Arlene Goldbard

Just about every spiritual tradition preaches it; just about every psychological tradition teaches it. So why is it so hard to learn to separate one’s desire from expectations of its fulfillment? Why is it so tempting to give up wanting what doesn’t seem to be forthcoming?

One of my strongest desires is help potentiate a paradigm shift in which things like artistic creativity and justice tempered by love move to the center of our social concerns, instead of remaining out on the margins where they’ve been pushed by the mechanistic, materialistic force that has dominated for far too long. Pursuing that desire, I generate essays, talks, workshops, letters, teachings, polemics, parables, and often, these resonate with the people who receive them.

But resonance doesn’t always initialize action. Even when something has the ring of truth, a countervailing force—a powerful inertia—may impede our will to act on it. It’s expressed in different ways:

“I don’t see anyone in Congress who’s going to sponsor a new WPA right now.“

“Yeah, the old healthcare system isn’t working, but people aren’t going to to change; they’re just too comfortable, too lazy, too easily fooled.“

“Teaching to the tests is poisoning the next generation’s education, but all Washington understands is metrics and optics, so what are you going to do?“

“The entire financial system needs an overhaul or the country is going down. But Wall Street will block it, and people are too stupid or too complacent to make it happen despite their objections.“

All of them add up to the same recipe: the fear of alignment with a lost cause, of failing or looking foolish; the irrational conviction that we know the future and it’s against us; anger and resentment at indifference to injustice; all of that baked into a pièce de résistance that keeps us from trying—thus fulfilling the proposition that trying isn’t worth the effort.

The biggest obstacle to progress I encounter, in myself and others, is a immobilizing disappointment. And every day, I see something more clearly. While we can’t know that our efforts will bring the desired results, this much is clear: the longer we postpone the sustained work of shifting the culture toward humane values because the odds are against us, the longer we will wait for the change to begin.

Everything happening in the external world of politics and culture has its correlate in the little world of the individual and family, of course. Through a quirk of the Hebrew calendar, even though the secular dates are weeks apart, this has been a week of yahrtzeits: the anniversary of my father’s death 53 year ago last Saturday; and of my mother’s death in 1999 today.

There are many people who endured much worse childhoods than mine, who grew up in war zones or detention camps or orphanages, sustaining unimaginable abuse. But my household of social and economic marginality, petty crime, ruthless self-preservation—suffice it to say that when I tell the tale, the unfailing response is surprise, the kind you’d reserve for a child with excellent table-manners who just happened to be raised by wolves.

This year, I suppose because I am at such a crossroads in life, the anniversaries hit me hard. I have been easily activated into anger or despair. It has been easy to tip the stream of my thoughts onto a rocky course, where I see myself as singled out for punishment. Along the stream, familiar objects float and bob: the feeling from childhood that I am being used; my identification with distorted ideas, such as the certainty that what I want will never come to pass. I keep hauling myself out of the water, reminding myself that old feelings are dragging me along, getting snagged on new situations. What with toggling back and forth between the limbic system and the neocortex—between emotional activation and rational thought—my brain in getting a big workout, and it is tiring.

Yesterday, a wise friend told me to look at the sense of entitlement, the narcissism, that was feeding the system. Since I prefer to see myself as an altruist, I didn’t much like the view. “You think because you’ve suffered and worked hard and want it so much,” my friend said, “you should have it. But why? Where is that written?“

My friend reminded me how important it is to break the chain between wanting and the expectation of getting. “Hold your desire. Get up every day and make your best offering. Then surrender. It’s out of your hands.“

I am familiar with the teaching that desire is suffering, but for me, it isn’t true. It’s not the wanting, but the conviction that desire should be fulfilled that brings pain. History is full of lost causes. Some stopped being lost and became real changes. Sometimes it happened in a surprising, tectonic shift, sometimes the change came by almost imperceptible degrees. But when such change arrives, it is always in the company of people who didn’t give up on what they knew just because the odds were against them, people who weren’t afraid to want and work, whether or not their wanting was fulfilled.

