Concluding Post

"True Vision is never wholly personal and by it's nature, needs to be shared." -- Hopi Elders. I don't expect to be adding further to this blog and am content to leave it as it is. From beginning to end I express my entire vision, for the most part, and it can be read from beginning to end. For those wading in, I've tried to breakdown this larger vision into more digestible entries often linked by a common subject (usually indicated by the entry title). Blogspot changed their format and invalidated the links overnight -- so it goes. Should there be any continuation, it may be under the heading, "The Perfect Wave Project."

The Perfect Wave Project: The More Tangible and the Less Tangible

Currently I'm promoting an integrated arts project that addresses as its subject matter, California and the ideal. I believe it can be a boon to the local arts while broadening the funding and support base at a time when the local arts are feeling the squeeze due to the loss of redevelopment funds from the state. I don't expect its for everyone; art can be different things to different people and that's all well and good.

Because we're treading into the murky ground of feelings and the mysteries of creative inspiration, we're contending with aspects of varying degrees beyond our ability to influence.

The More Tangible: The more tangible aspects of the project involve the use of the arts to explore the subject of California and the ideal. We can acknowledge our attraction to the ideal and accept art's role in its promotion as it can be inextricably tied to the aestetically pleasing, the suggestion of the attainment of love and happiness, one's self image, and the reflection of wealth and status. The ideal is a significant driving force behind our consumer culture.



While acknowledging our attraction to the ideal, the arts, nevertheless, can also challenge, or question, this ideal, lend itself to greater appreciation, acceptance, and the discovery of the poetic in the real. I believe art to be an important medium to explore these issues because it functions in the realm of feelings. As a recent -- and I believe successful -- example of this duality, the Annenberg Space for Photography acheived this as it concerned itself with the beauty ideal in last years exhibit, entitled "Beauty Culture."

Such an arts project I believe can attract visitors, as not coicidentally we're also promoting Huntington Beach as the city where the California ideal can be most tangible, that can help the local economy (and who might even purchase some art work as a souvenoir). Also not coincidentally, the project helps ensure that visitors and residents of all shapes, sizes, and colors -- not just those who more tangibly reflect the ideal -- will feel welcome and at home.

A central assertion of the project is that our attraction to the ideal can be a problem if it impairs our appreciation of the real and thus becomes an impediment to acheiving perfection. Because this assertion has a biblical basis that can be cited (we're also addressing some of the problems with a moral ideal), I believe there's an opportunity to appeal to groups who wouldn't usually patron the arts. For all the above reasons, I believe we can broaden the support base for the local arts.

The Less Tangible: The less tangible aspects of the project is concerned with blazing a trail beyond the modern era, a proposed movement in the arts and activism. Such aspects are less tangible and will probably involve an ongoing discussion. We can nevertheless move forward with the project as it strives, innocuously, to promote community spirit in concert with the human spirit.

Here I suggest that human history is in a flux between the individual and the collective and individual freedom, ultimately, may only be sustained through love of the collective, or collective spirit. Yet this is a feeling that has to be inspired and sustained on a certain level and thus it calls for a poetic approach that can make more vital use of the arts.

Under the auspices of Walt Whitman, a kind of poetry based spiritual movement can be created that, hypothetically, can address what may be a burgeoning spiritual crisis in our democratic society. Here I define spiritual crisis, simply, as the inability of its members to overcome entrenched narrow interests to act on behalf of the greater collective.

Part of the project's intagibility, I conceed, is its grandiosity in relation to my limited credibility and resources. But that's why the project conceiveably might work: it forced me to create the project in such a way that it's reliant on the weaving of mutually beneficial relationships and allowing both individuals and groups to creatively make it their own.

The project strives to inspire bottom up change while attempting to stay clear of the top down change associated with the political fray. I would imagine the alluded activism to best lend itself to spiritual/religious activism and also environmental activism. Whether the project inspires political activism outside of the project is one such aspect beyond its control.

As the project concerns itself with the revitalization of the moral culture of the United States, it recognizes religion as a significant influence of that culture. Consequently, religious symbols can be used, as they have been used throughout human history in art, to create the desired poetic effect. But the project itself does not conciously promote any one religion, accepting the pluralistic adage, "one truth, many paths."

