Why humanities?

Like anyone who graduated in English Language and Literature decades ago, I read of the growth of STEM and the fading of English and history courses with alarm. Apparently now I am not alone, according the this Saturday’s Globe and Mail, This decline now has an economic cost. Imagine - people have no sense of history, philosophy and literature can’t communicate and art good at the art of the deal. The article tells me that people can’t apply ethical frameworks to machine learning, biotechnology or nanomedicine. I’ll have to look that last one up.

Business leaders are starting to get worried that their workforce doesn’t have a broad understanding of the world. I have every respect for one of the people cited in the article because I met his parents some years ago when they were generous donors to a professional choir and actually enjoyed what they performed. And know he follows their example by attending and supporting the symphony, so he may be not be the best example of the writer’s point in the article.

Learning judgment - weighing evidence. How have we learned these things? Maybe through being read stories at a very early age, and later as children, young adults and throughout the rest of our lives by reading novels, poems, essays, drama, history and philosophy and even theology perhaps. When we don’t have these, the article writer says, we become poorer, “not just culturally but economically”. - oh so that’s the thing - he thinks the arts are really just equipping us to make more money for ourselves after all.

The article does appear in the business section. But isn’t being poor economically but rich culturally a choice that we might want to consider even there? I’ve been the beneficiary of my father’s business career and he went from starting as the thirteenth employee of a mid-sized Canadian insurance company to completing his working life there as the chairman of the board. In his retirement, he finally had the chance to play the piano every day and he painted well enough to have one of his works in the local art gallery - but he did these things all along. He didn’t have the benefit of my liberal arts education, having to go straight to work to support his widowed mother in the depression. Surely the benefit of the liberal arts isn’t to make us become more competitive and make more money. Let’s get real. Studying the humanities is an opportunity to become more human and stand in awe of all the world’s splendor and all its pain.

Holiday Pursuits

When I looked at two books on a coffee table, I was amused at the common titles with the same words. After years of never reading fiction, I am doing so at a furious pace now. It took me a while to discover the Canadian writer Louise Penny - and even more time to get a copy of the first one on the public library app, since it begins a series - and everyone wants to read the novels in sequence. While it took her five years to write this first one, I devoured it in about six hours. Luckily she has speeded up to produce far more. There are crime writers who like to create deeply flawed characters, but I am happy with Gamache - and the chief detectives of writers Donna Leon and Susan Hill. None of them are perfect but they and their accompanying families and cohorts live for me through dozens of books and become friends.

Drawing is also something I have pursued for years - sometimes in classes and for this month, just on my own. The library book has projects in pencil, pastel, watercolour, acrylics and oils - and I have plenty of supplies of all but the last - not a good choice for an indoor environment in any case. It’s not about creating masterpieces, but learning to see.

Insights from novels and paints - a good way to spend a staycation.

How to See

I’ve spent two hours a week this year taking an online course in abstract watercolour painting. The course and others are offered by Avenue Road Arts School, which used to be an actual place and has gone digital for a while. That means that people can join in from any where, rather than just in Toronto as I used to do. The instructor, Sadko Hadzihasanovic, has established an international reputation, but still enjoys working with amateurs and sharing his insights with energy and new technological skills to help us over Zoom. We can email our works in progress and he often make suggestions of small changes in the images on his ipad and sends them back. Often it’s composition where we need help from an experienced eye.

Sometimes abstracting helps us reconnect with the real world. Taking an idea to the next step and putting it into a visual framework we know can send a message that moves us to new understanding. “Poets are the unacknowledged legistrators”, the poet Shelley said. So are any artists who help us to return to learning through our five senses.

San Francisco Artist Ana Teresa Fernandez recently sat down with Bill McKibben to speak about her social sculptor, On the Horizon. It was a response to a comment she heard that sea level will rise six feet in the next fifty years. That’s a nice abstract number, but what does it look like? Her answer as a creator was to put a six foot tube on the beach, fill it to the top with the help of children who will face that reality and let viewers of all ages respond to it.

You can see it here:

What does it look like? How will it change us? Why is this happening? Artists ask the questions that in our day to day pre-occupations we avoid. We need them th help us see what we are doing to ourselves.

Artists and Water

I’m looking forward to attending the WaterDocs Festival in Toronto next week. One person heavily involved in the film festival before her death was Marjorie Sharpe who was also the founder of the Toronto Community Foundation. The arts organization that I headed up for in the 1980’s was the Foundation’s first grant recipient and it was a privilege to connect with her every year - and wonderful to learn only now of her passion for water and the need to care for it.

Thomas Berry stressed the need for all disciplines and organizations to converge in the great work of telling the new story. The young founder of Unify noted in a presentation at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions that film is the Shakespeare of our day in terms of impact -and his own film on water attests to this, Music is a natural too - and I look forward to coming performances of Missa Gaia.

But I was especially moved by Bill McKibben’s article last fall about the role of two young poets. One watches ice turn to water. Another sees her home go under water. The UN reports give access to real rather than alternative facts. But we human beings need stories to bring the truth home in a way that encourages us to change. It was Shelley who told us that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world". See how the poets help McKibben bring reality to this very important message.

You can see the full article here which also contains this video:

Paul Winter and Missa Gaia

There are a number of personal strands in the announcement that Paul Winter will receive the Thomas Berry Award at the coming conference of the American Teillhard Association annual meeting to be held at the Cathedral of St, John the Divine in New York City. While I am a supportive newcomer to the worlds of Berry and Theillard, I had a small connection with Paul Winter several decades ago.

Winter is a jazz musician of considerable prominence. His original sextet toured the world and was the first jazz combo to play at the White House. His later Consort has existed for years with a rotating membership. In the 1970’s Winter became interested in another species and its ability to make music - whales - and travelled with Greenpeace to try interaction with them and his soprano saxaphone. This encounter later produced the Missa Gaia or Earth Mass, which had its world premiere at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1981 and continues to be performed there each year. Performers include a chorus, vocal soloists, the jazz consort and an assortment of recorded whales, wolves and other animals, whose songs often provided the inspiration for the melodies. You can hear the entire mass here as well as several selections on YouTube.

It’s not surprising that Winter and Thomas Berry connected in New York City when they were both involved in shifting our consciousness to the beauties of the natural world and our responsibility to protect it. My own threads are many. I taught at a small Episcopal School near the Cathedral from 1960 -1963. The school at the time was in the process of raising funds to build a new facility and used one the Cathedrals’s chapels for the school to start the day. The work was premiered in Canada as part of the Joy of Singing International Choral Festival in 1989 by the Consort with the Toronto Mendelssohn Youth Choir conducted by Robert Cooper. As the Executive Director of the provincial service organization for choirs at the time I was a last minute adult recruit buried in the alto section when the conductor thought it needed an extra voice two. It was one of the most inspiring and enjoyable performing experiences of my life.

While I probably won’t make the award ceremony, it is gratifying to know that I will hear the Missa Gaui performed again in Toronto by a local choir and joined by some of Canada’s best classical, jazz and gospel musicians.

You can find more about the Toronto concert here. And it is also good to know that Thomas Berry wrote a beautiful poem after attending a Winder Solstice performane of this work, which is the last entry in one of his books. You can find a brief quote from it elsewhere on this site.