A fascinating article – Pearls Before Breakfast – showed up in the Washington Post the other day, about a virtuoso performance by a famous classical musician offered unannounced one morning in a Washington DC subway entrance. Almost no one stopped or even seemed to notice.
I mean, sure it was rush hour on a workday … but this was AMAZING music, played by a internationally acclaimed master on a $3M Stradivari.
What do you make of this story? Are we really ‘too busy for beauty’?
I recently saw a film that absolutely transcended previous cinematic experience. It was called Into Great Silence, and as the name implies it was mostly silent, and close to three hours long.
It was unlike anything I have ever seen, right from the very first few frames…
Grainy old-fashioned film leisurely following snow flurries and dust motes in the cold winter light; morning in a Carthusian monastery high in the French alps; the almost imperceptible movement of the
stars across the night sky; the almost unbearable tenderness of men’s voices, singing their
prayers direct to God’s ear.
Time winds like a long, repetitive round of sound and light in this film … morning passing into day
into dusk and then night, dissolving into dawn and morning, again and again.
The seasons pass in a parade of light and shadow so slow you can barely see it move, the relentless red thread of time woven through all things.
I entered into it like I would a long meditation … my mind
chattering away at first ["What am I doing this for?" "God, this is
uncomfortable" "I’ll never sit here for 3 whole hours"] even as my body
slows and prepares to still… I slowly sink into the mesmerizing images
and sounds of the great silence on the screen, as its magic wraps itself around me and all of us in the room. We are so quiet we can hear every movement, every piece of popcorn crushing and sound from the movies next door, but our collective attention is so focused these sounds don’t distract us.
The experience is luxurious, painterly, yet never less than austere. We take the time to dwell lovingly on small details one could only be aware of when the pace is that slow… the images are almost excruciatingly beautiful and absolutely ordinary, a metal wash bowl propped against the wall, rocking slowly as water drains away.
In the grainy film colors lose their distinction, outlines blur and particles merge dissolving into each other. As in a dream, I kept reaching in awe for my camera to record what was being revealed around me, only to be shocked to find I am in a seat watching a movie.
As part of the round of cinematic repetition, quotes in three languages kept appearing on the screen, over and over. One quote captures my attention each time, "Oh Lord, you have seduced me. And I was seduced." Every syllable strikes a chord & vibrates in my psyche.
This film seduced me with its rich thirst for silence; I wanted to surrender, like the monks, to simplicity and the raw beauty of the perfect eternal present. I was seduced by the rhythmic throb of nature’s pattern, wanting to give myself into it utterly, as if responding to the call of an insistent lover. It seduced me like the love of God had seduced those monks.
It seemed dream-like, a million miles away, but these were young men, living now, in modern times. Every now and then there would be some detail to bring that modernity home – a computer in someone’s room, or some bright packaging, a sticker on fruit. But they were living a life that was as old as time; their song books illuminated manuscripts from the 17th century, read by the light of candles; their feet treading stones that had been trod for centuries.
I was right there with them, my senses completely alive, cells toughening to withstand the cold as I knelt on the hard stone, planted the early shoots while snow still lie on the ground. I felt myself shyly expand into the warmth and joy of the short but utterly sweet summer, then let it go when the time and season changed. A year passed, and yet the flow continued; another winter, season into season, life into life, youth into age and dark into light.
When it finally ended, I wasn’t ready to go. My companion and I just sat there in the dark empty cinema, listening to the shifting scene around us, preparing to leave the silence … adapting to the current of our lives, the here and now of the Berkeley street just outside the doors … it wasn’t an easy transition, but I could sense the beauty in the silence that still remained, the eternal silence that always remains at the center of everything, and that was enough somehow.
Afterwards, talking about my experience with others, and again now writing about it, I am struck by what an amazing phenomenon it really was… far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in a film before. It’s almost like it changed the molecular structure of my body; certainly it took my consciousness someplace I’ve never been except after many hours of meditation.
In spiritual work, they say that once you’ve ‘woken up’ you can never go back to sleep again, at least not in that completely unaware way; similarly, I believe the experience of sitting with this film for three hours can change you; if you surrender to it you’ll never be the same again.
An article by Jonathan Lethem caught my eye in February’s issue of Harper’s (The Ecstasy of Influence). The piece itself was very clever, and has a fabulous twist I won’t go into here, but what interested me most about it was his description of art as something that exists simultaneously in two markets – the market economy and the gift economy.
