In Defense of Solitude

— “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.” - Michel de Montaigne —

In his 1848 work Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill observed:

It is not good for a man to be kept perforce at all times in the presence of his species. A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character: and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without.

That notion — of solitude “as essential to any depth of meditation or of character” — sounds weirdly, disturbingly, antique today. We can’t very well turn off our cell phones or keep our e-mails unanswered, can we? And what if we know nothing of the news of the day?

Still, the idea of solitude as an essential, humanizing trait is one that’s been honored, and reiterated, for centuries by the best and most influential minds of Civilization. It’s an idea come down to us through the humanities — art, history, literature, philosophy, religion — those disciplines which Mark Slouka panegyrizes in this month’s Harper’s:

The humanities … teach us incrementally, endlessly, not what to do but how to be. …[They] are a superb delivery mechanism for what we might call democratic values.

OK, yet are we to count solitude as a “democratic value”? Yes indeed, for solitude is conducive to thought and introspection, and introspection conduces to empathy and education, and thus to George Washington’s ideal of an “enlightened” citizenry.

“Thought is neither instant nor noisy,” Wallace Stegner reminds us:

… It thrives best in solitude, in quiet, and in the company of the past, the great community of recorded human experience. That recorded experience is essential whether one hopes to reassert some aspect of it, or attack it.

Writing back in the 1500s, Michel de Montaigne assures us:

It is not good enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the love of crowds that is within us, we must sequester ourselves and regain possession of ourselves. … That is what it is to choose wisely the treasures that can be secured from harm, and to hide them in a place where no one may go and which can be betrayed only by ourselves. … The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to ourselves.*

And Thoreau tells us in 1863:

When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. … Shall the mind be a public arena, where the affairs of the street and the gossip of the tea-table chiefly are discussed? Or shall it be a quarter of heaven itself, — an hypaethral temple, consecrated to the service of the gods?… It is important to preserve the mind’s chastity. …I believe that the mind can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality.

And Nietzsche tells us in 1888:

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what hath fallen into their depths. / Away from the marketplace and from fame taketh place all that is great: away from the marketplace and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values. / Flee, my friend, into thy solitude…

By contrast to these enduring voices from Stegner’s “great community,” our present day culture of Reality TV and Social Media sends us the subtle but insidious messages that 1) being alone amounts to humiliation and inferiority, and 2) being unknown amounts to worthlessness and disgrace.

Writer Dave Eggers touched on this concept beautifully in his book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius:

We’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our safe and comfortable homes … how we would fit into this or that band or TV show or movie, and how we would look doing it. [We] are people for whom the idea of anonymity is existentially irrational, indefensible.

“You are worthy or desirable,” declares the culture of today, “inasmuch as you can demonstrate acceptance by others via circuits and cables” (or in the case of reality TV, inasmuch as you remain in the group and avoid getting kicked off the show).

Similarly, we hear it declaimed: “You are valid, you are real, inasmuch as you publish evidence daily — even hourly (Twitter, anyone?) — of your existence, your validity.”

The unavoidable problem here, however, is that as much as we crave to avoid isolation and seek verification that we exist, the selves we wish verified are actually becoming less and less singular or unique, at least in the principle realm we use to verify them, the Internet.

Online we are more isolated than ever, but without the soul-shaping benefits of real aloneness. Why log on unless you hope to connect with somebody, or at any rate feel connected to the buzz of the day? Granted, the Web is more than minute-to-minute media (modesty aside, might this blog be an example?), but you get my drift.

The Internet, by itself, also cannot provide us with real community. An e-mail is not a handshake. Nor are most Facebook friends likely to live close enough to keep an eye on your house while you’re away.

(Blogger’s note: Herewith, I face an incontrovertible irony — employing the Internet to outline the Internet’s dangers and deficiencies as today’s medium of choice. But hey, that the medium is good for some things can’t be denied. Onward, then.)

Online we live in the thick of one another’s quasi selves, what writer Neil Postman called “a neighborhood of strangers.” And however manifold are the “activities” we initiate or the information we access on the Internet, the medium demands that we stare at a screen, and therefore it cannot enable individuality. To the contrary, screen-time can only act as a force of psycho-physical leveling. To stare at a screen is, for everyone who does it, the same experience.

So, one cannot be beneficially alone on the Internet, and in a very real sense one cannot be wholly oneself, for individuality, personality, and independent thought are conditioned not by the acquisition of information or by fiber optic “access” to others, but by varied experience (i.e. away from the terminal).

“The drift in the United States today is toward the submergence of the self into the Mass Mind,” writes Morris Berman in his book The Twilight of American Culture,

a trend that is powerfully encouraged by corporate culture and the new technology. Along with this — as in the early Middle Ages — we see the dissolution of interiority.

