The reading in this class has been fantastically eye-opening and has rekindled by love for reading. But if there was anything we read that had more impact on than any other, it was T.S Elliot's Four Quartets. His style is so potent and surreal, it's everything I could ever want to be as an artist. So naturally I've tried to steal his voice.
That's a joke, although only sort of. Learning to mimic other artists is probably the most important tool I've found in developing my own unique and authentic voice. This poem was an attempt to filter Elliot through myself, and I hope you like it!
I talked in class about my experiences at a Kanye West
concert the day I got back, but in light of my recent blogging experiences I
realized Mr. West can serve to explain where I’ve ended up in my struggles to
understand my perfectionism.
I’m not going to beat around the bush; Kayne West is a total
jackass. He is the definition of an ego maniac and embodies some of the worst
elements of modern society: he’s money hungry, rude, arrogant, and has zero
shame about any of it. One listen through of his music will make that very
clear.
So why is this man a hero of mine? Why do I seem him and
instantly think of him as a role model? To answer that I’ll have to give you
some background information.
Right now, Kanye West is in the middle of a world-wide
concert tour called Yeezus, which is a direct and intentional play on the name
Jesus. In the tour, amongst other controversial material, Kanye performs a song
called “I Am a God,” which is a song about exactly that; Kanye believes himself
to be a god among men. The song alone is shockingly blasphemous, but his live
performance of it took blasphemy to a new level; he sang much of the song while
being held up on a throne of 15 women wearing only full body fishnet suits. In
front of nearly 20 thousand people, Kanye was raised up in this way, declaring
himself a god and getting a massively positive response. To witness this was
mind blowing.
Kanye West was working on the clock while that was
happening. That means not only was he making a claim of godliness in front of
more people than ever could have seen Jesus do so, but he was getting paid
almost a million dollars to do it. And that was just one show. He’s going
around the world doing this.
By putting his name alongside Jesus’s in such a public way,
Kanye West is attempting to commandeer the icon that Jesus has become ( a
white, bearded dude who spends all his time hugging lambs and children) and
make it his own icon for radical honesty and self-expression. Jesus is easily the
most important symbol of power for the much of the western world, so it makes
sense that Kanye used it as a platform to demonstrate his own worldview that is
so strikingly different than the one originally created by the symbol. But
Jesus isn’t the only symbol Kanye is claiming; the concert merchandise sold
after the show was entirely dedicated to this idea. A major theme on his
t-shirts is Death wearing a robe made of the Confederate flag. I couldn’t
believe how many white people I saw walking away from a rap concert wearing
Confederate flag imagery, it was insane. Kanye chose the flag because it is in
many peoples’ minds a symbol of racial oppression and inequality. By dressing
Death up in it and being so public about its usage, Kanye is attempting to make
the flag that once triggered memories of racism instead trigger images of him.
And he is not subtle about it. The other
primary shirt design is the one I bought, depicting a skull wearing a Native
American headdress. This is a clear commentary on the result of rampant
cultural appropriation: by using Native Americans as mascots, we have killed
any legitimacy they have as a culture.
His re-appropriating of typically white-American iconography
doesn’t stop there. In an intentionally terrible music video called Bound 2,
Kanye sits on a stationary motorcycle in front of a green screen that depicts
classic American imagery – the grand canyon, wild horses, open roads, etc.
While these images are shown, Kanye and his naked fiancé Kim Kardashian pretend
to be making love on the motorcycle. When the video came out, fans and haters
alike were outraged, not because of the message (most had no idea of his
intentions) but because of the low quality of the production style. It is clear
though that this too was a conscious decision by Mr. West; he is taking the
symbols and icons of white America and fucking them in front of everyone,
making no attempt to take it easy on us while he does it. He want the
experience to be painful, much like Conchis made Nicholas’s enlightenment
painful by forcing him to watch Joe and Lily make love in front of him.
So what does this have to do with me and my problems with
perfectionism? Kanye West is going to be remembered for a very long time for
what he is doing, and whether that’s right or wrong is beside the point. That
goal is one I think a lot of people, including myself, desire to achieve, and
Kanye’s method is the source of my inspiration: he is using all of his creative
talent to expose the entirety of himself, taking his best qualities and using
them to display all of his worst qualities. By doing so, not only is he being
incredibly honest, but he is embodying contradiction in the process. As a
result, his audience and everyone who hears his music is given an immense
amount of insight into his mind, and simply by the nature of his medium, that
insight is loaded with very personal details. That means that as long as his
music survives, people will not only know that he existed, but they will know
exactly who he was as a man on a far more intimate level than is possible
through things like biographies or even retrospective autobiographies. They
will know him as he was in the moment he recorded his songs.
They say that if you know yourself, you will know the world.
What they never say is what happens when the world begins to know a person as
they know themselves: that person is held up and declared a god among man by
thousands of adoring fans.
But that’s not why I want to be like Kanye. I want to be
like Kanye because of the best contradiction he has taught me: he has reached something
that at the very least he considers perfection. But that perfection has nothing
to do with being flawless. No, Kanye West has shown me that it is from the very
same cracks and flaws in the structure of my being that the best of me can flow
out. I may one day be capable of doing great things, but the reason my family
and friends love me has almost nothing to do with that. They love me because I’m
goofy, because I’m clumsy, because I laugh so much. Those may not be the
characteristics that make a person great, but there will be no way for me to
become great without embracing them. This is because they define me to my very
essence; how could I be a perfect version of myself without them?
It is liberating to see my flaws and recognize the power
they give me to live my life as fully as I can. I still have a lot of work to
do as a person if I want to do big things with my life, but thanks to Kanye West
I know that to get myself there I will have to take all of myself; full of
flaws, but full all the same.