This interested me on at least two levels since 1) I am an artist, and 2) my work in the world – my ‘worldly art’ so to speak, given that I am in the business of design and communications – is inextricably entwined with the gift economy and exchange of Web2.0. So, the idea of art that can be ‘sold’ and yet still remain a gift was intriguing, and rang true to my own experience.
Much of Lethem’s article was inspired by the ideas in Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, which cites the central tenant of a gift as something that cannot be kept, but must be given away. In the gift of art what is passed can be an experience, like inspiration or illumination of some kind. Paraphrasing Hyde, “Art that matters to us – which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the sense, or offers courage for living, however we chose to describe the experience – is received as a gift is received.”
But this way of gifting goes beyond art; much that the people I work with do also occurs within the gift economy. Heartland’s Thought Leader Gatherings, for example, are all about fostering courage and hope and inspiration, and much of the wonderful work done by the World Café exists entirely within the gift economy of volunteerism.
Lethem describes the cardinal difference between gift and economy exchange as his assertion that “a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, whereas the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.”
I love this beautiful idea of all of us gifting our art (whatever that might be) out into the world and by doing so establishing an ever-widening network of feeling-bonds …
I’m not sure why I felt so compelled to attend Ellen’s memorial – after all, I didn’t know her all that well & our connection might be seen as tenuous (Ellen was my fiancé Steve’s son Lee’s grandmother). But she was a central figure in this admittedly unconventional family I’m part of, and somehow I needed to be there.
We gathered in a circle on the lanai of her Honolulu home (now her
daughter Elizabeth’s) for the ceremony, 30-40 people of varied ages,
races, cultures – each as it turned out reflecting a vital piece of the
whole. As we spoke, Quaker-style, about her life – Ellen Sung Sook Cha
Lee’s life – a picture of this unique being began to form
through our collective memory’s speaking.
There in the center of the lanai with the small round table (upon which
her ashes were held in a mango-wood box strewn with lei and surrounded by candles), dimensions of her life and personality began to emerge that
no one of us had known about before we gathered.
Slowly a composite image revealed itself… a rather glamorous
figure who was envied by her less exotic cousins, Ellen Sung Sook Cha
Lee was more than a little vain in her youth (proof that Lee’s
mirror-gazing didn’t ALL come from Steve 🙂 and we learned that she carefully made up her
face for work each day, rolling her hair in the elaborate pompadour
that was the style then. She was pretty in an educated way (meaning she unashamedly wore glasses); a
well-informed intellectual with a degree in English Lit and a mind that
stayed crisp and clear until death in her 92nd year.
Solitary, self-sufficient, unsentimental and frugal, Ellen
had the prescience to save for her grandson’s college
education, a priceless gift to Lee for which all three of his parents are also eternally
grateful.
She was a thoughtful neighbor, according to the elderly woman who
joined us to say that Ellen was the first to greet her and her husband
when they moved in, although no one could remember her inviting them
to anything or accepting an invitation.
However unsocial she may have been personally, she was seemingly unconcerned about sharing her home, TV, and the
contents of her refrigerator with a gang of rambunctious kids as Lee
and his friends grew into teenagers and young men & women. She
smoked cigarettes and drank a largish glass of red wine each day; she loved the
little pond in her back garden and spent many hours caring for the
potted bougainvillea that graced it. The stories friends family and neighbors told about her went
on and on…
The morning after the memorial Steve was messing around in the
basement and found a whole pile of photographs we’d missed earlier –
wedding portraits of an incandescent bride with an impossibly long
train, smiling happily at her joy-filled groom (they were both in their
30s when they found each other). As we poured over the pictures I had
the sense that there will always be new dimensions to discover about
each of us, and that each of us sees each other with our own eyes, calling forth different views and perspectives.
Death doesn’t stop the ongoing revelations either; it reveals things that may have been hidden, and may even release inhibition in sharing our thoughts. It made me start to think about my own life, and how different people would see it. Kind of makes me want to burn my diaries, actually. 🙂 But on the other hand I trust that as was true here around the circle of Ellen’s life, the people I love would see me and all my foibles kindly. Which is as we each would wish to be seen and held – in life and in death.
Fare well, Ellen Sun Sook Cha Lee. You were seen and loved.
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