Berman’s pungent phrase “submergence of the self into the Mass Mind” inevitably conjures Aldous Huxley’s classic Brave New World (1932), which envisions a blissful and soulless future “paradise” expurgated of societal “ills” such as individuality, books, religion, marital life, and yes, personal solitude — all in the interest of industry (read: economic superiority), harmony (read: societal conformity and obedience), and ceaseless pleasure (read: distraction).

Huxley’s future world is no authoritarian dystopia. Rather, it’s a smoothly functioning society whose citizens, as far as they can imagine, couldn’t be happier or more productive. They are prosperous, well fed, pleasantly medicated, entertained, sexually promiscuous (it’s the norm, “everybody belongs to everybody else”), and desire nothing other than what’s offered to them by their station in the societal hierarchy. The key to their societal health and harmony is the eradication of individual desire through systematic “conditioning” begun at birth. A crucial component of this “conditioning” is an uninterrupted involvement in communal life, a forbiddance — and inculcated horror of — solitude

The following bit from the novel describes this culture of mass-identity.

The group was now complete, the solidarity circle perfect and without flaw. Man, woman, man, in a ring of endless alteration round the table. Twelve of them ready to be made one, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities in a larger being.

Now put them around the globe instead of around the table, make them a billion instead of twelve, and change “solidarity circle” to Internet. Creepy, for sure. Fortunately perhaps, the present climate of the Internet is much more fractious (at its best, articulate debate defines it) than Huxley’s gray-eyed group-think. But the point remains that we relinquish something quintessentially human in being constantly logged on, “accessible,” and vulnerable to the manipulation of our focus and the depletion of our attention-spans.

“Being online,” writes Sven Birkerts, “and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations.”

Meanwhile, the vocation of selfhood, the cultivation of personal, psychic, and spiritual independence, remains — and will remain, as ever — inescapably tied to solitude and its concomitants: privacy, slowness, inner quietude, and anonymity. All of which, of course, contradict our culture of connectivity and instantaneousness.

In a 1968 interview in The Paris Review, John Updike alluded to the locales that tended to engender his best writing.

A few places are specially conducive to inspiration — automobiles, church — private places.

It was an offhand remark, not especially unique for its time. But in today’s cultural context does it not sound so quaint as to be practically … eccentric? Private places? Anybody remember those? The phrase today tends to conjure one’s bathroom or boudoir, for it may be presumed that in those two places most of us still prefer technological chastity.

But I digress. My point is that an intangible realm increasingly claims our waking hours, serving to drain our lives of private psychic space, and consequently of solitude, for the Internet is not and never can be a private sphere.

Firstly, of course, it is the Web’s connectivity that precludes privacy, but there is another reason we cannot be alone online. It is, quite simply, because we cannot “be there” at all.

The Internet, in a critical sense, does not “exist.” I realize this amounts to a modern heresy. What I mean is that the Internet is not properly a realm, a sphere, a space or a room. It cannot be “entered.” It is a word, an abstraction, a concept, a fancy — albeit a marvelously impressive and even useful one.

In his 1992 book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman traces the important distinction between ideas and things, and shows convincingly how in our information-saturated present day we tend to mistake technological notions and processes for actual, material absolutes. This profoundly alters our understanding of the nature of reality, and brings us to do immense damage to ourselves, each other, and our culture.

The isolated components which create what we call “The Internet” may be physical and tangible, such as a keyboard or screen, but a computer terminal is not the Internet, nor is a fiber optic cable or a modem. The Internet itself is immaterial. It cannot be touched, let alone inhabited. It is an idea — and by its nature it is unitary.

Thus, you cannot “sit inside” the Internet as Updike sat in his car or upon his church pew, and you most certainly cannot “sit inside it alone.”

Nevertheless, the lexicon of the Web persists to buttress the illusion of materiality. We "go" online, we "surf," we "build" a Web Site, we "open" a Web document, we "run" a program, we "chat." And we forget that we are sitting in a chair, almost entirely motionless, staring into a dimensionless glass or liquid crystal display.

Remember “Virtual Reality,” that once ubiquitous term so rarely invoked these days? Might its scarcity signal our total conversion to the ideology of the Internet — the belief that the erstwhile Virtual now constitutes Reality itself? If so, this would signal that we live in a veritable Technopoly, as Postman argued seventeen years ago:

Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.

One thing I feel for certain: the Internet has produced in our culture a connection-addiction, a constant being-elsewhere, a daily transplanting of the self from its real, palpable world into a virtual reality, a hive life, a maze of information stimuli — and all of this threatens to deplete our efforts to sow personal, psychic, and spiritual independence. A primary benefit of being solitary, after all, is that it facilitates being, that natural state of the soul in which you find yourself “in the moment,” as they say. Right here, right now.

