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.
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