You may wonder what I mean by the idea of culture itself becoming an anachronism. I don't have a clear definition of culture, but I can provide some examples. We no longer have to draw or paint because we have photography. We no longer have to read music and play the piano or sing together because we have recorded music. We no longer have to wear real clothing because we have polyester (oh, wait. We tried that in the 70s and we learned we didn't like it. Let's not make that mistake again.) We no longer have to paint our houses because we have tacky-looking vinyl substitute siding that can be spotted a mile away to save us the hassle. We no longer have to walk on our sidewalks from one place of business to another because we would rather drive anyway, damn the consequences.
A bit discursive, but I think you get my point. When something becomes a luxury and no longer a necessity, does its virtual substitute meet the neet it once met? Or is a new need created when we realize something intangible is missing? It is something I cannot define, but I know it when I see it. The interior designer who came to my sister's new house recently was drawn instantly to the hand-crafted statuettes and bookends I purchased for her from the fair trade store (where I do nearly all of my Christmas shopping). What was different about them? Whatever it was, she could tell right away. I mean, you can buy mass-produced knicknkack thingys at Mal-wart that look just like them and were manufactured in Chinese sweatshops, but why am I not drawn to them in the same way? How come we can so quickly tell the difference? Why should it matter?
It has to do with what I call a total experience. A total experience involves all of the senses and all of the dimensions of existence, not just one. A total experience meets more than basic needs, but self-actualization needs as well. A total experience invites imagination, sparks ideas, brings back memories, calls us to dream of possibilities. A total experience calls for celebration, makes us want to whistle or sing or paint a picture or write a poem or a play or a story. A total experience is what I have when I take a walk through a forest or a historic neighborhood and used to have almost everywhere else but no longer can. A total experience reminds us of the ends, not just the means. The means call for us to be practical. The means are necessary. The ends may not be imminently practical, but they may be every bit as called for. Let's not lose sight of them and get lost in the shuffle of struggling in the muck and the mire of the means.
Everything we do we do for an experience. We express negatively when we our expectations are thwarted and have to learn to live without expecting anything. Ironically, happiness seems to find the people who aren't trying to find it. We don't always know how to define the experiences we seek, but we know very well that there can be no substitutes.
Hugging is one of the ultimate total experiences. It is fleeting, like all experiences. It has no meaning beyond itself. It involves many senses and dimensions of our being. It is many experiences at once. Above all, it is shared experience. And it requires our total presence and participation. It allows no substitutes. The best way to live, I am told, is to participate in your experience and experience your participation.
So I honor my experiences, even (or especially) when they don't make sense. I forget that I "should" just "get used to" the growing ticky-tackiness of the scenery around me and recognize it when something valuable seems to be disappearing even if words to describe it escape me. Someone recently told me that, in his opinion, vinyl siding is "soulless". Well, I guess "soul" is as good a word as any.
One thing I do know, however, is that the statuettes and figurines that were handcrafted in so-called "developing" countries that I purchase for the members of my family are the things that will get passed down to the next generations, not the computer tables and TV sets and other ephemeral and purely "practical" paraphernalia we now keep around the house. They are not "useful" or "practical". But they live and breathe with us. They have soul. We can look upon them and have a total experience. And that is an end in itself.
3 comments:
Okay, about the vinyl siding thing - I agree with you that it looks cheap, and I HATE it when they side chimneys; it's awful. Though not quite as bad as the tarpaper brick siding they used to use in the 40's. But have you ever tried to scrape and paint a house? It's so everlastingly tedious.
Two summers ago I took down four of the shutters on the front of our house. It was my plan to do all eight of them, but four took forever, absolutely ages to scrape. I'd scrape and then set them aside to paint later, then come back and realize I still had scraping to do. I scraped and scraped for days. I never did get to the other four. And I could scrape shutters sitting down. Scraping a house you have to do standing up or even suspended. And you have to do it every 10 years or so. The older wood is more elegant, but unless you love scraping or can hire it done, well, I'm not going to judge you. We have 60 year old aluminum siding on our house. It's not classy, but it's lasted a long long time on one coat of paint.
You know, there's a group on facebook on the siding of chimneys (a rather bizarre idea). And on aluminum siding, what happened to it? At least it looks real--from a distance, anyway.
Let me preface my comment by saying that I am an esotericist and occultist and am in complete sympathy with your perspective.
However, I don't think we should descend into superstition. And I don't think hyperbole helps your argument.
Superstition: Walmart figurines are crap because they are mass-produced and hand-made stuff from "fill-in-the-blank" is more spiritual somehow. I don't buy it. Superficially: everyone is attracted to something outside the normal experience. "Third world" stuff is interesting, difference, attractive. No mystery. Items made by hand can certainly be just as banal as anything else. This gets atomistic: "natural paints *real*; synthetic paints *not real*. There is no logical basis for this sort of reasoning. Including 'spiritual' logic.
Hyperbole and logic: Frankly, your argument proves too much. First, the "vinyl siding" argument is fallacious--there is BY VOLUME lots more painting by hand than ever before. Any anyway, I doubt there as a percentage of the population there was more 'complete experience' painting going on at any past time than now. That's just weak reasoning. Next, let's just look at the volume---sheer hard number and as a percentage of the population--that are involved in the arts qua art. It's high. It's high because modern science and ingenuity have freed up vast portions of the population for creative arts. Yes, lots of folks rae 'just' couch potatoes--but even they get to view what in a prior era would be considered high art, or at least passing for it. For goodness sake there is nothing less 'artsy' than a well-done BMW commercial than looking at a holy statuette once per year in a procession. Even if I'm wrong on that score (and I'm not), there have always been couch potatoes. Basically, you can't prove to me that there is a higher percentage of cultural slobs than in any prior age.
Bottom line: I am sick and tired of hearing this faux angst about our culture drying up. It is not supported by facts. On the contrary, we are living in an age of an explosion of art, an exponential expansion in the number and percentage of the poplulation involved in (reading, practicing, disseminating) philosophies and works that 100 years ago hadn't yet been discovered and/or made public.
Oops. I ranted.
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