I had just seen the largest living being on Earth, a sequoia tree, in Kings Canyon National Park when I passed a very young boy and his parents. He couldn't have been more than four or five years old. Suddenly the boy just began talking to me:
"We've got to find the mystery house. It has two yellow triangles for ears, and a long tail."
His mom gave me an apologetic shrug, but I didn't mind. I may as well have been meeting a younger version of myself. As they walked past, he kept talking about whatever it was that he was imagining, and then he turned back to me and said:
"Don't worry, we're going to figure this thing out."
___________________________________
One of the best parts of running a class is that I can make people from all over the world get to know each other and understand each other. It is my opinion that this somehow reduces fear and increases comfort and happiness in the world. It also moves innovation and imagination.
The most effective activity I have come up with to this effect is simply making the students sit down with each other, face to face, and have conversations. At least once a week, and sometimes two or three times a week, we set aside 30 minutes of class time, move the desks around, and talk about anything for thirty minutes. I try to make sure that everyone has a new partner each time. Beyond that, they can talk about anything they want. The first few times I wrote topics and leading questions on the board to get things going. Afterward I would go around the room and have them each report on something they had learned from their partner. When you've got students from Japan, Bolivia, China, Turkmenistan, Siberia, France, Venezuela, Tajikistan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Tunisia and Brazil, it's amazing what happens when you mix them all together and make them share and learn.
We started that exercise about a month ago. Now most of the students are confident enough to the point where they get carried away in conversation, so there's little prompting needed from me.
Since everyone was getting so familiar with the approach and most of them have talked to each other by now, I decided to switch it up a little today. I made them line up all of the desks face to face but in a long row, side by side. Then I told them that instead of one half hour conversation with one partner, they would each be having five different six minute conversations with a new partner each time. One row would stay in place, and the opposite row would move down one seat after each conversation. On top of that, I would be giving them a topic to discuss, as opposed to having a free chat.
Recently I've been brushing up on some of my favorite inspirational sources to help me get energized with my writing project and my life ambitions as a whole. Back in December I made up this packet of quotes with the themes of creative expression, innovation and imagination. I like making packets of quotes when I'm on journeys, because they help me stay focused and inspired, especially when there aren't many like-minded people around.
Thus, it wasn't hard to find topics to ignite conversations. I began with everyone's favorite United States president, Abraham Lincoln. When I was teaching English in Japan I decided that I wanted to move across the United States. But not only that, I wanted to do it in the greatest, most adventurous and best poetic fashion possible. Since I'd been through the south before, I was going north this time. And that meant I'd be going by Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. When I got there I wanted to see the stories of the most influential country in the world in the faces of those four great men.
I began by ordering a book on George Washington, and followed that up with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and two books on Theodore Roosevelt. I also sneaked in Benjamin Franklin between Washington and Jefferson. Although he wasn't president, as my friend Jim put it, "He's that guy that everyone assumes was the president but was actually just incredibly awesome and influential in creating America." I ordered the books about Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but my parents gave me the Lincoln book for Christmas. Because they were aware of my dreams, they avoided all of the ones about his political maneuvering and gave me one called Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan. It turned out that he wasn't just a great speech writer and orator, he was also obsessed with the importance of writing. He really thought it was the most important invention of all humankind.
"All nature--the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual,--is a mine... Now, it was destined work of Adam's race to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine." To do that, mankind first needed to develop "the art of invention," based on "the habit of observation and reflection," and then the key tools, speech and writing, by which to communicate and exchange ideas." (Kaplan 289)
He even thought it was more important than speech, even though the greatness of his reputation is usually credited to his speeches. Since I'm always trying to impress upon my students the importance of being able to express their thoughts through symbols on a page or a screen if they want to effectively use this language they are spending so much time and money learning, I read them the following quote after making sure they knew who Lincoln was:
Writing--the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye--is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it--great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions... Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that, to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it." (Lincoln 291)
Naturally I simplified the speech for the students, and then slowed it down and clarified it even more when they all furrowed their brows and laughed at how long it was. Then I told them that all I wanted them to discuss was how the invention of writing was useful in helping other inventions to exist. Afterward they all shared their results.