“In Technopoly,” writes Postman, “we are driven to fill our lives with the quest to ‘access’ information. For what purpose or with what limitations, it is not for us to ask; and we are not accustomed to asking, since the problem is unprecedented.”

He continues:

Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed; i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.

So, predisposed as we are to move our thoughts, our inner lives, our reading habits further online — and thus further into the public sphere, where collective technology dissolves and annuls our personal solitude — we ought to pause and ask:

• Whither goes our sense of self, our ability to be alone, think alone, believe alone?
• Whither goes our propensity for discipline and self-reliance, for doing a thing solely because we believe, down to our human core, in the thing’s intrinsic value — even if it should never be seen by anybody else and thus never elicit praise, profit, or prestige?

On the rear flap of an old edition of J.D. Salinger’s novel Franny & Zooey I recently discovered the following impish testament, penned by the novelist himself, and well worth framing above one’s desk:

It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

Today we may ask: What if Salinger’s proverbial writer faces a compromised anonymity, a lack of solitude precluding the blessings (yes, blessings) of obscurity?

Say the young writer is — if not famous in a societal way — then “socially famous” on Facebook or MySpace; say he’s got 662 “friends” whose irresistible avatars dispel his focus hourly; say he’s engaged by thirty-seven e-mails daily; or say, instead of recording his thoughts and imaginings in the privacy of a paper-bound journal, he blogs these things to the world and then spends his days patrolling reader comments?

Connection, interaction has become the raison de vivre of our time. We rate our technologies first by the efficiency with which they allow us to reach another person and gather data. And quick, even instant measurability of that efficiency is a chief advantage of online media. Send an e-mail, get a response. Build a Web Site, then tabulate “unique visitors” and hits per day. Set up a Facebook page, count your friends. Within this hyper-social, data-driven ethos, does it not follow that endeavors failing to serve the ultimate utilities — i.e., connection and measurability — call for abandonment?

How, in such a culture, can one still conceive of spending three to five years writing a novel in the quiet of one’s study?

“The gods are just,” wrote Shakespeare in King Lear, “and of our pleasant vices make instruments to plague us.” (Huxley was so fond of the line, he included it in Brave New World.)

Here’s our friend Montaigne talking about solitude again:

Remember the man who, when he was asked why he took so much pains in an art which could come to the knowledge of scarcely anyone, replied: ‘Few are enough for me, one is enough for me, none at all is enough for me.’ He spoke truly: you and one companion are an adequate theater for each other, or you for yourself.*

The Internet, TV, and mass media in general promise to save us from ourselves. Solitude is now completely avoidable. But what do we lose when we lose solitude? What is the cost of trading in our anonymity?

“We are not merely social beings,” says William Deresiewicz in a dynamite article entitled “The End of Solitude,”

We are each also separate, each solitary, each alone in our own room, each miraculously our unique selves and mysteriously enclosed in that selfhood. To remember this, to hold oneself apart from society, is to begin to think one’s way beyond it. …No real excellence, personal or social, artistic, philosophical, scientific, or moral, can arise without solitude.

The spirit of the age notwithstanding, we possess in our solitude, our anonymity, our inwardness and interiority, the precious resources that have made possible and sustained the best and most enduring cultural creations of the ages.

No matter how popularly devalued these resources become, no matter what suspicion or scorn each may arouse, we ought to hold them dear. The health and wellbeing of our citizenry, society, and culture depend upon it.

So I write this offline, after slow and fruitful days in real time, in silence, alone with my thoughts or in the company of printed books authored by wide-eyed souls, each of whom, in turn, studied and wrote alone.

And I post this as a reminder to myself above all, before logging off to seek more of where this came from.

…If we have thus deconsecrated ourselves — and who has not? — the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to re-consecrate ourselves, and make once more a fane of the mind. We should treat our minds, that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention. Read not the Times. Read the Eternities. — Henry David Thoreau

*Montaigne translation by Donald M. Frame, Selected Essays of Michel De Montaigne, Walter J. Black, NY, 1943.

**Hesse translation by Denver Lindley, My Belief: Essays on Life and Art by Hermann Hesse, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 1974.

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman (1985)

A quarter-century after its publication, Postman’s classic litany of questions remains salutary as we confront an age of Social Media and the e-book.

“What is information? Or more precisely, what are information? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom, and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts, and forms of information require? … How do different forms of information persuade? … How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed? …

“To ask is to break the spell. To which I might add that questions about the psychic, political, and social effects of information are as applicable to the computer as to television. Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, I mention it here because, clearly, Americans have accorded it their customary mindless inattention; which means they will use it as they are told, without a whimper. Thus, a central thesis of computer technology — that the principle difficulty we have in solving problems stems from insufficient data — will go unexamined. Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection of speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

Prime Passage: George Washington's Farewell Address (1796)

Seems to me that Washington's words are well worth weighing amid the current party-line fracas concerning Health Care reform.

