Pursuit of Meaning in Life

Partly in response to Judah Leon Abravanel (c. 1465 – c. 1523) and his work Dialogues of Love (Dialoghi d'amore), Daniel Boyarin writes: 

“Rabbinic Judaism invested significance in the body which in the other formations [Christian and Jewish] was invested in the soul. That is, for rabbinic Jews, the human being was defined as a body – animated, to be sure, by a soul – while for Hellenistic Jews (such as Philo) and (at least many Greek-speaking) Christians (such as Paul) these essence of human being is a soul housed in a body” (Boyarin, 1993, 5).  

This difference, to me, is the essence of how we look at existence as a whole, and what kind of world view we shape and shapes us. Sadly, I don't think that we even have a "world view" (Weltanschaung) today. Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and other social media, life has devolved into a hodge podge of catch phrases that oscillate from one extreme to the other. 

Thanks to the fact that we have politicized everything relating to human existence, we have lost the sights and sounds of the metaphysics.  How can we expect to enter into a deeper meaning of life, if we are constantly living according to what Twitter feed feeds us?  It may be feeding us but it's certainly not nourishing us.

To be sure, social media has its place.  It can be used for sharing information, sometimes even knowledge, and you may even have occasionally a good conversation with others.  But to expect an existential answer is to expect an improbability. 

Some don't even have enough awareness to know that they are living half-lives, zombies going from one click to the next.  For those, I don't know what to say: maybe you're just a zombie troll and there is no hope for you.  An optimist in me tends to refuse that option.

Writers, pundits, critics - all say that to speak like this is to be nostalgic about the past because we are idealizing it.  Not at all.  I am merely looking at the facts.  Statistically, and how people choose to reveal themselves on the social media, tells us that they do not know the difference between sacred and profane, soul and body, body and mind.  I would even settle for some mind/body dualism in a conversation if people knew that such question even exists.

Digitization and politicization of everything, which should not be digitized and politicized, has made this world into a place that lacks joy and wonder.  Lacking such vision means that we are incapable of seeing the other person face to face, and that incapability leads to a lack of insight.  If there is no insight, there is no discernment, and if there is no discernment, then there is no action.

That is why, despite the illusion that everything is moving so fast, it's not moving at all.  We are just holograms of our potential selves, displaying the stilted animation of our bodies without minds, and certainly without souls. 

This is why, as a society, we have such strange view of sex as well.  It has nothing to do with eros.  It is, I would posit, even worse than anything Victorians imagined because sexual experience (whether excessive, hedonistic, or loving) is found in a non-erotic static.  Today's sex is a white padded cell - a sterile room of one's own in which the other is not recognized at all.  

We are left with loud voices that are not connected to bodies, with meaningless chatter masquerading as profound expressions, with crassness masquerading as intellectual prowess.  It takes courage to be still and to embrace the silence.  

If being free means anything to us, then we will make the first step on the path to the Unknown because the Unknown is more known to us than we might assume.  But we have to be prepared to let go of any expectations and attachments that have politicized and digitized our existence.  Otherwise, we will remain in an illusion, a pretense of real life, and not only will we not know the deeper meaning of our existence but also we will have no idea what politics really is or how digital world can truly be used.   
 

Distractions Breed Bad Vibrations

A few days ago, I went to a concert of Brian Wilson - the main founder of The Beach Boys.  Wilson was joined by another band member, Al Jardine, as well as Blondie Chaplin (who toured with The Beach Boys on their album Holland), and the current band/orchestra that accompanies Wilson.  This was the 50th anniversary of the album Pet Sounds tour.

The concert was a mixture of emotions.  This wasn't the first time I saw Brian Wilson in concert, and so I had an idea of what to expect.  The band is tight, but Wilson disengaged, whether from the audience, his band, or even himself.  This time, the experience was even worse.  Wilson brought "bad vibrations" indeed with snarkiness, sarcasm, impatience, and childish introductions to the songs of Pet Sounds - what I consider to be one of the best albums ever composed and produced. He was like an impish child who is forced to eat his "Vege-tables" (read: to tour), referring to the concert as the "fundraiser," and telling the audience that he just wants to "get the hell outta here." 