After six minutes we switched to the next quote, which came from Albert Einstein, the patron saint of science. His biography by Walter Isaacson was one of the last books I read as a resident in New York City. This was somewhat of a personal milestone for me after three years of intense study and mining of the world's knowledge and wisdom treasures in an attempt to inform and fuel my own imagination as a writer, storyteller and liver of life. I chose a much simpler quote from him:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
They discussed for five minutes, and were much happier with the brevity of Einstein. One of the students hit the nail on the head by saying that knowledge has a limit but imagination is unlimited. The second part of that quote is actually:
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
However, others did point out that if you don't have any knowledge, there is very little to build your imagination upon. Einstein would have to agree with that. After all, he didn't pull his general relativity theory out of thin air. He still went to high school and college and read philosophers and all of that.
Our next inspiration was also revealed to me through a biography written by Walter Isaacson. This time it was the biography of Benjamin Franklin. When I asked the students who he was, one guy immediately said he was the president, and I said no. When everyone gave me a blank stare, I said, "Electricity! He's the reason you can use electricity! He figured out how to harness lightning from the sky with a metal rod. He also did a lot of other things, but that's the most important one." The guy who thought he was president then added that he was on the hundred dollar bill, which was correct.
I have a special relationship with Ben Franklin. As young as age seven I was always teased--albeit somewhat respectfully--for having the same name as the man that everyone knew was really important and smart because he "invented electricity" and all that other stuff. "Your name is Ben? You mean Benjamin Franklin?" "What's up, Ben Franklin?" Stuff like that. I also loved this cartoon movie as a kid called Ben & Me. The premise was that all of Ben's discoveries, from capturing lightning, to creating bifocal glasses, to assisting with the Declaration of Independence (he added the words "self-evident" to the famous line "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"), to the constitutional convention, were really the result of a friendship he had with a small mouse who gave him his ideas and always hid out in his pocket wherever he went.
When I was learning about the history of my country as much as possible through the stories of the men who most heavily influenced its character, form and destiny, it only made sense that I should finally read up on the great man. It was the first book I read when I returned to Japan in 2012 after a two week vacation in the United States, having technically finished George Washington seconds before touching down at Narita Airport in Tokyo. Since I was planning my second big wilderness journey across America, you can imagine my joy in reading these lines in the first chapter, which I paraphrased for the class:
Franklin's favorite books were about voyages, spiritual as well as terrestrial, and the most notable of these was about both: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the sage of a tenacious quest by a man named Christian to reach the Celestial City...
A central theme of Bunyan's book was contained in its title: progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based upon a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian's famous opening phrase sets the tone: "As I walked through the wilderness of this world..." Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and communities, to triumph over obstacles.
...another Franklin favorite was Plutarch's Lives, which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch's heroes, like Bunyan's Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of humanity. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors. (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 5)
Obviously I didn't read the entire passage to the class, but I had them focus on the idea of progress, and how we move forward by "conquering adversity". That line raised some hands, so I simplified it to "defeating challenges."
After Franklin I went for the Isaacson biography trifecta: Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs started staring at me so crazily from book shelves wherever I went and I saw it was another Isaacson, I understood the theme: three innovative minds who pushed humanity forward in very different ways. Although I wasn't exactly sure how much Jobs personally measured up to the other two with his contributions, his story was completely intertwined with the personal computer revolution, the iPod, tablets, digital media and computer animation. Ironically, unlike Franklin or Einstein, he didn't actually invent or create anything. He just knew how to put himself in the middle of it by managing, influencing and bullying the right people to make his vision a reality. The only Apple product I actually own is an iPod, and I had a Dell DJ before that, so I don't really give Jobs any credit for creating my world, but I was still fascinated to read the story of the personal computer revolution as my first book when I arrived back in America in April 2012. After all, the most influential, successful, respected and famous CEO in America began his journey as a pot smoking, sandal wearing, LSD loving, zen meditating and India wandering hippie geek. Bill Gates might have more money, but Steve Jobs cornered the "cool" market, and left the world not only owning and running the majority of the most creative and innovative company in the world, but also Disney as well. This same man said that doing LSD was one of the two or three most important experiences of his life, and I would have to agree with that.
