TrueLife - On Creativity - Dr. David Salomon & George Monty

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

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Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Heirous through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphene. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, what a beautiful morning, afternoon or evening, depending where you are. I'm so thankful you have a moment to spend time with me and one of my favorite people to talk to, Dr. David Solomon. David Solomon. For those who may not be aware, David, David, would you be so kind as to please reintroduce yourself to those who may be listening for the first time? Sure, George. Thanks for having me back. I'm always good to be with you. I am, uh, been in higher ed for my, pretty much my entire

career and professor of medieval literature, religion, and culture for almost 30 years. and then came to Christopher Newport University in Newport, Newport, New York, six years ago to open up the office of undergraduate research and creative activity, of which I am currently the director. It's so fitting for so many reasons. Especially on today's topic of creativity, there is just this spark of the divine. And when we talk about the divine,

I think we should mention your book on The Seven Deadly Sins, which you've recently written, which is its own way, has its own divine nature. For those who are listening to the book, it's called The Seven Deadly Sense, Check It Out. But we're talking about creativity today. And it's almost like there's a spark of the divine. When I say creativity, what do you think of, Dr. Solomon?

That's an interesting question. What do I think of? I mean, I think of the various avenues that you can take to be, quote, unquote, creative. and the ways in which we largely today now have collapsed those and really said, well, really, everything is creative. It makes me wonder, you know, when I think of creativity, sometimes it seems to me that it stems from difficult times. There was a great quote that said,

I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said, we must jump off the cliffs and find a way to fly. I've butchered the quote, but it's something along the lines. The creativity comes from finding yourself jumping off of places where you're backed up against the wall. Is that an idea of where creativity comes up? Creativity has to, I think, involve a little bit of danger and risk taking, right? I mean, the most creative minds in history have been risk takers, whether we're thinking about Leonardo da Vinci or, you know, Picasso or even folks,

hurts me to say this, but folks like Elon Musk, who are somehow being creative and it involves taking something of a risk. And that can be a pretty scary thing to do. Because of course the risk, the possibility of the risk is, I mean, using Bonaget's analogy, you could die, right? I mean, if you jump off the cliff, but you really do have to do that. And I mean, I often encourage students, even in their writing. I say, you know, before you can, I even say,

even use that Vonnegut thing, I say before you can fly, you have to get out on the ledge, right? I mean, you got to be willing to take a risk. Yeah, and it seems to me like that's another reason why, you know, the person that is creative or a work that is creative seems so attractive to us. It's almost like we can see that risk in there. We can see that someone had taken that risk and it draws us in.

When it's successful, yes, it is kind of a joy to witness. But I would also say that even when it's not successful, there's something to be learned from it and gained from it either as the creator or as the observer. And I'm thinking about folks who make films that, you know, in modern parlance bomb, right?

and they're just terrible. And, you know, I think that we learn something from whatever it is. But, I mean, that creativity is about learning, right? I remember as an undergraduate sitting in a class and my manner became one of my mentors and most important people in my intellectual life, I remember sitting in class one day, and he was trying something new,

some new thing with an author, the way he was approaching it. And it bombed. I can't remember the specifics of what it was, but it bombed. And I remember sitting in the front row of the classroom. So help me, this is 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago, and thinking to myself, well, I'm not going to do that. You know, and just sort of filing away, like, well, okay, that doesn't work.

But you got to take those risks, right? I mean, and I think we see it in the world of the, the arts, we see it in the science world too. You know, as the director of undergraduate research and creative activity, I'm constantly telling students all research involves creativity and all creativity involves research. It really does, it is both in the same.

You know, if you don't think that scientists have to be creative, you don't understand what science research is. Yeah, it often wonder, because people can get in trouble there. Like when you begin getting into some sort of creative ideas about data or, you know, you create something that may not be there, it's such a double-edged sword because, like, on some level you could be looked at as a fraud. And on another level, you looked at as something that's original or avant-garde or something. Yeah.

What is that? Certainly, you know, I mean, this, the whole field of sort of data fudging, if you will, right, of what now we call fake news and all of the problems that we've had in the last decade with this kind of issue. Yeah, it's a serious problem. But it's not that creativity that I'm talking about. I'm talking about creative, being creative with, I was just talking with a bunch of students, and we were talking about a student that I had several years ago who was doing a project over the summer in chemistry. And she was working in the lab every day. And about halfway through the summer, the mass spectroscopy machine broke. And we couldn't get it fixed before the end of the summer when she needed to

continue working with it. And she needed to become creative about how she was going to continue to do her research. You know, I had a student several years ago during the pandemic who did a summer scholars project in my office virtually over that summer, the first summer of the pandemic. And she was working in biology. And her project was to look at the elasticity. of vegan cheese. And she rigged up this crazy Rube Goldberg device in her kitchen using kitchen utensils in order to test

the elasticity because she didn't have access to the lab equipment. So, you know, that's what I mean when I'm talking about being creative. And, you know, the creativity also comes in when you hit walls, right? And we all deal with that. I mean, I know I deal with that in my own research where you're following something that you think is going to

somewhere and it leads you down an alley or a hall and and there's nothing there and now what do you do you know I mean and and the I think the resiliency of the researcher or the artist is in what you do you know I mean it's a you know taking making lemonade at a lemons right I mean you know this this fell apart but now what am I going to do right I'm not going to just crumble and throw it out what can I you to sort of recreate and refashion this. And that refashioning is something which is really interesting because there's a great book by a guy named Stephen Greenblatt.

He wrote a book called Renaissance Self-Fashioning. And he's talking in that book about the fact that the Renaissance, the English Renaissance in particular, was really the first period of time when people really began to create themselves who they were. you fashioned who you were. And part of that was through actually, you know, what you wore, right? I mean, it was self-fashioning, how you fashioned yourself.

