Pottery Barn and the Dark Night of the Soul

The night after we hiked out from Point Reyes (see "About a Web" below), my friends and I spent one more night in San Matteo before heading our separate ways once again. Of course we spent the evening telling stories about friends and family after taking showers and having some yummy Chinese food. My friend A.'s story about someone close to her has set me off thinking about the nature of alienation in modern society, particularly as it is embodied in consumer culture.

A. told the story of a young man who, after graduating from college was doing quite well for himself in corporate America. After several years of pursuing the American dream, he decided to take some time off and do the quintessential American odyssey and take a month long motorcycle trip. A month turned into two months, then six months. Finally two years later, he returned to the U.S. having toured South America on his motorcycle and marrying a young lady from Columbia. She describes the trip as his escape from the golden chains and silken ropes of the consumer capitalism trap. "I was starting to shop at Pottery Barn!" she quotes him as saying.

This statement immediately resonated with me in a way that if he had said, "I was starting to shop at Wal-Mart" could not have. After I came home, it started me reflecting on the nature of social, spiritual, and creative alienation here at the dawn of the 21^st century. So why would the idea of shopping at Pottery Barn trigger such a response? On some levels, Wal-Mart and Pottery Barn are the same. They are retail outlets that sell imported goods in brick-and-mortar stores as well as over the internet. Pottery Barn also publishes a paper catalogue, but then so does JC Penny and Sears – neither of which would have resulted in anything more than a shrug in this circumstance. Pottery Barn isn't even a real company – it's actually just a brand that belongs to the Williams-Sonoma Corporation. I tried to find out how large Pottery Barn's sales were last year, but they were buried in the Williams-Sonoma financial data. Williams-Sonoma, which has several brands including Williams-Sonoma, had a total of $3.7 billion in sales in 2007, and a net income of $208 million after taxes. (They were apologetic in their annual report for not having done better especially with the Pottery Barn brand – but I think that's another story – see http://www.williams-sonomainc.com/inv/anr/WS_06AR.pdf). By comparison, Wal-Mart had gross sales of $375 billion and net earnings of $14 billion (http://www.valueline.com/dow30/f9638.pdf). Wal-Mart being 100 times larger than Pottery Barn's parent company is significant for my story because it illustrates the nature of Wal-Mart's business. To sell $375 billion worth of stuff, Wal-Mart has to be able to reach into our everyday purchases continuously. You have to need Wal-Mart. If you think about it, you could live solely on the stuff you could buy from Wal-Mart – especially if you happen to live near a super Wal-Mart. You can buy your jeans, a head of lettuce, a futon, and the oil for your car all in the same shopping trip. If you need it to live, you can buy it at Wal-Mart. The converse could be said for Pottery Barn – if Pottery Barn sells it, you probably don't need it to live. But does it necessarily follow that we don't need Pottery Barn?

The idea of alienation plays a central role in Marxist philosophy. Marx's idea, as I understand it, is that through the process of division of labor, we have lost touch with something essential in our being that flows from the wholeness of life. By dividing tasks and only focusing on one small, disconnected part, we become isolated from ourselves and from others. This effect of isolation is what he refers to as alienation. I think if you watch a show like "The Office" or read Dilbert comics, you quickly get an idea of what this means. Alienation is a significant source of dissatisfaction with life, and leads to a loss of meaning.

Marx wasn't the first to express this idea of alienation. Born in about 250 AD, the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus also wrote about the idea of alienation, though he did not use this word. In Plotinus's ontology, there was one transcendental being he referred to as "The One." His belief is not all that different is not all that different from what many New Age believers espouse today. He believed that through contemplation and appreciation of beauty, an individual could get closer to "The One", and it was only through contemplation of the transcendent essence of "The One" that we could be truly happy. Since ultimately the only real thing was "The One", and we were all a part of "The One", the farther from our understanding of the transcendent we were (i.e., the more alienated from the transcendent we were), the unhappier we were.

Christian doctrine was being formalized around the time Plotinus and the Neoplatonists were writing. In fact, there is clearly a heavy influence from the Platonists and Neoplatonists on early Christian doctrine. The idea of separation of the body and soul, for example, arguably is an idea that comes from Plato. But going even farther back, the Apostle Paul, also a Greek, while imprisoned in Rome in about 60 AD wrote to the Colossians: "And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled. In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight…" (Colossians 1:21-22). Paul is a pretty tough guy, but he's dealing with a tough subject. What I think he's saying is that we can become separated from our true selves by sin, but through prayer and creating a relationship with God, we can overcome that alienation.

