#SOL16: Sublime

from my art journal, 10.22.16 (gesso, found papers, acrylic paint, Tombow markers, tissue paper, ink)

I.

The weather has finally turned sending the too-hot and humid summer-like weather we had this past week in the Northeast US, packing.  Good riddance. The first fall-feeling day is here. Gale winds, raw cold, and buckets of rain ("Buckets of tears/Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears/Buckets of moonbeams in my hand...")

And it is absolutely glorious to walk in the fall of rain, feel the wind so strong tug at the umbrella that I must hold at an angle--less the wind with a sharp snap will turn it inside out. This afternoon I have the path to myself. No one else seems to have ventured forth and surely I can see the appeal of curling up with a good book in an oversized chair with some mint tea. I painted most of the morning, making the journal page at the top of this post and after lunch I found myself heading to that chair with some tea and a book. It was after all, raining.

So? I thought.  I transferred the hot tea to an old Starbucks cup, threw on a sweatshirt, and let myself outside after saying goodbye to Devon.  To me, nothing affirms life like a storm.


II.

I am rounding the last mile when the audio cuts out and my phone begins to ring. The display reads, Patty. My oldest friend in the world is phoning. We have known each other since we were each 4-years-old. I answer right away--using one hand to hold the umbrella and cup of tea and the other to put the phone closer to my mouth. We haven't spoken in a few months and I am eager to catch up. Between old friends there is no settling in to the conversation. No awkward pauses. No wondering what to say. There is just talk and lots of it--as if we talked every day. And well, I guess for so many years we did.

Pat tells me that creating helps ease grief.  Her husband John retired early and has taken up writing. "He says he needs two years.  One year to write and the next to reflect on that writing."

"How wise," I tell her, "to give himself that second year."

Pat's an art therapist. She recommends movement and creating as means to ease grief. She laughs telling me it was in the low 30s this morning in Michigan and raining too and she went out for a run anyway.  After about 20 minutes of which only the last 5 were dedicated to the election (Pat says with a chuckle that in Michigan all of the millennials and she voted for Sanders), she rings off as she is heading to a client.


III.

Later, after night has fallen and the wind has quieted a bit, I am reading an old copy of Flow Magazine.  I see there is an article about loss and begin reading. Dealing with loss says René Diekstra,

"is the ability to create something from our pain. This can be simple, like keeping a diary, contacting a fellow-sufferer or looking at a painting. Re-forging our pain can frequently lead to something sublime. The main question we must ask ourselves is: What can I do with my pain besides suffer from it?" (from Flow Magazine,  Issue 12).

What can I do? As much as there are days when I desire to stay active, I realize that I am even more partial to solitude. I enjoy writing and making art and both of these tend to be done alone. Painting all morning fueled me, allowed me to feel content and even, joyful.  It is the small acts that heal. Talking with an old friend. Walking in the rain. Watching what begins to emerge as I paint and become.

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

Bowler (M.A. Reilly Dublin, Ireland, 2008)

AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE

Charles Bukowski

”– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”

no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.

baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.

Making, not Replicating: The Joy Standards Cannot Bear

20 collages created each day based on my reading of The New York Times.

I. Composing

For the last few weeks I have been composing a collage a day in response to what I read each day in The New York Times. Tomorrow will be collage #21. Creating something new each day allows me to shape possibility from the raw messiness of the day, to confront not knowing, and to situate it as a source of energy. And although this work leads me to see differently (the world is more vivid as if I was walking about with polarized lens covering my eyes) and to think differently, too--what motivates me to continue making is joy.  Rollo May in The Courage to Create noted:

But what the artist or creative scientist feels is not anxiety or fear;  it is joy. I use the word in contrast to happiness or pleasure. The artist, at the moment of creating, does not experience gratification or satisfaction...Rather, it is joy, joy defined as the emotion that goes with heightened consciousness, the mood that accompanies the experience of actualizing one's own potentialities (p.45). 

Making a collage each day has increased my capacity to make connections between and among ideas as I don't turn off the layering process I use during collage making. I see the world as juxtaposition. At some point when I enter more deeply the work I am making, I disconnect from the world and time shifts and I find that I resurface hours later with a new work in hand. There's such joy in the making. Rollo May is correct--it is experiencing my own potential that fuels me--that fills me with joy.

Making matters beyond the object made.

