run-in with a friend, a Catholic priest she’s known for decades.

He said to me, ‘Why on earth would anybody use a travel agent these days. You can use the Internet!’

‘Is that so?’ I told him. ‘Well then, next time I need a priest I’ll use the Internet!‘

I’m no extrovert myself, but I know Grandma’s got a point. She lives larger than many people one-third her age — and bifocals or not, she sees far beyond our puny screens.

Maybe someday I’ll write a book as large as her life.

You may also enjoy:

“The Rainbow Vanishes”

“The Post That Never Was”

“Incredibly Shrinking Selves”

“Thanks, Bill, for Connecting Our Connections”

“Are You an Amateur? Why Not?“

– Destiny is the finest incentive –

Recently I read a New York Times Book Review article that discussed books solely in terms of the amount each author was paid. To my eyes, this is not a valid or worthwhile way to talk about literature, or other art for that matter. According to the specious logic of such a discussion, culture is little more than a byproduct of commerce — the better-paid a book, the more worthy of attention.

I believe passionately that young writers — or old, still-struggling ones — ought to be championed in their wildly impractical, unlucrative pursuits, even if the dominant discourse is all about cash, film deals, and bestseller lists, so I promptly wrote the following letter to the editor. It appeared in the paper’s May 3^rd edition.

I reprise the letter here for any reader engaged in an as yet unacknowledged creative enterprise.

Michael Meyer’s piece “About That Book Advance…” (Sunday, April 12, 2009) discusses fiction publishing in terms that hardly ever apply in reality, or terms more relevant to the publishing of non-fiction. While advance payment is the rule for memoirs or informational books, only the minutest fraction of published fiction writers command up-front cash for work still unfinished.

Wildly lucky name-grade authors notwithstanding, most fiction writers — even those with one or more novels to their credit — must labor, often for years, sans payment. What’s more, in our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among them labor sans all guarantees of eventual publication or income; one could argue — and demonstrate persuasively — that the greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism and status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. Laboring slowly, unhonored and unpaid and bound toward an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as New York parlance would have it, these writers have destiny for incentive — and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, they sing, and reap rewards that more than mitigate the annoyances of obscurity. Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy decried by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

In the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Proust — and more recently Cormac McCarthy and the late Andre Dubus — these unsung have their forebears. It shall be said we did not know them at first. Meanwhile, they worked.

Rather than discuss contemporary literature or even contemporary publishing, Mr. Meyer’s article does little more than survey the New York Cult of Success. The art of language and story lives elsewhere, sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.

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“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

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– A celebrated literary reference turned fifty late last month. Today we consider that book’s embedded life wisdom. –

A slim sourcebook for writers, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White is a veritable classic, thoroughly instructive and reliable for any writer young or old, novice or professional.

During one of my periodic perusals of the book recently, it struck me how much of Strunk and White’s writing advice can be viewed as advice about life and career. So, herewith, four nuggets from The Elements of (Life)Style.

(Note: Insertions of blue text represent my adaptations of Strunk & White.)

1. “Put statements in positive form.”

“Make definite assertions,” counsel Strunk & White. “Avoid tame, colorless, hesitating, noncommittal language.” Avoid using the word “not” as “a means of evasion.” This helps one see clearly and define one’s goals.

Thus: I do not very often work all that hard

becomes: I lack discipline.

And: I do not have a clear sense of how to reach my objective

becomes: I need clear intermediate goals.

2. “Use the active voice.”

Strunk & White assert: “The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive.” In undertaking challenges in life, too, the active voice helps harness one’s passion and belief.

I will pursue my destiny and embrace my happiness.

This is much better than

My destiny and happiness are there for my pursuing.

3. “Use definite, specific, concrete language.”

Strunk & White advise us to “Prefer the specific to the general, the definite to the vague, the concrete to the abstract.”

“If those who have studied the art of writing life are in accord on any one point, it is on this: the surest way to hold the attention of the reader get inspired and remain perseverant is by being specific, definite, and concrete” in one’s vision.

