Triangle Offense

So after a good discussion with my smart and lovely wife, I think I have a way of organizing the class/writing around the Making Connections idea, and also of engaging with form and content a bit.

1) The first thing is to look at the practice of making connections.  This part will try to establish a model for making connections, and examine the people who do it really well: Hyde, West, etc.

2) The second part will be to follow the model we define and start to make the connections myself.  This might include: the NY Giants idea, Black-Jewish stuff, head/heart/guts, dynamic rehearsal and collaboration (The Third Thing), etc.

3) The third piece is to find a way to argue or prove that it is one’s ability to make wonderful connections that actually manifests one’s creative self/identity.  (Everyone from parts 1 and 2 can be used to back this up.)  The person who makes the connections is the actual connective tissue that makes the new thing happen – otherwise it’s an idea/possibility that wouldn’t exist.  You are the triangular point, the thing that puts it together, and the conduit for an artistic and intellectually new moment.

Make sense?  That’s as organized as I’ve felt about it so far  Possible title = Making Connections: Interdisciplinary People and Practice.

Creative Extremism and Ungrammatical Profundity

My college friend Chris Hayes is the Washington, D.C. editor for The Nation magazine. He’s a great thinker and writer. On his blog today, MLK, Jr. Day, he posted a link to the full text of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (Full text here: http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html), calling it “The Greatest Text of American Philosophy”. After reading the whole thing, for the first time, it’s hard to disagree.

It is an astonishing and breathtaking piece of intellectual brilliance and soul plumbing depth. One could go on and on about the letter – like a chunk of Shakespeare, there are so many points of entry, so many aspects of your humanity that are stirred and awakened by it. Like all great work, it reminds us of what we always knew to be true (fundamentally, elementally, eternally true) but would not have remembered, somehow, without the efforts of the writer.

For now, I’ll just comment on the other Shakespearean aspect of the letter that struck me; King seems to be inventing language and ideas that didn’t exist before his connecting of the terms – (again, his connective ability is amazing, and, to the purpose of the post on that subject, is the ultimate sign of his brilliance and artistry.) Let’s just take two examples that jump off the page: “creative extremism” and “ungrammatical profundity”.

King begins a paragraph by refuting (and then accepting on his own terms) the label of “extremist”. He explains that the “repressed emotions” of black folks have to be expressed somehow, and that the non-violent demonstrations are preferable to explosive violence.

‘If his [the Southern Negro's] repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: “Get rid of your discontent.” Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”‘

After Jesus, King names Amos, Paul, Martin Luther, John Bunyan, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson as other extremists and reasons: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?…Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

King has invented this idea: that one who pushes back against the ways of the unjust world and seeks to heal it (Tikkun olam, anyone?), who remakes his own suffering into a moment of transformational potential is the one who changes the world and helps history’s “long arm” bend further toward justice. In the fully creative realms, of course, this is what being an artist is all about.

Several “creative extremists” from the artistic world come to mind – Joe Papp, Pete Seeger, Leonard Bernstein. They were provacateurs who always spoke the truth, priviledged access and participation above all, and became ambassadors both for their artistic forms and their ethical convictions.  More on these guys soon.

“Ungrammatical profundity” is a magnificent way of honoring the wisdom and depth of the voice that has no “technique”, to use a word from the creative world. But the connection to the authentic self and the firmness of the belief allow the lack of “correctness” to become a virtue – like the nose that’s a bit too big or the blemish that leads to real beauty.

King invents the phrase – again I’m reminded of all those prose Shakespeare characters with their ungrammatical profundity – when explaining that “One day the South will recognize its real heroes.” They will be people like James Meredith, he says, and ‘They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.”‘

Nothing could better encapsulate the tragicomic hope Cornel West always talks about being the core of black expression in jazz and the blues than that lady and her “ungrammatical profundity.”

Here’s to celebrating King’s 80th birthday, and the inauguration of our 44th president.

Making Connections

This is a large topic which I will, no doubt, return to often.  The phrase “making connections” seems to be the best one I’ve found so far to describe meaningful, exciting, powerful, and pleasurable learning and teaching.  It also relates to the “interdisciplinary”-ness question, which I’ll deal with later on.

My own connection to this idea today came from a brief portion of an interview on Leonard Lopate I heard in the car.  Didn’t hear the whole thing, but it was yet another person talking about connections between obesity, hunger, the local foods movement, classism, etc.  What’s getting me excited about recent trends in public intellectualism (and something that Obama seems to really get) is that people are starting to base their thinking on making connections.  For example, at the highest levels, the incoming leaders of government seem to recognize the connections between the environment, energy, economic policies, national security, etc.  Likewise, authors, thinkers, and academics (at least those interested in the actual world and not just “theory” {thank you, Trofimov}) are now thinking and writing about the radical connectivity of the world.  This applies to everyone from Gladwell and Barber (economics, behavior) to Tricia Rose (hip-hop, culture). Needless to say, I haven’t read any of their books yet, but they’re all great interviews.

I recognize that to have published a book, or have a column in the paper, or be interviewed on TV about what you’ve “discovered” can often be seen in the “serious” intellectual community as the first sure sign of charlatanism and a rejection of the communal values and efforts of those in your field.  (Again, Hyde talks about this in “The Gift” using the science community as an example.)  But surely it’s good news that a trend toward making connections, the goal of this blog, after all, is being explored and received with passion.

It will come as no surprise that my favorite thinking folks (Cornel West, et al) are the ones who like to make connections.  And that some of the artists I find most inspiring are the ones who have seen the connections between genres and modes.  Bernstein, Marsalis, McFerrin, Meyer, O’Connor (they’re easier to find in music, aren’t they?!?)  This relates more specifically to the large topic of “boundary-crossing” which I’ll get into more down the road.  But for now I’ll just say that when Leonard Bernstein was teaching Bobby McFerrin how to conduct an orchestra, he stopped at one point and said, “You know, it’s all jazz.”