I recently emerged from several years at one of the oldest, yet one of the most unconventional art schools in the country. One cannot help but broaden an awareness of art after seeing the panoply of expression that occurs in the incubator that is art school: A video shows a man peeing into his own mouth. A woman shows a video of herself having sex with her sculpture. A woman tears up a plant from a garden on her way to school and throws it onto the floor of our classroom as her final project. A man fashions a jock strap so that his exposed testicles hang perilously close to the barbed wire he is crawling under.

Ok, yes, besides the shocking and irreverent art, there are, of course, many instances of exquisite beauty and poetic creativity rendered by students: A meditative video on light hitting dust as it snows down through blackness. A woman wailing operatically as she kneels in an expanse of crimson sand. A watercolor painting that captures the poetic outline of a shovel being buried by snow.

A few years ago, we discovered an alternative route that bypasses a congested four-way stop in our coastal town. Along that route is a row of working class homes, occupied by older, long-time residents. In the middle of the block, there are two homes that face each other, each overflowing with their seemingly competing morass of lawn sculptures — two opposing yards teeming with inflatables, whirly-gigs, flags, sculptures, lights and signs. We like to call them the clutter sisters, though it seems the men of each household are intrinsically involved with the displays.

At first, our interest in the clutter sisters’ yards stemmed from the incredulity of their buying, storing, and rotating the hundreds of knick-knacks on exhibit. Then we wondered about the neighborly relationship between the two: Do they vie with each other on their expressions? Or are they collaborative? What happens if they perchance acquire the same lawn totem? Who started displaying first?

And it was today, on this most balmy of oceanside evenings when we passed the regalia of Halloween emblems such as fake tombstones, ghost and witch icons, and other plastic-y orange and black thingies, that an appreciative wave overcame us. The clutter sisters, in their undying lawn decoration management, are acknowledging the profoundly temporal and impermanent nature of being, a reverence for community ritual in our increasingly individualized world.

In describing Gadamer’s notion of festival, which repeats every year yet is differently performed and experienced every year, the philosopher Grondin notes: “A festival always celebrates the enduring in the perishing, but in such a way that the enduring as well as the perishing are contemplated at the same time. The festival always marks a self-collecting of time over itself, a wish to retain the moment, which we also know does not allow itself to be held. So every festival contains a consciousness of human frailty. Every festive joy, yes, every joy, is perhaps the other side of an inexpressible, unutterable.”

From an institution that would like to say it is communicating and defining contemporary art practice, the greatest gift I received therein was the openness cultivated in me to be moved, transformed even, by the most mundane yet passionate collection of Walgreens holiday-aisle, “human” expressions.

Today’s Advice: “The play of art does not lie in the artwork that stands in front of us, but lies in the fact that one is touched by a proposition, an address, an experience, which so captures us that we can only play along.” Jean Grondin on Hans-Georg Gadamer

It was during this time of year, the fall season, when Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, both well-established in the literary world of the time, first met. The year was 1922.

Virginia wrote in her diary of the meeting: “She is a pronounced Sapphist, and may… have an eye on me, old though I am… Snob as I am, I trace her passions 500 years back, and they become romantic to me, like old yellow wine.”

Vita wrote to her husband likewise: “I simply adore Virginia Woolf, and so would you. You would fall quite flat before her charm and personality… Mrs. Woolf is so simple: she does give the impression of something big… At first you think she is plain, then a sort of spiritual beauty imposes itself on you, and you find a fascination in watching her… I’ve rarely taken such a fancy to anyone, and I think she likes me… Darling, I have quite lost my heart.”

Complicated as any relationship emerging between two women married to men is, their relationship surpasses one of being remarkably unique and attains the level of poetics — the realm of untranslatability, where language meets its utmost limits. The realm of love.

Vita was a passionate conqueror, lusty for adventure, but guarded. Virginia was a sensitive, emotional intellectual, with a threatening, keen perception of people (the insights of whom would eventually inform her characters).

Vita, honoring a deep respect for Virginia beyond the emotional toy of sexual conquest, curtailed the physical relationship between the two. A scorned Virginia in turn wrote a cutting exposé of Vita, in the love letter turned novel, Orlando.  Yet, because of the profound connection beneath an initial attraction, the two would carry on a deeply loving, though not uncomplicated, relationship, evidenced by a tome of letter writing between the two — for nearly 20 years.

