Moving Up in the Draft

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger - but recognize the opportunity.”

John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)

Staring down at my dark slacks I carefully pick off a small piece of white lint while waiting my turn in the back of the nondescript lecture hall. Looking around at the two hundred people in attendance I am relieved that I made the correct fashion choice in wearing a jet black pin striped suit with a crisply starched white shirt and a conservative gold tie laced with silver highlights. I had a feeling that the crowd of city and governmental officials would be dressed a little more formal than most. Seldom do you see business suits and ties anymore which I believe contribute to a general feeling of malaise and insecurity in people. There is nothing more empowering than wearing a tailored suit with sharp pressed creases. People will walk more erect, confident and self assured. Maybe I hold this belief due to my father’s career on Wall Street where a three piece suit and a felt fedora was a daily uniform.

A middle aged woman in a stylist business suit seated three rows in front of me turns to steal a glance with probing blue eyes. With a subtle motion I smile and nod my head in acknowledgement of her attention. Slightly embarrassed she turns forward and whispers something to the gentleman seated next to her. The crowd is aware of my presence as I sense an eager air of anticipation. My mind drifts back to the pounding surf and sweet salt air of the Coral Sea. It stuns me to think that it has been 30 days since I removed my sandals and brushed the last grains of sand from my feet. The memories are already fading and becoming indistinct like a misty fog rolling over the shoreline. The images are there but the sounds and scents are disappearing with each passing day. Time is so fleeting and every day life is filled completely with activities that the weeks rip in rapid succession like a sign posts on a speeding highway. This week alone I am speaking in Baltimore, Kansas City, Indianapolis and San Diego. Something has changed in the past few months, a subtle shift in recognition, an ever so slight transformation. It is something I can sense but do not yet understand completely. I need to realize the increased demand for my time and limit my schedule accordingly.

My eyes aimlessly roam the patterned blue gray carpeted floor of the lecture hall when I am amused that below my perfectly pressed slacks is a pair of black wing tips slightly caked with mud from some recent site visit. I am immediately reminded of Frank Lloyd Wright’s quote “You can tell if a person is grounded by the soil on his shoes”. I attempt to discern the origin of the soil by its color and texture. Could it be the northeast or south or even the pacific west. I come to the conclusion that the soil could be from almost anywhere and it is going to be impossible to isolate the moment when my foot touched the moist earth. Quietly I spend the next few minutes scuffing my shoes together in a weak attempt to improve my spoiled appearance, but finally decide I rather like the eccentric appearance leaving most of the red earth clinging to the leather like a cluster of barnacles hugging an oaken hull.

Clasping my hands together slowly my head tilts toward the floor allowing all emotions to slip from my thoughts as if my skull was a sieve. My mind envisions that I am standing before a calm still body of water completely content and relaxed. The water is a symbol of power and adaptability assuming the shape of its container. This has become a ritual for me, a gathering of internal energy and focus exhibited in a brewing of a storm, a force of nature building in the sky. It’s like filling the cannon with gunpowder, canister by canister until the full charge is loaded in preparation of firing. As if being pulled by an invisible harness I rise to my feet as the voice at the podium recites an elegant list of accomplishments. It is always embarrassing to hear the litany of tributes which always makes me feel like the crowd is now expecting someone more important than me.

At a moments notice the crowd erupts into a loud and sustained applause as a roomful of eyes turn to stare at me. In an instinctual response I reach with my left hand to the lavaliere attached to my belt. With a familiar intimacy my hand caresses the wire next to the switch as I turn the microphone on. The fuse is now lit as kinetic energy explodes in my veins coursing like a hot fever. Suddenly I become another person, my alter ego emerges as the confident extrovert I always wanted to be. Somewhere in the recesses of the brain a switch is thrown as the Gemini twin awakes to command the spotlight. I find it similar to the euphoria an alcoholic feels during a blackout. Disconnection of an outer body experience as rambling muses of a madman prepares to extol the depths of his madness. I tease myself that the crowd is entertained as if watching a car wreck. They know something horrible is occurring but are unable to avert their eyes, the sadistic fascination with violence. This statement probably contains more truth than I would care to admit.

