L. Scott Ekstrom – Writer

When I was a pretentious young English teacher at a Christian prep school, I spent a lot of time theorizing about literature; time I might have spent grading papers, planning lessons, or actually reading the books I was supposed to be teaching.  I did read most of them.  But when it came to Les Misérables, I figured 800 out of 1200 pages was enough and brought in a guest speaker to cover the rest.  And as for Pride and Prejudice, I’ve never met anyone with a Y chromosome who’s made it past the third chapter.  Still, I wore nice ties and wrote even niftier syllabi, including, in an introduction for the AP seniors, something like “Our classroom discussions of classic novels may afford frequent epiphanies of Christ, the original Author.  But we must bear in mind that such discussions are a temporal activity:  since Christ is the ultimate aesthetic experience, there will be no need for literature in heaven.”

I’m no longer a high school English teacher, and I’d like to think life has hammered some of the pretension out of me, and that deeper reflection on the totality of scripture and its implications for now as well as later have brought me to recant at least the second part of my coarse outline (bad pun intended).  For, while I picture the Christian view of death to be something like a serene cruise through the ocean of God’s presence, heaven is the penultimate plan.  After that comes the new heavens and earth, that eternal moment of infinite place, somehow beyond time and space, when and where heaven and earth meld, and those who love Him get what they want–all of Jesus, in the flesh as well as in our hearts.  Then, I think it follows, along with Him, we will also receive, from His hand, the perfect version of every good thing earth has to offer.  And, for me, one of the best things in life, along with family and friends and food, has always been the arts, including literature.

When I was a schoolboy myself, some of my best friends were jocks.  In part because of that, I made it a life goal to figure out exactly what people found appealing about sport.  The fact that I prefer the Anglicized rendering of the word, without the s, probably indicates I’ll never be the sporty type.  And my being, at that time, a pacifist (and also, briefly, something of a socialist, but that’s another story) may also provide another clue into why athletics, which I viewed as ritualized warfare, were an enigma to me.  I hate conflict and am generally unmoved by competition.  When faced with a challenge, I feel no natural compulsion to rise to it or even run from it.  My inclination, in the midst of danger, accusation, misunderstanding, or the invitation to prove my opponent wrong, is to stand in motionless silence, praying for invisibility until the storm passes.  Had the desert storm in Iraq lingered much past my seventeenth birthday and actually resulted in a draft, as my friends and I worried it might, and had I gone through with my plan to register as a conscientious objector, my would-be fellow soldiers would be, no doubt, better off without the help of the sometime kindergartener who cried watching Shogun.

So, you’ll understand when I say that seeing opposite teams trash talk while working out strategies of how best to best each other does not provide an archetypal interpretation of my own life.  I’ll admit it has always kind of fascinated me, observing people demonstrate physical talent so foreign to my uncoordinated self, and noticing that others seem to get so much enjoyment out of watching their guys do well.  Bully for them.  Really.  In the meantime, back in college, I stuck to my books, feeling more at home in the library than on the quad, where, God forbid, someone might toss a football in my general direction.  But by the time I reached grad school, a little more filled out but no better at feats of strength and agility, I realized I no longer had a passion for academics either, at least not on par with my peers, so I settled for an M.A., letting the more bookish (and intelligent and hard-working) than I win the doctoral prize.  For me, reading a scholarly article about the theatre didn’t hold a footlight to actually going to the theatre.

Artists, not aesthetic philosophers, had always been there for me, starting with musicians.  It was a cassette of Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” that helped me realize my adolescent angst; a friend’s Tchaikovsky cd offered a note of hope beyond the angst; and a live performance of Ravel’s rendering of Mussorgsky assured me there was still fun and order in a world that also featured relatives languishing with cancer and the sudden death of childhood friends.

