Art: Our Great Escape

I recently volunteered to be one of the judges for a teen poetry contest sponsored by the Dallas Public Library. One of my top selections was a poem entitled, "My Great Escape." The author describes that whenever she wants to leave the noisy life of the city, she escapes into a book. Books offer her a great escape from her life.

The more I think about her poem, the more I realize that most of us use various forms of art to escape, as well. Film, television, literature, painting, music, video games. We spend half our day at work attending to the mundane activities of our jobs--activities that may have once been new, exciting and promising, but now feel routine, necessary and empty.

And the second half of our days are spent escaping. We read James Patterson's newest thriller; we tune into American Idol auditions or new episodes of Lost; we play our favorite video games on our new PS3s; we watch the movies Netflix sent from our queue; we listen to music and drink a beer. And once we're relaxed enough, we go to bed and start the whole process over again.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with these forms of art. After all, art imitates life and there is plenty to learn about life through art. It's not the little picture that concerns me. It's the big picture. The one we can't step far enough away from our lives for long enough to see. But be cautious. Though art imitates life, it is no substitute for life.

We live in an escapist culture where escaping through art is so embedded in our culture and so necessary to the system in which we live, that it has become an unquestioned norm. I think there was a time when art was the voice of revolutionaries. A voice that caused riots and action. But now art has been seized upon by the system to function as a means to its end. But art is no longer the shot gun for revolution.

Art is a medium in which revolutionary thought can be expressed to the appeasement of the artist and absorbed to satisfy its audience with no real action necessary.

Art is our escape from the half of our lives we spend performing tasks like robots. It allows us to experience things we may never experience. But it is a deceptive and temporary release from our realities. A release that only rejuvenates us enough to get up the next morning and keep doing what we do without question.

This blog sort of functions in a similar capacity. If it weren't for the illusion of expression and reception of thought this blog provides me, I may actually be doing something, rather than just writing about it. In that sense the blog successfully subdues any revolutionary or controversial thoughts I have. Thoughts that could lead to action if not safely and quietly channeled into something else.

Call me naive and idealistic, even call me crazy, but I don't want to escape my life through art while the rest of my time is spent feeding into a system that depends on me living a meaningless and robotic life. I want to physically go out and experience a life I don't need to escape. A life no art can imitate.

Happy Commercialized Love Day!

I'd like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Happy Commercialized Love Day! Ah, yes, yet another human experience the great U-S of A has managed to commercialize and strip of any genuine meaning.

There's la primavera, or the feeling of rebirth that is now represented by nothing more than baskets full of colorful plastic eggs and bunny-shaped chocolates.

Then there's la independencia, or freedom, the very foundation of this country, which to the average youth today means nothing more than a a day off from school and a chance to light firecrackers in the streets until 3 o'clock in the morning.

And let's not forget the big daddy of them all, la navidad, or the birth of the man born to save us all. This one may be worse off than the rest of 'em. Christmas is now the equivalent to crowded malls, angry shoppers, newly accrued debt and a jovial-big-fat-flustered white guy in a red suit.

Sigh...

So why not commercialize el amor tambien? Love is no longer something you feel. It's something you prove with the exchange of material objects.

Diamonds!
Red roses!
Expensive dinner for two!
Champagne so expensive you can't even pronounce its name!

Go ahead, treat each other like shit the other 364 days of the year.
Barely communicate or acknowledge each other's presence.
Check out other people.
Yell at each other about how you keep arguing about the same things over and over again.
Cry about how s/he never changes no matter how much s/he promises.

But not today.

Today, ignore all the non-love like aspects of your relationship and cover them up with a brand-new watch and pair of diamond earrings.

Now that's love.

We are the greatest country in the world. What other country could succeed in desensitizing, mass producing and exploiting everything and anything that makes us human?

Misery loves company

This may sound odd, but I am attracted to misery.

I do not aim to make people miserable. But should I come across someone and sense an inkling of depression and disillusionment I can't help but smile. Something about the rawness, the vulnerability and the devastation seem so real to me. So normal. So familiar.

We are attracted most to what we are most familiar. And I am all too familiar with misery.

It is without a doubt in my moments of greatest deprivation and destitution that my thoughts are most clear, that smells are most potent, tastes are most tantalizing and sounds have never sounded better.

