PERSONAL ESSAY
Ramblings Of A Midnight Stroller
Chasing ghosts during the witching hour can lead to the clearest of thinking
3:42 A.M. Damn. Another night. How many has it been? I remember hearing someplace that the average person doesn’t get enough sleep. People’s productivity would increase if only they got an extra hour of sleep each night. Fat lot of good having that information does when my personal body clock goes off at 3:42 each morning.
I also heard that sometime between 3:00 and 5:00 a.m. is supposed to be the “witching hour” — the time when the separation between our world and the spirit world is at its weakest. If you believe in that sort of thing, then who exactly is this ghost that keeps waking me up during the witching hour anyways? Damn.
4:03. Well, laying here watching the clock go round doesn’t do anyone any good. Who was it that said, “When you wake up, get up, when you get up, do something?” I don’t know but it seems like pretty sound advice to me.
“She” is sleeping on my arm. At least some part of me is asleep. (Ha! Not funny Brent) Can I get up and make coffee without waking her? She hates it when I get up in the middle of the night.
I wish I’d left my pants in the hall so I wouldn’t have to go scrounging for them now, but she hates it when I do that too. Aw…what the hell… this is my house, it’s not cold, there’s no one else up yet, and besides, we teach our kids there is nothing wrong with the nude human form. Why don’t I stop being a hypocrite and practice what I preach?
Neat word; nude. Quite a bit different than naked. Nude is something an artist would say: “Nude #16, Isn’t that an interesting use of shape and texture on this piece? What do you think Daa-ling?” I wonder what would happen if I, as an artist, titled my work “Naked #16”? I’d probably get a totally different response. Whether I should or not is a different question. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Right?
I wonder why “naked” is censored, and “nude” not? Then again, why is anything censored? Hmmmmm…. Before I can answer that I guess I’d have to look at exactly what is censored in the first place. The first thing that comes to my mind, (probably because it seems to directly impact me and my work as a practicing photographic artist) is pornography.
YIKES!!! The coffee can is cold against my bare chest, uncomfortably cold. It’s funny the habits you get into. When you’re making coffee and you have young kids that you always seem to be holding in one arm, you might learn, as I did, to tuck the can under your arm while you spoon the coffee into the coffee pot.
Later, when the kids get older, (or you are making coffee in the middle of the night, naked and before the kids get up) you find you still have that same habit. Now, with the coffee can fresh from the freezer, that habit becomes glaringly in need of a change. Sometimes you need a rude awaking like that before you see that things might need a rethinking. Hmmmm… I think that we, as a society, could do with a lot more of these rude awakenings.
Censorship was like that for me. Different special interest groups all calling for the banning of pornography, and me, right up there, agreeing with everything they said. They seemed to have a good case; all their facts and figures that, on the surface, appeared indisputable.
It all seemed to make sense and, besides, it really didn’t matter to me anyway; until that day I made that photographic print of a close-up of a pair of lips around a stuffed olive. It ran on the cover of the Saskatoon Community Calendar with the caption “Look What’s New.” The whole thing was done up to resemble a human eye.
I thought it looked so original I made a (16 x 20) of the same image, framed it, and have it hanging in my living room. It looks great, certainly not what I’d call offensive. The day the magazine hit the stands, the phone calls started. It seems that because it was decidedly a woman’s mouth, some people found it offensive and obscene.
I remember wondering at the time, “My God, what have I done?” Without realizing it, I had become a pornographer! According to the calls I received, the image I produced was pornographic, sexist, vulgar and bigoted.
Ummm… Just a minute here. “Bigoted?” Let’s take a second look at this whole situation. What, in reality, HAD I done? What were these people accusing me of and what, exactly, is the definition of this terrible deed I was supposed to have committed?
Geez, I like this illustrated encyclopedic dictionary. Best 20 bucks I ever spent. I could spend time reading it like some people read a novel. Hmm… It does seem that any definition uses something else as its reference point. The definition for pornography uses “lust”, and “lust” is… “powerful, strong, merry and joyous”? I see nothing wrong here.
Erotic is from Eros and Eros is… let’s see… “a self-preserving instinct.” They got a problem with that?
Sexist is… “any arbitrary stereotyping that…” just a minute here, arbitrary? Just who is making these “arbitrary stereotypical” decisions supposedly for my benefit?
