Bruner Loeb forum


Jack Murrah, President of the Lyndhurst Foundation Speech at the Bruner/Loeb Forum Chattanooga April 23, 2004	BIO
REMARKS
Introduced by Ruth Holmberg, Publisher Emeritus, Chattanooga Times and Free Press
It is a truly exceptional honor to be introduced by Ruth Holmberg. Simply being with Ruth is to be blessed with better eyes. You see the world as more richly endowed, more exquisitely crafted than you do with your own eyes, and that is a real blessing.
It’s also a privilege to be asked to speak to a group focused on the intersection of art and the community. I have to be honest with you, though. When I was first asked to be here today and I saw the theme “arts transforming communities,” I had a slightly queasy feeling. That’s because over the past quarter century in Chattanooga, I’ve seen the arts struggle to occupy a place of any recognition or serious consideration in the life of the community. They are often an afterthought. For instance, we will create an economic development plan, and no one from the arts community will have been asked to be in the process, and when that omission is pointed out, we’ll rush in that the last minute and draft a disconnected section entitled “The Arts Means Business.” That’s not a way of affirming the arts, but of pretending to affirm them. We don’t provide a substantial arts curriculum in our public schools, but we do persuade the administration to put up a banner once a year saying “The Arts Are Fundamental.”
So naturally I wondered if “arts transforming communities” wouldn’t be a similar overstatement or hypocritical gesture. But I do know something about the Bruner Foundation and the Loeb Fellowship, and I know that these people are really serious about their work and would not use language in a casual nor careless way. Since you have taken this subject seriously, I decided that I would, too. I’ve pushed myself to think about the theme in new ways, and I’m going to see if I can push you a little further today. In fact, I’m wondering if, by the end of these comments, we might all be thinking about the reciprocal relationship between art and community. I wonder if we might not imagine communities transforming the arts as well as the arts transforming communities.
Let me begin this journey by acknowledging that there are, in our community as well as yours, many individuals who are passionately devoted to the arts. So when I started thinking about why it seems so hard for the arts to be regarded as integral to our society, the place I went to refresh my thinking was to the dictionary.
Two of my favorite words are community and integrity, and one day I heard the word integrity used twice in the same day, but in ways that seemed contradictory. Both uses were familiar, but the contrast between them had never occurred to me before that day. In the first instance, someone spoke to me about a respected individual in our city as a person of absolute integrity. Now, I thought of this person as a pompous, priggish, rigid individual, and I wouldn’t’ have chosen to use one of my favorite words to describe him, but still I understood the meaning of the statement and grudgingly acknowledged to myself this was a “correct” usage of the term. The man was being complimented for being pure and incorruptible.
Later that afternoon I picked up a magazine that used the word integrity to refer to the body of a car. I understood the article to be complimenting the fact the parts of the car held together well, so that it felt tight and strong on the road. This meaning, too, was familiar and frankly more appealing to me than the other one, though I admitted that this usage was probably less common. Both meanings carried a positive connotation, but they still seemed to me opposed in some manner. So into the dictionary I plunged, because mysteries are always encoded in the language. If you peel back the layers, the word integrity has the same roots as the word intact, which means, literally “untouched.” Not touched. And you peel a little more and begin to realize there are very strong emotions tied up with that notion, feelings of holiness or sanctity, so that when a thing is touched (that is, brought into “contact” with something else), it is “contaminated.”
But keep peeling, and you come to the word integration, meaning to make something whole by bringing the parts together. And finally you realize that the concept of integrity had a fundamental ambiguity encoded in the word from the very beginning. And to this very day, we understand integrity, as we understand “wholeness,” in two quite different ways. One way is rooted in notions of purity, all the parts the same, no foreign elements to corrupt the unity of the thing. The other way is rooted in integration of different parts into a functional or organic whole. In a sense they are like a spectrum from one side to another, shadings of meanings, and when you get from one side to the other you’ve actually crossed over to an opposite notion.