But there is something about misery that happiness doesn't have. Misery motivates change and action. Happiness does not. No one in a state of happiness complains about it. No one who is happy says, "I can't wait to not be happy," or "I have to do something about my life because I can't be happy forever." If we were happy all the time we wouldn't move. And we all know how I feel about being in constant motion :).

But misery? That's not a place you want to buy a home and raise your family. Misery's the sort of place that once you move in, you need to move out. It's important to pass through though. It's the disappointments that teach us what we really want. The depressions that make us dream of happiness.

Light does not exist without dark.
Good without bad.
Happiness without misery.

But being attracted to misery? Now that can be a problem.

Even though I am not in a constant state of misery, my attraction to it and to people who exude it, can make me feel like I am, which then has a stagnating effect similar to constant happiness. Misery is necessary to pass through in order to get to where you are going, but if you stay too long you can get stuck.

And my wave is stuck in a loop.

As obvious as this may seem to others, it's occurred to me that bonding on mutual misery is not an appropriate foundation for a relationship.

-"I'm lonely."
-"Me, too!"
-"Let's get married."

-"I hate my life."
-"I hate my life, too."
-"Let's be best friends."

Not okay.

I have even found myself competing with friends and exes about whose life is more miserable?! Whose plight warrants more complaints?!

Definitely, not okay.

So I have to get out of the loop. I need to keep moving. And unfortunately (and fortunately), that means change. Change in me. Change in my relationships.

Chop Suey YOUUU!

One minute ago...

I sit and stare at the empty plate in front of me. It's a white plate with a pink and green floral print border. A shiny silver fork rests in its center. There is light brown residue glimmering in random areas of its surface. Remnants of the maple syrup that once spilled over a stack of whole wheat pancakes.

Two minutes before that...

I grab the Albertson's brand pancake syrup from the cupboard and take a seat at the kitchen table. It completes the setting. Bright yellow coffee mug to the far right. Pancake syrup to the left. Plate of hot and supple whole wheat pancakes dead center.

Poor pancakes. They didn't stand a chance.

Two minutes later...

What's wrong with me? Who eats this fast? I wasn't even that hungry. I'm not even in a rush.

It was like the Jasmine v. Pancakes showdown and no one told the pancakes...

One and a half minutes before the two minutes later...

WAM! BAM! CHOP SUEY, YOUUUU! TAKE THAT! HA HA! VICTORY IS MINE YOU SILLY, SILLY PANCAKES!

Thirty seconds later (or back to the two minutes later)...

Sad plate. It misses its whole wheat companions. I took them away from it.

Sigh.

To the dishwasher you go.

One minute later (or now)...

I can't believe I just wrote a blog about pancakes. And I like it.

We are not particles. We are waves.

It has recently come to my attention by a friend of mine that I do not know anything about myself, and that she does not really know me after all.

And now that I think about it, I don't know anything. At all.

Every time I think I know myself or my place in the world, something changes and I quickly realize that I in fact know nothing. Socrates believed that knowing you know nothing is actually knowing more than every one else who thinks they know anything. A true philosopher never comes to any certainties, only to continue questioning, and maybe this is more natural than trying to know.

It makes senses actually. If all matter exists as waves in constant motion and only appear as particles in the eye of the observer, then the same must be true of me, as well. Who I am and what I am is in constant motion. To know me is to stagnate me, make me a particle instead of a wave. No wonder than if you avert your eyes and return to view me, what you thought you knew you no longer know. For I am not to be known. I am constantly changing. To stay the same would be unnatural.

Perhaps this is why relationships don't work out for me. Most relationships are dependent on a certain knowledge of each other to continue. "I know him better than he knows himself," or "Oh, I know him, he would never do that," or "That's so unlike him," or "I guess I never really knew him." It's the knowing that keeps us together and the not knowing that tears us apart. But the presumptions of knowing can be suffocating and limiting. Eventually you become confined to being what the person you are with knows you to be. But this knowledge is forced and unnatural. For as fellow matter we are not to be known or stagnated. We are meant to be ever changing and in constant motion. We are not particles. We are waves.

Liberating isn't it?

Hmmm...no wonder I love the ocean and music so much.

So maybe I'll never know myself. You'll never know me and I'll never know you. But, isn't it the not knowing that makes life worth experiencing anyway? And isn't experiencing life what makes it worth living?