Bruce Lee is my hero. He has been since my freshman year and
I read this quote:
“Be like water making its way through cracks.
Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around
or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose
themselves.
Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like
water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a
bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the
teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
At that time, I had never seen footage of Bruce Lee
fighting, or doing anything for that matter. Yet the idea hit me as if Bruce
himself had punched it into my skull; why would the natural properties of the
substance that makes up the majority of my body not provide insight into the natural
properties of myself as a whole? Within a week of hearing his quote, my
personal worldview had changed: spiritual meaning was no longer limited to
philosophical words and explanations, but could be found literally (and I mean
literally in as literal of a way possible) anything: water, animals, my
friends, etc. And within a week of that first week, I was pretty sure I had a
full handle on the whole spirituality thing.
Fast forward two years and you’d find me still baffled by
the insights that just a single cup of water could provide. I have learned
volumes since the day I heard that quote, but all that I have learned only
increases the validity of the lifestyle Bruce Lee proposed. I think I’m
starting to understand why it feels so bulletproof: in life, change is not only
natural, it is essential.
Water is the most adaptable substance on Earth: it can
appear naturally in any one of its forms and can change between forms freely as
situations allow. If water is necessary for life, then the fact that life must
adapt to survive almost seems like a progression of the way water adapts to its
environment (notice that water adapting to its environment changes its
environment, i.e. a creek cutting a raving on a hillside). As environments
change, the only life that remains does so because it was capable of adapting
to and coping with those changes long enough to reproduce. But it’s not like
life is actively trying to evolve, it’s just that only certain forms of it
survive under the variable conditions of the universe. The water in the river
isn’t actively choosing which way to cut its meanders, it is simply taking the
path of least resistance. And no one ever says that a river isn’t flowing the
right way, or that a waterfall has been misplaced.
Unless, of course, life changes it and builds a dam. But
even those last trickles of the Colorado River are cutting perfect paths in the sand,
miles away from the ocean. Consciousness has allowed humans to consider all
choices possible, and it seems that ability has caused us to lose sight of the
natural path. Unless, in some strange way, our environmental destruction is
part of our species role, some kind of global parasite perhaps. I know at least
in my own life, when I look back on the various things I regret, in hindsight
there is always some obvious better choice I should have made. That’s always
what gets me too: how glaringly clear the right choice seems to have been. I
can’t help thinking that I get tangled up and make bad decisions not because I
can’t think of the right thing to do, but because so many other options present
themselves alongside of it. It’s easy to lose sight with so many options, “the
more we crave for convenience, the more we long to be like no one in
particular.”
Bruce Lee has a lot of amazing quotes and ideas, but one of
them that stands out is his philosophy on martial arts as a whole. He was a
student of Weng Chung kung fu, until eventually came to decide that an individual
can only physically express themselves fully when doing it in their own way. He
developed his own style, which for a long time he was hesitant to name, fearing
that to crystalize it would limit its potential. Eventually he did name it,
calling it Jeet Kun Do, which translates to “the way of the intercepting fist.”
This video is fantastic. I just found it thanks to google,
and it really sums up this whole Bruce Lee thing better than I ever can, mostly
because it’s Bruce Lee explaining it! Enjoy, and, remember to be like water!
So here I am, in the midst of trying to make up for my
self-induced lack of blogs by writing as many as I can in my waning hours of
Monday, when I hear a massive whoop of excitement come crashing through the
front door. My roommate, who shall remain anonymous, is a person who has told
me straight up that he prefers skiing to sex, and had by that point gone mad with
sheer glee. The rest of my roommates soon joined him in hollering and shouting
incoherently about Bozeman’s current weather conditions, dancing and stomping,
which from down here in the basement sounds like way too much like thunder for
me to be comfortable about the structural integrity of our house. That’s when
they presented me with a problem that is as perfect for this class as I can
think of:
“JOOEEE! GET THE FUCK UP HERE AND BUILD A SNOWFORT WITH
US!!!!””
Now, I have a lot of blogging to do. A lot. And I’ve got
play rehearsal in an hour. I need this time to get work done. Joining them
would be massively irresponsible in light of the situation. I yelled back
negatively, which they did not appreciate, but eventually they left me alone to
blog.
So I started working on a cool blog about Bruce Lee (which
will still get posted), when I realized something: if there is one thing I have
learned from this class, it is the importance of paying attention. The best
working, albeit cliché (Jonah-does calling it a cliché make it less cliché ?),
philosophy that I know that illustrates an attentive lifestyle is “live in the
moment.” If that is the case, then wouldn’t me staying inside and blogging mean
I have failed to apply the lessons from this class to my actual life? Isn’t
that the whole point of education in the first place, to teach others things
that will expand their worldview, and therefore improve their lives? It sounds
like their having fun out there.
I’m obviously still inside writing this, so apparently I
prioritize long term success over the short term. But what if I die on my way
to rehearsal for this silly school play I’m in? What would that make of my
priorities? Isn’t every moment be the moment your entire life has led up to? I
still have time to go outside.
Why is staying in here and blogging instead the more
responsible thing to do? Why do I feel like I’m failing at the class I want so
badly to succeed in by staying, when it’s staying here and blogging that’s the
thing that’s supposed to allow me to succeed? These arguments keep looping back
on each other, and it’s all so stupid: it’s just a Monday night and a simple
yes or no question. And I said no. And it’s driving me crazy.
They just came back inside. I gotta go to that rehearsal
now. I’m really confused, and I’m sorry if I let you guys down by handling the
last hour the way I did. I’ll be posting more blogs later tonight, perhaps I’ll
come to some closure on this whole thing.