On March 28th, 1941, afraid of losing herself to mental illness, Virginia drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Her last words to Vita inquired about Vita’s dying birds, the same type of birds kept in Virginia’s home. At the same time, ostensibly aware of her own end, she was writing what would be her last literary words in the closing scene of Between the Acts with the line “birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life…”

Knowing the calculating creative mind of Virginia, one cannot help but recall the reference, unmistakably from Orlando:

“Let us go then exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dust bin, when he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate: Life, Life, Life! cries the bird as if he had heard…”

At the brink of the dustbin, at the edge of her mortality overlooking the abyss, Virginia’s bird sings life, life, life, as if each utterance is a gift of the present moment, final and complete, and a true gift to those who hear it.

And ‘Life, Life, Life!”….  In latin, it is “Vita, Vita, Vita!”.

Today’s Advice: In the language is life and death.” Traditional Hawaiian Saying.

(references drawn from the work of Louise DeSalvo.)

We walked to the nearby Tuileries among the weekend pedestrians. Slowly the laughter and senseless chatter of children in the fountains and the cooing of eavesdropped foreign conversation transitioned us away from what had happened. I offered him a snack at the cafe in the park, and he ordered ice cream. We sat on a bench in the park and I, for whatever reason, explained that it was not his fault, it happened all the time, and there is nothing people can do about it. He had no control over what happened. Though they were children, they were professionals.

He interrupted to assure me that they were not children, but grown thieves, but otherwise he agreed that there was nothing he could do. He became softened when I said that fortunately, he was the kind of man that could afford to be pick-pocketed, that he would be fine, and above all, he had a true Parisian story to tell his friends when we returned. He even smiled slightly.

Soon, the subtle heat of the City took its toll on his ice cream, and my father’s shaky hands spilled his ice cream down his shirt. He brushed what he could of it off, though the dark stain was hopeless, and we ambled towards the Louvre, me, taking photos of the palace with a camera unwittingly empty of film, and he, silently fighting the last demons of regret and self-blame.

As if people dissolved with the Parisian sun, the museum was eerily empty. We walked straight to the paintings we had glanced the day before but wanted a more intimate experience with. I always passed up the Venus di Milo because it seemed to me a tourist trap, and the usual gawkers, invariably from Texas, diminished any value I could imagine in seeing it. But without people, the long hallway forced my eye down its perspective and there, naked and alone, under a heavenly halo of museum lighting was Venus.

My father and I must have stood for half-an-hour, circling her, tracing the lines of her unfolding torso, our imaginary hands doing what the faceless Roman’s hands had done millennia before our time. Her form started with some hope in the anonymous sculptor’s mind, fulfilled by faith in the agility of a sculptor’s chisel. And Venus before us, the Goddess of Love, was not unweathered. In fact, as with life, ideal smooth elegance was ruptured by reality. Her arms were missing, even part of her foot. But the middle remained. A subtly twisting torso — the bulk. The steadiness of being.  This was not about a love that takes care of someone, comforting someone’s fears. This was about a love that thrushes you to make you naked, but also sifts you to free you from your husks. The solid core of love.

Just as the streets of my friend unfolded new surprises as I turned even the most familiar corner, the museum opened up pieces I was beholding for the first time. I would not know for years to come that this was the last time I would spend with my father. He would not sustain any such dependence on his self-absorbed children; he would buy it from his future wife. For the conventional and for the fearful, the steadiness and strength of love is elusive – maybe something of surface snapshots: my inheritance.

As if we were all made too vulnerable, the museum folded itself up, arm by arm, hallway by hallway, squeezing us out into the palatial, floodlit courtyard. And the men and women of the stone facade, doused in rich, orange light, waved us home.

Today’s Advice: “Even the empirical world in which we live, observing things and events coming into and going out of existence, becomes transformed before our eyes into a field, intangible and mysterious, in which things and events assume a tinge of yugen, losing the empirical solidity of self-subsistency [ego], wafting as it were in the air, thus pointing to the presence of the primordial, non-articulated reality underlying them.” Izutsu

Today I am praying for Tu-Minh. Tu-Minh is a fellow birdwatcher and an undying advocate at the shelter I moonlight at. For months now she has been taking care of her dying mother, and she is struggling. But of all the people I’ve ever known, Tu-Minh won’t sink — she’ll swim.