So much of making collage is active problem solving--the trial and error, the endless re-shifting and reshaping of image and idea, and the unexpected rush and at times the slowness of understanding that occurs in ways difficult to predict.  It's complex work and beneath this process is the freedom to create, to err, to abandon a work, to not understand, to get it (sometimes) and to try again.

Making is indulgent.

II. Replicating

Indulgence and freedom are not the stuff made at school. The very dispositions necessary to creating are often threatened by the status quo that is present in the day to day conceptualization of what school is and how it 'ought' to be organized and what counts as important learning--especially with the rise of national standards. Educational standards, as we conceive of them presently, are a means for someone else to name the most important content for someone else to learn. It's a curriculum of servitude. At its base, standards are a form of colonialism.  (Ok, even if you aren't buying my Edward Said interpretation of educational standards, consider this):

The world’s information is doubling every two years. In 2011 the world will create a staggering 1.8 zettabytes. By 2020 the world will generate 50 times the amount of information and 75 times the number of "information containers"... from here.

Does it not seem foolish in 2014 to use time and resources to name what must be learned in a world where information doubles every two years?  Educational standards making is an exercise in asserting power.  Situating educational standards as even being necessary, tells us much about what is valued at school and in the larger society: standardization and replication. 

Ugh, it's the machine age all over again. 

III. Being a Simulacrum

Standards situate your child and mine as simulacrum--the copy for which there is no original. Is this really the measure of achievement we desire for children? Standards limit creativity as they are by design an orderly and singular way of seeing life. Think of replication, the outcome of standards, as an endless series of boxes, each with a very tight lid. There's no thinking outside of that box. There's nothing original. It's all about embracing the rational.

I think again about Rollo May who acknowledges that the creative spirit is a threat to the rational. He writes:

The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable. 

I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science (pp.71-72).

IV. Uncovering the 3 U's

Four things I think about when I think about educational standards:

1. Educational standards and our response to them render our world 'banal and progressively more empty'. 
2. Educational standards and our response to them keep the anxiety that arises alongside not knowing and the unknown--at bay. 
3. Educational standards consistently reassure us that the way we have come is the only way we could have done so. 
4. Educational standards and our response to them reduce joy--as such flights of fancy cannot be adequately endured.

And so it is not surprising when Ruth Richards in "Everyday Creativity: Our Hidden Potential" notes that creativity

may often be overlooked—either consciously or unconsciously, for a purpose. One may talk about the three "U's": Our creativity is often underrecognized, underdeveloped, and underrewarded, in schools, at work, and at home. Why is it, after all, that in so many schools students are trying to get 100% on someone else's test and not making up more questions of their own? (p. 26)

V. Dominating

Why indeed?  Who benefits from the development of an underclass who is systematically taught, not only how to take someone else's tests, but to do so as if such work was the mark of high merit?   Yes, yes, I know I will hear the rhetoric that standards lead to high achievement.  But is that really so? In last week's Washington Post article about Bill Gates's dominance in education policy, Lyndsey Layton writes:

Tom Loveless, a former Harvard professor who is an education policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the Common Core was “built on a shaky theory.” He said he has found no correlation between quality standards and higher student achievement.

“Everyone who developed standards in the past has had a theory that standards will raise achievement, and that’s not happened,” Loveless said.

Okay, so if there's no correlation between educational standards and increased student achievement, then what exactly did Gene Wilhoit, David Coleman, and Bill Gates want to create? Layton writes:

In February, Microsoft announced that it was joining Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, to load Pearson’s Common Core classroom materials on Microsoft’s tablet, the Surface. That product allows Microsoft to compete for school district spending with Apple, whose iPad is the dominant tablet in classrooms. 

Gates dismissed any suggestion that he is motivated by self-interest.

“I believe in the Common Core because of its substance and what it will do to improve education,” he said. “And that’s the only reason I believe in the Common Core.” 

Hmm. Okay, no self interest--even though he will benefit in ways you and I could only dream. 

What about Wilhoit and Coleman? Have they benefitted from this venture? Coleman is now the president of College Board with a $750,000 annual salary and benefits. Not bad.  Wilhoit joined Student Achievement Partners (SAP) as a Partner in 2013. The same group that is a top recipient of grants from Gates. (SAP received $4,042,920.00 from here.)

In reading Layton's article, it almost feels like the start to a very bad joke: Three wealthy guys meet up at a bar one night and... But it's not a joke and joy and more are at stake.