And I think a lot of how artists and researchers operate is in looking at how are you going to fashion yourself? How do you see yourself as an artist or a researcher? What do you see yourself doing? and how is that then going to bring you to a certain point, a certain endpoint? But it's, you know, I was looking through some of my things on my shelf this morning when we were talking about creativity. And I opened up a book by Paul Valhry called Anelects, just a bunch of little things that he wrote over the course of his life,

little notes really and one of the ones that I opened up to he says such is my turn of mind that I don't expect to learn everything from A to Z from books but only to get seeds of thought that I can cultivate within myself in my private garden so it's you know it's also this idea that you're not going to learn everything from books but you're going to get the seeds and it's why it's so important for artists to study other artists right I mean if you're if you're if you want to to paint you have to know what's been done before you have to study the history of art and then you take those seeds and you as he says you cultivate them within yourself and your own

private garden and you invent something that I like that's that's fascinating to me and it you know it my next question was going to be something along the lines of as a creative director how do you foster creativity and people but i think you answered that question by getting people to understand who they are and figure out who they are and then express who they are yeah go ahead i'm sorry go on i was going to say at with your background and expertise some of your expertise being in in the medieval times do you can you draw a parallel to how it seems like those times were restrictive but there wasn't a explosion of art. And in some ways, it seems like today, like we're being restricted, but it's,

I've yet to see the explosion in art. Am I missing it or are there some parallels there? How do you see the two meshing? I mean, I do think we're having an explosion in, in art, for lack of another way of putting it today. There certainly is tremendous growth in the visual arts, in the performing arts and certainly in writing. And, you know, it's a lot of that is the effect of, you know, what we've talked about before being the democratization of society and the internet. You know, I mean, you can now be an artist and put your work up for sale up on, you know, you can make a website, you can put it up on Etsy, you can put it up on eBay, and call yourself an artist. I don't know what that means exactly when you call yourself an artist. I've always struggled

a little bit with that. I think to some degree we're all artists. And so I think it's kind of a misnomer to self-identify and say, well, I'm an artist because we all are. You know, so if I have a student who comes in and says, I'm an artist, and I say, well, what do you do? And they'll say, well, I paint. Okay, so you're a painter, right? Or you're a sculptor. Or you are a filmmaker. And to think about the medium that you use to convey your art, the history of looking at creativity is an interesting one. Because, I mean, it goes back to the Greeks. I mean, you know, Plato and Aristotle are talking about the creative element and what goes into creativity and the whole, you know, mirror held up to nature and that kind of thing. And then it really isn't until, though, the Enlightenment and the 20th century that we kind of get the idea of a personal creativity.

Because for many years, throughout the Middle Ages, even, I mean, it was really looked at that only God could create. right so if we were doing anything it was just mimicry was imitation um and so it wasn't really until we got past the enlightenment that now it became this that we were permitted to have the agency to create and i i think that has interesting implications when you look at medieval and renaissance art and you see the shift by the time we get to the 18th and 19th century. And I'm not thinking just in visual arts, but in writing, right? I mean, the novel is born at that time. And there's a much, there's a big shift in writing from being about action to being about

the internal. For example, I teach a course on Arthurian literature. And most of the early literature in King Arthur is about what the knights did. He went there, he did this, he met her, they did this. And it wasn't until really the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, 12th century, 13th century, with a French writer named Cretain de Trois, who writes the first real internal literature about these figures, what they're thinking and what their motivations are.

And that's more about what we think about today when we think about writing, right? I mean, if it's, if it's, if it's, see-spot-run kind of stuff, we think about that as being childish. We want more of a development of character. And that did not exist originally because you couldn't create character. Who are you? Only God can create. Well, now we talk about this all the time. creating characters, creating a world, right? The world of Harry Potter, you know, creating these these worlds.

And that's a tremendous responsibility. I think as, as, you know, many have noted, you know, the great poet, Delmore Schwartz wrote about that a bit, about the importance of understanding the responsibility that we have, if we are creating something. Yeah, that is fascinating to think about. When you look at the shift from action to internal, can you give me some examples of how that shifted our society? I think in large part it was a greater understanding of who we are as individuals

and what makes us tick. And it was, you know, I mean, it rivals, of course, the rise of psychoanalysis, Freud, Young, and this understanding that there's more to a person than just what we're seeing. It's much more involved than that. And we see that reflected, of course, in the literature as well, even before Freud and Young. I mean, with the development of the novel and the rise of the novel in the late 18th and 19th century. If you look at novels like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, the Brontes or any Dickens novel, I mean, they're going deeper inside the character's minds.

And that was a place that we really hadn't gone in literature of that kind before. It was being done to some degree on the stage. I mean, the Greeks did it. Shakespeare certainly did it. I mean, on stage, we had a better understanding of the character. I mean, if you think about a character like Hamlet, we understand who Hamlet is. It's more than the particular actors.

And we get a lot of that through his soliloquies, where we hear about his inner thoughts. The soliloquy transferred to the page and the novel, then by the time we get to the development of the novel in 19th century, and we are getting that in those kinds of characters. So in a way, we can kind of see our own evolution of creation through the arts in that form. Yeah, I think so.

I think so. You know, and I'm sure that this is paralleled to some degree in the music world, not being enough of an a, of an aficionado of classical music. I can't say much about that. I know Mozart and that's about it. You know, but, I mean, if we think about contemporary music today and even popular music and the way that it is so confessional and so revelatory, I mean, everybody, you know, Taylor Swift just tells you all about every relationship that she's had.

She's an open book. That's something which is a modern sort of phenomenon in some ways. I mean, you might trace it back to James Joyce. Look at Portrait of the Artist's Young Man, and then eventually Ulysses, and really hearing what's inside the character's minds. I mean, when I read Portrait of the Artist's Young Man, that book is incredibly painful because you are really inside Stephen Daedalus's head,

experiencing what he's experiencing as a teenage boy at this Catholic school. And he is in a lot of pain. And because we are hearing it from his perspective, we are able to kind of tap into that empathy. Yeah, that's a, Can you excuse me for one second? My cat is just killing me about that. Hey, you monkeys, what are you doing?