Tu-Minh’s family arrived in the States without her, during the first wave of refugees fleeing Vietnam. In her late teens, she at first resisted the idea of leaving her homeland, but it became clear that to survive she needed to leave. For the journey, those too old to attempt leaving gave her gold and her younger cousin to look out for. Their own dying dreams lived beyond themselves and found an afterlife in young Tu-Minh.

The airport was bombed out and the roads were fraught with struggles for military control, leaving the surrounding ocean the only way to reach a country that cooperated with the UN. The first boat Tu-minh embarked upon, propelled by a weak engine, traveled less than a mile off shore when, overburdened, it sank, drowning most of the passengers and the hopes that had been invested in them. She was down in the ship when people above started panicking and while many froze in shock, she broke out a small window, grabbed her cousin, and swam him to shore.

On the second boat she boarded, the engine caught fire, and only some of the people were able to jump off and stay afloat. Again, she grabbed her cousin and a piece of floating debris and was picked up and brought to shore.

Somewhere in the story she laughs that most Vietnamese do not know how to swim and that the experience made her more discriminating about the kind of boat she chose for the next time. Then she laughs that there was a third try, and I might think she was crazy, but there was no other choice — and the odds were increasing in her favor that at least one of the boats would make it. In a side-note, Tu-minh adds that for as many boats she tried to leave on, there were as many times she failed her DMV driving test. She repeats in a deep mechanical voice, “Please return to DMV. Your driving test is over.”

Indeed, the third boat —  made putrid by the long journey, holding women who died in childbirth, husbands who beat their wives and threw them overboard, women who cradled dead babies, the huddled and starving skeletal survivors — made it.

Today’s Advice: “Go with art into your very selfmost straits. And set yourself free.” Paul Celan

My two faithful readers – ok the one reader besides me logging in as another reader, my mom, may be wondering why there appears to be a dearth of blogging and unwanted-advice giving here. Truth is, apart from trying unsuccessfully to make actual artwork for a deadline, I am recovering from a formative experience that has recently resurfaced.

During the second grade, I, for whatever apparent lack of discernment, became deeply enchanted by Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. So when my teacher announced that the day’s assignment would be to write a creative story, I knew that I was to copy word for word the entirety of Dracula as my response. I would in artistic ecstacy absorb each word of Bram Stoker’s as they spilled out of my no. 2 pencil into the form of my newly acquired cursive. Even in my rapturous state, I had some idea as to the ambition of writing a novel in one day, so I happily forsook not only my morning recess, but also my lunchtime to diligently complete my homage.

At some point my teacher noticed the fervent scribbling of a lone student in the classroom and discovered what I was doing. She quickly chastised me for not contributing original writing, for outright plagiarism. To my horror I received a zero for the assignment, a deeply cutting indictment of my failure as a second grader essayist — and an impotent stack of binder paper with my rushed writing was the fiery evidence. Even worse, after a range of other students’ presentations of their assignments, such as “Why I Hate Rainbows” and “Funny Things My Dog Does To Me,” I would suffer yet another indignance when another student asked why I was not presenting my writing and the teacher declared to the class and the attendant ghosts of literary epistomology that I didn’t follow directions.

So it is in that shame and utter disenchantment that I struggle for what area of unwanted advice to dole out, and long for the light of creative wonder and enthusiasm to shine again on me and bring obnoxious and sarcastic torments to my reader, my mom. I do believe in the words of George Steiner when he writes, “The true entrance into us will not occur by an act of will.” So I am forgiving my second grade self for not knowing the benefits of a master copy enough to tell my teacher to suck on it and…. and here I wait. And wait.

Today’s Advice: “The movement toward reception and apprehension does embody an initial, fundamental act of trust. It entails the risk of disappointment or worse. As we shall note the guest may turn despotic or venemous. But without the gamble on welcome, no door can be opened when freedom knocks.” (Steiner)

Recently I have had to question the nature of blogging, satirical observations, creative alter-egos, and unwanted advice-giving. And then answer it.