Thus:

I will work very hard to write well and try to get published

becomes:

I will write for two hours every day until I’ve produced a complete short story. Referring to The Elements of Style, I will revise the story. I will show the story to trusted readers, weigh their comments about it, and make appropriate changes and improvements. Finally, once the story is as perfect as I believe I can make it, I will send a copy of it to one magazine per week until it is accepted for publication.

4. “Choose a suitable design and hold to it.”

Strunk & White point out that every form of writing happy, healthy lifestyle and every fulfilling career is rooted in a structure or plan — though they acknowledge that “In some cases, the best design is no design.”

More often, however, planning precedes writing success. A primary rule of composition success “is to foresee or determine the shape of what is to come and pursue that shape.”

A sonnet is built on a fourteen-line frame, of five-foot lines. Hence, the sonneteer knows exactly where he is headed. …

The more clearly one perceives the shape a design for one’s desires, the better one’s chances of success. …”

What do you know, maybe writing well and living well aren’t all that different.

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“Eight Difficult, Outdated Ways to Excel”

“The Lonely Novelist’s Five-Point Productivity Plan”

“The Anchovy’s Rules of Goodwill and Good Work”

“Working Without Working”

“Secrets of Creative Longevity“

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for attending this week’s special Soul Shelter convocation. Now allow me to find my notes. … Ah, here they are.

(Shuffling papers)

Well, before we proceed I must tell you that the view from this podium is lovely. You all look just swell in your evening attire. I hope the food and drink is to your tastes. Please thank your servers, they’re doing a fine job, aren’t they?

(Applause)

Now for tonight’s introduction:

As regular readers well know, a recurring subject on Soul Shelter is one we refer to somewhat dramatically as Technology versus the Soul. Tonight we convene to formally acknowledge the emergence of an organism which embodies this conflict splendidly.

This organism, already amongst us but hitherto nameless, now bears a title thanks to Mr. Dalton Conley and his new book Elsewhere U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, Blackberry Moms, and Economic Anxiety.

This organism Mr. Conley dubs The Intravidual .

Prophesied more than a decade ago by Sven Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies (1998), the characteristics of the Intravidual and the sociological implications of its existence are familiar to us by now. Here’s how Birkerts described them:

We will establish a wide lateral interaction, dealing via screen with more and more people at the same time that our sustained face-to-face encounters diminish. It will be harder and harder — we know this already — to step free of our mediating devices. There will be people who never in their lives have the experience that was, until our time, the norm — who will never stand in isolated silence among trees and stones, out of shouting distance of any other person, with no communication implement, forced to confront the slow, grainy momentum of time passing.

Most of us recall an era of Individualism. We were born in one. We were subject to the laws of time as we waited on the mail, traveled to a friend’s home, or bided the dark hours when the world’s transmissions took a pause. We were subject to ourselves: solitude and privacy were almost unavoidable. We chose and savored them or had them thrust upon us and learned to make the most of them.

Many of us kept journals or diaries, recording and reflecting in sacred secrecy. If we wished, we could clasp the covers shut with tiny locks.

In contrast, today’s Intravidual blogs his thoughts for the world (it is not the purpose of a blog to cultivate privacy). One doesn’t tuck a blog away in a drawer and allow its recorded contemplations to fructify in the soul. The Intravidual clicks “Publish,” watches pixels flash into form, and eagerly awaits comments.

We used to send messages to friends by post, endorsing our salutations with the slow intaglio of the hand and creasing the papers with care. The Intravidual defaults to e-mail (perhaps customized with colored fonts).

We used to relate voice-to-voice by telephone or face-to-face over coffee. The Intravidual defaults to text messages, or connects briefly by voice-mail to alert his correspondents to incoming e-mails. Quickness is crucial, for the Intravidual must maintain countless simultaneous connections to Intraviduals elsewhere and everywhere.