Both conceptions lead to a sense of “wholeness,” but my claim here today is that the idea of purity and perfection is the more prominent in our modern consciousness, and that has something to do with how we build our communities and how we value and use the arts.
In fact, the word community itself is afflicted with the same ambiguity as the word integrity. Peel away the layers of community and you quickly find the verb “commune”, which means “to share thoughts and feelings.” Think about that for a few seconds and the concept starts to fissure. One way of picturing community is a place where people have the same thoughts and feelings, where they have “shared values,” as we often hear said. The other way of picturing community is a place where people who are different from each other find it useful to communicate with each other—to share their divergent thoughts and feelings with each other.
When we use phrases like “the Latino community” or the “gay community,” we are picturing these as groups with something in common, groups with shared thoughts and feelings. This usage, of course, makes for some really superficial thinking about human beings. I find it particularly troublesome when I hear the expression “the arts community,” because, as you will soon see, I think this leads to thinking that fundamentally betrays the role of art in our lives and in our communities.
When you’re guided by the concept of community as a group whose members are alike in all the ways that matter—well, that’s when you build subdivisions, that’s when you build gated communities and public housing projects, and that’s when you create single use zoning laws. I hate them all.
When you’re thinking about community in the other sense, you build cities and towns, actual places that are complex and interrelated, where the different elements and functions are made to touch each other in ways that are complementary and complete. You build a nation that, at least at one time, profoundly identified itself with the phrase “E pluribus unum.”
For the remainder of my talk, I’m going to make a four-part argument as a balance to the prevailing pattern of thought that’s led to gated communities and public housing projects. You’ll have to judge the merits of those arguments for yourself—and judge for yourself the potential for reviving in America an interest in building cities and towns. In the end, I think your judgment will turn upon whether you believe that art has the power to occupy the center of our communities.
But first a brief tangent: these two sides of the coin of integrity and community may be contrary, but they are not incompatible. An integrated whole can allow for “sectors of sameness,” but only if the overarching design begins with integration as its basic principle. If you start with purity you don’t ever get to integration. Purity as a driving principle will fail to achieve wholeness in a complex world, because purity that comes into contact with anything else is no longer pure. You may produce a loose and uneasy assembly of isolated units, but not an overall unity.
To illustrate my point: I knew a woman in Birmingham, Alabama, where I grew up. This woman thought that mini-blinds in the window of a house were the ultimate sign the residents were trashy people. She believed decent people had blinds at least one and a half inches wide and were always backed by sheers. If a neighbor moved in and put up mini-blinds, this woman’s anxiety about property values and personal safety went up, too. By the time a second house showed mini-blinds, she was packing. I don’t mean carrying a gun, but she was loading boxes. And her poor husband moved her seven times, in a nearly continual flight from mini-blinds.
It’s a bit of a silly example, but if you don’t recognize some element of yourself in this story you’re probably not being entirely honest.
My first argument for integration is a social argument, and it goes like this: Purity is a precious and fragile concept, and if you are rooted in purity you live an anxious and fearful life. When we build communities that reflect a desire for purity, we are on a slippery slope, we are just about to be as nervous as that woman and her mini-blinds.
But far worse social consequences are hanging in the balance. Communities that are only comfortable if everyone is the same become societies in which racism easily takes root. Even fascism finds favorable conditions for growth in cultures that play too strongly off the virtue of purity.
My second argument has its foundation in science, and it is, in some ways, my favorite. I myself didn’t go far enough in the study of science in school, so I need writers like Lewis Thomas, God rest his soul, to help me understand. He was a wonderful writer who explained in elegant and accessible essays some of the most challenging and provocative concepts of 20th century science. He just bowled me over once when I read one of his essays about DNA. He said there are two important things to know about DNA, though most of us are taught only one of them in school. The property of DNA that everyone gets told about is its ability to reproduce itself. You are told DNA is a double helix made up of bonded pairs of amino acids, and that these bonds can let go in such a way that the double helix unzips into two separate spirals. Then each half attracts its complementary amino acids, all along the spiral, so that the end result is two double helixes, each one identical to the original.