We can even leave the Western canon altogether and see alienation in the practice of Zen in the East. Zen in simple terms is the seeking of enlightenment (called "Satori") by being completely awake in the present. "In the moment of enlightenment, you have a keen sense of being alive, a keen appreciation of everyday reality" (http://www.ljhammond.com/phlit/2001-06.htm). A key element of achieving Satori is overcoming the rational – something we in the West do not do well without external aids. It is the rational that approaches life with analysis – the process of breaking things down into component parts so that each piece can be understood. Eastern thought in general is more holistic, and Zen's emphasis on overcoming the rational is an effort to bring together the many pieces of life that our rational processes make of "The One."

So what about Marx, Plotinus, Paul, Buddha, and Pottery Barn? I think the common thread in the literature of alienation is the loss of the beautiful. An alienated life is a life without beauty or grace. I believe artistic expressions of beauty help unify our minds and overcome the natural tendency to a splintered soul.

The existence of "The Artist" is one example of the division of labor that Marx thought brought about alienation in modern life. By having artists and non-artists, we disconnect the non-artists from the process of creating beauty. Non-artists are alienated from beauty in the same way that non-farmers are alienated from food. But if everyone reverted to a state of nature where there was no division of labor, we would rapidly spiral down to a quality of life that is barely above that of wild animals. It is precisely the rational division that enables us to exist and thrive. Take it away and there is only suffering and death.

All that said, there is something special about being connected to the creative process. Here I mean creative in the sense of any activity that makes something beautiful – whether it is art, artisenry, or agriculture (if this doesn't make sense yet, you should read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). It is why despite the fact that we can buy sweaters at Wal-Mart for less than an hour's wages, people still learn to knit. It is why despite the fact that we can buy a table and chairs at Wal-Mart for less than a day's wages, people fill their basement workshops with woodworking tools.

Like many of you, I have young children. Inevitably my house is filled with refrigerator art. Marx would have liked it, I imagine. (Or maybe not, given the historical Marx wasn't much of a father.) I like it. I value each of those pieces because of their context.

When we were camping at the beach out at Pt. Reyes, one of the things we did was collect rocks. The rocks on the plate with the candles are the rocks I found. I'm no geologist, but I think they must have been some sort of igneous rock, because they are all layered with the same type of minerals. The black layers were harder than the grey, so over time the ocean had worn the grey away, leaving a a rippling effect. They are interesting. But they were also meaningless. Were meaningless that is until I picked them. Then they were meaningful. When I put them on the plate with the candles, they became beautiful as well.

When you walk through the sliding glass doors of a Wal-Mart and the semi-retired guy smiles at you and says, "Welcome to Wal-Mart" your first response probably is not to stop and say, "I am now surrounded by beauty." I would argue that you might be, but it would be hard to be sure. Wal-Mart doesn't deal in beauty (the beauty section with all the cut rate make-up and hair products aside). It deals in the minimally acceptable. There is no shame in this. There is a place for the minimally acceptable. That place is where your heart is not. My heart is not in my athletic socks. It's not in the rug I put in front of the toilet in my bathroom. It's also not in the pack of 50 cd's I bought to burn my mix of 80's tunes. These are efficient purchases.

Walking into Pottery Barn is a completely different experience. Pottery Barn is about beauty (and now you can replace "Pottery Barn" with the upper-middle end store of your choice if the Arts and Crafts style isn't for you). But Pottery Barn represents the pinnacle of what Marx was objecting to when he talked about alienation. Here we have a lovely Sedona ottoman: "Handwoven from natural rattan over a sturdy wooden frame, our ottoman is perfect for summer relaxation." Only $119. Over there we have the Arlington Armchair: "Energize an entire room with a single chair in a vibrant print… Slim seat and back cushions give our Arlington Chair exceptional comfort without compromising its style." Only $999 in brushed canvas. More for suede. Pottery Barn represents the manufacture of beauty divided completely from meaning. These are not efficient purchases. We go to Pottery Barn in search of something we desperately need. Pottery Barn promises Satori. Pottery Barn promises spiritual reconciliation. Pottery Barn promises union with The One. But these are empty promises because there is no meaning to something that someone else makes, that someone else selects, and that we buy with our divided resources.

