Saved From Freezing

I recently read that until the 1830's, the typical daily newspaper was sold by subscription to a small audience whose interests were purely business and politics. "Just the facts, mam" fit neatly into four pages. Then in 1833, The New York Sun transitioned into a Penny Press and began telling "stories" with a "relevance to their reader's lives."

The Sun's first issue sold out immediately, and contained numerous "human interest" stories (a form practically invented by the Penny Press) that drew an audience of readers "starved for information about other people like themselves, distressed souls from other lands or from upstate farms - people marooned in a rapidly growing city that was often inscrutable, uncaring, or unintelligiblee," writes historian George H. Douglas. - Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations On Craft With America's Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft

Not much has changed really. If anything there are more distressed souls marooned in a rapidly growing world that is often inscrutable, uncaring and unintelligible. But by the early twentienth century, things slided back towards ice in the journalistic world because of the "growing belief that newspapers should strive for objectivity." Hmmm, people tend towards ice, echoes Norman Fischer's words in my head...

I'm in my car, on the highway. I turn off the news reports and the  baseball game I've been listening to and switch to a Beethoven violin sonata that's loaded in the CD player. Listening to the music, my mind gradually starts to release, like a hand that had been grasping something tightly and is beginning to let go. Another mind appears, a mind completely engaged with the pattern the music weaves. A moment before, I'd been frozen into the shape of a self in the world. Now, the music has thawed me out.

The world and the self really do appear to us as frozen. Our personal problems, our self-definitions, what we hear from those around us - all these convincing  and compelling experiences invite us to clutch  at concepts, positions, worries. We naturally build vast structures of ice to hold in place the world and the self, chilly and confined.  But the experience of art can shake us free of all that.  Art can save us from freezing.

Spiritual practice can, too. It can provide us with a much larger view of our lives, a warming, melting view. At least this is the theory. But anyone who's done spiritual practice for a while can tell  you that it doesn't always work that way. In  fact, spiritual practice too often hits us with an arctic blast, icing us over, if we are not careful, into more grosteque shapes than the ones we were in before we began practice. Why?

Because we tend toward ice: We crave a secure sense of self, a truth we can depend on, a world we can tame and understand. We want to be frozen, even as we long desperately to thaw. Religion is problematic because we are problematic.

But that snatch of music, that poem, that picture - these can make a big difference. The imagination situates us in a reality wider, deeper, and more mysterious than we can directly sense or rationally know. Imagination can see into and through the apparent world to something luminous and significant. Without imagination there is only plodding on in a two-dimensional world, merely surviving, getting through the day. - poet and former Zen center abbot, Norman Fischer, "Saved From Freezing", Tricycle, Spring 2005 (I love this magazine!)

This is true. I tend towards ice. I think proper art stirs us to transcend our frozen stance for a moment. I think when you are tuned to your natural voice - be it in speech, writing, or in the way you stoop over to watch the six tiny wild turkey chicks straddle across a wooden plank bridge - you melt just an itty bit more.

Speaking to people face-to-face, a lot of them imagine that my recent eight-day silent meditation retreat is like a spa vacation. Nothing can be further from the truth. It's not comfortable, it's not easy. But I do it to melt further into selflessness. Maybe just maybe someday fluidity will be my permanent condition. On the last day, one of our instructors, James Baraz, reminds us we will be overly sensitive, open, vulnerable as we reintegrate back into the world. "Be careful and kind to yourselves." He intends to reassures us: "Your armor will come back soon enough." That's good news? "No, no!" flashes through my mind, "Removing my armor - that's precisely what I've paid to be here for."

"I'm simply having a visceral reaction to your "voice," and am
choosing to share it with you." - Tom Asacker, in private email to me

Ah, yes. He's right, of course. It's the ice he's reacting to. We tend to skate towards the ice after an intense melting period. I witnessed my own distancing. It's just part of the dance of the ice maiden, I suppose. Two steps towards melting, one sliding step toward ice. It's a process.