"I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” (Steve Jobs 41)
Please don't take that as a blanket endorsement of LSD from me. It's not for everyone. As the rambunctious writer Hunter Thompson said, "Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when *it
I didn't get into all of that with the students though. I simply asked them who Steve Jobs was, and when a few said, "Apple," I said, "He's the reason you guys can't pay attention in class!" remarking on the unfortunate widespread gadget addiction that is ironically destroying focused human attention and communication while simultaneously expanding it. Then I read them the following about when they were creating personal computers in the 1980s:
"Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater."
"We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'" (Steve Jobs 123)
Then I followed it up with a quote from Jobs about when they made the iPod, my favorite invention in the world. Lincoln was right about writing, but I wouldn't want to live in a world without music:
"We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much." (Steve Jobs 407)
They discussed for five minutes because we were running short on time, and then moved forward to the final brilliant inspiration of the day: poet and storyteller Maya Angelou. She wrote a series of autobiographies, poetry books and essays that were heartfelt, eloquent and insightful enough to win her over thirty honorary degrees, the Lincoln Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Angelou has so many good quotes that for the final round of conversations I gave each partner pair a different quote. We had very low attendance today (they're allowed to skip one class out of four each week, and we're having a picnic in the park on Thursday, so today seemed like as good a day to skip as any), and several students had to leave early for doctor's appointments. So there were only five pairs. Thus, the following five quotes from Ms. Angelou:
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
“Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
“I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
We had only a minute to discuss those quotes because class was almost over, so the students didn't really have enough time to digest everything. I had to explain the butterfly-metamorphosis to them. The pair that got the Christmas lights quote understood it, and likened it to traveling: if you travel with someone you get a much better idea of how they handle life's challenges. I ended class by explaining the thrive quote, and then told them to all go thrive.
After class I read through some of the quotes, and I read over the Steve Jobs quotes again. One of them was the first draft of a slogan from an ad campaign:
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. (Steve Jobs 329)
Then it describes the faces of famous people they used for the ad campaign:
Most were Jobs's personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way (Steve Jobs 330) (Midnight in a Perfect World).
You might wonder about that last parenthetical. It's the name of one of my favorite DJ Shadow songs. When I was sampling from the books after I read them, I was usually listening to music, and if a song came on with interesting timing, I wrote it down as soon as it came on so I could record the "quality of the moment", as the I Ching would say. I got into DJ Shadow during my first year in college. He created the first album totally composed of sampled music from other artists by combining them all in a new way to create amazing beats and spooky beautiful music, especially that song. However, it wasn't until a few months ago that I finally looked up the lyrics and realized that the opening lines are, "I don't love you, walking the garden to my heart." It crushed me. All of this time I had been totally in love with this song, making it an integral part of my myth, but the whole time the world, or my love, was telling me that she didn't love me as I walked the garden to her heart.
So I began to wonder why. What was it about the song? Was it my shadow that made me unlovable? Or perhaps the muse didn't approve of me sampling great artists in my own work. She thought I should just be saying it my way instead. Express my own Chung Fu; tell my own inner truth. But if I experienced these truly and they're part of the story, then why not share them with others? Maybe someone who didn't know about them might get interested and return to the original source. I didn't start listening to Ahmad Jamal until I found out that my favorite hip-hop piano notes from Jay-Z's "Feelin It" were actually imagined and played by a jazz legend, not some hip-hop producer. I'm very glad that I did. Ahmad Jamal is beyond amazing. I finally got to see him live last week, and it was truly a wonder to behold.
This whole subject makes me think of Wu-Tang mastermind RZA's rant in Wu-Tang Forever before the song Triumph. I have changed the words which resemble at their root an incredibly demeaning name for people who were enslaved by the United States of America. See if you can spot the difference. All other language, however rough, is reported verbatim. I changed the word because some people just hate hearing or reading it at all. My writing professor and I used to talk about this a lot, because he used to teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and had to deal with the nonsense of it being banned because people didn't want to read that word while they were reading a book about a slave during the slavery era. He taught the first African-American literature course at my school, and said the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. was the best speech ever given. But he couldn't stand that people wanted to forget that that word even existed, as some soft attempt to simply step around the past which is present in how the world is today. There's a reason guys like Wu-Tang grew up around a survive-at-all-costs gangster mentality, and there's a reason they use that word with each other. Anyway, the RZA had this to say:
Ya know what I'm sayin? We come out with a style
Now everybody wanna imitate our style and all you producers out there
Ya know what I'm sayin? It's all good to show love to a [care bear]
But stop biting my shit, ya kno what I'm sayin?