What you’re supposed to understand from this characteristic of DNA is that it appears to be the chemical basis for the “drive to survive,” the reproductive urge in living things. So the tendency of DNA to replicate itself is of enormous consequence among living things, and it’s important to teach this principle.
But the second thing about DNA, and the one they don’t usually teach you in high school, is that DNA makes mistakes. It makes occasional errors in the replication process. Not often, and not regularly. Just random events in which pieces break off the chain, and broken pieces wind up sort of attaching themselves to other broken pieces, and new pieces come into being. What Lewis Thomas wants us to understand about this tendency of DNA to make mistakes is that it is responsible for the extraordinary variety of nature.
If DNA had been perfect, all it could’ve done is replicate itself. We could have a planet full of identical cells, each one endlessly reproducing identical copies of itself—all of nature just one vast photocopying machine. Random error, imperfection, accounts for the spectacular variety in living things.
And thus the unique qualities of DNA give rise to the capacity of nature both to replicate and to innovate—the ability both to conserve and to adapt. The first without the second is probably not sustainable because the world is a changing environment.
Because we have both, we find ourselves embedded in infinitely varied and interdependent ecological communities that have survived everything the universe has thrown at them for eons. Perhaps we should try to learn something from nature when we build our human communities. We should remember it’s the imperfection, not the purity, in nature’s chemistry that accounts for nature’s diversity and its adaptability. Perfection is a dead end.
Now I’d like to consider a psychological argument for integration rather than purity. I grew up in a Christian household, but I don’t profess that religion as an adult. One of the consequences of division within myself is that I am always in search of the those pieces of the Christian faith that got pushed out early on, much as I myself feel pushed out by the church today. I mean, there were people with authority and power who decided which books would be in the Bible and which would not. One of the great scholars of this early life of the Christian faith is a fantastic woman, Elaine Pagels. I hope some of you know of her work. One of her recent books is about the Gospel of Thomas, one that did not get included in the canon. There is a deeply moving and profound line in that Gospel, one I suspect wasn’t pleasing to the authorities, and it goes like this: Bring forth what is within you and what you bring forth will save you. Fail to bring forth what is within you and what you fail to bring forth will destroy you.
Now, I’m sure that I don’t fully understand that statement. But I think it has something to do with the fact that we are complex beings and we have to find ways to integrate multiple and sometimes unattractive elements of ourselves into a whole person. That is how we become strong and sound, not by suppression but by finding a way to bring forth and accommodate even those pieces of ourselves that we most wish weren’t there. What you fail to bring forth will destroy you. And if you’re interested in purity, you won’t bring forth.
Finally, let me make a cultural argument for integration. One of the fundamental conditions of living is that we have to live among others. If you’ve ever tried to raise a child, which thank God for the child’s sake I have not, you know one of the toughest things infants have to figure out is that they aren’t the whole universe. Initially it’s just “I” and what I want, and “you” are just an instrument for providing me what I want and need. There are a lot of tears shed and a lot of anger expressed in the process of accepting that there are other people who have wants and feelings too. I have to figure out how your wants and feelings come into play and get integrated into my world.
There’s something wondrous about the fact we are born dependent and self-absorbed, and have to be educated into interdependence and community. Some of us never seem to make it all the way, but surely progress in that direction is essential for both psychological maturity and social harmony. We’re complex individuals, and there are other equally complex individuals out there, and we have to live in one world with them.
So what does that have to do with culture? In fact, what does any of this have to do with art?
I once had a gifted teacher, one who was willing to be very honest with the class, and one day he told us this. “Many of you who are majoring in English and art and the humanities think you are better people than people who are majoring in business and science and other subjects. You think it is part of the deal—they make more money and live in better houses, but you live closer to the heart of God. But let me tell you, the sad truth is that you will find a lot of people reading Thomas Mann who are not very nice people. So we have to make more modest claims on behalf of our studies.”
