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Daily Prompt: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty …’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

(Some thought-fragments about art with a small a and Beauty with a capital B.) (Or vice versa.)

The title is from the final lines of Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which the poet ends by telling us that the centuries-old vase he has been describing serves as a reminder that, “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'” Earlier the poet also says, “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter … .”

The ones I can not hear, because I am a mere mortal and what I hear on Earth is all I need to know, those are the sweeter ones. O, vile mortality!

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Some experiences are almost universal: without sharing a common language, audiences will laugh at many of the same things. A person slipping on a banana peel. The fish-slapping dance. Analysis of comedy kills comedy (unless one is making fun of analyzing comedy) because laughter is more than a feeling, it is a reaction; when honestly expressed, it comes in an instant. Conversely, some experiences are unique to each one of us: all of us experience physical and/or emotional pain, but the best any of us can do is talk around it in an attempt to almost come close to describing it. Pain management specialists present their patients with a chart of a series of faces and ask the patients to circle the grimacing face that “matches” how they feel. It is simplistic, but it does something important in that it asks us to leave language, which can be misinterpreted, aside.

Language. The most vile and hateful sentiments can be expressed in sentences that might sound pretty when they are spoken. There is probably a language in which the sentence “I am going to kill you” would make me swoon just before I got shot.

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What makes me laugh might make you cry (if you were the person who slipped and fell) and what makes me cry might make you laugh. There is much ugliness in this world and someone somewhere finds harsh and violent things funny.

I find the sentence on that poster at the top, “We all have within us our own …,” which is a piece of typical Facebook inspiration-stuff, a poster that is designed to elicit a hopeful gaze or something, to be clunky and, worse, empty. Sunsets are nice and all, but why put words all over one? (I would rather the Kadampa Center had just put a picture of their temple on there.)

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To the best we can tell, birds are singing shopping lists to each other. “Seeds over here, seeds over here; nice sturdy branch I’m standing on.” The most boring and necessary stuff, but pretty to our ears, a sweet unheard melody to Keats.

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alainWe teach each other what we find beautiful. The cartoon at right captures, without words, something of this. Artists in a class learn to depict reality, but what about the world made Egyptians in the era of the pyramids and pharaohs depict things and humans as they did? We look the same now as we did then, but the art seen in the ancient (and beautiful) monuments does not look like our twenty-first century reality. Did life in the ancient world look all that different to eyes that are biologically identical to ours?

Certainly not. The same cartoon could be drawn about art classes from other eras: the flat crowds with identical faces in Giotto’s scenes, the extraordinary gowns and suits that probably rendered most people who wore them immobile for longer than the time it took to to sit for just the start of a portrait.

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Someone might bring up the Cubists, Picasso specifically. At different points in the cultural history of art, the visual and the performing arts diverge from mass notions of “pretty.” They always seem to reconvene, usually when the mass notions of pretty start to include the works of art the masses once rejected. Rocks were thrown at the orchestra during the debut performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” because it sounded so odd. You might hear snippets of it in television ads during NFL games now.

I can tell you that for me, Picasso’s drawing line is voluptuous and his color scheme, well, beautiful. And the intellectual challenge the Cubists presented themselves and attempted to conquer: to include time and time’s passage in a static form, painting (which is why two eyes will appear on the same side of a human head—think of any photo you have taken in which someone turned away just as the camera snapped); I find the intellectual challenge and game and the attempt to meet and match it exciting and, well, here is that word again: beautiful.

Here is one of David Hockney’s “joiners,” a type of photo-collage that he explored in the 1970s and ’80s. It is made of 77 Polaroid photos of a swimming pool taken as the sunlight shifted through the day, photos taken over the period of time that it would take to make 77 Polaroid photos with one camera and one artist. Pretty as a sunset but with time added as a design element as important as color in the image. It is a Cubist sunset. It is a beautiful attempt at one. hockney-sun-on-the-pool

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 16 asks, “We’ve all heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Do you agree? is all beauty contingent on a subjective point of view?” The answer is a definite and thus easily questioned simultaneous yes and no.

There is a famous “Twilight Zone” episode that I am sure someone else has referenced in their response, titled “The Eye of the Beholder,” in which a world that culturally dictates notions of physical beauty sends away people that we Americans of a certain era might find beautiful. We live in neither a world of only sunsets and platitudes and easy listening music nor in one in which we force one precise, single idea of beauty on one another, and that, that in itself, is beautiful. (Sadly, this is not true in every country, not right now; in some countries, Rod Serling’s script might seem to present a pretty good idea.)

Daily Prompt: T.M.I.

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Most of us will live somewhere around 28,000 days (75 years, give or take), and it is estimated that most Americans meet three new people every day. That comes to approximately 80,000-plus people you have met or will meet in person in your life.

(Do you say a personal hello to the person who takes your money for coffee in the morning? Count that person, or start saying hello more frequently and don’t be a Scrooge.)

I have worked as a college teacher, a reporter, and as a retail salesman, and I attend various support groups through the week, so my numbers might wind up skewed a bit higher than that, so perhaps I have already met 50,000 on my way to more than 80,000.

That is a small city, 50,000, or even 80,000. It is as if I never left Poughkeepsie, New York, my hometown, and set out to shake hands with every permanent resident there, never had any other ambitions, and never left. We would call that a weird life, a not-very fulfilling one, but that number describes most of our lives. We do not meet all that many people. It is a football stadium, and not a large one.