For me it is an internal dialogue, a discussion about passion to the point of fanaticism. It is an oral internal debate as opposing dilemmas are resolved on an imaginary verbal chalkboard. Simple proven diatribes strung together into powerful mantras which slither on the ground like cobras searching for a commonly held belief to sink their fangs into. It must be the almost thirty years of interviewing for projects and commissions that allows me to read the emotions of the room like a blind man reading Braille. My gestures slowly hypnotize the crowd as I draw raw emotion up from the earth and cast it over the crowd with each choreographed moment. I have developed a hard rule during interviews that when I ascend to a sequence of reasoning that become so inspiring and so emotional that goose bumps briefly crawl across my arms, its time to immediately shut it down and close. It is that critical point where nothing you can ever say will be near as profound as what you just said. All that is possible after that point in the interview is to talk the selection committee out of selecting you. Live the fundamental rule, stop selling after you have closed the deal.

The shift in recent months is subtle but evident. I have graduated from one of the featured speakers in a conference to the keynote speaker. Five of the last seven lectures were in the role of keynote speaker, a much different position in the agenda. No longer assigned to one of the six or eight lecture halls where you compete for audience with provocative topics. The keynote is the ultimate primetime slot during the delegate’s lunch or during a plenary session with the entire assembled conference attendees. Your name moves up on the marquee, you become the reason why people attend the conference. This increased stature comes with dramatically increased expectations.

A keynote speaker is the life blood of the conference business. It is no longer acceptable to rank along the top handful of featured speakers, but you must demonstrate an exceptional mastery of the craft that excels your presentation far beyond the pool of featured speakers. The keynote speaker must inspire, motivate, and empower the audience to change the world through wisdom, logic, character and antidotes. You must call on the wisdom of past leaders to teach. The keynote is as much illusion as substance with a commanding control of truth as they see it. I’m not sure I’m ready for the jump to the big stage, the center ring, the first chair. The margin for error is razor thin as now television cameras peer from the back row capturing every detail in stone. The words are no longer surreal drifting as a song on the wind, but precise and concrete so that it can be dissect over and over to remove the soft flesh and examine the intricate skeletal structure. Small strips of magnetic tape stream behind the curtain recording very hesitation and stumble.

Once again the Gemini twin explodes into a fiery climax remaining calm and erect as the crowd applauses. The high energy switch is turned off as a dizzying spin back to earth allows fear to grab my ankles. For a brief second I once again feel like the alcoholic confused, awaking from another blackout, wondering if I covered all my thoughts. I search my short term memory to reconstruct the dialogue but find it surprising empty. As I step down from the podium, turning off the lavaliere, my insecurity forces me to seek opinions from the people around me about the message, finding reassurance in the positive reviews. Today I captured the buzz, I succeeded in bringing the crowd new insights by challenging their percepts.

With each step into on this new stage I feel confidence growing, which will allow me to dig deeper into my fundamental beliefs and fearlessly bear more of my soul. It will allow me to stray further into the jungle, to push the madman closer to the cliff, to wade deeper into the dangerous currents to navigate uncharted waters. The next step won’t take long because tomorrow is another keynote is San Diego. This time I’ll put an extra canister of gunpowder in the barrel testing the limits of the crowd’s indulgence as I move up in the draft.

“Great wisdom is generous; petty wisdom is contentious. Great speech is impassioned, small speech cantankerous.”

Chuang-tzu (369 BC - 286 BC)

Torment of the Art

Art is a terminal disease of the mind. One quietly suffers isolation to understand its meaning. The artist can never purge themselves of the suffering of the art. It changes how you see the world. It consumes all senses. The only way to lessen the suffering is to produce art. It is a natural reflex like breathing underwater. It is the ultimate contradiction of the mind that has to be expressed in physical form and once it is embodied in physical form it is immediately dismissed in search of a better solution. The need is primal and cannot be ignored. A body of work from an artist is nothing more than discarded remedies consumed in an attempt to cure the madness. It is a mathematical equation that can never be solved, but the attempt to solve it leaves a legacy of wrong answers. M. C. Escher identified the connection “By keenly confronting the enigmas that surround us, and by considering and analyzing the observations that I have made, I ended up in the domain of mathematics, Although I am absolutely without training in the exact sciences, I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists”
It is a restlessness that can never be comforted. Albert Einstein said “True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist”.