It was, needless to say, disappointing.  Obviously, Wilson is in a bad place in his life, and most likely suffers from clinical depression.  My theory is that he never truly addressed his past (particularly the strange "therapy" of Eugene Landy), and we will really never know what happened after the incomplete production of SMiLE. 

Strangely enough, Wilson did not have any respect or reverence for the music he wrote.  Pet Sounds is a deeply spiritual album, what you might call an American musica sacra, and it will be forever part of the Great American Songbook.

As if taking cue from Wilson, the audience too failed to see the beauty of the notes.  I was distracted from the left, right, front, and behind with glowing orbs of distraction, i.e., smart phones.  People were either recording (the concert or themselves), taking flash pictures, texting, updating their Facebook statuses as well as obsessively hitting the "Like" button on pictures of someone's graduation or grandchildren at play.  But here is the most egregious act of them all: looking up the information on Pet Sounds album on Wikipedia!!!

As I looked around, I realized that most of these people are not living in the present moment whatsoever.  They have a patience of a two year old child, who needs to be constantly gratified, pacified, given attention.  We can forgive the child but an adult?  Hardly.

There is no doubt that is a collectively existential problem.  But why are people not seeing it as a problem?  If an unexamined life is not worth living, then all I see are a lot of worthless, meaningless lives.

It would appear that we have to break up this problem into small bi(y)tes.  Cut up those vegetables and meat for the impish children!  Before addressing the philosophical aspect of distraction (lack of spiritual and ethical discipline), we have to focus on the act itself.

If you are scrolling through the Facebook feed during the experience of concert,  you have to ask yourself why.  Are you afraid that you might miss something?  Are you afraid that someone might forget you unless you post a status update?  Why are you afraid that you might be forgotten?  Now, we're getting somewhere!  We have to tease out the perennial questions out of contemporary absurdities.

If you're looking up the information on Pet Sounds (on Wikipedia no less!) during the concert that is playing the album in its entirety, then you must ask yourself why are you at the concert to begin with?  Could it be that you are just not enjoying yourself at all, and you are only familiar with Good Vibrations, and that maybe your partner (who seem to be enjoying himself a lot!) dragged you to the concert, at which point, you may have a bigger problem than not knowing the music of The Beach Boys?

Thomas Merton, 1915-1968

Thomas Merton wrote, "Why do we spend our lives striving to be something we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted?  Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of what we were made for?"  
To be honest with you, I am not even sure whether we are ready for a question like this.  In order to ask it, we must first begin to question the meaninglessness and absurdity of our daily acts, and recognize that there is something "off" in the whole set up of our day.  (And if you do not experience this, then great!  Hopefully you won't be offended by my spiritual musings and you won't see it as a "micro-aggression").

We really have to ask why are we doing what we are doing.  Why do we have the need to pick up that phone (or as my husband calls it, the "porta-puter/pewter") when we are alone, or even in the company of others?  Of course, we are distracting ourselves.  But from what?  Only each individual can answer that for him or herself. 

Against Identity Politics

Edward Albee, 1928-2016

The great American playwright, Edward Albee died last Friday at the age of 88.  I was reading his obituary in The New York Times, and I was struck by the fact that Albee was gay and in a relationship with a sculptor, Jonathan Thomas from 1971 until Thomas' death in 2005.  All these years I've been reading and admiring Albee's work, and I had no clue he was gay.   Not that it would matter, one way or the other.

Then, another thing struck me even more - a quote from Albee himself.  Accepting an award in 2011, Albee stated: "A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend self. I am not a gay writer. I am a writer who happens to be gay."  He continued: "Any definition which limits us is deplorable."

Of course, you can imagine and not be one bit surprised that he received backlash from gay community for saying that, presumable for not being "supportive," or whatever overly emotional word du jour was.  Who were the ones who backlashed?  It doesn't even matter because they are forgettable, and they are forgettable precisely because they are not true artists.

This quote by Albee and the backlash shows how much society has changed, and might I add for the worse.  It's called "identity politics," and great art and great thought suffers because of it.  Of course, one's sexual orientation (just as religion, or ethnicity, or nationality, etc) makes one unique in his or her view.  But the problem here is that one aspect of that identity is what makes great art.  So say mediocre "artists."  Albee's insistence that art is art (and there's either great or bad art) is what is missing from our current cultural consciousnessness.