Review of Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape

Here's a link to a book review I wrote for what I believe to be an important book currently offered at a scandalously low price.

Review of Only a God can save us

Here's a link to a book review I wrote on the subject of Martin Heidegger's philosophy.

State of the Project into the New Year 2012

As this blog enters into its third year, readers -- if there are any -- may note a significant drop-off of entries in 2011. This is is due to the most practical fact that I got a job that leaves me little time to write. But also, as the project moves more from vision and into action, this site will serve more as background as to where I'm coming from, so to speak, should there be any readers that care to wade into it.

Furthermore, I'm moving away from the word "promised land" because of its religious connotations when my main concern is the spiritual state of democracy regardless of religion. I'm currently promoting the "Perfect Wave Project" as a project capable of promoting community spirit with the suggestion of being the wave of the future capable of promoting a greater democratic spirit in general. In time, I would expect such a project would eventually have its own site.

For those reader who do wish to wade into the blog background, the titles of the entries can provide a guide, some of which I've noticeably grouped together as they addressed a common subject.

Art and the Ideal

What's currently going on at the Annenberg Space for Photography, in the exhibit entitled, "Beauty Culture", as it concerns the cultural ideal of beauty, is similar to what I had in mind for a Perfect Wave Project (see blog entries from Nov. 12 – Dec. 14) but more focused on the regional, California ideal. The Annenberg exhibit no doubt benefits from the contradictory feelings of challenging, or questioning, the ideal while simultaneously being attracted to the ideal. I believe art is an important medium for exploring these issues because it functions in the realm of feelings.

In contending with the cultural ideal of beauty -- that is, the dispiriting affects it can have as we become self-conscious of our shortcomings in comparison to this ideal -- a common response is the vague prescription of developing a positive self-image. But this is limited because we can’t help our feelings of being attracted toward an ideal. Furthermore, as social beings, we can’t help feeling self-conscious of how others within the culture perceive us. Yet it is the self-image itself -- so central as it is to our consumer culture – that I believe can be deemphasized through cultural transformation.

The real potential for art toward culturally transformative change, I believe, lies in a realm that remains largely unconsidered: affecting a kind of everyday poetry that culturally shapes one's frame of mind, or the frame of a person's worldview. A recent editorial by New York Times columnist David Brooks provides a good introduction to this issue (see the link to my blog of April 16).

We can attain a sense of self through two means, though usually through some variation of both: comparison to others, or to a cultural ideal; or, through contribution to a greater collective. By employing the arts and other means to culturally emphasize the latter, thus promoting a greater collective consciousness, we in turn deemphasize the former, thus demoting individual-self consciousness.

The problem with the self-image in our consumer culture, I argue, is that it lends itself to demoralization as others and our own selves fail to live up to an ideal. The essential moral problem is the occlusion of the human spirit. But again, what is important to note is that these involve feelings that we’re socialized into and that we commonly can’t help but feel nevertheless.

While art can challenge, or question the ideal, or the idea we have about ourselves (i.e., one's self-image), it can also lend itself to the affirmation of a sense of self derived through contribution, a more truthful and inherently moral disposition without being moralistic – or didactic. In his essay on the poet Walt Whitman, the writer and poet D.H. Lawrence wrote as follows:

The essential function of art is moral. Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But Moral. The essential function of art is moral.
But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic.

Art can be all those things that Lawrence describes, and it is, but what Lawrence is honing in on in his use of the word moral is to mean the opposite of demoralization. Both Lawrence and Whitman (and I would add Jesus of Nazareth) we’re onto something prescient and potentially revolutionary. The significant problem of the issue of the ideal, and derivatively, the idea and ideologies, is that the truth about ourselves is potentially greater than whatever ideas we might have about ourselves. But to reap that potential we first have to come to terms with truth.

