The Artist or the Academic

On my old blog, I attempted to compile a list of my favorite authors. My archivist tendencies love lists of this sort, but my perfectionism tends to cancel that out because how can you craft a list that perfectly embodies your tastes? Actually, back up, what criteria for a favorites list are we using? Which books made you laugh out loud or cry real tears, or which ones fundamentally altered the way you think? Nostalgia, entertainment, conviction, inspiration, pleasure, revelation—what's the telos of a book anyway? 

It gets complicated, you see.  

But there are a few authors that are pretty easy for me to name as favorites, regardless of the genre or category we're talking about. One of those is Chaim Potok. He was an American writer of many forms, from novels to poetry to plays. He was also a rabbi. He died a few years after I was born, and I first encountered his works in high school after a blogger I followed raved about The Chosen. I think it was her description of the chapter-long baseball game that first lured me in.

The Chosen—which will now have to always be accompanied by the caveat: no relation to the TV show—is a story of two Jewish boys and their fathers in World War II-era Brooklyn. Reuven is the son of an influential Zionist and Orthodox Jew, and Danny is the son of a charismatic Hasidic leader. It's one of those books you hate to summarize what it's “about” because anything you say will cheapen it. It’s about silence and love and suffering and legacies and communities. It’s also about—and this is the relevant point—two bright students who really love and find meaning in their studies.

Then I read probably Potok’s most famous book, My Name is Asher Lev, whose titular main character is a tortured artist, also a Jew in Brooklyn, grappling between the honesty art demands and the boundaries his family and religious community uphold. So I read both of these in high school, and both times were exhausting, formative experiences that shook the world under my feet and reshaped the constellations I looked up at. Among the many questions they planted in me was this one, scrawled in cursive in one of my many journals:

Who am I—Reuven and Danny or Asher? 

Also during high school my family went hiking in Utah, on those rough ribbon trails curling around columns of stone, drawn in invisible ink under the bleaching sun. If you follow them right, they will propel you to the perfect viewing-place of an impossible arch, like a wave casting you on a sandbar so that you can see how that distant curve of shore is actually an island, although you could never tell so from the shore. The sandstone of Utah may not seem to have much to do with ocean waves but both move your feet for you, both have hidden currents and unmapped courses found only through bad luck or surrender. Both bare you beneath the sun like a sacrifice to be judged worthy or consumed. 

One such path led to Bowtie Arch, a perfect circle punctured through a high rocky vault. We were told it was there, but as we hugged the cliff that curved toward it, all we could see was a smooth dome of stone.

It's there, and it’s stunning, the people coming back told us. Like prophets: Have faith,  have faith, trust not your eyes.

So we did. It was there, and it was stunning, visible you only when we stood right beneath it, a crescent shadow of light from the distant opening etched on the wall. It was like a revelation of grace.

***

If you’re a nerd of a particular sort, you'll appreciate this. In the Myers-Briggs personality system, I’m an INFJ. Some websites that purport to be experts on the subject describe this type as the “most cerebral of the feelers.” Well, that explains some things. It's a relief, and also a frustration.

To go even nerdier: I'm a One on the Enneagram—the Perfectionist or, the preference of every One ever, the Reformer—but I’ve got Four—the Individualist, the Seeker—in my tritype. Ones are body-dominant, but when I need to access emotions, it’s Four that I go to. If all of that is gobbledygook to you, the point is, the main way I approach the world is a physical gut-punch sense of right and wrong that I am forever trying to slot every experience into—but then there’s this constant subliminal call to dive into the beautiful mess of the human experience with all its nuances and particularities and rarity. Order and chaos. Ikea organizers and fingerpaint. Boundaries and embrace. 

***

What I remember more vividly than the arch, however, is the path to it. It was, like I said, all but invisible. If you follow the trail right—but how can you when everything is smeared with the same shades of clementine and rust? How can you when the sun outsmarts your eyes and you can no longer tell a cliff-sized shadow from the dark huddle of a bush? 

You can, the answer is, because of the ones who went before. The ones who know. On every hike, cairns dot the landscape like play-sized pagan altars. In the desert, there are no trees to paint to mark the paths. But there are stones, millions of them. And the ones who went before collect them into piles, precarious little towers pointing the way. Every time we halted, sweaty and uncertain, if we changed direction just a little, we would see one. You could not miss the path, you could not miss the stunning revelation at the end of it, if you followed the cairns. 

***

I have long wanted cairns to chart my life. I don’t feel like I am asking for much: I do not need a divine message about who I will marry and when, or where I will live most of my days, or when I will die. I am asking for a map to my own little heart. 

I don't need to know what job I will have, only a job title. Not in the corporate sense, but in the epic fantasy sense—you know, the stories where everybody is “The Something”: the Bard, the Guardian, the Healer. In the stories, characters are just one thing. In good stories, they are multifaceted and multi-talented but especially in the fantasy epics whose themes I often map onto my own life, the characters are content in their one grand calling. They may wrestle about how to implement it, they may not initially embrace it, but by the end of the story they know who they are supposed to be in some categorical, existential way. The contours of that calling are their cairns.