What I truly detest about identity politics is the unapologetic and disturbing objectification of people.  The proponents of it have nobody to blame but themselves because, frankly, they are the only ones who are objectifying themselves, continuously reducing themselves to either a penis or a vagina, or as it is fashionable these days, to something in between (what would you call it? pegina? vagis?). 

Art has suffered because of lack of resolve, definition, and statement.  The only statement "identity politicians" are making is that of human reductionism where soul doesn't exist and metaphysical uniqueness of each individual (and thus his or her artistic output) has no bearing, or worse, is not even needed in order to produce art.  What is needed is a fantastical tale of pseudo-suffering.  This will suffice in being heard.  What?!  How is this possible?  Why are we accepting this?  Get over yourself, I say, and show me some real work, some real art, and then, perhaps, just perhaps, we can talk about your "identity."

Among many things, I am a Muslim from Bosnia.  But I would hate to be reduced to that.  A token Muslim.  Highly dehumanizing.  Yes, it's part of my identity, but I am much more than that.  And I refuse to categorize myself for the ease of those who are unwilling to understand the interiority of a human being.  I am not going to make myself simplistic so I can be deconstructed.  And this is exactly what identity warriors are doing to themselves and to others. 

The question to be asked is this: what makes great art?  When we read something, can we recognize what took precedence in the work?  Was it based on "identity politics" (in other words, complaining and marinating in some falsely perceived victimhood) or was it based on great human questions?  What are these questions?  Read the classics, you'll know.

Art is not about (often times, false) victimhood.  Art is about beauty and perennial questions, which will never cease because we are human beings with souls, and minds, and faces. 

How to Look at Art

Today, I'd like to say a little bit about beauty.  Given the amount of useless information that we see every day, there isn't enough attention paid to beauty.  I don't want to sound nostalgic and that is not my intent.  I am sure that there was plenty of useless information in the year 1345 (year picked randomly, by the way).  But the difference between 2016 and 1345 is the dissemination of the information.  Of course, this is nothing new; we are already aware of this.  And we choose to ignore the consequences of the abundance of informational detritus.

Much of this problem has to do with the change in the conception of time.  Once man figured out a way to move faster from point A to point B, it changed our experience of the landscape that we are in contact with.  But this does not have to be a negative experience.  There is bound to be change.

If you look closely, if you examine the subject matter of information that is out there at an immediately gratifying disposal, you will see that most of it is senseless, mediocre, boring, uninspiring.  The democratization of dissemination of public opinion has allowed the loudest and the most obnoxious voices to rise.  Pundits of all kinds analyse and analyse and analyse compulsively the same situation over and over again.  People, unfortunately, listen.  Everything is an argument, or at least, it should have an argumentative flair because we cannot possibly handle silence.

This voice equality is not bad.  It allows me, for example, to write a piece like this.  But shouldn't we be aware of what are weeds that need to be plucked out?  Not by censorship, of course, but by creating a different way to communicate, dialogue, and most of all see.

What does this have to do with beauty?  Everything.  The rise of the "social justice warriors" has erased the possibility of aesthetic experience.  Ethics are important but these "warriors" are not interested in real ethical acts.  They get their sexual release from the perception that they are making the world a better place.  They have substituted one experience for the other: protests that have reached a pathological level have become an aesthetic experience.

At the center of any experience is an encounter, whether we are dealing with another human being, an animal, flower, a stone, and of course, a work of art.  Ruins, for example, should make an impact on us.  They speak of a very distant past, of those who came before us and have experienced this world before us.  There should be, at the very least, a sense of respect for the past endeavors.

Leonardo da Vinci, Head of a Woman, c. 1508, Galleria nazionale di Parma

Do we know anymore what to do when we are in front of a work of art?  How are we to encounter it, how are we to relate to it?  Take for example, Leonardo da Vinci's painting titled Head of the Woman.  What do you see?  Look closely.  Don't worry about the constraints of time.  Who is she?  The name is not important.  Her gaze, at once removed from us and yet inviting, "speaks" to us.  She is confident and shy.  She knows something we do not.  She is aware of her interior life.  Here is an inanimate object that is actually having a dialogue with an enfleshed person!  Aren't you amazed by that?  Or have you been "somatized" by the millions of twittering screens that pop out whether you like it or not?