Come from your own heart with this
And all y'all MC's, stop biting from my [care bears]
We told y'all [care bears] on the fucking Cuban Linx album
Don't bite our shit, y'all [care bears] keep biting
Basically he's complaining about people stealing his style and ripping off his group's original creativity. I feel kind of bad for sampling Striving For Perfection--the tremendous inspirational blood-pumping opening to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (the album he is referring to)--in two of my blogs. He's right. I should come up with my own pep talks, and I do, and will continue to in my books. I think it's fair on a blog, because I'm simply "showing love" to Wu-Tang, and Einstein, Jobs, Franklin, Lincoln, Angelou and everyone else I've ever quoted and cited, by "sampling" them on my free weblog. I don't do this to show off I know about them. Anybody can know about them if they're curious enough. I do it because it threads relevantly through the story, and it helps spread their influence to people who might read me but not necessarily know about them. Although obviously many more people know about them anyway (for now). I'm just putting the world together in a new way to show you how beautifully connected and related the world is to itself.
Plus I don't think he really cares about sampling. And if he does have a problem, well, the supreme irony/hypocrisy is that his entire production repertoire, along with the success of the entire hip-hop genre, is founded upon sampling: he takes already existing music from other artists and reorganizes it to make a new beat and song so that others can rap over it. Every great hip-hop producer does it. The difference between Wu-Tang and Shadow is that rappers add original raps over the newly combined sampled beats. Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World has one unique contribution from him: four truly sublime piano notes, which make the whole song for me, as simple as it is. It's about the atmosphere. Stargaze to that song while spinning in a canoe and you'll be glad he did what he had to do to bring this "organized sound" to you.
This all reminds me of the smile scar on my arm and the Phish quote: "shouldn't have took more than you gave." I've been writing papers my whole life, and it's always okay to quote others so long as you don't exceed the word maximum for a sample (500), and most of all, that your original voice and ideas are what carry the piece and make your unique contribution worthwhile.
So what do I think about writing, progress through conquering adversity with wilderness voyage style, imagining in the name of beauty and the desire to see the highest quality exist, and successfully thriving as I courageously metamorphose amidst the tangled Christmas tree lights?
Well, beyond the words, I'm living all of it. And as far as beautiful progress is related to the issues of the day and the issues of all time, there is one spiritual and terrestrial voyage that intrigues and excites me above all:
Conquering fear with journeys through poetic imagination. That is truly our salvation, whichever our nation.
If she doesn't love me as I walk the garden to her heart with such a style, then she's not the one worth the moonlight mile. That being said, I do not fear such a trial, because I know in my heart that I do everything so we will smile.
Works Cited:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York, Simon & Schuster: 2011.
Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York, Simon & Schuster: 2003.
Kaplan, Fred. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. New York, Harper Collins Publishers: 2008.
"We've got to find the mystery house. It has two yellow triangles for ears, and a long tail."
His mom gave me an apologetic shrug, but I didn't mind. I may as well have been meeting a younger version of myself. As they walked past, he kept talking about whatever it was that he was imagining, and then he turned back to me and said:
"Don't worry, we're going to figure this thing out."
___________________________________
One of the best parts of running a class is that I can make people from all over the world get to know each other and understand each other. It is my opinion that this somehow reduces fear and increases comfort and happiness in the world. It also moves innovation and imagination.
The most effective activity I have come up with to this effect is simply making the students sit down with each other, face to face, and have conversations. At least once a week, and sometimes two or three times a week, we set aside 30 minutes of class time, move the desks around, and talk about anything for thirty minutes. I try to make sure that everyone has a new partner each time. Beyond that, they can talk about anything they want. The first few times I wrote topics and leading questions on the board to get things going. Afterward I would go around the room and have them each report on something they had learned from their partner. When you've got students from Japan, Bolivia, China, Turkmenistan, Siberia, France, Venezuela, Tajikistan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Thailand, Tunisia and Brazil, it's amazing what happens when you mix them all together and make them share and learn.