There is a story that in hell you are standing forever in a cool river with a burning thirst and when ever you bend over to quench the thirst from the river, the water disappears. That is the torment of art. If you do not have the passion, you will never understand it. You may look at art and like it or even love it, but you will never understand the extent of the suffering that produces it. The art itself is only a pale representation of the attempted resolution of the principals in conflict. Auguste Rodin said “The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation”.

Some artists work in such a depth to resolve conflict that their work may not be understood or relevant for generations. Some work may never be understood by anyone but the artist and at times the artist themselves may not understand. I believe William Faulkner was incorrect when he said “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life”. I don’t think the aim of any artist concerns themselves with what a strangler thinks, it’s the exercising of demons.

It cannot be explained to someone that is not of similar mind and most disturbing is that there are so few similar minds. It is a mortal struggle of opposites in search of balance. Norman Podhoretz noted “Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence”.

Artistic pursuit is a desolate existence in which every experience is poured into the crucible of creative expression. Any thought is rendered and stripped to the essence of an abstract ideal in order to understand its complex relationship of meanings. Then by the process of brute force a concept is extracted from the seething crucible to be hammered yielding an imperfect resolution to be immediately discarded. The failure is then minutely examined in to discover its flaws. For each object that survives the process there are hundreds that are destroyed along the way. The deeper an ideal is pursued the father the artist distances themselves from society. As the threshold of enlightenment is approached the beauty of the rapture is solely outside the understanding of anyone that has not struggled with the burden. Carl Rogers stated ‘The mainspring of creativity appears to be the same tendency which we discover so deeply as the curative force in psychotherapy, man's tendency to actualize himself, to become his potentialities. By this I mean the organic and human life, the urge to expand, extend, develop, mature - the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the organism, or the self.”

Society has convinced itself it understands art, but that is an illusion wrapped in ignorance and empathy. Is looking at a picture from the highest peak of the Alps the same as you being there? Are you immersed in the frigid thin air? Does the air cut your lungs like a knife? Does the sunlight reflecting off the snow burns your eyes? Does the wind howl like a freight train in your ears? Does your body tremble and scream in pain from the journey? Is every one of your senses exploding in rapture being immersed totally in experience? A picture can not convey the years of training and preparation. It can not reveal the mental conditioning. Pablo Picasso said “The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape”. Society may empathize and value the suffering of the artist but they can never fully understand what it attempts to personify.

Jules Feiffer observed “Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid”. The most cruel and ironic contradiction is that society controls my ability to express and communicate my art in the public whelm. Artists are selected by commissions of well intended citizens that can not place my work in context of meaning. Many times it reminds me of attempting to convey calculus to second graders. What of value is derived from the discussion? The public process rejects risk and controversy in favor of consensus and neutrality. The result is a suffocating embrace of mediocrity that excludes genus. Oscar Wilde once said “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius”. What society accepts as art is for the most part nauseatingly bland and disconnected.

Society isolates art to prescriptive uninspired “points of interest”. Assuming that placing art in such a location will transform it with relevance and significance. Art is severed from context and integration with its surroundings. Art must be fused into every aspect of our existence. It can not be isolated from the physical reality of the world. Art must be ubiquitous as it touches every endeavor in life. Unfortunately we can only dream. The narrow uninformed minds of the architects, developers, urban planners, city officials and engineers that are responsible for the built environment will never shed themselves of standard convention and embrace risk. Just look at the cities these self appointed critics have created. Where does art exist in our cities? It’s located at the top of a brutal 30 story glass and steel monstrosity in attempt to disguise its inhumanity. It’s located pushed into a forgotten corner of a crushing vacant expanse of granite plaza which provides all the atmosphere of the moon. It’s located impaled on a column overlooking some blue gas corridor so people can marvel at it at 70 miles per hour as they attempt to escape the visual violence of our urban centers. The future for the artist does not appear to be positive.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy forecasted “Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art.” Society has indeed severed the root of art. All the artist can do is to suffer the torment of art in isolation as is their destiny.