Get down from there. There we go. Sorry about that. Crazy animals are driving me nuts. Yeah, so it blows my mind to think about when you look at through the lens of music today. I think there's a parallel. Well, some people who are artists, I guess they, like you said, They can all be artists.

But there are some people that write their own music, they play their own instruments, whether they sing or they play an instrument. And then there's other particular bands or individuals who have stuff written for them and they follow a script. And on some level, I think most people, while still looking at them as a performer, see them differently that someone is creating their own type of music, their own type of sound. And I think you can draw a parallel between an artist that writes a book. or performs that way. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's the development of singer-songwriter in the 1960s, right? But that doesn't mean that somebody like, you know, Frank Sinatra or Mel-Tor-May or Whitney Houston who are interpreting other people's songs aren't artists in their own right because they are

interpreting them. They are, you know, I mean, we always think about that as being, you know, the best performances like that make it theirs. I mean, I don't know who wrote most of the songs that Sinatra sang. I think about them as Sinatra songs, because his interpretations of them are just so powerful and so his. It's a song, I mean, if I say White Christmas, you think Bing Crosby. And Bing Crosby didn't write White Christmas.

But, you know, he made that song his. And now, you know, if anybody else sings White Christmas, I don't know about you, but automatically in my mind, I'm comparing it to Bing Crosby and say, This isn't better to Mick Crosby. I'd rather hear Bing Crosby. You know, and so sometimes we see this intersection or this eruption of creative forces.

And when we talk about who wrote a Sinatra song or Ben Crosby, I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and there was a band called Millie Vanilly. And these guys just looked like they were the perfect people to sing this song. But it turns out they have this huge concert, the record skips, and this whole thing explodes, and they were just front people.

But it's not like they weren't creative. They were good dancers. They were doing stuff. Yeah, but they weren't only front people, George. They were lip-sing. They weren't even singing. They were listening. So it's one thing to be singing and interpreting somebody else's stuff,

but all they were doing was dancing and lip-singing. So that was the problem there. It wasn't then singing. And, of course, sadly, one of those guys of eventual committed suicide. Yeah. Yeah. It was it's a horrible thing But I was trying to bring up the point of

Creativity It almost got hijacked by like there was somebody in the background that said you know what? I like this sound But it would be a lot better if these guys pretended to sing it And that's its own sort of way of Captivating or stealing creativity and that eruption between the people that actually created it And the people that were trying to create an image of it Like there's this weird dichotomy there Yeah, yeah

I mean, I always think it's interesting when you hear a songwriter play and sing his or her own songs, even if they're not the ones who made the songs famous, because it takes on a whole different tenor. And I find that very interesting. I actually enjoy listening to those kinds of recordings. Usually they're acoustic of them playing on a piano or the guitar and singing the song that they wrote, even if it's not the one that they made famous because it was made famous by somebody else. Yeah, I think, I remember one of my mentors told me when I was spending a lot of time with him, he says, you know, George, who writes all Elton John songs?

I'm like, I have no idea. And he began to tell him that, look, you know, there's the way the world operates. Sometimes you can be the guy in the flashy jacket. Sometimes you can be the guy behind the scenes. Very rarely are you both. But I always held on to that. And it just got me thinking like, what kind of an individual? Like the person that writes and creates the song usually has the passion,

but maybe they don't have the need to want to wear the flashy jacket, but they're happy to create it for someone else. That's an interesting, I always think that's very fascinating. Yeah, and I mean, of course, in the case of Elton John, me, Elton John did write, does write the music. Bernie Tompun writes the lyrics for most of those songs. But yeah, I think you're right. I mean, I've never heard Bernie Toppen sing.

I don't know if he can sing. You know, but certainly Elton John is an entertainer. You know, and that's the way I would think of him as an entertainer, right? Whereas, you know, somebody like James Taylor is a singer-songwriter. Although a lot of James Taylor's most famous songs, he didn't write, which I would find interesting. You know, songs that you identify with James Taylor and you're like, well, he actually didn't write that. I mean, you've got a friend. He didn't write. That's funny. The title of that song, You Got a Friend, and then he didn't write that song.

He was at a good friend write him that song. Yeah, well, I think Carol King wrote that song, I think. Somebody can correct us if I'm wrong, but, you know, and how many kids sing that at camp? I mean, it's a camp song, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's mind-blowing to me. And in some ways, I think we're on the cusp of seeing this radical shift the same way you spoke about the Arthurian legends of action giving way to internal thought. I think we're on the cusp of a new way of looking at things or maybe a cyclical way of looking at things.

If you had to take a guess at what may be the next shift, what would you guess? Well, I'm worried that people are going too far within themselves and becoming. isolated. And that's a real concern. I mean, when I think about the ways in which, and let's just do the last, you know, 100 years, when the ways in which certain artists have dealt with their creative drive and the kind of pain that goes with a lot of that, I mean, you know, there have been multiple studies of the links between creativity and mental illness, right? Creativity and bipolar, creativity and depression and schizophrenia. And some of the greatest artists of the last half of the 20th century certainly dealt with one of those very problems. I'm worried today that people

have become so isolated that ultimately the next, you know, the next Alan Ginsberg may be out there, but may be so isolated and so in his own head that we're not getting the fruits of that. I don't know. You know, I don't read a lot of the sort of scattered stuff that's on the internet. I mean, you know, everybody's got a web page, right? You know, I don't read a lot of that. And so, you know, I know I've got friends who are big followers of X, Y, or Z, who publishes just online. And I tend not to look at that stuff. And I guess it's just my own old-fashioned bias in saying, well, you know, it should be published

and available in that way in some kind of a vetted way rather than this, you know, everybody can have anything up on the internet. So I don't know. The isolation, I think, is what I'm concerned about, is people being isolated and keeping a lot. I mean, I see some incredible art produced by my students. And, you know, I'll talk with some of them and, you know, that they're majoring in finance.