The Intravidual is determined and defined by the efficiency of his gadgets, by his light-speed inclusion in a conversation, an argument, a realm of professed opinion chattering at every hour and encompassing everywhere. The Intravidual exists in a sphere of selves, a sphere that in Mr. Conley’s terms lies perpetually elsewhere– that is, never right here right now. Through his gadgets the Intravidual channels his work directly into his home, once a private space. Fiber optics allow him to constantly import the world and export himself.

Where is nature in this new Intravidualistic order? Where is time, whose constraints once fostered privacy, silence, solitude, which things in turn begat the illuminations of art, religion, and philosophy through the ages?

Faced with what we are becoming, it’s important to recall what we have been. Dictionaries are helpful:

Individual / adj. & n. adj. 1 single 2 particular; special; not general 3 having a distinct character 4 characteristic of a particular person 5 designed for use by one person. n. 1 a single member of a class 2 a single human being as distinct from a family or group 3 colloq. a person (From Middle English = indivisible).

Individual, you might say, is soul. Poet John Keats (1795-1821) described a soul as an Intelligence that has acquired an Identity of its own.

What do we mean by “soul” here at Soul Shelter? I like Birkerts’ definition:

My use of soul is secular. I mean it to stand for inwardness, for that awareness we carry of ourselves as mysterious creatures at large in the universe. The soul is that part of us that smelts meaning and tries to derive a sense of purpose from experience. … Soul is our inwardness, our self-reflectedness, our orientation to the unknown. Soul waxes in private, wanes in public. We feel it, or feel through it, when we are in sacral spaces, when we love, when we respond to natural or artistic beauty.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Intravidual is here. Long live the individual and the soul.*

This concludes our special convocation.

*Some handy tips for cultivating anti-Intravidualism: 1) Try keeping an offline journal, for your eyes only 2) Set a time for powering on, and limit time spent online 3) Write a letter the old-fashioned way 4) Invite a friend for a face-to-face visit, or meet for conversation over coffee 5) Take a walk (longer the better, no connective devices allowed) 6) Read books.

(Thanks to reader Steve for pointing us to Conley’s book.)

You may also enjoy:

“Soul School”

“Is the Internet Dangerous”

“Why Multitasking Slows Productivity — and What To Do About It”

“Six Ways to Stretch Time”

“The Hazards of Career, the Rewards of Vocation“

-Resident Baby: Daddy?

-Hm?

-RB: Are you still here, Daddy?

-Mm-hm, I’m right here. Why?

-RB: You’re looking at that thing again.

-Hm?

-RB: That thing. You’re staring into it and going click-click-click, pressing all those buttons.

-Oh, my laptop? Sorry. I’ll be finished in a minute. Just wanted to type some ideas.

-RB: But I wanna go for a walk in the stroller.

-OK, in a minute.

-RB: It’s sunny outside.

-I know, I’ve just got this Soul Shelter post to write …

-RB: Soul Shelter?

-Yeah, it’s a blog.

-RB: I want to play choo-choo train. Or have story-time together. Or maybe you could build a living room tent for me?

-OK, mm-hm, when I’m finished here we’ll go for a walk or build a tent or whatever you want.

-RB: A tent. That’s what I want.

-A tent it is … as soon as I’ve typed this thought.

Resident Baby plays quietly with his plastic train. He flops over onto his belly and tries to eat my slipper. He yanks one of his socks off and stuffs it into his mouth.

…Click-click-click.

-RB: Vumz-im-rmph-bow.

-Did you say something?

-RB: Sorry. Had my sock in my mouth. I said, What’s it about?

-Hm?

-RB: Soul Tent.

-Oh, Soul Shelter, you mean?

-RB: Right. Freudian slip.

-It’s about striking a balance, I guess. Like how to locate fulfillment in one’s life and one’s work, both at once.

-RB: Mm, fulfillment…

-Do you know that word?

-RB: Mm-hm.

-Really? So how would you define it?

-RB: That’s easy: Mommy-time. Or … a comfy blanket. Or a cracker and a cup of juice. Or a turn in the bright blue bucket swing at the park. Or, say … a living room tent.