Surrendering feels like a big relief. I don’t entirely trust my ability to remember that, but I’m guessing life will provide abundant reminders. And along the way, I hope to get up each day, make my best offering, beam my desire into the world like a homing beacon, and tune out the tyranny of the instantly achievable. Desire, offering, surrender.

I’m not in classrooms every day, only dipping in occasionally when I’m on a campus to give talks. But I came up K through 12 in the California public education system, I vote here now, and I have more than a casual interest in the future of the human species, which gives me ample reason to contemplate this interesting week for education in California.

Today, I write first about the big questions of educational provision; and then about the spark that ignites the hunger to learn, without which no meaningful education is possible.

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By now, I have tried out approximately one gazillion concepts, arguments and images intended to convey my passion for art’s public purpose. Some have great persuasive power and some, despite my deep conviction of their merit, don’t quite get over.

Sometimes, these are like beloved children who learn to walk or talk behind schedule: you just have to wait for events to catch up to their potential. Especially in the realm of ideas, people can find it difficult to perceive information that run counter to their usual ways of seeing. But recently, patience has begun to pay dividends in the form of greater receptivity to information that was formerly ignored or resisted. Please read on.

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Be forewarned: if you don’t feel like a rant today, save this for later. For the last few days I’ve had the strangest sensation. It’s as if I’ve been struggling to emerge from some intensely sticky substance—a vat of rubber cement, perhaps, or a freshly spun spider web as it might appear to a hapless fly—only this substance congests the realm of thought.

If we were on the old “Star Trek,” I’d be Mr. Spock, peering levelly at Captain Kirk and saying, “It’s Anti-Thought, Jim, a resilient life-form from the planet InstaMedia that induces a powerful confusion, reducing highly intelligent beings to the mental capacity of a child.” And then the captain would marshall his team to devise a clever antidote that would be administered with total success by the top of the hour. Over blue cocktails in the canteen, Spock would gaze at the camera with the wry amusement that is the Vulcan equivalent of horror. “Imagine,” he would say, “if we had to live in a world where Anti-Thought was replacing the capacity for rational thought.”

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February 17th is World Community Arts Day, the third annual global celebration of “art as a catalyst for caring and sharing,” with the goal of creating “a World Festival Society for a day.” Its underlying philosophy is that “We can either react in fear or anger to the state of our world thus becoming part of the problem or respond creatively and become part of the solution.” Anyone can take part:

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“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”

Stew, Passing Strange

I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)

I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely beautiful and rich musical story of the musician Stew’s coming of age, as an artist and a man, a journey that took him from a two-story home with all the mod cons in L.A., through cannabis coffeeshops in Amsterdam, post-punk clubs in Berlin, communes, collectives, love affairs that ended on the border of realness, and back again.

Repeatedly, Stew’s story draws a hard, straight line between the redemptive, clarifying, transcendent capabilities of art and spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment. I’ve drawn a few hundred of those lines myself in talks and essays over the years, I admit. But I have resisted tethering myself with them, because when I contemplated joining the Church of Art, my feelings about some of my prospective coreligionists made me think again.

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I don’t know if this is a political problem, a spiritual one, or a psychological one: I’m fairly certain it’s all of the above. Or maybe it just feels that way based on all the space it’s taking up in my mind. How do people overcome the obstacles—fatigue, disappointment, magical thinking—that make them reluctant to invest in the often time-consuming and painstaking work required to build something, brick by brick?

In the physical world as in other realms, it takes remarkably less time to destroy something than to rebuild it. A house burns in a matter of hours; perhaps a thousand such intervals are needed to make it habitable again. A single executive order unleashes a war; decades are required to repair what can be fixed.