Still, contrary to some beliefs, we do have free will.  You can choose to step away from the screen and choose to step in front of a painting.  I urge you to take some time today and reflect.  Don't feel one bit guilty for contemplating.  Great beauty, by very definition, is not an ethical act.  But great works of art can inspire acts of charity, precisely because you chose to nourish yourself for that day.

A Better Way to Communicate

Pundits (or a better term would be “talking heads”) are always in competition with each other at who can come up with the best one liner or a phrase that will forever remain in cultural consciousness, and will be used as a frame of reference in many contexts. But these phrases are quickly forgotten because they either have no substance or because people really are oversaturated with information. Truth and real thought provoking reflections get lost and they have no impact. People are extremely impatient and examination of one's life is not on their priority list. Give me the next information. More, more, more!

Social media feeds are like this. Not only are they in constant change of information, literally second by second, they are feeding the mind of the people and it is junk food. Recent debates about Facebook selecting what they put on their news feed and how it is biased toward liberalism are a perfect example of what constitutes news.

It is true – they are certainly more liberal than conservative. You won't find a National Review link on its feed. However, if you look closely, most of what Facebook deems news is celebrity gossip. In this way, you could say, that they are selectively choosing to not report on real issues, and because of that the Facebook is participating in a mild form of censorship.

Somehow, we have to seek the articles and essays that give us information, but most of all, a glimpse of the universal human questions. Let's get to the heart of the matter, and not constantly engage in ad hominem attacks and insults that masquerade as intellectual analysis. It does not take any effort, self-reflection, or careful thought to throw insults around. This is just another instance of dehumanizing one's opponent. It's one thing to be witty, funny, and satirical. It's another to be utterly humorless and quite simply, cruel. Smugness of the so-called intellectual elite is tyrannical and does not permit any deviation from their linguistically and euphemistically formed metaphysics, where good is evil, and evil is good.

Artists, philosophers, intellectuals – they all have to find a way to be heard in the noise of meaningless opinions. But how do you do that? I must admit, it's a depressing world out there. But you have to remain strong. The intellectual thrust has to be even more aggressive and powerful than what artists and thinkers have experienced in the past. But, to paraphrase, Andrei Tarkovsky, without disorder and pressure, an artist would have no reason to create. All of art and thought is borne out of some kind of struggle.

How to rescue art from politics? Do we respond to and analyze the loud and obnoxious and gyrating culture of beyonces, taylor swifts, lena dunhams, etc.? If we speak about them, we give them attention. If we remain silent, they continue to deconstruct that which is beautiful. In the meantime, they are the true capitalists, who through cultural and historical appropriation masquerade as social justice warriors. I would say that someone like Beyonce is wearing a metaphysical mask, but maybe there is no face underneath the disguise.

Look, let's face, it's about the money. Whatever gets more attention from the people, whatever creates more “controversy” is more profitable. Be it beyonces or professional activists, they are making money. What they are saying hardly even matters. But the words and twisted meanings of them do spread. And suddenly, it all becomes a really bad telephone game. The unfortunate aspect of this game is that the message was a lie to begin with.

Artists and philosophers and true intellectuals need to keep forging ahead. They need to annihilate the mediocrity that calls itself “art” and “thought.” Quite simply, standards need to be raised. Commenting on the dryness and depression that comes from an artist’s struggles as an actor, John Cassavetes said: “If you don’t get any good parts, you have to keep preparing. You can’t go slumming. You can’t ever slum.”

Life Imitates Performance Art

A few days ago, people at an art gallery (Art Basel) witnessed a curious incident, which involved two women. One was stabbed by the other with an X-Acto knife. The attacker has been identified and arrested. But it still remains to be clarified why was the woman attacked. Did they know each other? Was the attacker simply expressing aggression and picked a random person to attack?

 

Although such questions are interesting, what’s more compelling is the fact that the gallery patrons didn’t do anything about it. They thought that it was performance art and that the act was part of an exhibit. Similarly, when the police taped off the area of the attack, the gallery goers thought it was part of an exhibit.