In his Plato’s Republic, Socrates cites an ancient argument, or difference , between poetry and philosophy that I submit continues to this day. I believe there’s an opportunity to weigh in on this “ancient argument” from the poetic side and advance a resolution. More than art, poetry can be about the truth. To me, it’s no accident that both the arts and philosophy flourished together at that time known as the Golden Age of Greece. In her book The Greek Way, Edith Hamilton writes as follows:

It is clear that in Greece the values were different from our own to-day. Indeed we are not able really to bring into one consistent whole their outlook upon life; from our point of view it seems to involve a self-contradiction. People so devoted to poetry as to make it a matter of practical importance must have been, we feel, deficient in the sense for what is practically important, dreamers, not alive to life’s hard facts. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Greeks were pre-eminently realists. The temper of mind that made them carve their statues and paint their pictures from the living human beings around them, that kept their poetry within the sober limits of the possible, made them hard-headed men in the world of every-day affairs. They were not tempted to evade facts. It is we ourselves who are the sentimentalist. We, to whom poetry, all art, is only a superficial decoration of life, made a refuge from a world too hard to face by sentimentalizing it. The Greeks looked straight at it. They were completely unsentimental. It was a Roman who said it was sweet to die for one's country. The Greeks never said it was sweet to die for anything. They had no vital lies.

To restore greatness to our society, we’ll have to shed the untruths that falsely prop up our vitality because that foundation, I sense, is fast crumbling beneath us. Already, I believe, a new foundation is being constructed to enable the world leadership that our country is in a position to provide. But must we first bottom-out before we can begin to recognize it? In the concluding words of James F. Cooper from his book, Knights of the Brush: The Hudson River School and the Moral Landscape, James writes as follows:

The promise of the future outweighs the doubts and repression of the old order. We can boldly advance into the future with the visionary gifts that artists and poets alone possess. Or we can choose to hang back with the dead, blind culture of the old order. I suspect we will choose life. Let us unashamedly honor the strengths and virtues of our nation and encourage our own recognition of them. Let us begin this great task by enlisting gifted artist to help us see once again.

If these words I write come off as too high-minded or detached from reality – and honestly, they often do to myself – recall the more grounded proposal that we’re merely exploring these feelings, much as the Annenberg is currently doing concerning the beauty ideal, through the realm of art. I expect no wordy philosophy to induce good art but by the individual artist exploring his or her own feelings and creatively making it their own. While acknowledging our attraction to the ideal, we can nevertheless cultivate a greater appreciation for the real. If the Perfect Wave Project does prove to be the wave of the future, I know no better community than “Surf City” Huntington Beach where we can ride it.

National Poetry Month: Addressing the Problem of the Human Condition

The condition of men is the result of their disunion. – Tolstoy

We began the month recognizing the alienating effects that modern poetry can have on the average citizen, lending itself to a sense of the exclusionary. The irony is that poetry, and the arts in general, has a deep history as a means to bring people together. As our society comes to terms with its divisions and entrenched narrow interests, I argue we can again look to poetry to help enable unity.

Poetry has addressed the problems of the human condition in the past and can be useful in the present. The allegory -- a poetic device -- of Adam and Eve, generally attributed to Moses, provides a narrative to describe the dispiriting effects of the fall into self-consciousness. Thus the allegory provides a narrative to describe the evolution of consciousness toward the self apart from others and nature.

As we celebrate Easter on this date, we should recognize that the story of Christ accepting the cross, whatever theological interpreations it may have, provides a powerful poetic interpretation: a symbol of love, faith, and sacrifice. In response to the fall into the self, described in the paragraph above, the life of Jesus becomes a symbol to "deny the self", as described in the Biblical Book of Luke (9:23), toward the moral disposition of acting for the greater good.

Yet the symbol of the cross is controversial, causing the effect of differing reactions to that symbol, because it is generally viewed as a symbol of religion. But this is where poetry can step in, differentiating between religion and mythos, and making use of symbol, metaphor, and narrative to induce an evolution of consciousness.

Our socialization into the individual consciousness of the modern era, compounded by a consumer culture that incites the pride and passions of the self, may leave us in an unsustainable imbalance of consciousness toward the individual self at the expense of the greater good, leaving us drifting toward spiritual crisis. Moving from the margins of society to the forefront, however, poetry may be in a position to meet this crisis. But as it appears to me, to intone Walt Whitman, it would have to move from paper and types to bodies and souls.