-Smooth, the way you worked that in at the end there.

-RB: (shrugs) I’m a baby. We know what we like.

-You do indeed. You should write this post.

-RB: I can’t write, Daddy. Or read. Come to think of it, I can’t even speak in words yet.

-That makes you no less of a teacher, my wise little one.

-RB: Mm. And that you imagine my voice makes my message no less true.

-Exactly.

-RB: So can we get cracking on that tent now?

-All righty (chuckling), do you want the entrance to be north- or south-facing?

The laptop clicks shut.

-RB: Now we’re talking!

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“Let Us Begin”

“The Risk of Happiness”

“A Moment of Fulfillment”

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“The One Place You’ll Always Be Indispensable”

“The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality, everything which is made, is made to satisfy a demand artificially stimulated by sales propaganda.”

The English poet Stephen Spender wrote these words in 1949 following a visit to the United States. By “spiritual goods” Spender was referring to works of art. It was true more than half a century ago, and it’s true today: works of art and sales figures, creativity and commerce, rarely jibe (dynamic entrepreneurship excepted).

We all know American culture is consumer driven. By and large, Americans live in, by, and for the marketplace. And in today’s age of global business, the effect of the marketplace is a great leveling out of culture, a homogenizing of experience. The marketplace likes broad appeal, it likes high sales figures, it likes a mass audience. It does not thrive on slow contemplation, individuality, eccentricity, or introspection. All of these things, which are at the core of real art — both creating it and experiencing it — are in fact a threat to the happy clatter of the cash drawer.

Thus, strange things happen when that which is spiritual, personal, and irrational meets that which is profane, collective, and statistical — in other words, when art meets commerce.

This phenomenon is explored beautifully in the transfixing 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev. The film focuses on Marla, a four-year-old girl who loves to paint. Marla lives in upstate New York with her parents and her little brother, and her life is much like that of any other healthy, delightful four-year-old who loves to paint — except for one thing: Marla’s colorful creations have made her famous.

Where most child artists stick to butcher paper and fingerpaints, Marla creates large vibrant canvases using fancy acrylics, brushes, and a variety of application techniques ranging from smears to splatters to complex overlays of colors. Marla has exhibited her work in exclusive shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Her works have sold for upwards of $20,000.

“The paintings are incredible,” says gallery owner Anthony Brunelli in the film. Brunelli was the first to curate Marla’s paintings in a solo exhibition. That show, highlighted by the New York Times, sparked widespread interest in the petite genius’s work. Soon TV networks began calling. Marla became a media darling. “Even if a four-year-old didn’t do [the paintings],” says Brunelli, “you’d like ‘em. The fact that she is four makes it really incredible.”

The kid’s canvases are gorgeous, to be sure (see the online gallery at MarlaOlmstead.com), and there is something indescribably moving at the thought of such beauty flowing so easily and unselfconsciously through the brush of a girl yet to lose her baby teeth.

“When I am in Marla’s presence,” says Brunelli on Marla’s website, “there’s a weird feeling ‘cause I know there’s something inside this girl that many artists look for their whole lives and never have.”

Marla’s paintings vibrate with the mystery of childish wonder, of magical freeness and unhampered creativity, and this mystery is the lyrical heart of My Kid Could Paint That. The film makes us linger on questions like:

– Where does such purity and ease disappear to later in life?

– At what point do we surrender the productive freedom and harmonious accidents of play for result-driven work — and why can’t we retrieve what we’ve surrendered?

At one point in the documentary, New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman comments:

There’s a spiritual element to it which appeals to people … People could read all sorts of things into her pictures. That there was some force at work, something larger than even Marla. That this child is speaking almost as a medium. And her innocence also says something about the ultimate cynicism of the art world…. [where] probably the worst thing you could say about an artist is, ‘Everything this artist does is joyous and wonderful and openhearted and just simple and great.’ … Some of the appeal … of the Marlas of the world is that it seems pure innocent joy, no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm, none of that kind of stuff that goes along with modern art. Nobody’s saying ‘f—- you’ in this picture. They’re just saying, ‘I’m a happy girl who loves painting.’