Capitalism is an incredible engine that brings us things we need to survive. It has delivered a quality of life that was unfathomable in any other period of human history, if that quality of life is measured in material wealth. People who respect the trade are far less likely to go to war with each other, so it also promises us peace. The non-sensical drivel that Marx and his ilk spun from a deep observation about human need for meaning has dealt the world nothing by misery. But capitalism delivers material wealth – it gives us Pottery Barn - how do we reconcile the existence of cold beauty in our lives?

The picture above was taken in my living room. The coffee table, candles, and even the dish were purchased at Pottery Barn. I like Pottery Barn. I'd love to be able to make a coffee table that is as attractive as the one I was able to buy from Pottery Barn. I'd love to be able to make candles wrapped in birch bark. I'd love to be able to hammer a piece of metal into a lovely dish. But I wouldn't even know where to begin, never mind have all the tools required.

Do we need Pottery Barn? I think so. I started shopping at Pottery Barn a long time ago. I don’t buy much, but I don’t expect I’ll stop soon. But I can’t get to meaning through Pottery Barn, and it is a mistake to think so. Meaning is free, but takes work. After all, it is the sound of one hand clapping.

***

To read the Williams-Sonoma annual report, go to http://www.williams-sonomainc.com/inv/anr/WS_06AR.pdf

The quotes about the pottery barn products were from www.potterybarn.com

For some basics on Marx's alienation, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation

About a Web

This past weekend I went hiking with some friends along the Point Reyes National Seashore (http://www.nps.gov/pore/). This web was suspended between the rails of a small wooden bridge over the fresh water stream that ran by our campsite. I took it the morning we were getting ready to pack out. You can see the morning fog that rolls in off of the Pacific had not yet burned off.

From the bridge back to where we left the cars was about a 5.5 mile hike. It was gentle slopes with good trails, so it wasn't a hard hike, but it was long enough that there were relatively few casual visitors hanging around our campground. When we hiked in we did so in the darkness with only our headlamps to light our way. This amplified the sense of heading into total isolation. We had a pretty rowdy night once we arrived, under the mistaken impression that we were completely alone. (Luckily our neighbor was understanding and joined us the next night for a few hours.)

A web is a thing mostly of empty space. In fact, even the most solid things are mostly of empty space when you regress far enough. Things that we hold to be certain are mostly just the result of determined efforts by the tiniest particles to stay in relation to each other, over empty distances that can only be considered proportionately impossible.

I was lucky to go on this hiking trip with a group of people that included two friends whom I have known since a time before I have memories. As a potted basil (see earlier post), there aren't many people I can say that about. These two friends' (who are brothers) mother babysat me when I was less than a year old and my parents and their father were going to the same college. Our lives weave in and out over almost four decades now and have taken very different paths. At this time we literally span the country, with one brother living near San Francisco, one in Minneapolis, and me of course near D.C. Despite differences and distances, we have managed to stay connected.

I was also lucky to go on the trip with three other people. One was the wife of one of the brothers, whom I have known for many years now and is also now an old friend. The second is a close friend of the brothers, and I had met several times over many years, but only spent casual time with. The third I had never met before, but was now the fiancé of the second brother. Each of these new friends is special to me, and I am glad to have had time to spend with them. After all if you add strands to a web, it just becomes a bigger, more complex web.

Over the last several weeks I have had something of a renaissance with old friends. I seem to have reconnected with so many people recently that I have felt at times almost overwhelmed. It's a good sort of overwhelming, though sometimes the emotions of reconnecting can be a bit swampy. One must tread lightly at risk of falling into unmarked holes. Not unlike hiking a new trail by the light of a headlamp. Or perhaps more like hiking along an old trail that you think you remember, but you can't be sure there hasn't been a washout or a slide since you were there last. Or perhaps the grass has just grown over a place that your feet once knew well.

If you take away one strand from a web, it probably is still a web. If you take away two, it is still probably a web. How many strands can you take away before you no longer have a web? I'm fairly certain there is no such thing as a web with no strands. One could hardly call a single strand a web. But two strands? Three strands?