It's like, oh, that's great, but you're not sharing your art. You're not sharing your art with the world, and you should, you know, be a finance major, but share your art. I mean, I have a student from several years ago who is a lawyer now, pretty successful, pretty good lawyer, and she's also an amazing painter. And she has continued to paint and show her work. Now, granted, we're talking about people who have privileged positions that they could do that. But I do think that that's an important part of it. I mean, it's an important part of what we talk about with research.

Research and creative work, right? Research and creative activity are nothing if they aren't disseminated. If you don't share it with others, it's pointless. You're not Emily Dickinson, right? You're not going to lock up your poems in a box with a bow on it, and then someone's going to discover it after you die. It doesn't mean anything if you're not sharing with other people because that is what contributes and gets a discussion going

and contributes to the overall discussion. And I think that that's what's really important in this work. So, you know, we talk about this all the time when we talk about students working on projects and, you know, I'll say, well, you're going to, you're going to submit that to present at a conference, right? No, no, no, I'm not going to do that. It's like, well, then why did you just do that work? Because you're not, nobody's going to know about it. That brings up some really interesting points. When you speak about the idea of isolation, it automatically brought to my mind this kind of voyeuristic world in which we're beginning to live.

And I'll give you an example of that. There's a whole new genre of books called like Lit, RPG, like role-playing games. So people are writing books about someone else playing a game. The reader plug. When I was a young man, I don't play video games now as a man, but when I was a little boy, I played them all the time. And nowadays, it's not uncommon to have groups of young boys or girls watch other people play video games.

The same way you would go and watch a sport, a soccer, football game. They'll sit down and watch somebody else play a video game. It's voyeuristic in that way. And I wonder if the isolation has something to do with that. Yeah, I don't understand that. I've happened upon those kinds of things because even ESPN sometimes shows them. And I'm like, wait, we're watching someone play a video game. I don't get that.

I mean, I remember standing around somebody in an arcade watching them play. Yeah. And, you know, you know, you're going to, you're going to finally rescue the princess. or beat Pac-Man. But I don't really get that. I think that the rise in these RPGs is really interesting because, again, we're talking about creating, right? Creating characters, creating worlds.

And it's akin to what some of us remember playing Dungeons and Dragons back in the 70s, which I guess is hot again. And that's what that is, right? You're creating these characters and you're creating this alternate universe. and all of these, I think, are kind of group activities. Now, whether they're conducted actually in person or over the Internet,

because you're playing a game with someone who's 5,000 miles away, the isolation there, that bugs me a bit. The idea of somebody sitting in their room, you know, 24-7, and playing a game with a bunch of other people online from around the world and thinking that they're having a social experience, I think that's a problem. And, you know, the studies are coming out about this because it's a live thing.

It's happening now, the effect of this on people. You know, we saw it through COVID, right? I mean, all of these students who sat on their beds for months on end, supposedly doing school, and, you know, missing out on any social interactions. And what did that mean now that they're back in school? It's really, it's changed a lot. Yeah.

You know, I try to find reasons or look for the positive things that I think may be happening. And sometimes I think if I can think of these things, they must be real on some level. And I want to give you an example of an interesting thing and then get your opinion on it. A lot of the children today, they will have their headsets on and they will be playing games online. And when you look at someone from a, if you're watching someone play a game and they have their headset on, it's very similar to hearing voices in your head, which we would have thought of as someone with a mental disorder, not too long ago. And one of the positive outcomes of that that I recently, I was recently speaking to a gentleman, and we were talking about goals and how to make your,

life better and make the world around you better. And one of the things he said is like, you know, I really get a kick out of doing things for people and having them not know who I am. You know, maybe I can come up and say something kind to them or I can point them in the right direction or I can give them a book. And, you know, I don't need any recognition for that. I just want to help. And in my mind, I think it does. And then I correlate, maybe those two things are correlated between speaking to a voice on a headset that you may never see their face and doing something kind for them, whether it's in the game, but then equating that to real world outside. Like now you're out in the world and the same way you did something nice for the voice in your

head, maybe you see that other person has a voice out there. And maybe that's something that's kind of shifting the conscience of people. Is that too far out there? No, I mean, and I think if that does transfer, then that would be a wonderful thing. You know, I'm not sure it is, but I'm not sure it is because I think what's happened is a lot of the time, especially the kids who are playing those games are at such a formative stage in their maturation that it's removing something from their social skills. And so I don't know if it's transferring. I think it just is encouraging them actually should just be alone and inside their head. you know and i could be completely wrong and you know please argue with me if you think i am but

i just i think that um you know it would be nice if that transferred i don't know if it is i think that uh you know and i and i'm not going to going to pile on video games here by talking about them as being this horrible evil thing um but you know we all know that you know most video games by and large are based in some kind of violence. Certainly the popular ones if you look at the top 10 best-selling ones. And I'm afraid of what that's teaching kids about how to deal with conflict. You know, and we were kids. We watched Bugs Bunny and they were, you know, Bugs Bunny could be pretty violent. But we always knew it was a cartoon. And because video games are getting to be so real and realistic,

and because the kids who are playing them that are such formative ages in their emotional and psychological development, I worry sometimes that they're just transferring that and saying, well, okay, the video game, that was so real. And now look at reality. It's just like that. And it's not. You know, and we see it.

I mean, you know, the, the, the, the rise of violence. I mean, the, the occurrence of violence in our culture, it's just, it's, it's, it's sickening. You know, I mean, I watch the local news here every morning, and it's like watching a police blotter, because all it is talking about is, you know, the shootings that happened last night. And, and, of course, you know, we're seeing it oftentimes happen younger and younger. We just had this very high profile case here in Newport News last week where a six-year-old shot his teacher. You know, it's just, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy.