It seems to me that art making and creative expression is paradoxical in manifold and complex ways — and always making one aware of the inescapable suffering caused by being human. It is truly a solitary, non-self-centered act, creating.  But the work at its best is met with communion. And yet often neither happens. Ego.

I didn’t bring my favorite aesthetic philosophy books with me on vacation, but if I could dare butcher some pretty amazing dialogue from a favorite film, Tous Les Matins du Monde, and then loosely apply it to my mundane and shrively blog, and since it is my blog afterall, I will:

– You’ve found that music is not for kings. Music wishes to say things words cannot say, which is why it is not entirely human.

– Who does it wish to speak to? God?

– No, God can speak.

– For the ear, gold, glory, silence? Love?

– No. One must leave a drink for the dead; a refreshment for those who have run out of words. For a lost childhood. For the time before we were born, before we breathed. Or saw light. To wake the dead.

Today’s Advice: Write and make art for the dead. They are a forgiving audience.

Being a bird-ophile, I am often sent a whole host of websites, photos, trivia, scat and carcasses of the bird variety from well-meaning friends. Today a friend sent me a terrific link to a recent TED lecture by an engineer who crafted a robot that looks and flies like a seagull.

http://www.ted.com/talks/a_robot_that_flies_like_a_bird.html

In general I despise technology, in the same vein of Heidegger’s suspicion that technology deludes us from Being. And I certainly can’t stand using the Internet to look at videos of things that inspire me or to post blogs.

But when I saw this robotic seagull take to the airspace above the theatre seats, beating its mechanical wings and tilting it’s unnatural head in the way only seagulls do, my eyes welled up in the way they do when I experience Beauty, or a moment of Being.

It’s not that the bird itself is beautiful – it is clearly a robot. And let’s face it, they chose a seagull, one of our most despised birds due to it’s greedy opportunism, it’s cadent, shrill birdcall, and well, to be frank – show me a person who hasn’t been relishing a glorious day at the ocean’s edge only to *plop* get shat on by a seagull.

Moreover, my idea of Beauty is not platonic in the way science and engineering would have us believe – that there is a classical, ever-lasting, hierarchical Beauty; that somehow this robot is man’s step towards that eternal, perfect, golden ratio.

Instead, I find humble beauty in the homage man pays to something it cannot appropriate — that all the complicated materials, intense mathematical analysis and intricate architecture dissolves into reproducing flight – something man will never attain unassisted.

And most of all, an audience of highly educated people in this most technological of times (and places) was unabashedly reduced to the childlike awe of flight. The same flight that is taken for granted when that seagull soars above and shits on you.

Today’s advice: Get off the damn Internet and make something. And then post it on the Internet.

Apparently people are wondering from where this blog idea sprang, if indeed my email wasn’t hacked and by reading this you won’t get life long spams for Cialis.

The other day I attended my undergraduate college’s professional club’s new event: A Mentor/Mentee Career Advancement Program. Since I don’t have a career that I can discern, I decided maybe I could be paired up with a mentor who would help me.

At the event, I was introduced to a group of engineers, finance professionals, young and old entrepreneurs, internet specialists and a linguist (all uncannily into sustainability).  Surprisingly there wasn’t another artist. Sort of — you can cite my earlier post about art and solitude.

But the diverse group agreed that maybe there are specific interests that people can pair up around, even if on face the careers are vastly different. So people went around a circle introducing what they know and what they need help with. At the end, an uptight educator said, why don’t we just let people find each other based on those introductions, and the group quickly dispersed and reformed dyads, except for me alone, inching my way awkwardly towards the snack table.

The group organizer, another entrepreneur, saw me having an involved career discussion with the snack tray, took pity, and asked me more about what I was looking for. I said I was an artist with lots of potential directions blah blah blah. He stopped me and said, you know what, you need to make yourself a self-appointed guru of something. Seriously? Yes, he said, and he stated his serious reasons why, and I laughed crumbs of crackers into the air. I then changed the subject and then eventually went home. What would an entrepreneur who has sold two companies know about me? I hate unwanted advice.

Today’s Advice: Find a way to make your work about sustainability.