I think ultimately we wisely sense that our true nature isn't static, isn't stiff and frozen and cold and stark lonely. That's why art works it's magic. And why authentic voice seeps through our frozen cracks.

In particular, the process of melting essentially melts the separation, the sense of loneliness and alienation that divides "us" and "them."

As city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in the 1890s, [Lincoln] Steffens made literary journalism - artfully told narrative stories about subjects of concern to the masses - into editorial policy, insisting that the basic goals of artist and the journalist (subjectivity, honesty, empathy) were the same. "Our stated ideal for a murder story was that it should be so understood and told that the murderer would not be hanged, not by our readers," he writes in his Autobiography. "We never achieved our goal, but there it was; and it is scientifically and artistically the true ideal for an artist and for a newspaper: to get the news so completely and to report it so humanly that the reader will see himself in the other fellow's place." - Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism

Brands tend toward ice over time as well. In the developed world, abundance has made us too icy and we're readier than ever to thaw. One famous study in the 1970s showed that the happiness levels of new lottery winners and people who had been recently paralyzed were equal after one year. Slum-dwellers in Calcutta are among the happiest groups in University of Chicago psychologist Ed Diener's research. Studies show that the Forbes 400 richest Americans are only slightly happier than the Inuit of Greenland or the Masai tribe of Kenya which lives in dung huts without electricity or running water. (Source: "If It Makes You Happy", Plenty Magazine, June/July 2005)

"[I]t has become increasingly difficult for marketers to make people care about their brands based on image plays...  The current generation of consumers is more self-directed than those of the past century. They aren't as easily persuaded by iconic brands. The success of the networks' reality shows, from Jackass to the star-on-the-pedestal shattering The Osbornes, indicates that today's consumers seek extreme reality, not false gods. (Although anyone who actually utters the term "today's consumer" without a hint of irony is in grave danger of not getting it themselves.) - Alex Wipperfurth, Brand Hijack

In Brand Hijack, Alex Wipperfurth cites John Grant's After Image "brand lies" chart. The gist 'Chanel makes you seductive', 'Fosters makes you a good bloke', 'Nike makes you a hero' just don't penetrate any longer. Post dot-com, post 9/11, post-mass media, they simply come across like a blast of artic wind sweeping across a frozen tundra.

The next type of brand will provide consumers with a higher purpose. Think of brands like Apple and Linux, which have been elevated beyond their functional and emotional performance. Their purpose, if not political, is at least of a social nature. The next type of brand will declare a worldview, not just an individual benefit, and play a meaningful role in people's lives. - Alex Wipperfurth, Brand Hijack

I don't know if Wipperfurth is right. I hope so. All I know is I care to only buy and work with brands that don't send artic chills down my spine.

How are you staving yourself and the world you interact off from the slide towards ice? Listen closely and you'll hear the rumbling of the shifting glacier in our heart even as the temptations of fear harden us. We ache to melt.

Not so much an inspiring close as I was seeking, but a cautionary note to watch our tendency toward ice in Robert Frost's poem, Fire and Ice.

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Or maybe Frost is wrong. Some say the world will end in an infinite tranquil blue ocean.

Comments

[Tom Asacker]

Welcome back. ;)

[Etienne]

Dear Ms. Rodriguez,

"People haven't time to learn anything. They but things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends." (Saint-Exupery) You, Ms. Rodriguez, appear to be an enemy. I teach philosophy and literature at various schools here in the South, and one of my principal difficulties is instructing young minds to be mindful of people in marketing, for such souls buy and sell the anima and animus of our cultures as if we ourselves were mere commodities (thus the observation about friends). You, my dear, appear to have had some considerable teachers, for your metaphors are amazingly insightful -- I must say, "Bravo." A marketer with integrity though???? Possible? Well, the Frost was a bit forced, don't you think? So... I choose to conclude this epistle with a bit of a forced connection from Borges:
"No one should read self-pity or reproach
into this statement of the majesty
of God, who with such splendid irony
granted me books and blindness at one touch."
Keep watching, my dear, for the splendid ironies do seem to enjoy biting us in our collective arses.

Etienne