And so, you know, that elementary school has been closed. I think they're planning to reopen Monday, so they will have been closed for almost two full weeks. They had a big meeting last night with parents. And one of the solutions is they're putting in metal detectors. So again, it's not really looking at the, what's the root of the problem here? Because, you know, in the typical Western fashion, we don't look at prevention.

We look at treating the symptoms. Yeah, everything from social disasters to drug design. You know, we're not trying to solve the problem. We're just trying to put a big band-aid on there. Yeah. And, you know, when you speak about the idea of video games in that manner, it's weird to see the world in which technology is trying to get, gamify the workplace, gameify drive, and gamify everything.

The majority of games out there are goal-oriented, and it usually has to do with some sort of, you know, materialistic game. You know, it's not like you're trying to create a better environment, or you're trying to become more part of the system or develop. I wonder what part of, what does language, where does language fit into creativity? We spoke about the middle evil ages, and obviously there was a more, there was a different type of communication there. And there was a different type of writing, a different type of art, move forward into almost, I would argue that there's been a degradation of language. And maybe that shows the, maybe that arises at the same time as the artist who, what's that form of art when the deconstructionist? Did they come out in a time when language is being degraded?

or can you draw a parallel to language and creativity? I don't know if it's a degradation. I mean, you know, the English language is a living language. And so it's constantly changing. And there are, you know, certainly two different sort of schools of thought when it comes to this. The one is the prescriptivists who say, you know, this is the way it should be, and these are the rules. And the other are the descriptivists who are, you know, well, this is the way language is being used. So that's what we're looking at.

And I think, you know, both of them are interesting. Both of them have merits, I think. You know, I have never been one to teach grammar in a class. Even when I taught, you know, remedial English classes years ago, I never really taught grammar because my attitude about it always was that it's like driving a car. in order to drive a car, you don't first have to learn how the engine works. And so, you know, if you know the rules of grammar, that's not really going to help you to become necessarily a better writer. I think you write and you kind of learn as you need to go along.

It makes me think about the program Microsoft Excel, the spreadsheet program, right? That program can do everything from, you know, doing the most basic things that you might that you might need of putting together a list of invitations for your birthday party to doing, you know, high financial analysis for a corporation. Well, I needed to do something in between. And so, you know, I'm not going to look to, I don't need to know how to do the high finance for the corporation. So I'm going to sort of just dive in there and start fooling with it.

And then as things come up, I'm like, okay, well, how do you do this? Because that's really what I need to know. And one of the problems that I've always had with the, especially the, the books that come out to help you learn how to use a computer program is it starts from, you know, the most basic thing and it's going to show you everything. Like, I don't need to know everything. I only need to know how to do this. This is what my part of it is. And so, you know, I've always thought that the teaching of formal English grammar is probably not very very. helpful. Now, I should say in elementary school, some of it is. But once you get past there and you're

on to middle school and high school, if you haven't learned that yet, you ain't learning it now. And so it really is not going to be helpful. And so I find the usages, you know, the folks who study English usage really interesting. There's a guy named Garland. who publishes a book on English usage. I forget how many additions he's had now, American English usage. And it's just a dictionary of American English usage, of words and how they're being used. And, you know, I was just at an event, and one of my students was sitting there, and she had socks on that had a Labrador retriever on it.

and the student who was sitting next to it said they were making a joke about, you know, having your socks off and, you know, your dogs free. And she looked at me, she said, do you know what that means? And I said, yes, I'm old. I'm not dead. You know, your dogs in that case, and your feet. You know, she was talking about her feet with the socks on. But, you know, if you were to look up dogs in the Oxford English Dictionary, you're not going to find that, you know, they may mean feet. But usage, yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating to me.

You know, it reminds me of that old book, Flatland by Abbott and how people can see things in like a one-dimensional way or a two-dimensional way. And if you lived in this one plane and you saw a cube coming and you would have no words to describe it, you would just see this, you wouldn't see all the dimensions of it. Well, I worry sometimes. Well, it's perspective, right? I mean, now we're back with perspective and how we view the world. You know, I think about that very early film by the Lumier brothers of the train coming towards the station

and people sitting in the theater when they saw that screaming because they thought the train was going to come right off the screen and coming to the station. It's perspective and it's what you are familiar with and what you understand. And so it's frames of reference, right? And maybe, so this is an idea that I had a while back. that what if we took what if we used our language today like the we let's take the english language and we added like some sort of suffix and a prefix that denoted um honesty you know almost like honorifics or something like that like maybe we're one step away maybe and we can see the language changing right now the different the different ways in which we're using

different parts of language we never have before what if we're on the cusp of just changing a suffix that denoted honesty and integrity. And if you use that in contract law, all of a sudden, people would be held guilty. They would be held accountable. Maybe that's where we're at with this idea of creativity and this rebirth sort of, where we're at right now is our language is about to shift in a way that allows us to understand a new perspective. Because that's really all we need is just a shift in perspective to get the world back where we want it to be. Or to set up the world in a direction that we want to be.

that we want to go maybe that's where we're headed yeah i mean perhaps i mean it i mean the the roadblocks there are everybody's got a got on board and you know and as we've talked about so often you know our our world is just moving so damn fast that you know to have everybody sort of stop and say you know hey look over here um i don't i don't even know if that's possible anymore um because i mean you know the flood of media and data on a daily basis that people get, it's kind of frightening to think of. And mind you, I don't want to go back to the days when, although sometimes, you know, nostalgically maybe,

when you got your morning paper and you watch the news at 6 o'clock and you listened to Walter Cronkite and you got the late news at 11 o'clock and that was all you knew. You know, now we are inundated with news, you know, every moment of every day. And it's overwhelming at times. You know, I understand why people want to sort of retreat. And I do understand why people are becoming isolated for that reason. because it's scary. It's hard to keep up with.