We started that exercise about a month ago. Now most of the students are confident enough to the point where they get carried away in conversation, so there's little prompting needed from me.
Since everyone was getting so familiar with the approach and most of them have talked to each other by now, I decided to switch it up a little today. I made them line up all of the desks face to face but in a long row, side by side. Then I told them that instead of one half hour conversation with one partner, they would each be having five different six minute conversations with a new partner each time. One row would stay in place, and the opposite row would move down one seat after each conversation. On top of that, I would be giving them a topic to discuss, as opposed to having a free chat.
Recently I've been brushing up on some of my favorite inspirational sources to help me get energized with my writing project and my life ambitions as a whole. Back in December I made up this packet of quotes with the themes of creative expression, innovation and imagination. I like making packets of quotes when I'm on journeys, because they help me stay focused and inspired, especially when there aren't many like-minded people around.
Thus, it wasn't hard to find topics to ignite conversations. I began with everyone's favorite United States president, Abraham Lincoln. When I was teaching English in Japan I decided that I wanted to move across the United States. But not only that, I wanted to do it in the greatest, most adventurous and best poetic fashion possible. Since I'd been through the south before, I was going north this time. And that meant I'd be going by Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. When I got there I wanted to see the stories of the most influential country in the world in the faces of those four great men.
I began by ordering a book on George Washington, and followed that up with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and two books on Theodore Roosevelt. I also sneaked in Benjamin Franklin between Washington and Jefferson. Although he wasn't president, as my friend Jim put it, "He's that guy that everyone assumes was the president but was actually just incredibly awesome and influential in creating America." I ordered the books about Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, but my parents gave me the Lincoln book for Christmas. Because they were aware of my dreams, they avoided all of the ones about his political maneuvering and gave me one called Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer by Fred Kaplan. It turned out that he wasn't just a great speech writer and orator, he was also obsessed with the importance of writing. He really thought it was the most important invention of all humankind.
"All nature--the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual,--is a mine... Now, it was destined work of Adam's race to develop, by discoveries, inventions, and improvements, the hidden treasures of this mine." To do that, mankind first needed to develop "the art of invention," based on "the habit of observation and reflection," and then the key tools, speech and writing, by which to communicate and exchange ideas." (Kaplan 289)
He even thought it was more important than speech, even though the greatness of his reputation is usually credited to his speeches. Since I'm always trying to impress upon my students the importance of being able to express their thoughts through symbols on a page or a screen if they want to effectively use this language they are spending so much time and money learning, I read them the following quote after making sure they knew who Lincoln was:
Writing--the art of communicating thoughts to the mind, through the eye--is the great invention of the world. Great in the astonishing range of analysis and combination which necessarily underlies the most crude and general conception of it--great, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space; and great, not only in its direct benefits, but greatest help, to all other inventions... Its utility may be conceived, by the reflection, that, to it we owe everything which distinguishes us from savages. Take it from us, and the Bible, all history, all science, all government, all commerce, and nearly all social intercourse go with it." (Lincoln 291)
Naturally I simplified the speech for the students, and then slowed it down and clarified it even more when they all furrowed their brows and laughed at how long it was. Then I told them that all I wanted them to discuss was how the invention of writing was useful in helping other inventions to exist. Afterward they all shared their results.
After six minutes we switched to the next quote, which came from Albert Einstein, the patron saint of science. His biography by Walter Isaacson was one of the last books I read as a resident in New York City. This was somewhat of a personal milestone for me after three years of intense study and mining of the world's knowledge and wisdom treasures in an attempt to inform and fuel my own imagination as a writer, storyteller and liver of life. I chose a much simpler quote from him:
Imagination is more important than knowledge.
They discussed for five minutes, and were much happier with the brevity of Einstein. One of the students hit the nail on the head by saying that knowledge has a limit but imagination is unlimited. The second part of that quote is actually:
Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
However, others did point out that if you don't have any knowledge, there is very little to build your imagination upon. Einstein would have to agree with that. After all, he didn't pull his general relativity theory out of thin air. He still went to high school and college and read philosophers and all of that.