I think I’ll check the kids while I’m waiting for the coffee to finish. It might sound mushy and cliché‚ but they really are little sleeping angels. Standing here looking at the scene before my eyes makes me want to bundle them up and whisk them away to a place where I can better protect them. Sometimes I really want to isolate them from the outside world so that they won’t have to go through the same pain as I had to.
Thinking of those calls always makes me angry. I just can’t understand how people can be so narrow-minded. Where do people learn to think like that? Don’t they realize that the only thing they ever really censor are ideas? They think they are being “politically correct” but the political correctness movement is now stifling freedom more than expanding it.
In these days of “political correctness” certain members of our society, (we’ll call them “Karen”) have taken on the role of watchdog for the moral conscience of others in this society. We have become obsessed with labels. There always seems to be a new one popping up somewhere, and they keep changing so fast I can’t keep up.
From my own personal experience, when I was in grade school, I was called “stupid,” then I was called “slow, lazy and retarded.” That eventually became “challenged,” which morphed into “learning disabled,” and lately it’s been “dyslexic and ADHD.” It seems to me to be getting a little ridiculous.
We now have “vertically challenged” describing a tall (or short) person. Cognitively lacking? Beauty impaired? It sounds surprisingly similar to “newspeak” from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Newspeak was the propagandistic language that is characterized by euphemism, circumlocution, and the inversion of customary meanings. It was designed to diminish the range of thought, and was the language preferred by Big Brother’s pervasive enforcers.
It all seems a little out of control, but it still seems important for some to classify things and put them into their own little boxes. The purpose of doing this is supposedly to categorize and make clearer the nature of what the object is, what it contains, or what its origins are.
But the problem with definitions or labels is that they tend to isolate and obfuscate the objects being defined, not clarify them. This is because nothing is only one thing. You are never only a man. You can be a man and a husband and a father and a son and a grandson and a bus driver and tall and Jewish and a myriad of other things, all at the same time. When you put something in a box you cut all ties to other relationships. The simple act of classification hides the true nature of the object instead of revealing it.
In spite of all the research and opinions of so-called experts, glaring shortfalls are still evident. To get back to our original topic; one of those shortcomings is exactly what is a good working definition of pornography? By the yardstick we use today, and Canada’s criminal code regarding obscenity, Michelangelo’s “David” could be considered pornographic.
The next question to ask is “Why do we try so hard to classify”? One answer to that question might be “control.” We can’t control (cancel) something until we label it. The reason to define pornography is so we can control or censor (cancel) it.
“Dad?”
“What?” (Shoot. The light from the hall must have woken him.)
“Is it time to get up yet?”
“No, go back to sleep?”
“What’cha doin, dad?”
(Tough questions these kids ask.) “Chasing ghosts.”
“What?”
“Nothin. Go back to sleep.”
I better leave and shut the light off before I wake them all.
Is Michelangelo’s “David” pornographic or not? I think that regardless of where the axe falls, no one wants to stop anyone from viewing this great work of art, but what about “Catcher in the Rye”, I think I just heard on the radio that it had very recently been banned by some school board someplace, or “Gone with the Wind”? When that movie was first released, because it used the word “damn,” if the board responsible for rating movies had an equivalent rating system, it would have received a “Special X” rating. Now this movie can be shown throughout the school system and is greatly valued from a historical perspective.
Therein lays two more parts of the same problem. The public sensibility as to what is acceptable is not constant over time, and what is acceptable, varies from community to community. At one time, in various parts of Europe, fig leaves were added after the fact, to a great number of existing art pieces to cover any “socially unacceptable” areas.
At other times, in North America, showing any skin above the ankles, even on the beach, was totally inappropriate. In Japan almost any form of nudity is acceptable except showing any pubic hair what-so-ever — yet, an exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. of Robert Mapplethorpe’s work showed a self-portrait of the photographer dressed in leathers with the handle of a bullwhip “up his ass.”
As a practicing photographic artist, I have had to settle these incongruencies very early in my career, at least in how they pertain to me. The working criteria of an acceptable image that I use, (and as it turns out, a lot of other controversial terms) can be boiled down to one word: Intent.
Keeping in mind that there is a different relationship between every player in the chain, this relationship can change every time the player changes. The model, the artist, the critic, the client, the distributor, the owner, and the viewer each have their own unique relationship to the piece of art and therefore, what might be pornographic for one is art in the highest form for the next.