It's scary from that perspective. If you are somebody who prides yourself on knowing what's going on, being that person today is a hell of a lot more work and has more pressure than it did 20, 30 years ago. Yeah, learning something today that may be true that causes you to have to go back and revisit everything that you did in the past. that's a big problem that's a lot of bandwidth that's a lot of perspective changing in real time that you have to do if you want to you know be intellectually honest with yourself or maybe maybe that's dishonest i don't know but there's a lot of things you have to go back and rethink it's like in that book 1984 when they would get the new the new thing would come out depending on whether

they're at war with and you got to go back and change all the articles and change everything in your in your mind it's i can understand it too it does seem as if the time we were just at not too long ago or so much simpler. Well, but we experienced those shifts in a lot of arenas. I was reading the New York Times review this morning of the new night court comedy that's on, I think it's on NBC. And it's a kind of a reboot of the old night court show. John Larrakhead is on it again.

And it was an interview with him in The Times, and he's 75. And he's 75 now. He had no interest in doing it. He was convinced to do it. He's reprising the role. But he talked about the fact that, I mean, it's a very different character now. Because when it was on in the 1980s, you know, 80s and I guess early 90s, I think it was. You know, he was a he was a sort of a despicable womanizer.

And that's not going to fly today. And so, you know, I didn't watch the show. It was on, I guess, last night. I think or the night before, I still want to see it because I did like the original. But it's interesting the way that those shifts are happening, even within people's lifetimes, when that wasn't the case previously. Right. I mean, those kinds of changes would take decades.

And now the shift occurs, you know, almost overnight. I mean, I can remember presenting at a conference in Washington, D.C., probably this is maybe 10 years ago. And we were talking about compensating faculty and faculty evaluation. Very exciting topic. The move next week, George Clooney will be planning me. And I remember somebody asked a question. We were in a packed room for this presentation because it was a very hot topic that we were presenting about. And somebody asked a question and I said, well, we need to make sure that this is,

you know, equitable for all faculty or they're going to feel like they're getting jipped. And someone came up to me after the talk and said, do you know that that's a slam, a slander to say jipped? And I at that time did not know, did not understand why it was. You know, I mean, I remember I went back to my hotel room and I looked it up because I was like, well, wait a minute, what? And I realized that, yes, I mean, it's short for gypsy. and, you know, the idea of being jipped,

and it actually was a kind of a slander and that you can't use that word anymore. And so there's a shift that occurred, you know, pretty quickly within my lifetime, to be sure. And so the way that language changes and the way that we're sort of permitted to use language and what's permissible, I mean, today we're seeing it in probably in a more heightened degree than ever before because you know all you have to do is tweet

something that's that's you know got the wrong word or the wrong attitude or the wrong sentiment and you know we live in in cancel culture yeah it's true i saw i recently saw a debate with jordan peterson and eric dyson it was fascinating to see two of these guys get out there both of them have such a command of the English language. And it's, it just, it brought me hope in some ways to think like, wow, there are people out here that are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. And they can communicate it, not only to themselves, but to each other. And the idea that you can push those boundaries using language.

And it just made me realize how important the language we have is, especially, teaching it to the kids and the use of metaphors and the ability to have a language that is almost beheld in front of you when you can when you see someone that understands the trivium and rhetoric and can put these things in front of you and you can see the world in a way it gives me hope and promise to to see you know just to use language like that i can see what's going to happen it's it's fascinating i mean language still is power it always has been yes right and if you if you are articulate um you are looked at with a different view than someone who is not you know i i i oftentimes teach the essays of james baldwin fantastic incredible essayist i mean it's

unbelievable with language and um you know he basically says that if you're going to talk to white people about the problem of black America, you're going to have to talk to them in their language. And so he realized that he was going to have to do that. Tony Morrison has said the same thing. And so, you know, there's something to that. I remember during the first Gulf War, we had sent CIA folks over to the Middle East. And there was a story on 60 minutes about the fact that I think we had two CIA agents who were fluent in Farsi. And they were talking to all these people whose language was Farsi. But we couldn't speak to their language.

So how are you going to deal with anybody? I mean, in that case, you know, trying to talk with them about what was happening in their world, an attempt to try to change things, but you don't speak their language. And so, you know, there's a Baldwin essay called Stranger in the Village, one of my favorite essays, where he talks about, you know, when he went to Switzerland, and he says, you know, I'm sure that before I got to this little small Swiss village, they had never seen a black man before. And he talks about the whole history of Western culture

and of being white and how in order to sort of make a change, it meant that he was going to have to speak their language. It's interesting the relationship between culture and language and how they are almost beyond, there's no way to describe, there's no words to really describe. You can say it's rich or it's complicated, but it's very difficult for present an argument that has the essence of the relationship between those two things. No wonder we can't get along. No wonder there's so much more.

It's, we can't communicate effectively. Well, I mean, that's the paradox of Tower of Babel, right? I mean, he's the Bible, right? You know, up until then, everyone spoke the same language and, you know, God and it being vindictive in that story because the people which trying to build the tower to reach him, supposedly whips all these foreign languages on them so they can't work together so they can't talk and communicate so they can't continue to build a tower. But, you know, getting away from that, I mean, you know, the beauty of languages is, it's really kind of incredible when you look at them. I mean, you know, the study of foreign

languages in American schools isn't such a bad state. And it's it's it's really disturbing. I mean, this attitude that, you know, well, everyone speaks English is just, it's it's moronic, to be honest. And I mean, I think the ability to be articulate in any language, whether it's English, French, farcey or Russian, whatever it is, is a gift. You know, I mean, I know, I know, it, it's, it's, I mean, I can read French. My spoken French is terrible, but I can read French. And when I read, you know, something, a Balzac novel or Proust, I mean, I can appreciate the use of the French language, the same way that I do when I read an English novelist and appreciate the way that they are articulating themselves. Or, you know, nonfiction for that matter.

you know, whatever it is that I'm reading in the daily paper or magazines and seeing the way people have really honed their craft, because it is a craft. It is a craft. Using language as a craft, writing as a craft, and the only way you can do it is to practice. Yeah, maybe that's one reason why sometimes, at least in my world, maybe that's why, with the explosion and the adoption of English everywhere, maybe that's why we begin to see things kind of bland or one-dimensional, is that we're only using one way to describe things. And I think in ancient Greek and in Hebrew,

the letters serve as numbers. And when you learn a different language, you learn the different structure of that language. Like sometimes there's no double negative, or the verb comes before the noun, or vice versa. And when you begin studying languages, you begin seeing the world different. So when we start losing languages, you can argue that we're losing ways in which to interpret the world. Well, and in some ways, I think what we have done as a culture is we've removed the nuance from the English language.