Our next inspiration was also revealed to me through a biography written by Walter Isaacson. This time it was the biography of Benjamin Franklin. When I asked the students who he was, one guy immediately said he was the president, and I said no. When everyone gave me a blank stare, I said, "Electricity! He's the reason you can use electricity! He figured out how to harness lightning from the sky with a metal rod. He also did a lot of other things, but that's the most important one." The guy who thought he was president then added that he was on the hundred dollar bill, which was correct.
I have a special relationship with Ben Franklin. As young as age seven I was always teased--albeit somewhat respectfully--for having the same name as the man that everyone knew was really important and smart because he "invented electricity" and all that other stuff. "Your name is Ben? You mean Benjamin Franklin?" "What's up, Ben Franklin?" Stuff like that. I also loved this cartoon movie as a kid called Ben & Me. The premise was that all of Ben's discoveries, from capturing lightning, to creating bifocal glasses, to assisting with the Declaration of Independence (he added the words "self-evident" to the famous line "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"), to the constitutional convention, were really the result of a friendship he had with a small mouse who gave him his ideas and always hid out in his pocket wherever he went.
When I was learning about the history of my country as much as possible through the stories of the men who most heavily influenced its character, form and destiny, it only made sense that I should finally read up on the great man. It was the first book I read when I returned to Japan in 2012 after a two week vacation in the United States, having technically finished George Washington seconds before touching down at Narita Airport in Tokyo. Since I was planning my second big wilderness journey across America, you can imagine my joy in reading these lines in the first chapter, which I paraphrased for the class:
Franklin's favorite books were about voyages, spiritual as well as terrestrial, and the most notable of these was about both: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, the sage of a tenacious quest by a man named Christian to reach the Celestial City...
A central theme of Bunyan's book was contained in its title: progress, the concept that individuals, and humanity in general, move forward and improve based upon a steady increase of knowledge and the wisdom that comes from conquering adversity. Christian's famous opening phrase sets the tone: "As I walked through the wilderness of this world..." Even for the faithful, this progress was not solely the handiwork of the Lord but also the result of a human struggle, by individuals and communities, to triumph over obstacles.
...another Franklin favorite was Plutarch's Lives, which is also based on the premise that individual endeavor can change the course of history for the better. Plutarch's heroes, like Bunyan's Christian, are honorable men who believe that their personal strivings are intertwined with the progress of humanity. History is a tale, Franklin came to believe, not of immutable forces but of human endeavors. (Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, 5)
Obviously I didn't read the entire passage to the class, but I had them focus on the idea of progress, and how we move forward by "conquering adversity". That line raised some hands, so I simplified it to "defeating challenges."
After Franklin I went for the Isaacson biography trifecta: Steve Jobs. When Steve Jobs started staring at me so crazily from book shelves wherever I went and I saw it was another Isaacson, I understood the theme: three innovative minds who pushed humanity forward in very different ways. Although I wasn't exactly sure how much Jobs personally measured up to the other two with his contributions, his story was completely intertwined with the personal computer revolution, the iPod, tablets, digital media and computer animation. Ironically, unlike Franklin or Einstein, he didn't actually invent or create anything. He just knew how to put himself in the middle of it by managing, influencing and bullying the right people to make his vision a reality. The only Apple product I actually own is an iPod, and I had a Dell DJ before that, so I don't really give Jobs any credit for creating my world, but I was still fascinated to read the story of the personal computer revolution as my first book when I arrived back in America in April 2012. After all, the most influential, successful, respected and famous CEO in America began his journey as a pot smoking, sandal wearing, LSD loving, zen meditating and India wandering hippie geek. Bill Gates might have more money, but Steve Jobs cornered the "cool" market, and left the world not only owning and running the majority of the most creative and innovative company in the world, but also Disney as well. This same man said that doing LSD was one of the two or three most important experiences of his life, and I would have to agree with that.
"I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.” (Steve Jobs 41)
Please don't take that as a blanket endorsement of LSD from me. It's not for everyone. As the rambunctious writer Hunter Thompson said, "Jesus man! You don't look for acid! Acid finds you when *it
Coming back to America was, for me,
much more of a cultural shock than going to India. The people in the Indian countryside don’t
use their intellect like we do, they use their intuition instead, and their
intuition is far more developed than in the rest of the world. Intuition is a very powerful thing, more
powerful than intellect, in my opinion.