“There is an opinion that parties in free countries are useful checks upon the administration of the government and serve to keep alive the spirit of liberty. This within certain limits is probably true; and in governments of a monarchical cast, patriotism may look with indulgence, if not with favor, upon the spirit of party. But in those of the popular character, in governments purely elective, it is a spirit not to be encouraged. From their natural tendency, it is certain there will always be enough of that spirit for every salutary purpose. And there being constant danger of excess, the effort ought to be by force of public opinion, to mitigate and assuage it. A fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest, instead of warming, it should consume …

Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened …

It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a people always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence. Who can doubt that, in the course of time and things, the fruits of such a plan would richly repay any temporary advantages which might be lost by a steady adherence to it? Can it be that Providence has not connected the permanent felicity of a nation with its virtue? The experiment, at least, is recommended by every sentiment which ennobles human nature. Alas! is it rendered impossible by its vices?”

Read the whole address here.

Prime Passage: The Ghost Road by Pat Barker

(From a journal entry by the young Billy Prior, just before going into a hopeless battle in 1918 France ... )

"I realize there's another group of words that still mean something. Little words that trip through sentences unregarded: us, them, we, they, here, there. These are the words of power, and long after we're gone, they'll lie about in the language, like the unexploded grenades in these fields, and any one of them'll take your hand off."

Prime Passage: Libra by Don DeLillo

(Here "He" = Lee Harvey Oswald)

"He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down. He wanted to carry himself with a clear sense of role, make a move one time that was not disappointed. He walked in the shadows of insurance towers and bank buildings. He thought the only end to isolation was to reach the point where he was no longer separated from the true struggles that went on around him. The name we give this point is history."

Prime Passage: Art as Experience by John Dewey

"Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what now is.

To grasp the sources of aesthetic experience it is, therefore, necessary to have recourse to animal life below the human scale. The activities of the fox, the dog, and the thrush may at least stand as reminders and symbols of that unity of experience which we so fractionize when work is labor, and thought withdraws us from the world. The live animal is fully present, all there, in all of its actions: in its wary glances, its sharp sniffings, its abrupt cocking of ears. All senses are equally on the qui vive. As you watch, you see motion merging into sense and sense into motion -- constituting that animal grace so hard for man to rival. What the live creature retains from the past and what it expects from the future operate as directions in the present. The dog is never pedantic nor academic; for these things arise only when the past is severed in consciousness from the present and is set up as a model to copy or a storehouse upon which to draw. The past absorbed into the present carries on; it presses forward."
(From Chapter Two, "The Live Creature," Art as Experience by John Dewey, 1934.)

Open Letter to The New York Times

My letter to the editor of the New York Times Book Review appears in this Sunday's edition (May 3, 2009). They've elided my text in places (most tellingly in the opening achtung), tweaked it in others. Still, I think they're dignified to print it at all.

Here's the letter (with links added). Text omitted by the Gray Lady is restored in brackets. Bold text signifies Gray Lady additions or changes.

[ Earth to New York: ]

Michael Meyer’s essay [piece] “About That [Book] Advance…” (Sunday, April 12, 2009) discusses fiction publishing in terms that hardly ever apply in reality, or terms more relevant to the publishing of non-fiction. While advance payment is the rule for memoirs or informational books, only the minutest fraction of published fiction writers command up-front cash for work still unfinished.

The wildly lucky Audrey Niffenegger and her ilk notwithstanding, most fiction writers—even those with one or more novels to their credit—must labor, often for years, sans payment. What’s more, in our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among them labor sans all guarantees of eventual publication or income; one could argue—and demonstrate persuasively—that the greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism and status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. Laboring slowly, unhonored and unpaid and bound toward an immaterial prize far more meaningful than “success” as New York parlance would have it, these writers have destiny for incentive—and perhaps the exemplars of bygone literary gods for inspiration. Unsung, they sing, and reap rewards that more than mitigate the annoyances of obscurity. Quietly, faithfully, their late-paid, ill-paid or altogether unpaid works go into the world untrumpeted, unreviewed, and unbought, to give the lie to the fallacy denounced [decried ] by Annie Dillard a quarter-century ago: “that the novelists of whom we have heard are the novelists we have.”

[In the likes of Whitman, Dickinson, Proust—and more recently Cormac McCarthy and the late Andre Dubus—our unsung have their forebears. It shall be said we did not know them at first. Meanwhile, they worked. ]

Rather than discuss contemporary literature or even contemporary publishing, Mr. Meyer’s article does little more than survey the New York Cult of Success. The art of language and story lives elsewhere, sustained by the unwavering economics of the spirit.