He said that a book or a painting, if you have the right relationship with it, gives you access to another consciousness in the most powerful way possible. “What is required of you is that you quiet down your own hyperactive consciousness enough to let another one rise up in your imagination.
“Alas, what you’ll see among students of the humanities, and even among the faculty in this college, are some people who don’t treat books and art objects that way. Some of them parade themselves as if they are in command of books, as if they own and possess them, and you’re here just to borrow a little slice of their empire. That is a fraud, an act of arrogance that violates the fundamental principle of what the encounter with a book is supposed to be about—a humbling of yourself in order to come to an appreciative recognition of other consciousnesses, other beings in this world.”
He also told us the only person who could really teach you how to read a book or look at a painting or view a dance was the artist. He said you really cannot read a book, you can only re-read a book because the first trip through is just getting your bearings in that writer’s universe and learning that writer’s language. The best teachers will give you the courage to turn the pages the first time through, and then have a conversation with you as you go through it the second time.
Arts institutions can function as kindly teachers if they choose that role. They can serve as supporters and sustainers of citizens as they encounter challenging visions that may be hard for them to absorb. The best museums are places of learning, though there are some museums like those faculty members who own and command their possessions. You can tell which kind of place it is when you walk through it. The good ones awaken your desire to find more art, and the best communities are places that present more art, in more places than museums. In fact, one of the greatest places to encounter art is the public realm.
We’ve been blessed in this community for the last twenty years by an extraordinary talent, the urban designer Stroud Watson. When he arrived here, not many of us had any idea what the public realm was or why it mattered. Stroud has taught us the public realm is the most precious territory of all because it’s the place that welcomes you to be in the company of others, even strangers. The public realm has to be artfully designed if is to fulfill that function, but it must also be suffused with art itself. In such public spaces a reciprocal relationship between community and art can develop. That’s the vision that I hope you will carry away at the end of this talk.
I want you to think of the artfully designed and art-enriched public realm as the place where we have our strongest experience of community and as the place that reminds the arts and the artists what they are to the community. The public realm is where we acquire the fundamental disposition and the skill for living in community.
Let me end by circling back to the word integrity. You remember that one of the root words means to touch. I’m reminded of a line from one of the least read poets of our time, Edmund Spenser. His sixteenth century language is just too hard for most of us to penetrate, but it’s worth your time to make the effort. The Faerie Queen is a book wise beyond belief.
One of the characters is the Red Cross Knight, who is among the most foolish and admirable of people, a man committed to doing right, but who wanders into mistake after mistake after mistake. There is not a cave from which a lady’s cry of help may come that he will not enter—and inevitably find himself captive of a dragon. He never learns that dragons often pose as damsels in distress.
It’s his good fortune, though, to find a teacher, a wandering friar by the name of Fra Dubio--Brother Doubt! I’m not sure how many congregations today would be comfortable in sending forth as the main messenger of the faith a man named Brother Doubt. But here he is in a sixteenth century poem, trying to show the Red Cross Knight he has his empirical and spiritual lives confused. The result is he cannot truthfully know either the world or God. When his senses fail him, he doubts God. He has too much faith in his senses and not enough faith in God. He hasn’t developed the humility that arises from a deeply developed spiritual life, so his intellectual arrogance continually undermines his ability to do good in a world full of deceptions.
The line in The Faerie Queen I’m thinking of is this: “Entire affection hateth nicer hands.” (Now you know why no one reads this stuff. It’s pretty, but what does it mean?) Well, “entire affection” means whole love. The poet says that whole love is not fastidious, it is engaged.
And so we end here with a vision of wholeness that is not about being untouched. It is about the opposite. It says, “Please touch. To love, you must touch.” I like to think that this vision from the world of art is a vision of community, a vision of integrity. It tells us that whole love is what we might have in our hearts if we find the courage to put art at the center of community and community at the center of art, and make community and art one place.