I recently read a terrific article by two famous economists - George Stigler and Gary Becker - who were trying to explain why people seem to have a "taste" for certain things. One example they used was why some people have a taste for listening to music. Their argument, in a very simple form (and manipulated to fit my purposes…) is that we make investments in certain activities, like music appreciation by spending time learning about that activity. We might take a music appreciation class to learn about the evolution of German Romanticism for example. After having invested time in learning about German Romantic composers and what they were rebelling against, we would have a greater appreciation for what Wagner and Beethoven had actually accomplished. Presumably we would then get more joy from listening to their music. Stigler and Becker called this learning "musical capital". The more musical capital you accumulate, the more pleasure you got from listening to music. Unfortunately, the value of this musical capital depreciates with time, so it is necessary to constantly renew the stock in order to continue to maintain the same level of pleasure that was available before. Kandie and I learned a long time ago that this applies to marriage. Unfortunately it's an easy lesson to forget when the business of living gets going.

I remember sitting with my grandmother a year or so before she died trying to help her connect with an old friend by phone. She was very worried that perhaps this woman had passed away because she had not responded to my grandmother's letters. By this time my grandmother was quite hard of hearing. When the woman's husband finally picked up the phone, we had an odd four way conversation (my grandmother used a speaker phone because it was easier for her to hear) – me repeating and clarifying what the old man said for my grandmother, him speaking for his wife because she was unable to hear on the phone at all. When we hung up, she was sad, but satisfied. At least this connection was still there – so many others had been severed.

It takes some work to keep all the strands connected – against weather, random interference, and most powerfully time – and I have to constantly relearn that this maintenance should not be neglected. If friendships are the strands in our web, it is the richness of life that is captured and made solid in the seemingly empty spaces between them all.

P.S. – the Stigler and Becker article is called "De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum" and is in the The American Economic Review, Vol. 67, No. 2. (Mar., 1977), pp. 76-90.

P.P.S - the two great photos (other than the web) were taken by my friend Annette. Must give credit where credit is due.

What Comes Down to Us

A few weeks ago my friend Jack came over and helped me install a new ceiling fan in one of my daughters' rooms.  Jack is pretty handy with wiring and in order to run the cable down through the ceiling, we had to drill a fairly large hole in the existing junction box.  The largest of the drill bits I keep in my tool box turned out to be too small, so when he asked for something larger, I went and found an old set of my grandfather's drill bits that my father had mailed me a few months before. 

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My grandfather was a machinist among other things in the course of his life.  He passed away when I was three, so I don't really remember him except through a few stories and photographs. 

I once read how the genetic connection between generations rapidly becomes meaningless, especially in a large gene pool with mobility.  Because genetic material does not move across in perfect symmetry it is possible that within a few generations, one or more grandparent's contributions can completely disappear.  It is possible that there would be no physical relation at all between the ancestor and the descendent except by a line on a family tree.  This struck me as sad.  Knowing where you came from is an important part of knowing who you are.  But perhaps it is freeing at the same time – to know that we come from some amorphous stew of genetic material and we eventually return to it as well – that the past is mostly the same for all of us, and that the future cannot hold to many grudges against us as we emerge, differentiate for a time, then re-merge with the mass of human stuff.

Of course genes are not the only thing that comes down to us from our ancestors.  We don't just inherit an oblong face, a moderate stature, and a predisposition to heart disease from them, but also behavioral traits like mannerisms, ways of speaking, how we hold ourselves.  And we inherit deeper psychological constructs as well - things like self-esteem, the ability to cope with stress and change, patience, and perhaps an inclination towards happiness.

It's not quite as easy to look at yellowed photographs from thirty plus years ago to tease out those other kinds of inheritances, but I think we can get hints.  I have two photographs I like to look at when I want to think about my grandfather.  The first is one from probably his senior year of high school.  He and a few of his "chums" (I believe that is a generationally appropriate term) are posed in a fake car in what must have been some sort of hokey gangster photo shoot.  He's a big goofy kid in the back with an open smile and nice jacket and tie.

The second picture is from his time as a machinist.  The picture is taken from the side.  His hair is graying and close-cropped – how he wore it shortly before he died.  He's leaning over a big saw, one hand holding a raised metal arm.  He is smiling in the picture, but his face is down, concentrating on the cut he is about to make – I wonder what someone might have just said to him.  The smile is too real to simply have been the result of "Say 'cheese', Joe."  I imagine it was something a bit more appropriate to an all-male machine shop in the late 60's – or maybe they said that this picture would go into history, and he just didn't believe it.

Somewhere between these two moments frozen in time, he lived most of his life.  He was drafted into the Army in WWII, he came back and married my grandmother, he had a daughter who grew up and got married, he had a grandson.  He was a heck of a bowler.  There were troubles that I am only vaguely aware of, but most of them were over by the time the second picture was taken.  And then he died.

