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The
Coffee Guest
Straying from our usual interview format we are pleased to bring you 'Remember
heart, still beating', an essay addressing the tragic bombing of Mutanabbi
Street, written by David McGuire. We hope that you will take the time to read
this with your morning coffee (or tea). Enjoy!
Remember heart, still beating
Broken edifice; crumbling, no longer simple. The perspectives of Mutanabbi
Street thrown in shards: so now we must consider the art of fragments, find each
other again as creators. Things are more than what they are; the symbol's
resonance eclipses the actuality of the object. Art galvanizes spirit so that
spirit may continue on. And then you know, and then there is, and it doesn't
matter
what you call it-- that's what I want, that place not called. Or call it
Mutanabbi Street.
My focus begins as a reaction to a bombing. I am dismayed. There is
something broken in the world; perhaps the ground I walk on is Mutanabbi
Street. I have never been to Baghdad, yet my sense is that I am not unconnected
to this event. What does it mean when a symbol of free inquiry and creativity
is damaged or destroyed—such destruction then becoming another kind of symbol?
I am driven to reflect on the transformative power of art and spirit and
community, the profound and ephemeral realities we stand to lose when
institutions like Mutanabbi Street are disabled or disappear. I do not
comprehend this; my reflections must be fragmentary.
How shall we survive our violence? We cannot destroy it—it is in destruction
that we are destroyed. How shall we escape it? What does it mean? Mutanabbi
Street can actually happen anywhere for example: the other day I just heard a
story about a man who shot two Latino youths in Los Angeles--”he felt they were
threatening him.” The youths were spraying graffiti on a bridge; the man saw
them and stopped to write down the license plate number of their vehicle. They
approached him to take the paper and then “continued to threaten him”--he said.
The man was soon being hailed as a vigilante. Righteous lawyers insist that the
government is sending an implicit racist message by not moving quickly to
condemn the shooter; local citizens celebrate the act after years of frustration
with local authority's inability to keep danger and anarchy at bay. But the
man only said he shot the youths because “they were threatening him.”
Does the event really possess the significance that all the opposing factions
attribute to it? To the community, the shooting is already significant in ways
which belie the actual motivation of the principal protagonists. The unadorned,
unqualified tragic event seems to have been overwhelmed by an avalanche of
somehow implicit meaning, rising up like destiny. Does such significance really
belong to the event—or is it just free-floating, only needing some particle
around which to crystallize, like a storm cloud?
When we say we want the ultimate truth, what we really want is the ultimate
meaning. Truth is a logical attribute of propositions—or a metaphorical way of
alluding to that which is beyond words.
We want to say that art is meaningful; but we only realize the scope of this by
engaging the world aesthetically.
Even violence has its traditions, its histories. But history is something
done in the present—history is an interpretation; history changes. A
living relationship with history is fluid and creative (as are insight and
discernment at their best). Creativity is empowering because it is the most
self-directed and autonomous way to augment identity. Always it is true: we
can be more than this.
'Infinity'--a leap of faith. If the limit of imagination is everything that
any conceivable sentience could somehow be aware of, then infinity also
comprehends endlessly everything beyond that border:
that which cannot be known, has nothing to do with being known, of no relevance
to awareness or existence. The illusion of a concept which cannot be
conceptualized: the word becomes an incantation, incomprehensible, yet it draws
me on. Impossible yet not nothing, as though I sense somehow the relativity of
these limits. This very tension is a cryptic hint—I sometimes feel like a
person with amnesia, beginning to suspect. Everything remains the same, yet
this strange yearning for I can't imagine what.
We must somehow heal our shadow; we must heal and rebuild the Mutanabbi
Streets of the world and of the heart. We must find each other again as
creators. As soon as the complexity of a situation exceeds linear cause and
effect, aesthetics emerges spontaneously as an aspect of the situation, even as
a methodology of the situation.
In play, there exists an innocent yet intuitively astute sense of
quality; the more creative (i.e., high quality) the play is, the more fun it
is—and, of course, this is the point.