We Are More Than Big Heads

On Grafton Street (M.A. Reilly,  Dublin, 2008)

In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945) writes: "Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system" (p. 235)


Knowing is embodied.  

Say it.

I feel this each time I lift my Nikon and connect with a subject.  

I hear the shutter rotate, sound.

I feel my fingers sliding and turning knobs in order to to set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO--to set the conditions for what I think I want.

My camera has heft. 
It weighs. 

Surfacing (M.A. Reilly, Tuscany, 2009)

Late in the day after hours of shooting the muscles in my arms ache.  

It is a good ache. A necessary ache.

A knowing ache.

I feel the weight of body when I look down and wonder where that bruise now forming on my shin first happened.

Etta And Butch Go For A Ride (M.A. Reilly,  NYC, 2010)

200,000+ images later and I can feel the weight of my camera without lifting it.  

I can make the image without taking it.


Art guides and (in)forms my teaching. It helps me to remember that we are more than big heads on parade.

Far more.

Be for Me, Like Rain  (M.A. Reilly,  NYC, 2010)

The Ordinary (M.A. Reilly, Teaneck, NJ, 2013)

Moonrise Over Atlantic (M.A. Reilly, Rockport, Maine, 2012)

Watching  (M.A. Reilly,  Newburgh, NY, 2011)

On Creating

Being creative takes work.




In writing about creating music, Keith Jarret says:

Each piece emerged out of a "zone." I have certain zones that I sit down with, a
given key, a given general mood. In that sense, there is an element of
preconception. From there, everything is new to me (although I generally work
within conventional, relatively simple harmonic movements). The music starts from
a seed, a few notes; it sprouts; arpeggios, textures and melodies develop; new leaves
appear; sometimes a theme or two from previous explorations of the same zone
appear; they're incorporated; new branches appear; everything expands and grows
and becomes fully developed — seeds, sprouts, branches, leaves, flowers in
profusion — then it concludes on its own. Sometimes it takes three minutes, or five,
sometimes ten or fifteen, whatever feels right. It's got a life of its own, which I
respect, cherish, and honor.

Edwidge Danticat (2011) writes this about creating:

I am even more certain that to create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts (p. 148).

On storytelling...




Steven Pressman (2010) offers this insight about creating:

Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got. (Kindle Locations 1068-1069). 

On overcoming resistance:




Sir Ken Robinson (2001) asserts:


Human intelligence is essentially creative. We not only find meaning in the world, we interpret it through structures of ideas and beliefs. We each create the worlds we live in (Kindle Locations 2117-2119).

On creating...





Works Cited

Danticat, Edwidge (2011-09-20). Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

Pressfield, Steven (2010-10-11). The War Of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle. FastPencil PREMIERE. Kindle Edition.

Robinson, Ken (2001-06-15). Out of our Minds: Learning to be Creative.  John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

An Exchange of Energy

Amethyst (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

Sometimes I shoot pictures.  

Sometimes I make images.  

Corn (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

The difference is all about energy. 

Something Like Magic (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

When I make images,
there is a transfer of energy
between the subject and myself. 

Repeating (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

This morning was image-making and I connected with the subject.

A Bird Singing (August, 2012 by M.A. Reilly)

Through the fog, I became the bird singing.

Imagining A to Z: T is For Talking When You've Nothing to Say

T is for Talking When You've Nothing to Say

Talking About Malcolm X, II (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

John Cage  (1967) wrote:

                                                                           

                                                                              For something                         to

be             a                 masterpiece                    you             have             to             have    enough time       to     talk            when    you     have          nothing      to       say.

Talking About Malcolm X, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I think about Cage's words as I think about the two men who are featured in these images. Both men were kind enough to allow me to photograph them while they talked. Originally from Brooklyn both were at that time living in Florida. They each lived in Crown Heights, but neither knew the other while there.  They met each morning at the ocean to talk, often about politics and the old neighborhood. One of those mornings I photographed them while they talked. On that day the topic was Malcolm X, Barack Obama, and how America might come to better understand itself by studying both men.  At the time Obama had not yet secured the Democratic nomination for president.  

Cage is right. Sometimes you just need enough time to talk, to see what surfaces, to come to say what you did not know you could produce. There are all kinds of ways to talk, yes?

Note: In this series of post during the month of April, I am participating in the A to Z blogging challenge, with each day focusing on a letter.  In order to bring some cohesion to this process--releasing the imagination is the focus of each post.