Surely THAT is Not Art

I sometimes wonder whether I am missing something, as I'm often frustrated by current art and literature. Post modernism has been taken to the extreme . . . squares of paint on a blank canvas, pictures of toilets, jumbles of words masquerading as poems, rambling, incoherent pieces.

Art may be subjective, but I just don't like what is currently being called art.

I honestly fail to see the talent present in these pieces. Maybe it's the creativity that should be praised, but surely it takes more than creativity to create masterpieces. Otherwise, I could fill water balloons with different colors of paint, tape them to my body, and fling myself against a white wall to produce my own creation. It sounds creative, but it's probably already been done. Or I could just put a starving dog in a room and call it art.

I've always seen art as something untouchable, something I wish I could do but that I know requires a talent that I lack. Renaissance paintings with their incredible level of detail. Photographs capturing images at that perfectly lit moment. I don't think our time will ever have talent like that of Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Renoir, or Raphael (Or if we did, these people would find their work to be passe and unpopular). Even Picasso and Munch, whom some call postmodern, could work magic with their brushes. I love to stare at these paintings, marveling at the perfectly placed brush strokes, the textures, the shadows; such paintings strike me as almost unworldly because their creation just seems so impossible.

I often feel the same way about poetry - Victorian poets such as Hopkins, Browning, Tennyson, or Hardy, epic poetry by Homer or Milton, or anything by Dickinson. These poems have musical rhythm, vivid images, and originality.

So while much, but far, far from all of the world moves deeper into post modernism, I will continue to find most of my satisfaction in art and poetry from a previous time.

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

            The Darkling Thrush
              By Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
 When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
 The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
 Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
 Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be
 The Century's corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
 The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
 Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
 Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
 The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
 In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
 Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
 Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
 Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
 His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
 And I was unaware.

Mountain Man Syndrome

They've hitchhiked across the country, they've biked across Mexico, they've moved from town to town with only a satchel full of belongings. They can live off of the land, and their hands are hard and callused from work. You may have encountered one in the book or movie Into the Wild. Maybe it's their enthusiasm for adventure; maybe it's their crazed devotion to the West. But whatever it is, it's enough that many women find themselves to be chasing the ever elusive "mountain man".

I once found myself to be intrigued by one of these creatures. Maybe I found him attractive because I missed the West, and he seemed to be almost its symbol: wild, rugged, adventurous, and full of possibilities.

I am not the only one who has fallen prey to such a man. Other friends have become smitten with these men, sometimes for months, sometimes for years, only to be left for adventures that were seen as somehow greater, somehow more pressing, than any other possible commitment. One man just had to work at a ski lodge for a couple months. Another wants to boat down the Amazon river. But these aren't always just short vacations, and they don't include others. These excursions are usually solo, long, and often dangerous.

And I often find myself sympathizing with the mountain man. I too am constantly looking for a new adventure, and I find myself longing for places that are far from civilization. I understand the crazed need to be in the West. I want to climb mountains, hike past clear streams, run across miles of open farmland. But I don't want to do it all alone.

I want to wake up, drink coffee, and share the paper with someone else. I want to reach the summit of a mountain and look at another person so that we can share the same moment of exhausted satisfaction. I want to wake up in 10 years and feel that I've built something special. I want to commit to more than just the land.

Here are some signs you might be interested in a mountain man:

• He constantly talks about his next big adventure - alone.
• He knows how to hunt, fish, and live completely off the land.
• He thinks that living alone in a small cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness for a year sounds like a dream come true.
• He makes no commitments to people, only to places.
• He makes the following comment about the main character in Into the Wild: "That book could be about me".

Run.

A Few Mispronunciations Never Hurt Anyone

I have several idiosyncrasies. I insist on eating yogurt and peanut butter with the tiniest spoon I can find - often the 1/8 teaspoon. I often make animal sounds; when I see a sheep, I bleat. Unfortunately, especially given my field of study, one of my more notable ones is that I tend to mispronounce words. It may have started in my 8th grade World Cultures class when I correctly located Mozambique on the map - but pronounced it with a "q" sound on the end. Then I failed again when I attempted to order my first quesadilla. "May I have a quas-a-dilla?"

Or there was the time that I was painting with friends, and having fought off several hornets, I sprayed one and loudly pronounced: "Look, it's writhing in pain." This looks fine in writing, but the "i" came out short rather than long. I still confuse this one.

These minor indiscretions happen only, of course, when I even bother to pronounce each syllable at all. I can't remember the last time I actually pronounced the "e" in my sister Valeria's name.

I'm not sure how this happened. And why did I think that snown was a word for the longest time? It makes sense grammatically. Of course, I also believed that "for all intents and purposes" was "for all intensive purposes" - as a teacher, I see this one a lot.

I like to think this "problem" makes me a more sympathetic writing teacher. I've only ever corrected grammatical issues in my students' writing; I don't think I could correct their speech. This may seem unusual, as I've stereotypically had several people, upon learning my career path, immediately say "Oh, I better watch my grammar."

But to be honest, I don't really notice. I know people who say "I seen it" on a regular basis, and I don't even flinch. The only person I ever correct is my sister, and only because it's a running joke for me to point out her use of "good" rather than "well." Which led to this conversation between us:

Having correctly used "well", my sister pointed out her accomplishment.
Her: I used "well" correctly.
Me: That's great!
Her: Yeah, I'm doing very good.
Ooops.

Ironically, I find that the people who do tend to correct one's grammar are those people who learned some "rule" a long time ago, and now they think it's their responsibility to hold people to that rule, however incorrect, irrelevant, or ridiculous. Or course, I may just be annoyed with this tendency because an ex's father, who had no trust for anyone with a college education, liked to immediately correct anyone who used "yeah" rather than "yes".

Yeah, it bothered me.

Coming Home

At home, I'm covered in paint, I'm sweaty, and I'm myself. It wasn't until recently that I began to see my hometown for what it is - a blue collar, farming community in the desert. And apparently, one that produces the most potatoes in the U.S. I had never noticed the sagebrush that sprawls on undeveloped land, the sunsets that unfold over half of the sky, the lack of a downtown community.

Then I moved away to a place where only hired hands do lawn work, where girls wear dresses every day, and where going out for a glass of wine is a standard past time. I smiled at the migrant workers who moved out of the way as I jogged past, I bought the dresses (albeit the cheap versions of popular looks), and I drank the wine, which I tolerate only when it's syrupy sweet. I suppose I fit in, but I felt best late at night when I returned sweaty from a run.

What I missed most was a feeling, one that I've only ever had on this side of the country; I think I can only describe it as being absolutely content and at peace. This feeling comes at night when the sun goes down and a cool breeze fills the air; everyone knows to turn off the AC and to open the windows. I get this feeling when I do my yearly hike to the top of Oyster Dome to look out at the San Juan Islands, when I see a forest of snow covered pines, when I smell cows and the lake and alfalfa. When I return to the West.

Over there, it's not like here. I sweat when I walk out the door, and even at 3:00 AM, it's too stifling to turn off the AC. The trees are unfamiliar, and I'm depressed by hills full of empty branches when the leaves fall. I hike, but the highest point is the same as the average altitude of Colorado. In the south, no one understands snow; towns close down before the first flake has fallen.

I never saw myself as being attached to a place. Now I wonder how much I'll give up to return here permanently.