Art as alchemy: consider something conventionally worthless—an old barn
falling down—a rusted junker-car. Yet find the right light, the right angle,
and suddenly the object is eloquent, even moving. Is the object changed—or have
we uncovered something which was always there? Our ability to re- imagine is
very empowering—if we take this ability to heart, then we cannot be trapped
emotionally.
“Imperfection” can be a powerful aesthetic stimulus: Lincoln, for example,
was a powerful orator even though his voice, by contemporary accounts, was reedy
and cracked occasionally. Yet these very qualities seemed to make it more of
a voice.
Our inability to formulate
quality does not mean there's nothing to talk about; rather, that we'll never be
finished talking about it. Quality can only be realized through an unrelenting
search for its own limits. And if we believe that quality is embodied in good
works, still, such quality will never be realized without an engaged witness to
complete the circuit. Without a witness, such quality will effectively not
exist, because it won't make any difference. Mutanabbi Street is community;
compared to this, location is trivial.
“Beauty” is invoked when we
encounter things or events that strike us as inherently delightful and
worthwhile, valuable in themselves; even profound. The way we talk about beauty
suggests it is a property, which leads to no end of confusion. Beauty might
better be conceived as an appreciative, transforming sensibility. Thus,
it becomes over-simple to say that a thing or event is beautiful or not—rather,
we come to suspect the existence of a characteristic beauty in all things if
only we can muster the grace to apprehend it.
“Mutanabbi Street”--never more than an approximation. Living things change;
let them change. Consider the world as multitudinous idolatries, among them
“art”. 'Loving' an object or an idea is a euphemism for naming our attachment
to the emotional responses that the object/idea elicits in us. Idolatries are
the metaphors with which we mask our self-absorption.
Such labor, to make a world; and after all, it might've been some other world
(fear of commitment).
When we approach something with appreciation (whatever it is; a situation, a
relationship, an artwork, 'what should I wear tonight', etc.), this alone makes
our relationship with this something more workable. Appreciating
something isn't necessarily the same as, or a means to, liking something—there
is a gently consoling irony in the way we become more resilient to misfortune if
we can find some vantage point from which to appreciate it.
We must release violence. We cannot destroy it. What is it, really, to
forgive? The word creates a dilemma: merely defining it is sophistry. The only
way to know forgiveness is to do forgiveness—and then the very idea becomes
superfluous. That's what I want, that place not called.
So how free are we? The view from after-the-fact looks pretty deterministic,
but even here our understanding of the facts and the causal chain that binds
them is influenced by some frame of reference that we choose. And when
we assess the scope of determinism in human affairs, we must not forget about
imagination—determinism is limited to the predetermined, while one of the most
characteristic human predilections is to generate possibilities.
How shall we survive our violence? Shall we examine our beliefs? Belief is
either a type of intuition or a demonstration of loyalty, even fealty. Shall we
pray?
Prayer is not a transcendental type of petition—it is a spontaneous
expression of belief in grace as the only way out of the spiritual cul-de-sac
that the observer is the observed. I don't have spiritual problems: I
am spiritual problems. The problem wants to change the problem without
being changed by the changes. Left to my own devices, I simply pull the knot
tighter.
Map to Mutanabbi Street: we can never catch up to ourselves; we only realize
our potential by transcending it.
David McGuire is Vice President of the Pandora's Collective Board of
Directors, a composer, writer, teacher and arts-advocate from upstate New York.
Previous Interviews:
Randy Jacobs
Mike Peacock and Chad
York of Melic Thrum
Marc Creamore
Rogue Reese Murphy and
Trevor Spilchen
Ashok Bhargava
Shulamit Joffre
Sean McGarragle and
Chystalene Buhler
T Paul Ste. Marie
Ariadne Sawyer ~ Re:
The world Poetry Reading Series
Johnny Frem ~ Re:
Bolts of Fiction
Liars of Orpheus ~ Re:
The intentions of Orpheus
Estelle Bogoch ~ Re:
Crosswords for Gardeners
Byron Sheardown ~ Re:
Quills Canadian Poetry Magazine
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