The Perfect Wave Project: Introduction

To some degree, we're all attracted to the ideal – as we see in the movies, for example – and we live with a cultural ideal. But there's a problem when a cultural ideal lends itself to the suppression of the spirit, or demoralization, and the occlusion of sympathetic love in our society, towards others and our own selves. To help address this problem I propose a project we can call The Perfect Wave Project that strives to make greater use and integration of the arts.

For over twenty years I've been contending with the consumer culture and this problem of the ideal. To contend with this, I believe, is to draw on and emphasize certain aspects of the moral culture, which includes a societies religions, traditions, the mythos (the stories a society tells about itself), ideals, history, and the arts. Concerning the latter, The Perfect Wave Project reflects Walt Whitman's approach but expands to include all of the arts, including poetry as art.

Recognizing and addressing this problem I believe can be a boon to the local arts scene. There's much competition among artists and arts groups for limited funding and attention. Yet I believe we could weave a collective approach that can be a boon to all involved and potentially expand the funding base. The project itself shouldn't necessarily be part of any art institution but enable such an institution to make use of it. I've outlined some guiding principles that I believe could lead to its success as follows:

1. Weave mutually beneficial relationships among artists and arts groups.
2. Enable both individual artists and arts groups to creatively make it their own.

Besides the obvious surfing reference, use of the term perfect is informed and reconciled by influences such as follows:

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.
-- from Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric"

"Morality which is based on ideas, or on an ideal, is an unmitigated evil. No absolute is going to make the lion lie down with the lamb unless the lamb is inside. It is no good casting out devils. They belong to us, we must accept them and be at peace with them."
-- D.H. Lawrence

In the Biblical passage where the Apostle Paul addresses the Cornithians, he makes reference to a "thorn in his side." Recognizing his own weakness, he'd appealed to God to remove this thorn. The answer, Paul relates as follows:

But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.'

The Perfect Wave Project: Doing the Poet's Job Collectively

While I pass no judgments of what art should or should not be – art can be various things to various people – I do believe in greater possibilities of what art can be. In her introduction to Ellen Bass's wonderful book of poems, Mules of Love, the poet Dorianne Laux writes as follows about the poet's job:

What is the poet's job but to help us to become aware of life's transience, love's power, the subtle manifestations of hope, to play for us again the ancient themes.

I'm suggesting here that we can better do the poet's job through a collective approach rather than individually, recognizing the limitations of the art form. But I expect it would have to start within the circles of poetry, as the writer Henry Miller asserted:

The future always has and always will belong to – the poet.

We can start with Laux's quote above and break it down and inspect more deeply its various parts to help guide us.

The Perfect Wave Project: Human Flourishing and the Problem of the Ideal

To some degree, we're all attracted to the ideal – as we see in the movies, for example – and we live with a cultural ideal. But there's a problem when a cultural ideal lends itself to the suppression of the spirit, or demoralization, and the occlusion of sympathetic love in our society.

Being socialized into the consumer culture there's an inclination to feel -- the key word -- something like as follows: I want this ideal life, I want to be this ideal person and attract an ideal mate. Needless to say, the individual will have to come to terms with the real, though such feelings can remain, in the dubious pursuit of happiness. Part of our national obsession with celebrities, I think, at least in part, is that they appear to either have attained this ideal or be in a position to.

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. The former is problematic while the latter often fails to receive recognition and monetary compensation; consequently, our society is susceptible to a certain degree of demoralization.

The problem of attaining a sense of self through comparison, to others or too a cultural ideal, manifests itself in a variety ways but notably here is it's simply a weak foundation. Comparing ourselves to others, we lack the vision to pass such a judgment; consequently we can set ourselves to be humbled.

Comparing ourselves to an ideal contributes to a problem of promoting an image of our selves rather than confronting or opening up to the truth about ourselves. This can cause distance in our relationships; worse, it can cause a deep sense of shame for not being able to up to an ideal. The mind can have a way of not confronting the shameful truth. As the ideal can impair our ability to confront the truth about ourselves and our human nature in general, it impedes our progress in creating a society that promotes the best of our nature while minimizing the worst.

Recognizing how a cultural ideal can lend itself to demoralization, we subsequently can turn to the moral culture and determine what aspects can be promoted to alleviate that demoralization. Part of the reason Rick Warren’s book The Purpose Driven Life became and remains a best-seller, I believe, is that it addressed and provided some alleviation from this demoralization, that is, in the Christian context. But in a pluralistic country founded on the tenets of the enlightenment, a broader approach is needed because a country’s moral culture is more than religion, also encompassing, for example, its history, traditions, ideals, and its art.

In another time of division in this country, Walt Whitman, perhaps the country’s greatest poet, took on these issues in the prelude to the Civil War. Expanding on Whitman's approach and other influences, I believe there's a poetic path towards cultural transformation to better enable an imaginative framework that affirms one’s sense of self derived from contribution as the appropriate foundation toward human flourishing for both the individual and society.