So who am I: Reuven and Danny or Asher? 

The academic or the artist?

***

I read Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators in high school too (the theme of my early twenties is unpacking all the books that influenced me in high school). I named my laptop Ada after Ada Lovelace, one the heroes of his origin story of the digital revolution. Back in the early 1800s, Ada foresaw that Charles Babbage's rudimentary computing machine could one day be used not just for solving complex mathematical equations but for creating and sharing works of art. I guess this wasn't a surprise to musicians, who have always known how works of spirit-stirring beauty rely on mathematical structures.

Anyway, Isaacson talked about how this is what will lead the revolutions of this century: people who can see the sciences and the humanities as partners in crime, enzymes that catalyze technologies, innovations, and solutions we can’t dream up if we stay siloed in our narrow, either-or fields.

He wrote, and it’s stuck with me ever since:

“This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.” 

It all sounds so good.

***

It all sounds so good, except for this fear that by picking one I forever swear off the other. I've taken basic economics, I know that when you say yes to one thing, you’re inevitably saying no to something else. This fall, I could start taking Hebrew to give myself a head start on that Master’s degree I want. Or I could devote my free time to picking back up my sci-fi retelling of Perseus and Andromeda that I think has real potential. I could apply to grad schools or I can submit my poetry to magazines. I could read The Art of Biblical Narrative or Letters to a Young Poet.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s not either-or, you dramatic psycho. 

And I know. I could just do both. But I want to do both well. I have always felt more like Jo and Meg but lately (Greta Gerwig’s) Amy’s quietly desperate statement has resonated more: “I want to be great, or nothing.” Not necessarily great in reputation but great in quality. I’ve heard about the fox versus the mole paradigm, how people are either broad learners or deep. What if you want to be both? '

And what if you have always felt time breathing down your neck and know how impossible it is that you will have time to get decently good at either? I don’t want to do things halfway, I don’t want to be mediocre at a bunch of things—but I also don’t have direction, or the guts, to just pick one.

The problem is, as it has always been for me, time, and limits. If I just had more time—but I don’t. If I just had unlimited energy and resources and skill—but I don’t. And the reality is objectively mediocre may be my personal best.

***

I expressed some of this to a professor once. He didn’t seem concerned. You will be able to do more good, he told me, because you have a foot in both worlds. We need people who can appreciate both.

***

I know, I know, what my true calling is. Probably a lot of you are waiting for me to come to that conclusion: my true calling is a witness and ambassador of Christ, and I can do that through footnotes or free verse. But how big is the kingdom, and how small am I. I just want to know what neighborhood in the kingdom I belong in. Mary Oliver’s aching, glorious question has to do with more than just highest-order teleogy; it has to do with what I do every day, not just the why of my life but the how: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

***

I realize I haven’t really been looking for cairns. I have been searching for Stonehenge, all sweaty and sore-armed with the heave of my striving to arrange the stones in a way that will let me divine my destiny. Situate the slabs just right, and the stars will tell you what to do. You can manipulate fate to unveil itself. Or so the ancients thought. So we still think.

But Stonehenge isn’t the answer. Real cairns only show you the next step. If you want to see the whole chain of them, you have to look back.

It’s only when you turn and the setting sun flows past you and lights upon those messy rocky heaps that you see what they really are: Ebenezers.

Thus far I have been saved. 

***

Ebenezers, an abbreviated list: I happened to see a play on Broadway for my eighteenth birthday, the summer before my senior year, and bursting out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal I knew right away I had to be there. A year later, friend happened to tell me about The King's College, which I hadn't heard of before and so hadn’t applied to in my first round of applications. At King’s, another friend happened to know yet another friend who connected me to an internship at the place where I now work. I thought I was going to double major in neuroscience and journalism and instead here I am with a theology degree I wouldn't trade for the world. I thought I was going to grad school right after college and here I am with a job in development, something I’ve never done before and something I already love. There were years I thought my health wouldn't let me go to college at all, and here I am, graduated in three and a half years, living on my own in one of the biggest cities on earth.

***

Thus far I have been saved—so what does this mean for tomorrow? Will I spend my precious time on Hebrew or poetry? I don’t know. Probably a little of each because I can’t let this fear of mediocrity keep me from trying either. Fear is the one thing I know not to follow, the anti-cairn.

A foot in both worlds, as my professor told me. That’s a little more messy and much less clear than I’d like but one thing is true: I don’t have unlimited time, and there’s no point in spending it on this hamster-wheel angst. I’ll join Reuven and Danny and Asher in pouring out my days for things that are true and good and beautiful, and one day, looking back, I’ll see the pattern. If I have to be a hyphenate—the Artist-Academic—so be it. 

One day, I’ll hear my true name. And even though I don’t know it now I’ll see how all along it was shaping my steps. You don’t have to label a thing to know it. And you don’t have to be perfect at a thing for it to be good. I still feel Amy’s cry for greatness, and as long as it pushes me to use well the days—as long as it doesn’t paralyze me into doing nothing—then I’ll treasure it in my heart and see what the great Cairn-Builder does with it.

***

“‘Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot always be torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.’”

~ Frodo in The Return of the King