Tipping My Hand

Readers of this blog will have noticed common themes running through its posts. As I near the end of the first draft of my final book, So Are You to My Thoughts, I think often of the value system embodied in the characters. I haven’t tried to make it explicit, as it is indeed meant to be reflected in their actions and thoughts. Their human natures compel their actions, while their feelings and thoughts make meaning of them.

In our study of tai chi, the Taoist way and its principles, we were taught an exercise between two people in which we first “listened” with our bodies, “surrendered” to the other person, “transformed” their energy as it came toward us, and finally “pushed.” It is a practice of balance within oneself, and harmony between people, which also results in positive accomplishment.

In my work, I’ve tried to show that there are ways of taking the material you grow up with and find in yourself and transforming it. Thus the freedom everyone in my generation fought for (“like a bird on a wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir”) does not have to be freedom from anything. It can be freedom to make homes, families and lives of which we are proud and which honor those we love.

Likewise, the self definition which many of us were so desperate about can be understood in terms not of self expression, but of service. Beyond the idea that only a few are called to become artists, documenting every last impulse, we can recognize that all of us are able to display the cardinal virtues of discernment, courage, temperance and fairness. Cultivation of these virtues enables us to live beside each other in harmony and peace.

A third major preoccupation of my generation was lifestyle, making new ways to live beyond the traditional furniture-ridden, unquestioned round of those who had gone before. Transforming this impulse to trash the past, we can educate ourselves to live with grace and taste, seeing these as elements of everything we do.

Goodness, truth, and beauty have long been the ideals of humanity. Keats saw in the Grecian urn that “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” None of this triad exists without the other. I associate freedom with truth, as all paths must be open in order to find it. Beauty has within it the necessity for authenticity, as in nature, where nothing is anything but itself. Goodness too is hollow without the backbone of character. Victimhood has been the subject of art, and of people’s prurient interest, way too long. And people hardly believe they have a right to beauty, that they know what it is. We can turn our gaze back to these ideals.

In his book, The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit [1995], Frederick Turner says: “The greatest arts are, I believe, not those which cause a stir on museum walls or extend some ‘shocking’ modern or post-modern critical theory into yet another posture or attitude, but those arts which intensify ordinary human existence and fill it with meaning, that make a home into a place that recalls all our beautiful and tragic past, and points to futures that are as human as they are strange and adventurous.”

John Bayley pointed out, regarding Czeslaw Milosz, that he was beyond ideology, having lived through so much change and violence during the 20^th century. Milosz was “not after himself, but after that old European goal of cultivation and understanding, enlightenment and humanitas.” The U.S. too is growing up, forging a new culture not seen before from its indigenous peoples, its immigrants and its unique place on the globe. Humans evolve slowly, but culture is quick. We can do better than we have in recent years. Postmodernism, with its identity and power politics, is a dead end. We are over it. Time to look back and pick up the pieces.