Even better at capturing and soothing my imagination than music alone was music as the backdrop to movement.  There was Tchaikovsky again, but this time with more major chords and paired with the storyless choreography of Balanchine and a corps of in-sync dancers, all testifying that there was beauty, so much of it, Somewhere.  And in recent years, So You Think You Can Dance, the great reality competition show with the terrible title, has moved me even more with contemporary, hip-hop, and disco pieces that feel like the telly is reading my soul.

Sometimes the music and the dance, like books and plays, tell an explicit story, and parts of that story relate clearly to mine, and that realization, that someone else has walked where I’ve walked, that my experience is in step with the greater human community, this brings identification.  Once life is sufficiently processed by art, I can let go of the mystery; catharsis ensues.  Sometimes it really is that explainable, formulaic even.

But more than the cerebral stuff, I like it when art of any kind works on a deeper, more intuitive level, and thinking doesn’t get in the way; I prefer it when, to quote an old acting coach (who himself was probably ripping off a line from his favorite guru), “we go out of our minds to get back to our senses.”  Then, we go beyond even the composer/choreographer/writer’s intention, become less conscious of the musician/dancer/actor’s technique, and we feel, it seems, that the aesthetic has become the mystical.  Moments like that, in a Toronto opera house or a London theater, in front of an original Van Gogh at MoMA or the silver screen of a multiplex in a suburban mall, these experiences, at their best, help me understand why agnostic theists and even atheists sometimes use near-religious language to describe their impressions of art, be it in a Lower East Side singer-songwriter dive, at a symphony hall uptown, or, in midtown, on their own sofa in front of the small screen.

Like me, they try to capture in words what that music and movement or word and action meant to them; like me, they fail.  And so perhaps, also like me, they have, to some extent, stopped trying to discuss in everyday life these transcendent moments that give greater meaning to all of life.  For, at least in my pampered existence, there are few things worse than opening up to someone who responds with a blank stare, dismissive laughter, or advice like “Dude, you need to stop eating soy.”

I understand, as smarter others have said better, why some people who are post-believing, post-modern even, gravitate to the arts for something like religious experience.  A Broadway pop opera, an ensemble drama at a hole-in-the-wall theater, a raw performance by an incredibly natural young film actress—these can provide goosebumps, rivers of tears, or palpitations of excitement that echo, or try to simulate, the joy I have known in the Holy Spirit.  So can booze.  Or Tylenol PM . . . give a sensation of ecstasy.  But, at least in the case of actual drugs, though called substances, substance is precisely what they do not have.  And what God alone has and wants to give us.

In adolescence, I affirmed my faith in Christ not only because I needed something beyond myself and any god would do; or even because I became convinced I needed Him alone, though I desperately did, not just for heaven later but on earth now; but also, and mostly, it was because I became more certain about this than anything else before or since—that He was true, is, in fact, the Truth, as well as Love.  If I didn’t believe He rose from the dead, I’d probably be some kind of middle-brow pagan.

That’s not an insult to my self-professed pagan friends, some of whom are some of the nicest and happiest people I know.  They have seen, as I sometimes see, that there is much potential joy to be had in the experience of nature.  And what is culture if not the harnessing of nature for human enjoyment?  I love saltwater breezes in the sun, country bonfires under the stars, hikes through desert valleys, or drives near snow-capped peaks.  But even more, I love a warm rainy night in a lakeside amphitheater, under a roof held up by pillars without walls, when the lights are dimmed, an orchestra plays Mozart, and the 75-year-old woman in front of me reaches for her husband’s arm, touching him as the music has touched her.   Or, even better, back in the City, sharing a blanket on the Great Lawn and, somewhere past the baseball diamonds, under lights, soprano and baritone provide the accompaniment for friends catching up over wine and pizza.  These moments of nature and culture—along with those precious family times over Christmas coffee cake or on vacation together or during a perfectly ordinary day—these are the minutes we hope to immortalize when we think, life is good, and should always be such.

But, though good, life is also hard.  And we all have different strategies for coping with that reality.