With increasing media attention came a fervor for Marla canvases in the art market. Her prices soared. As of February 2005, after less than a year in the limelight, wee Marla’s work had earned her more than $300,000. But that same month brought a blow that sent the family of this miniature master reeling.

Though Marla herself was the embodiment of innocence and spirit, her bright canvases — those reverberant spiritual documents — had nevertheless become commodities. And the commodification of a thing, given the unavoidable cynicism that attaches to money, is necessarily a cynical process. So with widespread commercial attention came a qualitative shift in the public’s fascination. The clamor surrounding Marla went from adoring to suspicious when TV journalist Charlie Rose hosted a 60 Minutes segment examining the Marla craze.

He interviewed Marla’s first curator, Anthony Brunelli:

-Charlie: So what do we have here?

-Brunelli: You have a genius.

-Charlie: Genius?

-Brunelli: Yes.

-Charlie: (leaning forward, bearing down) Is there any other explanation?

Rose also interviewed a child psychologist, an expert in gifted children who’d observed Marla painting. The pyschologist’s remarks were a mother lode to a primetime program lusting for an exposé:

I don’t see Marla as having made, or at least completed, the more polished-looking paintings, because they look like a different painter.

The art world was unnerved. Major media hungrily took up the possible scandal. Was the kid a fake? Were her parents pulling the wool over the eyes of art aficionados? Was this four-year-old girl no more than a public stand-in for her dad, a brush-wielding trickster?

If it was all a fraud, the stakes had become very high. Large sums of money had changed hands, after all. People got nasty and Marla’s parents were harangued with hate mail.

Personally, I believe the girl’s for real (what kind of four-year-old could pretend to be a painter without, at some point, spilling the beans?). But whatever the truth, a peculiar thing had occurred. While in the wake of the 60 Minutes bomb people still appeared to be talking about Marla and her work, the engine of the conversation was no longer art and beauty, it was money. The market had intervened in Marla’s creations, and people had begun to buy — not Marla’s paintings themselves, so much as the story of Marla’s paintings. And as buyers began to suspect that they weren’t getting the story they’d paid for, trouble ensued.

Recall Stephen Spender’s words: “Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality.” Was the art still beautiful? Of course. But money had muddled that truth. The “value” of the paintings had become an exclusively monetary matter. Aesthetics were suddenly irrelevant.

The story of Marla’s quasi-scandal epitomizes the clash of commerce and creativity, two often uncomplimentary forces. For anybody seeking the fulfillment and spiritual enrichment that comes of art or creative work, the crucial trick is to remember the natural opposition of spirit and commodity — and perhaps to rebel quietly against the American mindset author Morris Berman calls “the reduction of values to commodity fetishism,” a mindset so money-warped that it can fail to behold the still evident beauty of a painting regardless of its authorship.

Toward the close of My Kid Could Paint That, journalist Elizabeth Cohen observes:

The whole story, really, is about grownups. It’s really not about this kid. She’s just a little girl painting in her house.

Marla’s art did not begin from the base concerns of the dollar. No child’s art does. We start from joy, exuberance, inquisitiveness, and serious play. And to the extent that we maintain and cultivate these attributes as creative adults, the more life our creations will possess — and the more readily we will recognize beauty and be inspired by it.

The dollar is a different matter altogether.

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“Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?”

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Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal entities like the NEA, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. — Denis Donaghue

(UPDATE — Tues. March 17, 2009: “President Obama Establishes White House Arts & Culture Post.” A step forward perhaps?)

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“Nourishing the Creative Impulse”

“Is the Internet Dangerous?”

“The Ground Underfoot: Why Stories Matter”

“What We Really Need to Be Happy”

“On Pilgrimage: The Ghosts Who Are My Teachers“