Oh, yeah. A lot of foreign languages are still incredibly nuanced. I mean, you talk about Hebrew. My biblical Hebrew doesn't have any vowels. And so when you read biblical Hebrew, there's a lot of nuance in to reading that because you have to understand what those words are without seeing the vowels. And I think we've removed a lot of the nuance from language today and made it too much about, you know, this is what it means. It's a one for one. There's no, there's no nuance.

And that's a dangerous, dangerous thing. Yeah. I think that that comes from law and finance. That's people trying to figure out this is it, black or white. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, it legalizes everything that we say, right? I mean, because now any word that comes out of my mouth has a, you know, they would say, they would say, a, you know, a standard sort of static meaning. That's what it means.

And, you know, it's not enough to say, well, I didn't mean. it that way because but that's what you said right um that that that that's dangerous it is dangerous it it it allows us to focus on the least common denominator regardless of who we are and let's just simplify this incredible piece of work down to like something so it makes me kind of mad you have to laugh if you don't get upset but let's just break this beautiful thing down into like something really ugly and small how about that yeah yeah yeah Yeah. Well, as we're getting ready to land the plane right here, I got a little exercise that I wanted to do with you. And I'm going to go through some pages here. And I would like you to give me your initial idea of what you think of when you see these images. Are you ready?

Okay. I feel like I'm getting into the psychoanalysis. What do you think? The analyst chair here. You are. What do I think of when I see that? That looks like, well, I mean, I'll free associate. I mean, to me, that reminds me of Hildegard of Bingham's Illuminations, 12th century,

where God's light comes down to her, in her illuminations to her mind here, that light is coming into this person's heart, and they are really awestruck by it. Beautiful. Let's move on. This is Jung's Red Book, isn't it? Is it? I thought I would have got a couple more pages before you would think that I did. I thought it was familiar.

Well, I mean, the snake, I think, I mean, especially when it comes to the auroboros, right? Although that's an interesting sort of almost looks like a paw print in the red. Yeah. Yeah. All right, let's keep moving here. We'll go through a couple more. You'll still get your training here. This one's an interesting.

Oh, yeah. Yes, yes. This reminds me of, what's that ancient statue of the woman? It's one of the oldest statues that we have. I can't remember the name of it. It reminds me of that. In the statue, the woman has very wide hips. It's a very female image.

Of course, you know, not even look. at what Young is doing in the backgrounds in these, which is all interesting as well. Right. Can't tell what she's holding, though. Hmm. Interesting. What do you think that is? You know, I see just, I just see the primitive nature of it when I see it without digging into the one exact that she's holding. It just seems to me that I would, I would go. with the

primordial now. Like, this is us now, even though that was us then. Like, we're still here in this moment. And as mon as we think we are, I was trying to grasp on to that which

we've, it doesn't really make sense. It's, I think you get the point. Yeah, it's the Venus of Willendorf that I'm thinking of. I don't know if you can get that. You can get that image. I can picture it in my mind, but I, yeah.

Yeah, I've seen it's like a bronze statue. It's almost like a brown color. Here, I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to move my camera to show you. Okay. Oh, yes. Yep. Yeah, it's fascinating to think. I had heard some interesting stories about Young and the red book and his time writing it and Yeah. She's such a mystical, mystical adventure.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I can't say enough about it. Yeah, here, this looks like possibly something like the self stuck in a room. Yeah. But it shows that there's depth, right? There's depth often the perspective goes so that you can go through there and maybe drive. deeper in it's a hell of a hat though

isn't it? It is. This one I think speaks to creativity like we were talking about. There's so much depth and there's the illusion of life and the illusion of us being trapped, going towards the

light and focusing on on I think that's what that dot represents is like the intense focus of and then to pan back out and realize that you're in this brick room of conscious

the perspective there is really kind of interesting though isn't it? It is. Yeah. It really is. Especially you look at the different walls like that. Yeah. You know, it's almost like a spiral if you pan back a little bit.

It's kind of sucking you in there. It's almost like a bottomless pit on some levels. You know, are you looking up or are you looking down when you see that how it is? Because it depends how you feel that day. Yeah. Let's do one more here.

Okay. This is a pretty awesome one, too. Let me see if I can get a bigger picture here. This one's pretty fascinating, too. This one's back to the auriboris as well, it seems like. Yeah. This guy's got his sword in there as if he can claim his fate, but he's destined to repeat it.

Yeah, he's trying to escape it. Yeah, I like that. Interesting. It's so fascinating to me, right? Yeah. Yeah, Young's read book. This book is. Yeah.

And it gets me, I wish I could read it in its, it's full. Yeah. Well, you have the, do you have the English translation? There is an English translation. I have the, yeah, yeah, I have, I think in, I don't have the actual translation, but in this, in this actual book, this giant manuscript of a book, they give you some sort of breakdown of it. Yeah, there's a separate volume that was, that's just a translation of all the text. Yeah, I And it's much cheaper than the It makes me wonder

This one was pretty pricey But yeah It's a nice one to have For a conversational piece And if you have some free time Just to sit down And try to wrap your mind around What what the human mind is capable of

If you're if you're Happen to be born that way I guess But yeah It's a It's fascinating And I It's like the only manuscript That I really have

It's interesting to think about how this, how information may have been consumed. Well, you, as someone who has studied the, the, those particular ages, what was it like, do you think for the people that were reading manuscripts? Yeah, I mean, working with manuscripts to me is one of the greatest things that I'm able to do. And working with medieval manuscripts when I have done is, uh, is just incredible because, uh, the history there is just amazing. and to think about, you know, the scribe writing it or if it is something by the actual author writing it.

