the golden slot

I hate waiting.

In the broad hallway of the education building at Simon Fraser University I stop to look at a large oil painting hung on the southern wall. It depicts a black-cloaked figure, faceless for the shadows, standing against a wall next to some urinalesque, broken-down objects, artifacts of some foregone industrial conclusion. Through the glass doors way down to my right I can see the drabness of the heavy fog blanket smothering the campus, and I think of what I have been told – that this school has the highest suicide rate in North America.

This could be a myth, promulgated to give the “enemy” a darker air at inter-collegiate sporting events. Nonetheless, I find myself eyeing the faces of the students walking by, wondering if there might be more to their occasionally dour visages than an unpleasant hangover or an overbearing professor. Still, I am excited to be here, dropping off my application for admission into the Master’s of Art Education program. My friends who have studied here, Curtis and Yoey, have always spoken highly of the professors, and everything I have heard about the program and its director draws me in, suggesting that I will flourish in here – challenged and expanded in ways I happily cannot anticipate.

Down the hallway I proceed, left and into the education building, where the standard overworked secretary and her glowing assistant direct me to the “golden-plated mail slot”. Schloop it goes and then I am walking away, to wait.

I hate waiting.

Will they open the doors? Will I be allowed to walk the hallowed halls and bow before intellectual giants? Will I have the courage to challenge them, to abandon intellectual fear as I struggle to balance the humility of wise studiousness with the arrogance inherent in being academic? In that legal-sized manila envelope, schlooped through the brass-gold slot and lying in some tray, or spread out on some laminated desk is my best foot, stuck firmly forward. There are glowing references from people who believe in me, glowing references from me (attempting, as always, to believe in myself), and a sample, written at the behest of the program director, of my thoughts on the meaning of art and art education.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

Writing Sample for Dr. Stuart Richmond, SFU

When I was four years old my dad pasted a large, fantastical Peter Pan poster on a piece of particle board and mounted it on the wall of the room my brother and I shared. I was fascinated with it, as all the vibrant colors and cavorting characters easily transported me to another world, a world where reason and rules were not nearly as important as imagination and fun.

Then a tragedy occurred – boyish enthusiasm and the corner of a metal Tonka truck conspired to tear a gash from the magical masterpiece, leaving behind a glaring strip of white. After a prolonged session of tussling and name calling, my brother and I dragged dad into the room to show him the eight-inch long, four-inch wide triangular tear on the bottom left of the poster. He calmly surveyed the damage, took down the poster board, and got a twenty-four color marker set out of the desk. Then, with his gigantic, dad-sized magnifying glass in his left hand, he proceeded to fill in the white space with color: finishing out the edges of flowers, coloring in the beach and imagining the details of the mostly-missing pirates’ chest, heaped with gold.

My dad is not an artist in the traditional sense. Looking back, I can remember obvious discrepancies between the polish of the original and the awkwardness of my dad’s reproduction: the coins were too yellow, the flowers too blurry and the sand too flat. But watching him work I fell under the thrall of the process of creation, reveling in the discovery of heretofore unimagined treasure.

I believe that the true magic of that moment arose from the discrepancy between the art being made and that which it was intending to duplicate. If my dad had merely pasted the original triangle (which had been too damaged by the incident and subsequent fight) back into place, the whole experience would have faded off into that chasmic black hole that is my memory. What made it stick was that dad was looking at something I perceived as real and using his imagination to create an illusion of continuity in such a way that if I unfocussed my eyes a bit, his creation would disappear into the greater reality.

I believe in a Greater Reality. I believe that Reality exists independently of my opinions and feelings about It. As an inevitable result, I often feel as though I am a fool for maintaining Its existence. Nonetheless, I hold that one of the most important functions of art in the life of a human being is to allow him or her to explore that Greater Reality through creative acts in a way that the purely rational mind, by its very nature, can never do.

Make no mistake. I am not an anti-rationalist. I believe that reason is, by and large, the dominant mode by which I will inevitably perceive the world. Attempts in artistic and philosophical endeavors to deny the pervasiveness of reason are doomed to self-defeat. This is evidenced by the fact that painters who ignore the rules of structure and balance create unappealing work. Nevertheless, it is the ratiocentricity of the modern mindset that today’s artist must attempt to counterbalance. At its worst modernity, in its obsession with the mind, neglected the heart (or soul, or spirit, or whatever you want to call it) – thereby killing itself. While it was right to propose that the heart cannot function without the mind, modernity neglected to remember that the mind without the heart is dead. The problem is that having arrived at that point of realization (standing there, holding a lifeless heart), a person is incapable of arguing his or her way back into a more balanced way of being. The mind cannot reason its way to the heart. This is where art steps in. It forces the mind to reconnect to the heart, opening what may very well be the only channels by which we as humans can touch upon Reality in any meaningful way.

What is this Reality of which I speak? To my mind, it is paradox. It is mystery and it is ignorance – not entirely, I don’t think – but enough to make things interesting. This Reality is not anti, but rather supra-reason. It both includes and exceeds reason. The rational mind hates this and goes into conniptions to try to reassert dominance. It boxes. It names. It creates symbols for things as a means to control them. It does this because the motive force behind reason is almost always a desire for power. Power (and its bedfellow, knowledge) can be used for good – but without a strong counterbalancing humility, it inevitably corrupts the person who holds it.

From this comes all manner of (dare I say it?) evil. The inclusion of art in a person’s education and life is a way of stepping back and saying, “No, wait! Explore, don’t explain! Allow yourself to get lost in the process of creation. Abandon, for a moment, the tyranny of a solely rational, linear mindset in favor of a way of being that allows you to move forward without first ensuring that the path is sound. Follow your guts.”

As soon as I write that, though, I find myself recoiling from the inevitable counter-punch. Remember, oh remember, the folly of uncontrolled passion. What horrid things are done (what awful, muddy and bloody canvases are painted!) when the heart of a question beats un-moderated by the mind.

This is why people must be educated simultaneously in the spirit and technique of the art they propose to learn. While love of the piano is killed when all one ever does is play scales under the monotonous tyranny of the metronome, without a solid foundation the pianist will never be able to forget the rolling complexities of Rachmaninoff’s notes and dive, soul-tinglingly, into what one of his pieces really means. If Picasso had never studied the mathematics of composition and the significance of color, he would never have left generations with the brutal, real exploration of war that is Guernica.

The call of a teacher of the arts is to equip students with the tools to continue this journey and then to teach in such a way that they can continue not merely in the knowledge of how to create in such a way that others can find common rational touch-points with which to connect, but also why they would want to do so. That, I believe, is what good art and good art education is all about – a struggle to bring together the mind and heart to explore what it all might mean. Good art reaches out a quivering finger in an unending, never-arriving attempt to touch upon Reality – not the imaginary reality our grasping minds fabricate to keep questions at bay – but the real, wondrous deal.

There are endless directions I could have taken this current, written exploration of the Reality I so faintly perceive. Art is so many things. Writing, however, as with all art forms, carries its own limitations, so within the confines of these four pages I have narrowed my vision in an attempt to shoot straight at the bare bodkin of the matter. Even though I think I have managed to aim true, tomorrow I will wake up to find the target moved. For today, however, it all comes back to a small child watching in awe as his dad falteringly attempts to bridge the rip between the Way Things Are and the way they are perceived to be. For me, today, this is why art really matters.