M. Allen Cunningham

Portland, OR

Prime Passage: Rabbit, Run by John Updike

"He hates all the people on the street in dirty everyday clothes, advertising their belief that the world arches over a pit, that death is final, that the wandering thread of his feelings leads nowhere. Correspondingly, he loves the ones dressed for church: the pressed business suits of portly men give substance and respectability to his furtive sensations of the invisible; the flowers in the hats of their wives seem to begin to make it visible; and their daughters are themselves whole flowers, their bodies each a single flower, petaled in gauze and frills, a bloom of faith, so that even the plainest walk in Rabbit's eyes glowing with beauty, the beauty of belief. He could kiss their feet in gratitude; they release him from fear. By the time he enters the church he is too elevated to ask forgiveness. As he kneels in the pew on a red stool that is padded but not enough to keep his weight from pinching his knees painfully, his head buzzes with joy, his blood leaps in his skull, and the few words he frames, God, Rebecca, thank you, bob inconsecutively among senseless eddies of gladness. People who know God rustle and stir about him, upholding him in the dark."

Prime Passage: At the Same Time: Essays & Speeches by Susan Sontag

From the book's title piece, "At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning," the Nadine Gordimer Lecture delivered by Sontag in South Africa in 2004:

"... And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experience of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language (that is, expands the basic instrument of consciousness): namely, literature."

My Kid Could Paint That

-- Creativity and commerce collide in the form of a four-year-old genius --

"The American malady is a spiritual one, the commercialization of spiritual goods on an enormous scale, in the same way as material goods are commercialized. Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality, everything which is made, is made to satisfy a demand artificially stimulated by sales propaganda."

The English poet Stephen Spender wrote these words in 1949 following a visit to the United States. By "spiritual goods" Spender was referring to works of art. It was true more than half a century ago, and it's true today: works of art and sales figures, creativity and commerce, rarely jibe (unconventional entrepreneurship excepted)

We all know American culture is consumer driven. By and large, Americans live in, by, and for the marketplace. And in today's age of global business, the effect of the marketplace is a great leveling out of culture, a homogenizing of experience. The marketplace likes broad appeal, it likes high sales figures, it likes a mass audience. It does not thrive on slow contemplation, individuality, eccentricity, or introspection. All of these things, which are at the core of real art -- both creating it and experiencing it -- are in fact a threat to the happy clatter of the cash drawer.

Thus, strange things happen when that which is spiritual, personal, and irrational meets that which is profane, collective, and statistical -- in other words, when art meets commerce.

This phenomenon is explored beautifully in the transfixing 2007 documentary My Kid Could Paint That, by director Amir Bar-Lev. The film focuses on Marla, a four-year-old girl who loves to paint. Marla lives in upstate New York with her parents and her little brother, and her life is much like that of any other healthy, delightful four-year-old who loves to paint -- except for one thing: Marla's colorful creations have made her famous.

Where most child artists stick to butcher paper and fingerpaints, Marla creates large vibrant canvases using fancy acrylics, brushes, and a variety of application techniques ranging from smears to splatters to complex overlays of colors. Marla has exhibited her work in exclusive shows at numerous galleries in the U.S. and abroad. Her works have sold for upwards of $20,000.

"The paintings are incredible," says gallery owner Anthony Brunelli in the film. Brunelli was the first to curate Marla's paintings in a solo exhibition. That show, highlighted by the New York Times, sparked widespread interest in the petite genius's work. Soon TV networks began calling. Marla became a media darling. "Even if a four-year-old didn't do [the paintings]," says Brunelli, "you'd like ‘em. The fact that she is four makes it really incredible."

The kid's canvases are gorgeous, to be sure (see the online gallery at MarlaOlmstead.com), and there is something indescribably moving at the thought of such beauty flowing so easily and unselfconsciously through the brush of a girl yet to lose her baby teeth.

"When I am in Marla's presence," says Brunelli on Marla's website, "there's a weird feeling ‘cause I know there's something inside this girl that many artists look for their whole lives and never have."

Marla's paintings vibrate with the mystery of childish wonder, of magical freeness and unhampered creativity, and this mystery is the lyrical heart of My Kid Could Paint That. The film makes us linger on questions like:

-- Where does such purity and ease disappear to later in life?

-- At what point do we surrender the productive freedom and harmonious accidents of play for result-driven work -- and why can't we retrieve what we've surrendered?