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This is a profoundly confusing (and almost irresistibly depressing) moment in our political culture. Reactivity is at such an all-time high, a visitor from outer space could be forgiven for concluding that in the U.S., anyway, we humans lack any access to the neocortex, while our reptilian brains and limbic systems are shooting as many sparks as a wayward match in a fireworks factory. Danger! Panic! Despair!

Under such circumstances, confusion is an intelligent response. What is going on!?!?

Well, a lot, obviously. Start from your own center and work out. We all know the personal version of the reactivity now sweeping our political culture: something pushes a button, unleashing a swirl of memories, images, emotions. Flooded with brain chemicals, our thinking minds come unglued. A small setback turns into a hopeless failure; a major challenge triggers the kind of fight-or-flight response our brains were built for back on the savannah, being chased by sabertooth tigers. It happens to every being with a body. I’m guessing that even the Dalai Lama goes reactive now and then, and obviously, most of us warrant no comparison with the Dalai Lama’s mastery of automatic emotional responses.

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My friends tend to a few views of President Obama and the Democrats at the end of Year One. They seem different, but actually, all are part of the Disappointment System, my new name for the combination plate of hurt and response which has become our national dish. As is so often the case, what we are as political animals in the wide world is largely due to what we eat in the little world of relationship and emotion.

Right now, the political buffet is piled high. There’s a heaping portion of cynical gloating: See, the gloaters say, I didn’t get my hopes up, I didn’t fall for all that magical thinking about Obama as messiah, and guess what? I was right! There are full platters of bitter disappointment: He had us on his side from the get-go, the bitter ones say, and instead of standing tall for progressive values, he’s compromised everything away. And there is a veritable smorgasbord of Measured Response: Better on Haiti than Bush on New Orleans, better on health than nothing, too bad about Afghanistan but look at the pressure, and let’s be realistic, I mean, it’s the system, so what can you expect?

The cynics are pre-disappointed, having decided at some point to insulate themselves against further pain by never allowing their hopes to rise. The cynics’ remedy doesn’t work, of course: the result is a constant, dull ache, an addictive pain that makes up in duration whatever it might lack in intensity. The bitter ones have hit their pain threshold, deciding that opening to their hopes has gone far enough. But there’s a cost to pay too: the cocktail you get by stirring regret into disappointment delivers a hangover likely to endure for the rest of the President’s term.

The measured responders never really perceive how disappointment came to be their medium; they just live in it, like fish in the ocean. By allowing themselves less imagination, they feel less pain, of course. But unfortunately, also less of everything that transcends the limitations of the moment: as it has been, so it shall be.

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I spent the first part of this week in Sacramento, where I gave a talk to a statewide “arts visioning retreat,” an audience of about a hundred artists and administrators who wanted to help lead a conversation about reframing the arts’ public purpose. (Download my brief introduction and keynote at California Arts Advocates’ Web site.)

The drive, a little over an hour through rolling hills and vast flat stretches, was a little surreal, a scene from a personal sci-fi picture in which time folds back on itself, with uncanny echoes. I haven’t made that journey for many years: no reason. But long ago, I lived in Sacramento for a year or so, running a cultural project in the now quaintly kooky days of the Jerry Brown administration.

When I drove away from my rented house in Sacramento for the last time, it was exactly half my life ago. Today is my birthday, so I am able to make this calculation with some precision. Back then, the trip was a drive in the country. At night, when I usually made it, there were long passages with no illumination but the stars and moon. Now most of it is a repeating tableau of discount malls and tract houses, spotlights on billboards tinting the night sky pink.

In between trips to Sacramento, the politics of culture have morphed through several incarnations, including a very long time in which my ideas about culture and democracy (and others like them) have been in official disfavor. But as I am discovering, if you stick around for half your life (so far), you may see the wheel start to turn. Right now, many mainstream arts people—by which I mean leaders of institutions and agencies, mostly—are concluding that the old support strategies are no longer valid, whether on account of their intrinsic flaws or the poor state of the economy, or both. … Read the rest of this post»