Thirty five years later, a box came in the mail from my father.  In his laconic hand, the message in the box read, "These belonged to your grandfather, I should have passed them down to you sooner.  Be careful – the saw is sharp."  In the box were an old bow saw with black plastic hand grips, a hammer, some metal files, a tape measure, and a steel box of drill bits with a hinged flip lid.

What comes down to us – some of it's good and some of it isn't.  In all the pictures I have, he's smiling.  Maybe a little more wisdom in the later picture – but still a good natured smile.  Was he happy?  I don't know.  I hope so by then. 

I handed Jack two or three different bits until we found the right size.  We punched a hole in the junction box and ran the power through it. 

At the Crossroads

I was out running my usual route not too long ago and as I passed by the stop sign, I noticed how many nails, staples, tacks, and tape had been stuck into it over the years. It was covered in a virtual fuzz of fasteners. I've run by this particular sign at least a hundred times in the last two years, and driven by it probably three or four times that. Thoreau talks about awakening and how men live lives where they are asleep to the things around them. It's at a moment like this that I realize how asleep I am so much of the time.




I was thinking about how each of these bits of metal or plastic represent a story. Most of these stories are commonplace things - lost cats, lost dogs, yard sales, moving sales, concerts, after school karate classes, baseball camps, open houses. But when you look at the sheer number, it's like the climactic end of an opera - the curtain is coming down - the fat lady with the horned helmet and spear is singing something in German, she is surrounded by a Greek chorus reminding us not to think we can cheat fate, and off to one side is a man in a half mask with his arm around two barbers - one from Seville, the other from Fleet Street. Perhaps as we watch, there is an old Italian Don rising up from a hole in the floorboards preparing to exact his otherworldy revenge. It's a caucophony of many lives' small moments reaching out to us for a moment of our time - sometimes in professionally printed block letters on thin guage plastic signs, but more often it's a message in marker on posterboard. "I have something to say."

What message would you post on the existential stop sign at the cross roads?

Potted Basil

A grad school friend of mine commented at Thanksgiving that he was going home – but wasn't sure what that meant anymore.

This year I had a small garden in the side yard. I raised basil and tomatoes. Since I'm a believer that one can never have too much fresh basil, in addition to the garden, I planted one basil seedling in a terracotta pot and set it out by the car port. The natural home for a basil is in the ground. The basil in the garden did quite well, as basil is somewhere between grass and dandelions in terms of being able to survive neglect. Being firmly rooted in the ground, it is able to tap the natural nutrients and water around it – giving it a marked advantage over the isolated life of a potted brother. The potted basil went through gyrations of looking perky and bright, and limp and curled up into a horticultural fetal position depending on whether I remembered to water it or not. But it survived the summer none-the-less, and actually yielded some very nice leaves that had a richer taste than the ones in the garden.

Just before Thanksgiving (you can see I'm behind in my blogging) I brought the potted basil inside and set it by our kitchen sink. I'm a firm believer in raising basil if only for the benefit that when you touch the plant, it lets off such a wonderful aroma. The whole room fills with the promise of spaghetti sauce or tomatoes and fresh mozzarella.

In early December we had our first hard freeze and the garden basil died. The leaves turned yellow and fell off, and the stocks turned brown.

Sometimes I wonder what life would have been like to grow up in the same house in the same town, go to the same schools, and then get a job and raise a family in that same town, close to parents and friends. It's easy to mock such an existence as a simple one – but there's a richness to such a life. You know where everything is, you know the best place to get a cup of coffee, which garage is going to actually fix the knock in your engine, and which grocery store has the best price for milk, and which for meat. The physical reality becomes overlaid with an emotional and historical significance. Behind that building you stole your first kiss. On that corner you took the worst beating of your life. She broke up with you when you called her on that pay phone by the snack bar. It was on that bench that you asked her to marry you, and she said yes. The names in the graveyard mean something to you. And this is a source of strength. The danger is when the freeze comes.

Some of us were born potted. At the mid-way point, I have to take my socks off to count the number of times I have moved, and I'm about out of toes. But people are more like basil than orchids I think (or maybe dandelions, depending on who you're talking about). I've dragged my family through 10 moves in the last sixteen years in the Army. My oldest, at 11, has lived in 6 different states. Our roots don't run too deep anywhere. Where is home? When you're a nomad, it's wherever your pot lands. You learn a little, live a little, and with luck you land next to a sink where someone can remember to water you regularly. You put those experiences in your pot, and you get ready to move on again.