Generations back, National Geographic or even the Eaton’s catalogue lady’s underwear section, served as the “Playboy” for many a young boy growing up on the farm. The relationship between that particular viewer and the artwork was different than what was intended by almost anyone down the production line of these publications.
The problem “they” (the collective they) have with this method is that it makes it too hard to police. It removes the “objective” and makes it “subjective.” If you still decide you want to apply labels, and you throw into the equation the added dimensions of possible sexism, racism, gender specification, gender inclusiveness, religion, or political affiliation, you have an almost insurmountable task. Funny how that doesn’t stop some people from trying. What do they know that I don’t? (He asks sarcastically.)
Michelangelo did not start out to create a piece of pornography, nor did the church that commissioned the work view it in that manner. The art historian that studies it and writes a textbook certainly thought of it as a great work of art. The teacher that presents it to his class is trying to enlighten, not titillate… but special interest groups become concerned with images and publications showing up on street corners and start writing letters to politicians.
The politicians, trying to protect their jobs, ban all full-frontal nudity, and, voila, hundreds of years after its unveiling, poor old “David” is dubbed porn. Where does that leave the kids? Censorship curtailing ideas, and all in the name of “political correctness.” It is getting so bad that even Supreme Court Justice John Sopinka thinks “… political correctness is posing one of the greatest threats ever to freedom of speech.” He has said that “There is now a danger of judges rendering verdicts that are politically correct but legally or factually wrong.”
Perhaps the biggest threat was expressed by Harvard University law professor, Alan Dershowitz, who complains that “Students are no longer willing to experiment with unorthodox ideas.”
Let’s just think about this for a minute… one of the top universities in the land, and its students no longer want to experiment with ideas??? To think that a school board, or any other board for that matter, can and should stop ideas is almost an oxymoron. A censored university? A university is supposed to be a… a… “…a place of higher learning with teaching and research facilities.” (Thank you Mr. Webster.) A place where ideas are exchanged, analyzed and built upon, not hidden away, locked up and stifled.
Ironically, the very term “politically correct” originally started as an inside joke among idealists — mostly left-leaning, but really people who cared about the Earth, ecology, sexism, racism and even how we treated animals as a way to tease each other over whether their actions lined up with their ideals.
Then, in the 1990s, right-wing think tanks and conservatives started to use the term as a form of attack in both the media and Academia, and it all of a sudden became a thing. According to NPR, a search of newspapers and magazines in the archive Nexis shows just how rapidly the term expanded beyond its original scene. In 1989, the phrase “politically correct” appeared fewer than 250 times in print. By 1994, the archive shows more than 10,000 hits. The phrase had gone from wisdom to weapon.
“We find free speech under assault throughout the United States, including on some college campuses.” said then-President George H.W. Bush in 1991. “The notion of political correctness has ignited controversy across the land.”
The battle continues today under the name of “Cancel Culture” where, according to presidential candidate Donald Trump who also campaigned against political correctness, “The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as we know it,”
[INTERESTING SIDE NOTE: within days of regaining the presidency, Trump signed an executive order directing college campuses to rout out and cancel visas for foreign students who are sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. Interesting… Very interesting.]
And just like a runaway train, it’s taken on a life of its own. While everyone seems to be calling for it to be stopped, nobody seems able to stop it.
Hey! Look at this… Edward Donnerstein, a psychologist who teaches at the University of California in Santa Barbara, seems to agree. He thinks that if you start banning things, then the problem is, where do you stop? Instead, Donnerstein argues that “society must begin offsetting the effects of mass media and pornographic violence through massive educational programs starting at the grade-school level.”
I guess getting up early does have its advantages. I probably would have missed that article in the Maclean’s magazine if I wasn’t walking around the house with a cup of coffee in one hand, looking for something to read, just to kill time. How apropos that I should stumble on this particular article on this particular morning. Is my ghost trying to tell me something?
As these educational programs take effect, certain kinds of images will become unacceptable, just as the racist attitudes reflected in the movies of 50 years ago are completely unacceptable today. It is one way of ensuring a free exchange of ideas among the students. The beliefs they eventually develop will be stronger because they are their own beliefs, developed over time and through understanding, and not just beliefs rammed into them by some out-of-date bureaucrat trying to get re-elected.
Two other things come to mind though. If we stop politicians from ramming junk down our throat, and we teach the people to think for themselves, who is doing the teaching, and who tells them what to teach?