At one point in the documentary, New York Times chief art critic Michael Kimmelman comments:

There's a spiritual element to it which appeals to people ... People could read all sorts of things into her pictures. That there was some force at work, something larger than even Marla. That this child is speaking almost as a medium. And her innocence also says something about the ultimate cynicism of the art world.... [where] probably the worst thing you could say about an artist is, ‘Everything this artist does is joyous and wonderful and openhearted and just simple and great.' ... Some of the appeal ... of the Marlas of the world is that it seems pure innocent joy, no cynicism, no irony, no sarcasm, none of that kind of stuff that goes along with modern art. Nobody's saying ‘f---- you' in this picture. They're just saying, ‘I'm a happy girl who loves painting.'

With increasing media attention came a fervor for Marla canvases in the art market. Her prices soared. As of February 2005, after less than a year in the limelight, wee Marla's work had earned her more than $300,000. But that same month brought a blow that sent the family of this miniature master reeling.

Though Marla herself was the embodiment of innocence and spirit, her bright canvases -- those reverberant spiritual documents -- had nevertheless become commodities. And the commodification of a thing, given the unavoidable cynicism that attaches to money, is necessarily a cynical process. So with widespread commercial attention came a qualitative shift in the public's fascination. The clamor surrounding Marla went from adoring to suspicious when TV journalist Charlie Rose hosted a 60 Minutes segment examining the Marla craze.

He interviewed Marla's first curator, Anthony Brunelli:

-Charlie: So what do we have here?

-Brunelli: You have a genius.

-Charlie: Genius?

-Brunelli: Yes.

-Charlie: (leaning forward, bearing down) Is there any other explanation?

Rose also interviewed a child psychologist, an expert in gifted children who'd observed Marla painting. The pyschologist's remarks were a mother lode to a primetime program lusting for an exposé:

I don't see Marla as having made, or at least completed, the more polished-looking paintings, because they look like a different painter.

The art world was unnerved. Major media hungrily took up the possible scandal. Was the kid a fake? Were her parents pulling the wool over the eyes of art aficionados? Was this four-year-old girl no more than a public stand-in for her dad, a brush-wielding trickster?

If it was all a fraud, the stakes had become very high. Large sums of money had changed hands, after all. People got nasty and Marla's parents were harangued with hate mail.

Personally, I believe the girl's for real (what kind of four-year-old could pretend to be a painter without, at some point, spilling the beans?). But whatever the truth, a peculiar thing had occurred. While in the wake of the 60 Minutes bomb people still appeared to be talking about Marla and her work, the engine of the conversation was no longer art and beauty, it was money. The market had intervened in Marla's creations, and people had begun to buy -- not Marla's paintings themselves, so much as the story of Marla's paintings. And as buyers began to suspect that they weren't getting the story they'd paid for, trouble ensued.

Recall Stephen Spender's words: "Everything which sells has to sell on advertised merits which are not its true quality." Was the art still beautiful? Of course. But money had muddled that truth. The "value" of the paintings had become an exclusively monetary matter. Aesthetics were suddenly irrelevant.

The story of Marla's quasi-scandal epitomizes the clash of commerce and creativity, two often uncomplimentary forces. For anybody seeking the fulfillment and spiritual enrichment that comes of art or creative work, the crucial trick is to remember the natural opposition of spirit and commodity -- and perhaps to rebel quietly against the American mindset author Morris Berman calls "the reduction of values to commodity fetishism," a mindset so money-warped that it can fail to behold the still evident beauty of a painting regardless of its authorship.

Toward the close of My Kid Could Paint That, journalist Elizabeth Cohen observes:

The whole story, really, is about grownups. It's really not about this kid. She's just a little girl painting in her house.

Marla's art did not begin from the base concerns of the dollar. No child's art does. We start from joy, exuberance, inquisitiveness, and serious play. And to the extent that we maintain and cultivate these attributes as creative adults, the more life our creations will possess -- and the more readily we will recognize beauty and be inspired by it.

The dollar is a different matter altogether.

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter.)

Do We Need a Cultural Bill of Rights?

– And by the way, are you getting the Expressive Life you’re entitled to? –

Here’s an egregious adaptation of some famous words by William Carlos Williams:

It is difficult to get current events, wealth or social standing from the arts, but people die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.

Author Bill Ivey would agree, as attested in his stirring new book, Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights.

Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, is convinced that America’s collective appreciation for — and cultivation of — art and culture is withering in a social climate where the mentality of big business reigns and a mania for the bottom line severely impoverishes the cultural lives of Americans.

Not only is our intake of art reduced to “product” that best “performs” — i.e., conforms to market analyses — but since the early twentieth-century our nation’s artistic heritage (in other words, private art-making passed down through tradition) has been increasingly threatened, a result of America’s steady development into an almost strictly consumer culture (recall that our recessional woes owe much to our 70 percent consumer-driven economy). Ivey writes:

By the 1920s new arts companies offering new arts products were converting engagement in art into an act of consumption. The notion of participation was reshaped — its sense of doing replaced by passive activities like purchasing a recording or attending a concert or exhibition. … The commoditization of emerging art forms pumped up the taking in (consumption) at the expense of making art.