That’s had a big impact on my work. (Steve Jobs 48)
Western
rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is
the great achievement of Western civilization.
In the villages of India, they never learned it. They learned something else, which is in some
ways just as valuable but in other ways is not.
That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom. (Steve Jobs 49)
Anyway, it turns out that he was also aware that Isaacson had already written about Franklin and Einstein, and he actually brought it up to Isaacson that he naturally saw himself as the third installment in the trio, something that Isaacson thought was funny but eventually found worthy of pursuit.
I didn't get into all of that with the students though. I simply asked them who Steve Jobs was, and when a few said, "Apple," I said, "He's the reason you guys can't pay attention in class!" remarking on the unfortunate widespread gadget addiction that is ironically destroying focused human attention and communication while simultaneously expanding it. Then I read them the following about when they were creating personal computers in the 1980s:
"Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater."
"We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'" (Steve Jobs 123)
Then I followed it up with a quote from Jobs about when they made the iPod, my favorite invention in the world. Lincoln was right about writing, but I wouldn't want to live in a world without music:
"We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out. If you don't love something, you're not going to go the extra mile, work the extra weekend, challenge the status quo as much." (Steve Jobs 407)
They discussed for five minutes because we were running short on time, and then moved forward to the final brilliant inspiration of the day: poet and storyteller Maya Angelou. She wrote a series of autobiographies, poetry books and essays that were heartfelt, eloquent and insightful enough to win her over thirty honorary degrees, the Lincoln Medal and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Angelou has so many good quotes that for the final round of conversations I gave each partner pair a different quote. We had very low attendance today (they're allowed to skip one class out of four each week, and we're having a picnic in the park on Thursday, so today seemed like as good a day to skip as any), and several students had to leave early for doctor's appointments. So there were only five pairs. Thus, the following five quotes from Ms. Angelou:
“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.”
“Courage: the most important of all the virtues because without courage, you can't practice any other virtue consistently.”
“I've learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way (s)he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”
“My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
We had only a minute to discuss those quotes because class was almost over, so the students didn't really have enough time to digest everything. I had to explain the butterfly-metamorphosis to them. The pair that got the Christmas lights quote understood it, and likened it to traveling: if you travel with someone you get a much better idea of how they handle life's challenges. I ended class by explaining the thrive quote, and then told them to all go thrive.
After class I read through some of the quotes, and I read over the Steve Jobs quotes again. One of them was the first draft of a slogan from an ad campaign:
Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. (Steve Jobs 329)
Then it describes the faces of famous people they used for the ad campaign:
Most were Jobs's personal heroes. They tended to be creative people who had taken risks, defied failure, and bet their career on doing things in a different way (Steve Jobs 330) (Midnight in a Perfect World).
You might wonder about that last parenthetical. It's the name of one of my favorite DJ Shadow songs. When I was sampling from the books after I read them, I was usually listening to music, and if a song came on with interesting timing, I wrote it down as soon as it came on so I could record the "quality of the moment", as the I Ching would say. I got into DJ Shadow during my first year in college. He created the first album totally composed of sampled music from other artists by combining them all in a new way to create amazing beats and spooky beautiful music, especially that song. However, it wasn't until a few months ago that I finally looked up the lyrics and realized that the opening lines are, "I don't love you, walking the garden to my heart." It crushed me. All of this time I had been totally in love with this song, making it an integral part of my myth, but the whole time the world, or my love, was telling me that she didn't love me as I walked the garden to her heart.
So I began to wonder why. What was it about the song? Was it my shadow that made me unlovable? Or perhaps the muse didn't approve of me sampling great artists in my own work. She thought I should just be saying it my way instead. Express my own Chung Fu; tell my own inner truth. But if I experienced these truly and they're part of the story, then why not share them with others? Maybe someone who didn't know about them might get interested and return to the original source. I didn't start listening to Ahmad Jamal until I found out that my favorite hip-hop piano notes from Jay-Z's "Feelin It" were actually imagined and played by a jazz legend, not some hip-hop producer. I'm very glad that I did. Ahmad Jamal is beyond amazing. I finally got to see him live last week, and it was truly a wonder to behold.