It's one of the reasons why whenever I go to libraries, I love to see those exhibits where they're showing manuscripts. And it's one of the things that we lament is that a lot of that seems to be gone now because everything is done on the computer. And so the handwritten manuscripts have kind of gone the way of the dodo bird. And that's too bad because, you know, I know when I've studied William Wordsworth's poems, you know, we have the manuscript of the prelude, his autobiographical epic. And it's such an incredible poem. And I love the poem to read the whole book. And then to look at the manuscript and actually look at his handwriting,

writing this all out just to me is something magical about that. Was there some sort of alphabet in, like a picturesque alphabet? It seems that there was some sort of codified language in manuscripts via images that we don't have now. Well, there is. I mean, so for the images, I mean, there is the whole field of iconography. But in paleography, which is the study of manuscripts, a lot of the media and manuscripts are written in a kind of shorthand. And some of the trick of working with them is that decoding. And it can be really interesting. It can be incredibly frustrating. There is an Italian guy named Capelli who wrote a put

together a dictionary. Must have been back in the 1940s or 50s. I have it over on my shelf here. And he went through medieval manuscripts and basically compiled a dictionary that, as a attempts to kind of give you the decoding of the shorthand in these manuscripts. It doesn't work for all of them because a lot of the scribes use different things. But, you know, if you look at some of these authors, I mean, I mentioned Hildegard of Bingham before. I mean, Hildegard had several, several of her pieces are written in a language that, we don't know what it is. It was a language that was apparently invented for the nuns at the Abbey where she was, that she invented. and we've never found the cipher.

So we don't know what the heck it says. But apparently the nuns understood it. So can you say that? Like is this just part of the journey, David? Do we create libraries? Do we create languages and then we must forget them so that we can? Maybe we have to forget them so that we can move forward. Maybe we're trapped by the past if we don't continue to move forward the language.

I think that maybe. I mean, it depends on whether or not you're going to look at the language as being a living language and whether you're willing to let it be malleable and adaptive. You know, if you're going to be restrictive, I mean, famously the French have their own academy that governs language, that governs the French language to keep the purity of the language. English has nothing like that. And I think one of the only ways that it progresses is if it does have that adaptability. You know, you look at something like, oh, I mean, any of the dead languages, I mean, I deal a lot with the Celtic languages. And, you know, most of those, many of those are dead languages. Now, a dead language means that no one speaks it anymore. So that's the definition.

A language is dead if there aren't any speakers of it still alive and using the language. So for example, Latin is considered a dead language. It is still the language of obviously the Catholic Church. And the only place that actually still uses it on a daily basis is the Vatican. But it is not a living language. The language is, that's it. Now, sometimes that's really helpful. I mean, I can remember when I studied New Testament Greek in graduate school,

I mean, New Testament Greek, which is different from classical Greek and different from modern Greek, New Testament Greek is the words in Greek in the Greek New Testament. Once you learn that, you know New Testament Greek. That's the language. That's all there is. So it never changed, right? I mean, it was what it was. Aramaic, you know, a lot of these ancient languages are the same one.

way. But it really is interesting because without our ability to understand them, you know, we can't understand our past. I mean, look at the history of the Rosetta Stone. You know, without deciphering that, you know, we wouldn't know our past. We wouldn't understand what came before. And languages, you know, as we said before, language is, you know, as we said before, language is power yeah have you read have you read the bible in hebrew english and new testament greek i have read most of the old testament in biblical hebrew um i've read the new testament in in new testament

in new testament greek and and yes gone through it in in english and read big chunks of it in latin medieval latin um yeah that's fascinating to me. Like, you're the only person I know who's done that. Like, I've been so too that I know you. I'm not sure. It's a badge I want to wear, but, yeah. You know, I mean, as somebody who studies the past, I mean, you have to be conversant in language. You have to be able to deal with that.

Otherwise, you can't study it. You can't look at it. I mean, it's like someone who wants to study, you know, the novels of Gabriel Garcia-Marcette. but can't speak Spanish. I mean, you know, you can read them in English translation, but you're not getting the original. You're not getting the real thing. It's like reading Proust and French,

which I don't recommend to anybody. Proust in English is difficult enough. But, you know, it's akin to that. I mean, if you really want to read Proust, I mean, I remember in graduate school, when I said to my professor, I said, I really think I should read Proust. I'd never read in English or French.

And I remember he said to me, said, why? And I said, well, isn't it something to have done? And he said, well, I've never read them. And I said, oh, you know, and so I read, you know, some of Proust. I have not gotten through even half of it. But I've also read large chunks of it in French to see what the actual original looks like. And boy, it's as difficult as this is the English translation. The man loved a long sentence.

It's fascinating. Well, as we are, as we're coming close to the inn here, what do you got coming up? Where can people find you? And what are you excited about? Yeah. So my website's David A. Solomon, S-A-O-M-O-M-N dot com. Links to my blog and my books and speaking engagements and my consulting and exciting things that are coming up. We are in the second week of our new semester, which feels like it should be spring break already, but we won't go there. And I've got a great class of students that I'm teaching in an advanced museum studies course who are just getting ready to start doing some curating work for an exhibition that we're going to be putting on in April. And just real glad to be able to talk to you.

Yeah, pleasure is all mine. I really enjoy the conversations and I enjoy learning. And I've gotten some great feedback from some people that are also getting to tune in when they can. and play a part. So thank you for being here. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for participating in the chat and taking time to spend with us and hopefully getting to learn us as we go through our own journey and try to solve the world's problems. That's all we got for today.