As revealed by the virtually unrestrained media conglomeration and rise of big-box retailers over the last quarter-century or so (witness your neighborhood’s own Wal-Marts, Targets, and Best Buys), this culture of consumption-over-creation has only gotten worse. Which means, says Ivey, that we are all being cheated out of something that ought to be endemic to any thriving culture built upon democratic, pluralistic values, namely: our “expressive life.”

The term is Ivey’s coinage, and refers to “a reservoir of identity and spiritual renewal powerful enough to replace the fading allure of empty consumerism.”

Today this Expressive Life is rarely attributed the importance it deserves, but is nevertheless a vital-sign of culture and societal health, or as Ivey puts it:

A realm of being and behavior that …can be as distinct as ‘family life’ or ‘work life.’ …[It is] something akin to tradition, a place where community heritage interacts with individual creativity, maintaining the past while letting in the new.

Who is working effectively to repair our diminished Expressive Life?

Ivey pleads passionately for Americans to take the pulse of their nation’s cultural wellbeing and see if we don’t need a new cultural fitness program. Not only is personal art-making at risk in a society where the marketplace rules all, but professional art-making is in distress, thanks in no small part to bottom-line thinking, as well as to the predominance of “intellectual property” and broad expansions in restrictive copyright:

By failing to link our expressive life to America’s public purpose, we have placed our nation’s heart and soul at risk. We are forcing our great artists to navigate a complex and discouraging marketplace in order to survive. We have converted the shared memory embedded in our priceless cultural heritage into mere ‘intellectual property,’ which is bought, sold, abandoned, or simply locked away in the vaults of giant media companies.

For the record, Ivey’s subtitle, How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, dangles unfittingly; better if it continued: … And What We Can Do About It, for he offers a range of fresh policy ideas, all of which gravitate around his astonishing central premise that America ought to adopt a “Cultural Bill of Rights” and establish an office of cultural affairs dedicated to the protection of those rights.

Arts, Inc. even includes Ivey’s prototype for just such a document (which, it should be noted, would advocate not for the rights of any one artistic community, but for artistic culture in the broadest sense):

The right to explore [the arts of]…both our nation’s collective experience and our individual and community traditions.

It’s wonderfully fresh thinking — and makes for an affirming read. Surely we’d all agree that more art for everybody can only be a cultural positive. (Writer D.K. Row hints as much in this fine Oregonian article in support of gallery-going in hard economic times).

But … there’s a frightful prospect that inevitably accompanies any vision of legislative cultural advocacy like Ivey’s, and that is a government empowered to tell us what art is, how it should sound, what it should show, etc. Censorship, and all the gray areas that come with it, is the big ugly genie in the bottle here.

Or … maybe not. Ivey (who, by the way, was an advisor on President Obama’s transition team) compellingly demonstrates that de facto government censorship is already with us, through heavy fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission.

We must lay our fears of a new McCarthyism to rest, says Ivey, if we are to counterbalance the prevalence of corporate mindset in our arts system.

One example of that prevalence (not mentioned in Ivey’s book): Ever heard of BookScan? It’s a point-of-sale technology used by mega-bookstores (nefariously) to track the sales history of authors — and to excise store inventories of those writers whose “product” fails to “move.” This means that if your last book sold less than 20,000 copies you’re likely to miss your shot at shelf space in such a store — that is, unless your publisher coughs up the fee for a special co-op display. “Who can argue with that?” say BookScan apologists. “Sales figures don’t lie.” And so the gatekeepers of the present cultural system (read: market executives) keep on looking for the next sure “big thing.”

Until we articulate our cultural rights and take measures to protect them, such cash-cow worship will continue unfettered, and will further narrow what cultural offerings come readily available to the public.

Likewise, private ownership of our cultural heritage will only grow broader. (Did you know that the monolithic firm CORBIS owns the famous photograph of JFK Jr. standing in short-pants and saluting his father’s coffin? Thought that image was a part of every American’s heritage? Actually, it’s “intellectual property.” Happen to be a teacher and want to use it in a history lesson? Fine, but it’ll cost you.)

Where, in such a system, do we see the artists and cultural advocates having their say? Federal cultural initiatives and endowments, says Ivey, are well-meaning but politicized to the point of dysfunction. Lacking a central and binding proclamation of cultural rights, such organizations inevitably get bogged down in petty congressional partisanship. The public non-profits sector, on the other hand, is in a shambles and has succeeded in little more than polarizing culture by class: expensive highbrow versus popular lowbrow. (Maybe Creative Commons, for one, is a start.)