The answer to that last question implies some kind of value judgment and that in itself also implies some kind of censorship. Look at the Jim Keestra affair. A certified teacher in Alberta, with, over the years, hundreds, if not thousands, of young, impressionable minds going through his classroom, all soaking up almost anything he had to say as a “truth,” was fired from his job because he was teaching the wrong things. Teaching that the Holocaust didn’t happen is wrong to us, now, but in a different time and at a different place, his teachings would have been widely applauded by the state he was teaching in.
At one time, I dare say, if you were to stop any kid in Moscow on his way to school, that kid would tell you that the communist system was the best system and that everyone should have one. The same question when posed to a counterpart in North America would yield dramatically different results. Why? These kids are taught (indoctrinated???) dramatically different things, and with the full support and blessing of the state.
We supposedly live in a free society with freedom from oppression, freedom of speech, and freedom of a great number of other things, but is it possible to really have a freedom of thought, or is this just another myth? How can we say that the thoughts we have floating around in our head are our own thoughts, and not something we “learned” in school? That constitutes censorship and even Plato and Aristotle would agree with me, although they might not necessarily think it was a bad thing.
Plato was clearly all for censorship because he didn’t think that the peons at the bottom of his hierarchy could or should understand all the decisions being made on his behalf at the top. Aristotle didn’t believe that a citizen belonged to himself but belonged to the state and therefore I suspect that he saw no problem with the concept of censorship, as long as it was for the good of the state. Here’s where I’m afraid I have to disagree with both of them.
Just a minute here. Did I just publicly disagree with not one but two of the greatest thinkers in the history of the human species? (What is in this coffee?)
But… now that I stop and think about it, my wanting to bundle up my own kids and whisk them away, (to protect them of course), would also be another form of censorship.
Boy, the ghost of this snake has two heads, doesn’t it? I think I was just bitten. It appears to be a lot more complicated an issue than it originally looks. All I wanted was to be the one to monitor what ideas they are exposed to and when. I guess all I really should be looking at is the “when” part.
We live in a society of organizations and institutions all trying to influence us in one form or another. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from speech.
Just a minute… what was that thing I just read here a little while ago?…Come on, where is it…? Ah… here it is…
“…institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tend to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
Boy, did Robert Pirsig ever know what he was talking about when he said that. Amazing how everything relates to everything else, isn’t it? I’m going to pour myself another cup of coffee and think about that a little more.
I was once asked if it was possible to know you are in the grip of a myth while you are still held in that myth. That’s a tough question to answer and I’m not sure if I have enough time here to do it justice (pffeuph, it’s 4:45 A.M. I got all the time in the world, Y-A-A-W-W-N). I also don’t think you can answer it without getting into a heavy-duty discussion in semantics. (i.e. At the point you begin to understand something, or relationships to it, it ceases to be magic and becomes a science and is therefore not a myth anymore???)
Let’s just say that for now, I believe there should not be any, what I’ll call “active censorship,” (as opposed to passive censorship) particularly in the schools. The fact that we are held (or not depending on your semantics) in this myth of “freedom of thought”…? we will just overlook, or choose not to open that particular can of worms on this particular morning. After all, I’m already having trouble sleeping and that question could render any further attempt useless.
Now, just because I do not think there should be any active censorship in the schools does not mean I think that “anything goes. I do feel, however, that if we try to protect our youth from any “undesirable” ideas (example; Pornography) then they will not have been exposed and therefore not educated about these same ideas. Later, when we can no longer isolate them and they do come into contact with these ideas, they may not know how to respond.
So, like Donnerstein, (Y-A-A-W-W-N) I guess I think that education, not isolation is the goal. I guess I’ve always felt that way and didn’t realize it till tonight, (or this morning… whatever the case may be). Isn’t that why I’ve been teaching our kids that there is nothing wrong with the nude human body. Yeah, it is come to think of it. Nothing wrong with the human body or the free-thinking mind. I guess ideas, like that ghost I was chasing, only have power over you when you don’t understand them. And since it only is the idea, the same philosophy works whether you’re talking about pornography, or racism, gender issues, or any number of other controversial subjects.
“Intent” does seem to work well on an individual basis when you have the education or background with which to make a decision. And… we’ll just have to wait for my next midnight stroll to see if it would also work on this expanded scale.
Y-A-A-A-W-W-N. Now, let’s see what happens if I, on an individual basis, “intend” on sleeping. After all, I gotta be up in an hour. If I can just get back into bed without waking her, she hates it when I do that… Damn.