This whole subject makes me think of Wu-Tang mastermind RZA's rant in Wu-Tang Forever before the song Triumph. I have changed the words which resemble at their root an incredibly demeaning name for people who were enslaved by the United States of America. See if you can spot the difference. All other language, however rough, is reported verbatim. I changed the word because some people just hate hearing or reading it at all. My writing professor and I used to talk about this a lot, because he used to teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and had to deal with the nonsense of it being banned because people didn't want to read that word while they were reading a book about a slave during the slavery era. He taught the first African-American literature course at my school, and said the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Jr. was the best speech ever given. But he couldn't stand that people wanted to forget that that word even existed, as some soft attempt to simply step around the past which is present in how the world is today. There's a reason guys like Wu-Tang grew up around a survive-at-all-costs gangster mentality, and there's a reason they use that word with each other. Anyway, the RZA had this to say:
Ya know what I'm sayin? We come out with a style
Now everybody wanna imitate our style and all you producers out there
Ya know what I'm sayin? It's all good to show love to a [care bear]
But stop biting my shit, ya kno what I'm sayin?
Come from your own heart with this
And all y'all MC's, stop biting from my [care bears]
We told y'all [care bears] on the fucking Cuban Linx album
Don't bite our shit, y'all [care bears] keep biting
Basically he's complaining about people stealing his style and ripping off his group's original creativity. I feel kind of bad for sampling Striving For Perfection--the tremendous inspirational blood-pumping opening to Only Built 4 Cuban Linx (the album he is referring to)--in two of my blogs. He's right. I should come up with my own pep talks, and I do, and will continue to in my books. I think it's fair on a blog, because I'm simply "showing love" to Wu-Tang, and Einstein, Jobs, Franklin, Lincoln, Angelou and everyone else I've ever quoted and cited, by "sampling" them on my free weblog. I don't do this to show off I know about them. Anybody can know about them if they're curious enough. I do it because it threads relevantly through the story, and it helps spread their influence to people who might read me but not necessarily know about them. Although obviously many more people know about them anyway (for now). I'm just putting the world together in a new way to show you how beautifully connected and related the world is to itself.
Plus I don't think he really cares about sampling. And if he does have a problem, well, the supreme irony/hypocrisy is that his entire production repertoire, along with the success of the entire hip-hop genre, is founded upon sampling: he takes already existing music from other artists and reorganizes it to make a new beat and song so that others can rap over it. Every great hip-hop producer does it. The difference between Wu-Tang and Shadow is that rappers add original raps over the newly combined sampled beats. Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World has one unique contribution from him: four truly sublime piano notes, which make the whole song for me, as simple as it is. It's about the atmosphere. Stargaze to that song while spinning in a canoe and you'll be glad he did what he had to do to bring this "organized sound" to you.
This all reminds me of the smile scar on my arm and the Phish quote: "shouldn't have took more than you gave." I've been writing papers my whole life, and it's always okay to quote others so long as you don't exceed the word maximum for a sample (500), and most of all, that your original voice and ideas are what carry the piece and make your unique contribution worthwhile.
So what do I think about writing, progress through conquering adversity with wilderness voyage style, imagining in the name of beauty and the desire to see the highest quality exist, and successfully thriving as I courageously metamorphose amidst the tangled Christmas tree lights?
Well, beyond the words, I'm living all of it. And as far as beautiful progress is related to the issues of the day and the issues of all time, there is one spiritual and terrestrial voyage that intrigues and excites me above all:
Conquering fear with journeys through poetic imagination. That is truly our salvation, whichever our nation.
If she doesn't love me as I walk the garden to her heart with such a style, then she's not the one worth the moonlight mile. That being said, I do not fear such a trial, because I know in my heart that I do everything so we will smile.
Works Cited:
Isaacson, Walter. Steve Jobs. New York, Simon & Schuster: 2011.
Isaacson, Walter. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. New York, Simon & Schuster: 2003.
Kaplan, Fred. Lincoln: The Biography of a Writer. New York, Harper Collins Publishers: 2008.
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