From Confrontation to Retreat to Confrontation

            When I was seventeen-years-old I dated a headstrong (if not stubborn and melodramatic) young woman who would break your neck if you crossed her or any member of her tight-knit community of family and friends. I still talk to her on occasion and enjoy the fact that I am probably still a member of this community (tight-knit communities, in the minds and hearts of such women as the one I speak of, die hard). One weekend evening, during one of those crucial we-just-got-together-is-this-gonna-work-out high-school dating moments, my date and I were perusing the shelves of a local video rental store when I came across the film Life is Beautiful (I think it might’ve been the year’s Oscar-winner for Best Film, but don’t fact check me on that). I called my date over from the nearby stacks she was sifting through and offered my selection for her approval. She stopped cold, immediately began crying, and informed me that the actor who played the male lead in the film, and whose face was prominently displayed on the video’s front cover, closely resembled her uncle who had just passed away. We never, of course, watched the film and broke up soon after the incident (there is probably something of value in this anecdote about how the arts have influenced my relationships with others, but I’m choosing to overlook it in favor of a meditation on movie-titling, rap records, writing, and, in some sense, hope. Bear with me).

In recent years I have sometimes thought about Life is Beautiful (which I believe I at one time learned was titled to promote a sense of irony amongst its viewers), not so much as a film but as a declaration, almost a way of life. What does it mean when one says “life is beautiful”? What worldview or ideology would one have to subscribe to to make such an audacious claim? How could one have such a worldview or ideology in spite of all the ugliness that occurs daily?

For my metaphysical money, I prefer hip-hop artist Talib Kweli’s title-tracked, bold-voiced affirmation that “life is a beautiful struggle.” This notion pairs life’s potential elations with its unavoidable miseries, its natural health with its incurable illnesses, its sought-after victories with its crushing defeats. It is a notion tailor-made for artists and general-thinkers alike. I constantly and consciously write with it in the back and front of my mind. If I were the type of person that got tattoos across their belly (a la Tupac Shakur), it would be tattooed across my belly.

Writing is a perfect art form because it embraces, in a way that is tangible to its practitioners and consumers, both the beauty and struggle of human existence (and perhaps the existence of all living beings that come into contact with humans). It is easy for an average art-viewer to look at a painting and say to herself “that is beautiful” even if she on some level recognizes that the painter probably went through quite a struggle to create his/her piece. Visual arts often project only beauty or struggle to the average viewer who takes the act of seeing/viewing a piece as a natural (read: easy), rather than a critical (read: difficult), practice. Literature seems different.

Writing is work. Anyone who has seriously struggled over how to express a feeling or image or point of view with something as fragile as human language already knows this. Reading is work. Anyone who has read something and seriously struggled over how to make sense of it already knows this. (I would like to mention here that the creation and reception of visual arts are also work, very hard work indeed. Unfortunately, it seems many average contemporary viewers/witnesses of visual art experience it on a surface level that can easily be compared with entertainment rather than critical work. Such viewers, when approached by say, a painting they don’t understand immediately, often quickly move on to the next piece in hopes of finding the acquisition of beauty or struggle more easily. Paradoxically, in our visually-dominate American TV consumer-culture, it seems many people are more willing to put in emotional and intellectual work over a poem they don’t understand than an image they don’t understand. Perhaps because deciphering a poem traditionally offers more cultural capital than examining the intentions behind an image? (I guess by this I mean that one seems more cool/smart to one’s peers if he/she “gets” what a poet is trying to say than if he/she “gets” what McDonald’s is trying to rhetorically accomplish with their most recent Big Mac billboard advertisement)

Language’s inherent slipperiness make it the ideal medium to express and receive life’s illogically balanced truths. Even the words “beautiful” and “struggle” bring so many contrasting and conflicting notions and images to mind. I like that, while we’ve already discussed the work that writers and readers do, language itself seems to participate in a type of arduous meaning-making (or at least meaning-trying) work. Every participant in a written linguistic event (writer, reader, language) is working, struggling, to find something beautiful or tangible or meaningful/sustaining. Writing and reading use language to encourage their participants to hold on to something (anything) permanent in our world of impermanence; this is a beautiful struggle in itself, a lovely and complicated microcosm of the destruction/confusion-obsessed reality we nobly live in/through.