Some people, I guess people of a different personality type than I, seek to enshrine their best moments by talking about them with whomever will listen.  I’ve sometimes envied people who can digest both good and bad memories by telling a little anecdote and then moving on to whatever life brings next, have often wished I could be a person with less porous skin covering my soul, one who didn’t take in everything so deeply and seem to remember it all forever.  But that is not me.  The boy who cried when the girl in the miniseries was rescued from hara-kiri was also the boy who told his parents he was crying because he stubbed his toe.  He later became the baritone who first saw Les Mis on a high school chorus trip to Chicago and was so shocked by the death of young Gavroche that afterwards, standing outside the Auditorium Theatre, he had to remind himself it was only a show.  And talking about it later, with his buddies, he had to find ways to make fun of it in order to keep from gushing.

The decision to become an English teacher was an attempt to temper the artistic with the practical.  But I knew, before I even finished student teaching, that, while I enjoyed writing, teaching others how to read the printed page would never thrill my soul.  I had been intrigued by the theory of literature as a subset of the arts but had never really been much of a reader, of fiction anyways.  When I tried to teach novels, I kept imagining how much better the movie would be.  So I decided, mid-twenties, to gush away, to enter in to the 3-dimensional world of the dramatic arts myself, or to try to, by pursuing my childhood dream of performing as an actor who sometimes sings and sort of can dance.

It didn’t work, and when I eventually had to admit that neither temperament nor talent favored me sufficiently to be a successful performer, I comforted myself with the possibility that on a glorified Broadway or in a heavenly Tinseltown or even at a celestial Bolshoi, I might still see my name in lights.  Stranger things will happen.  But, whatever we may be, for now, “that which we are, we are.”  And with those dreams deferred indefinitely, I find I needn’t just dry up or explode.  There are, in fact, other dreams, maybe even better ones.  Like the opportunities to take in the arts for pleasure—to listen, see, and, sometimes, read—and not be distracted by wishing I were the artist instead of the audience.  And then, there is the writing, if only for a few readers; this opportunity to say, “I . . . this,” and for them to respond, “Yes!  I . . . also that.”  Even if it turns out to be merely an exercise for myself, I find it is, honestly, much more enjoyable than acting (fairly) or singing (poorly) ever was.

Recently, I was watching somebody talk about some sporting event, and the end of the story was about how all the players were hugging and crying and saying they did it for their Dad or Jesus or America or Johnny.  I wondered if, for a moment, that was the hope of athlete and fan all along—an opportunity to feel deeply, express that feeling openly, and, through that experience and the sharing of it, live more fully.  Maybe in the New Jerusalem, whatever that turns out to be, I’ll be roommates with Tim Tebow, and he’ll teach me how to throw a football.  Until then, sports (I’ll add the American s, since I didn’t end up becoming a communist after all), will probably never be my thing.

And though the arts probably always will be, they needn’t be my all.  Like all good things, asking them to be more than they are is to abuse them and myself, and to become overly dependent on my supplier–be it the celebrated thespian who shows up first in the second scene, after anticipation has sufficiently built, so that the frenzied audience erupts in spontaneous applause and the actor can feign humble annoyance; or the headlining star who rises into a pool of light on an elevator built for one; or the jazz legend, too cool to accept applause or even smiles, who leads his knowing remnant of aficionados into the sublimity of authenticity.  I can take in the talent of these folks, enjoy their work for what it is, and admit what it isn’t.

Remembering the wisdom of a scholar-artist who once lived in Oxbridge as well as Narnia, I can look above the created to see Creator.  And, borrowing a term from that fellow’s drinking buddy, I can see through artistic “sub-creators” to know the real Auteur who made and transcends middle earth and will some day remake every part of it, melting the bad, perfecting the good, and sharing it all with whomever would come, with all who accept His invitation into the real-life story and game and party that lasts forever.

@LScottEkstrom  is a freelance writer living in New York.

Article and photo credit:  Copyright 2013,  L. Scott Ekstrom.  All Rights Reserved.