But what we need is an organized office working in service to our fully articulated rights to cultural wellbeing.

Ivey asks the right question:

How could a department of cultural affairs possibly generate a cultural system less functional, less attuned to public purposes, than the one we’ve been handed by a century of marketplace arrogance and government indifference?

Are you ready to claim your Expressive Life and stand up for your cultural rights? Read Arts, Inc. and decide.

* * *

A society that does not labor to be beautiful becomes indifferent to smog, litter, what Henry James called ‘trash triumphant,’ lurid communications, wretched TV, billboards, strip malls, blatancies of noise and confusion — or it considers these things the price you have to pay to make more money. --Denis Donaghue

(This post also appeared at Soul Shelter)

Prime Passage: Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton

“Status anxiety may be defined as problematic only insofar as it is inspired by values that we uphold because we are terrified and preternaturally obedient; because we have been anesthetized into believing that they are natural, perhaps even God-given; because those around us are in thrall to them; or because we have grown too imaginatively timid to conceive of alternatives.

“Philosophy, art, politics, religion, and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attempted, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognized by, and critical of, those of the majority. While maintaining a firm grip on the differences between success and failure, good and bad, shameful and honorable, these five entities have endeavored to remold our sense of what may rightfully be said to belong under those weighty and dichotomous headings.

“In doing so, they have helped to lend legitimacy to those who, in every generation, may be unable or unwilling to comply dutifully with the dominant notions of high status, but who may yet deserve to be categorized under something other than the brutal epithet of ‘loser’ or ‘nobody.’ They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way—and more than just the judge’s and the pharmacist’s way—of succeeding at life.”

Prime Passage: Arts Inc. : How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights by Bill Ivey

"Artists feed an important part of our expressive life, the world of ideas, sounds, and images that greet us every day. These individuals dedicate themselves to employing their talents, bringing insight and invention to life. Artistic vision makes a special contribution to the quality of our society. If citizens have a right to a broad engagement with artists across the spectrum of public life, what elements must be in place for artists to flourish in American society? I believe three things must be present. First, conditions must be conducive to originality; artists need to be able to find a way to enter and function in our complex arts system. Second, they need respect for their ideas and their approach to problem solving, and respect in the form of sufficient compensation to maintain a creative life. Third, artists, must be free to draw on—to synthesize—the work of contemporaries as well as creativity from the past. Respect is critical in securing the benefits of a vibrant arts community. If society sees artists as irresponsible eccentrics, if the arts system is shaped by big companies that value only the big-hit superstar, and if a writer, composer, filmmaker, or even classroom art teacher must pony up a stiff fee every time he or she needs to reference the work of others, then we are a long distance from fulfilling the right of every citizen to the imagination and understanding of the most talented among us."

Buy Arts, Inc here.

Prime Passage: Minghella on Minghella

The late great screenwriter/director Anthony Minghella in conversation on the topic of generating a screenplay:

"I play the piano a lot when I'm writing. I listen to music a lot. But just as you have to make peace with your voice, you have to make peace with your process as well. When I look at the madness of the way I write, it would be very easy to get enormously irritated. Even if I did one page a day, that's only 115 to 120 days of work. So, why does it take me a year and a half? What is going on with me? But I realize that the time spent reading the Book of Job for a day is not specious. It's because that's where my own particular journey requires me to be. Or when I'm spending two days examining the Smithsonian collection of early American folk music, it's not just indulgence. I know there's going to be a clue there somewhere that's going to feed the film. When I was writing The English Patient I walked into a record store because I wanted to listen to Hungarian music, and found a disc by a band called Musikaz. I put the disc on and the second or third track I listened to was called 'Szerelem, Szerelem' and that became the voice of the film for me. And I listened to that music repeatedly throughout. But I have to give myself permission to do that. There have been times when I haven't and I got very exasperated with myself and with everybody, and I didn't work well."

Prime Passage: The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner

From a letter written June 4, 1979:

"As for the book business, God knows. The Dalton Book kind of merchandizing demeans books and reduces them to merchandise like aluminum siding. But there are occasional bookstores -- there are three in this area, thank God -- that still like books, hire clerks who read and love books, and make every effort to get a customer the book he wants whether the merchandiser's computer says it's popular or not. So maybe there's hope. Tell me the struggle naught availeth, and I'll ask you what alternative to struggle you can think of. The big hard one to get around is why, in literature as in economics those that have, get, and those that have not get not. I could devise a fairer and more equitable system, but nobody has yet called me to the throne and given me the commission."

The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner, edited by Page Stegner, Shoemaker & Hoard 2007