The only thing I remember from Thomas Pynchon's novel, The Crying of Lot 49 is a definition of miracle as the penetration of one world into another.
A column I read by George Will, in which he actually counted how many times Michele O'Bama used I in her remarks at the Nobel ceremony, penetrated my tour of the Visionary Art Museum last week in Baltimore.
Also called "outsider art" or "intuitive art," visionary art is made by people, unlike the various royal Georges, whose worlds rarely penetrate the worlds which entitle privileged people the affectation of what I call third-person faux-neutral.
In the prim voice of the well-educated, one feigns distance, one takes off points for the use of first person, one feels well-bred embarrassment for she who dares center herself in public. Geez, George (et. al.), don't you think we know who the one is behind the pronoun!!!? Who else can one be but who he is---looking out on the world from a particular set of experiences, with all the riches and the limitations of that. Here's the dirty little secret of third person faux-neutral: what you're really saying is that the set of experiences you bring to the world is not particular but universal. This unacknowledged assumption is pure pretense, faux neutrality. You don't, despite linguistic posing, see issues from any more heroic-self-immolating neutrality than any of the rest of us, so stop already with counting I's and acting as if your pronouns are better than the rest of ours.
In fact why not just say I and mean the wonderful, partial, joyful, also-imperfect person YOU, George, are--- I won't kill you! In fact, it might just enliven you as it does so many of us, SICK of being defined---who begin to define, starting with ourselves.
A visit to the Visionary Art Museum is a great place to start. I know, I know, just walk quickly past the graffitied school bus, and shield your eyes lest you see anything too offensive to your above-reproach sensibilities, I'll hold you hand, ok, now see:
a luminous curve of applewood, shaped by an anonymous patient who showed little interest in anything before he began to carving the figure with the concave, tubercular chest.
the paint and mixed media collages of Jamaican Athlone Clark who turned his back on an education he said, 'had prepared him for a life in which he would never feel at home,' following instead his intuition toward the wisdom of his long-dead mother.
the wildly intricate dreamings and self-portrayals in the private collage
diaries and scrap books of Gayleen Aiken, eccentric Vermonter who created her own world as a retreat from the teasing of classmates
and my personal favorite: the fabric art of former Polish dressmaker and Holocaust survivor, Esther Nisenthal Krinitz. At age 15, she decided she "didn't want" to report to the train station with the rest of the Jews in her village, including her family. Esther and sister, age 13, walked into the countryside, posing as Catholic orphans. At age 50, Esther began to remember her home and family, all destroyed by the Nazis, in fabric narrative pictures.
So, George. Saying I for outsiders is not the stuff of unhealthy ego, or tawdry celebrity. It's the stuff of survival, and eventually, thrival, not just for the person who braves the contempt of artistic and linguistic experts to render her vision, but for all of us who learn:
(to expand) The definition of a worthwhile life
Respect for and delight in the gifts of others
The use of innate intelligence, intuition, self-exploration and creative self-reliance
The great hunger for finding out just what each of us can do best, in our own voice, at any age
Now those, I daresay, are goals any good conservative can get behind!
(from "Educational Goals" American Visionary Art Museum www.avam.org)
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