Going back a couple generations, when a person could live an entire life in one town, which my grandmother who lived to be 98 did, a person probably met about three people a day. Maybe two-and-a-half. One of my great-grandmothers grew up in Pinsk, traveled across Europe with a baby in her arms, came through Ellis Island, and eventually lived out her years in Poughkeepsie. She probably met three people a day. We call our lives more complicated, and claim they are growing more so, but they really are not. Not in person. I do not think that this has changed by a large quantitative margin over the generations. Most of us know, truly know, only a handful of people at any moment; many of us do not even know the names of all eight of our great-grandparents.

I have not included my online life here. Not yet. According to WordPress, this blog has received over 3600 visitors from 50 countries, from some time in late January to today, at an average visitor count of 14 per day. (Since I started publishing every day, the numbers have increased; 1300 visits have been tallied in the last seven weeks.) I have exchanged personal notes with a few readers who make me blush when I think that they know my writing almost as well as I do. I hope I am an encouraging reader for writers, as well.

Until recently, I have limited my Facebook life to friends I personally know, but I have lifted that self-imposed stipulation recently and I am happy I have. I have under 400 Twitter followers and have had perhaps a dozen lengthy personal Tweet-exchanges of some depth in my three or so years on there. In my online life, as in my in-person life, thousands of encounters to find a handful of true friends I value and hope to someday meet.

When we claim that our lives are more complicated and information-packed, we are not, not most of us, speaking of our personal lives. We are reflecting that we have given ourselves the great gift of more. There are more outlets, more ways to declare to any who will read or listen that we are living a “purpose-driven life” or some other catchphrase (sorry, Rick Warren) without actually living that life. If I am telling you I am living one kind of life or another, how do I have so much time to testify to this? (There are exceptions; sometimes the testimony is a part of walking a walk.)

And every song not only has a singer but a listener, it seems. Everything we hear and read is, in its rawest sense, “information,” but not all of it is necessary. What you prepared for dinner certainly is information, and if I send you directions to my house, that is information as well. We can and will filter out each other. I can give you a virtual thumbs-up on a nice-looking meal and forget I did while doing so. You might be amused I sent those directions that we both know you will ignore.

There is a lot of noise in this world because everyone seems to have purchased a mic and an amp and kept their utility bills up-to-date. This just means good has more ways of declaring itself and so does evil. The numbers of people wanting to be heard have not changed over the centuries, the tools to be heard have.

One hopes that most of the people that we truly know and love contribute more to the information side of our lives and less to the noise.

“… Everybody knows the scene is dead
But there’s gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows …”
—”Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 15 asks, “‘Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.’—Gertrude Stein”

Daily Prompt: From To-Do to Tah-Dah!

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for September 13 asks, “Quickly list five things you’d like to change in your life. Now, write a post about a day in your life once all five have been crossed off your to-do list.”
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There are websites for one to use to make to-do lists, apps for shopping lists (I own a not-very-smart phone, so I am outsider to the world of apps), websites on which you can compile top 10 lists with friends. After one creates an account and logs in, not one of these websites offers “get a notepad or a scrap of paper and a pen and start writing your list” as list item number one, so I guess they are serious.

I am not one to scoff at online office tools or their use. I no longer compose in longhand and type straight into WYSIWYG tools like, well, the WordPress composer here and other tools like 750 Words. I recently used an online website to create a legal document and get the required parties to e-sign it. Not one drop of ink was spilled. (I am so green my carbon footprint is a dot.) I have had an email account of one sort or another since 1986, starting with one I never used at college.

Further, there are online courses one can take to help one learn to create better or more “do-able” lists, lists that give one a sense of accomplishment because, with them, one crosses items off throughout the day, one spends more time crossing items off the list than actually doing the things on the list. Most of these courses offer as Rule Number One: Do not fill one’s shopping lists with one’s life ambitions. “1. Be more interesting. 2. Asparagus. 3. Read more. 4. Read ‘Ulysses.’ 5. Dishwasher detergent.” Keep it simple.

Lists of life plans or life changes are daunting, and too often in my life these have become scraps of paper left behind when I moved, unmodified except for the bleaching that long exposure to sunlight exerts on paper. Many of the things I would like to change in my life are things that I complain about but no one else seems to think of as issues. Should I have written this prompted post earlier today? Probably, as now I am rushing (which contributes to some bluntness) because I am going out to dinner and it is already late in the afternoon. But it is Saturday and there is college football to catch up on, I am reminded by the devil on my shoulder, the time-wasting devil me! And I have not checked my Twitter account in hours and I transact social business on there.

Our culture teaches us that we do not have enough, have not done enough. Whatever it is. This is not the same as “more-more-more,” but “is that all there is.” I promise that I will be revisiting this topic in a later, longer, post. (Is that all there is?)

For instance, my second thought upon waking is, “I am still tired. I don’t think I slept enough.” (The first is “Where am I?”) We are told that we are supposed to sleep eight solid hours a night, which is a number I last hit when I was an infant and someone was watching over me. This provides the side of me that is inclined to think that I am doing things wrong, everything wrong, with two notions: One, that I did not get to sleep early enough and need to do better at this, as if going to sleep is a task, and two, that I am lazy if I need more sleep.

(Please note that I last held a job in 2010. I am disabled. There are not a lot of demands on my time, and I make my own schedule as a result.)

So yes, there are five things I can list that I think would provide me with an improved, a qualitatively better, life if I worked on them and achieved them. The improvement would be that I would no longer be complaining to myself over a handful of things that I complain to myself over, not that these things were accomplished. A day spent not telling myself that I am lazy and at the same time feeling tired because I did not get “enough” sleep would be a sweet day. But I have quite sweet days most days anyway.