I have written several articles over the past few months about how pleasant my wife and I believe our new community is. It is just a tad comic the name of our town is Mount Pleasant. Technically, we reside within Charleston’s city limits, but the boundaries are oddly drawn so while we shop, buy gas and recreate in Mount Pleasant, we actually live in the City of Charleston, SC. I’ve also described the homogeneity of our community located on the Wando River. As I mentioned previously, a striking number of homes have remarkably similar vertically oriented “WELCOME” signs propped up next to the front door. They are decorated with flowers and butterflies. Many, maybe most of our neighbors, display American flags proudly mounted on porch posts that wave in the Wando River breezes.
Early this morning I reviewed my e-mails while having my coffee as I do each day. One was from the Gibbes Museum of Art. Lynda and I joined the museum several months back when we attended an exhibit featuring the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston. This morning’s email from the Gibbes featured an upcoming talk entitled “Queering the Charleston Renaissance” inspired by the current exhibition “Something Terrible May Happen: The Art of Aubrey Beardsley and Edward ‘Ned’ I.R. Jennings. The provocative title felt somewhat out of place in my new Southern community, so I pondered it for some time.
Over lunch, I explained to Lynda how glad I felt that this talk and the exhibit that inspired it was being offered within our community. Is it something I am likely to attend? No. But what made me especially grateful for it was how the title celebrated/acknowledged/honored the importance of our how our differences inspire creativity and lie at the heart of novelty. This is true in fine art, poetry, literature, and yes, even business.
As a member of the Woodstock Generation, iconoclasm, and the inevitable conflict it engenders, I have come to believe, draws us closer to the greatest manifestation of true virtues- truth, beauty, justice, and so on. Creative tension, as an intellectual construct, may contribute to a better outcome. But the brilliance of Oscar Wilde, Lord Byron, Vincent Van Gogh and so many others was bound up with their inability to fit in or conform. Their creations were a consequence of their unique difference from those around them. Oscar Wilde saw the world through the lens of someone regarded as different and ultimately dangerous. He was gay. Psychiatrist Karen Redfield Jamison’s book, Touched by Fire, carefully reviews biographical details of some of the greatest poets, writers, artists and musicians of the past several centuries only to conclude that many met the diagnostic criteria for Bi-Polar Disorder. How easy it would be, and how often we did, simply lock them away because they were peculiar, odd, irregular, and couldn’t fit in. Creativity is a function of being separated from the standard, the usual, the accepted. It is the standard that inhibits innovation which is why creative endeavors are so elusive. Novelty arises from having exhausted the generally accepted norms to discover the great AHA! breakthrough. There is no formula for creative breakthroughs except to clear away the standard, the generally acceptable, and all norms to make room for something genuinely new.
Efforts to marginalize the different, the dissenter, and the peculiar are short-sighted and arise from ignorance rooted in fear of what we have yet to understand or having to bear the burden of a solitary life because we are “odd”. At some level, it was a desire to drive conformity that inspired the lobotomy, so-called conversion therapy, and a whole host of genocidal actions all driven by a kind of righteous but ignorant arrogance. It reflects one’s incapacity to summon the empathy to be patient enough to allow the fruits of our glorious differences to emerge. I’m not naively suggesting brilliance lies behind all who are different but is not the potential for brilliance worth the risk of finding a way to be patient?
Something to Say 