 

Deconstruction and abstraction in art (which includes performance art) is a state of mind which does not allow for the order of things. Its point is always to shock and disturb. Its creators are obsessed with involving the viewer into the art experience itself, provoking them into making strange choices. The viewer ought to be left in a state of discomfort and bewilderment. The message: there is only chaos. The ideal does not exist. There is no order and you, the viewer, are a pitiful excuse for a human being.

 

Another aspect of deconstructive art is the blur between ethics and aesthetics, which is meant to either desensitize the people to any level of suffering or prove that people will remain neutral when it comes to the suffering of another. This is not entirely untrue, but the question is should this be art? The fact that the art world has not produced anything of substantial value in the last four decades is a testament to why the patrons at Art Basel reacted the way the did.

 

In 1974, Marina Abramovic (often described as the “grandmother of performance art”) staged an exhibit called Rhythm O in which she chose to present herself as an object. She spent six hours on stage at the Studio Morra in Naples, while the ongoing public made a decision to humiliate and abuse her body. They used objects that were provided by Abramovic, and in one of the photographs, she is weeping, while her naked body is covered with various objects, one of them being a thorny rose.

 

One can argue that Abramovic has proved a point by cleverly showing a triad of a relation: brutality-power-aquiesence. Fine. But once such “art” expressions enter into people’s consciousnesses and people get used to a deconstructive process of the entire world that surrounds them, the line between an ethical and an aesthetic act has disappeared. Suffering can continue indefinitely. 

 

The decision to treat the human body and mind as disordered ready-made objects that are nothing more than a, say, urinal, leads to a rejection of the order of things. And more than anything, such art is dreadfully dull. We need some fresh voices, not the recycled garbage of sustainable art.

Rooms of Christina's Heart

Sometimes, I like to sit on the floor of my living room with art books spread all over the carpet.  The carpet is black and white - an exercise in sharpness of modernism.  I still don't know whether art has a calming effect on me, or whether it lights more fires in my mind, or perhaps, whether it is a combination of both states of being.

There is a small book of Andrew Wyeth's paintings, among El Greco, and a book of Medieval manuscripts.  I know of Wyeth's painting, Christina's World (1948), and so I look for it.  I slow down on purpose, touching the pages, sensing them.  "Go slowly," I tell myself.  "There is no reason to rush."  "What kind of life is lived when we rush?"

Ah, there it is!  Christina is seductive.  I always thought of her that way.  Christina's thinness is frightening and grotesque and ideal.  What about her face?  What is she trying to do?  There is no object to seduce.  A house?  A meadow?  Hardly.  The earth does not care about our attempts at seduction.

Sometimes, it's not a bad idea to read the back story of great paintings.  Her full name is Anna Christina Olson.  She was born in 1893 and she died in 1968.  Wyeth had a house which he spent summers in and the Olson family were his neighbors.  He befriended them and was intrigued by Christina.  She had a muscular disease, most likely polio, and one half of her body was paralyzed.  

One day, Wyeth looked outside of his window and saw her crawling toward the house.  Her world was slow, her body did not allow for swiftness, and it was a struggle to get from one place to the next.  Her world was limited by her suffering body.  Her world was limitless by her suffering body.  Like the landscape, the boundlessness and the uncertainty of human body and heart interrupts our thoughts and restlessness. 

Christina, in fact, was not trying to seduce us, or anyone else for that matter.  She was not indifferent to us either.  It was us, who looked first into our own interiority and found insecurities and rejections.  "Turn around!"  "Let me see your face!"  But more importantly, "Look at me!"  But there is something else hiding behind the insecurities, which are just illusions anyway.   There is a need to be seen, to be recognized.  By desiring to be recognized by Christina, we find  something wholly outside of ourselves - her being is an imposition, a call, which must be answered.  Or are we going to turn around and go into another direction toward another vastness of the landscape, where there is another desolate house, whose interior is unknown to us?  But the house is inanimate, isn't it?  The space of the house can be controlled, maintained - the imposition comes from us.  Christina's interior and the rooms of her soul are unknown too but the uncertainty is coupled with a constant possibility of surprise.  The rooms may be locked, may be open, some might even miss a door, some might have creaky doors. Who knows what the vastness of human heart will bring?