juxtaposition
Weekly newsletter 3.2.2021
Friends,
A few years ago, my sister gave me perhaps the most unique gift I’d ever received. She went to a ceramics studio and made me a set of dessert plates, and when I opened the box I noticed her label, “The Women of Bill’s Life.” (“Where is he going with this?” you’re asking. Well, “Where is she going with this?” is what I wondered in that moment, too.) The first plate included a painting of me (because who doesn’t enjoy eating cake off of one’s own face?). The second plate depicted my mother. Then came Glinda (the good witch from The Wizard of Oz), Wonder Woman, Angela Lansbury, and Madonna. There it was on my kitchen counter, an assembly of the women who shaped me, and just seeing them all in one place not only made me want to throw a party right away to show off my new collection but also gave me a new perspective on myself.
Sometimes, constructing meaning doesn’t take a whole lot of effort. Just by putting the images of these women together generated a conversation about me. Ordinary plates, ordinary (and lovingly crafted) images, an ordinary setting - but I’d never thought to put them all in one place. These weren’t passive relationships. My imaginary best friend as a child was a mop whom I named Glinda and carried everywhere. One of my earliest memories is having a fit because my mother wouldn’t let me bring the mop into a grocery store, but Glinda granted wishes (and provided fabulous footwear) and helped young Dorothy find her way back home. No wonder I wanted her close! As for Wonder Woman, I wasn’t into comic books as a kid, but Lynda Carter’s Diana Prince was able to transform herself into something else with a few spins and a flash of light, she could eke the truth out of anyone, and she got to snuggle with Lyle Waggoner. I mean, come on. At 5, I didn’t totally understand Wonder Woman’s full powers or cultural significance, but I wanted to be her so badly that I’d find old toilet paper rolls and fashion them into the cuffs that Diana wore. You might assume that my devotion to Angela is rooted in “Murder, She Wrote,” and you’re right. A smalltown schoolteacher turned bestselling author and surprisingly effective sleuth, she was a badass, wriggling into investigations that stumped bumbling police chiefs or unlucky detectives (all men) and saving the day for countless unjustly accused relatives, friends, and neighbors.
The collection got me thinking: who’s missing? My piano teacher for 11 years. My high school theater director. Nuns. Bernadette Peters. The more I contemplated the most formative relationships of my childhood and adolescence, the more women I identified. Relatives, teachers, friends...all women. Yet as a kid the only woman elected official I knew of was Jane Byrne, the mayor of Chicago from 1979-83 whose name now applies to an interchange between the city’s major freeways. I don’t remember if we ever read or talked about women authors or leaders or scientists in elementary school, and except for Kate Chopin’s The Awakening in my Senior year religion class, I can’t remember ever needing to read a book by a female author in my all-boys high school education. In college in the 90s, a debate about challenging the white, male canon of “Western” literature was raging and I was introduced to the language of feminist theorists and activists. That language, like my formative relationships with women, helped me develop a self-awareness that the white male canon never did.
Women’s History Month intends to commemorate and encourage “the study, observance, and celebration of the vital role of women in American history,” and these are noble aspirations, but if we still need to have a month to highlight these contributions, then we’re doing it wrong. Likewise with any calendar designation to uplift the experiences of and demonstrate on behalf of the rights of marginalized groups should tell us: we’re doing it wrong. Perhaps our starting point is the problem: if we put our energy into understanding the big picture, we let ourselves off the hook from examining our own relationships and experiences. We shouldn’t (only) celebrate and advocate for women because Susan B. Anthony did or because Marie Curie won two Nobels. We should do it because of our formative relationships, and earnestly starting there would make it impossible to accept the status quo.
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UPCOMING
Guided Meditations | Mondays, 4:00pm PST, via Zoom
Good Stuff III | 4-week symposium on Mondays at 5:00pm PST begins on April 5. Sign up here!
Good habits: understanding nuns through film | 6-week symposium on Tuesdays at 5:00pm PST begins on April 6. Sign up here!
UPDATES
Speaking of juxtaposition, the past week included different experiences whose overlapping schedule got me thinking about overlapping ideas and motivations across the boundaries of industry and field. Last Thursday, I participated in a consortium that brought together a number of the panelists at the Leadership in the Age of Personalization summit in October. Over the past six months, Glenn Llopis has gleaned insights from leaders and thinkers in the realms of corporate America, health care, and higher ed and started that reveal not only the rumblings of what Llopis calls a shift from “standardization” to “personalization” the immanent need for that shift. From Thursday through Sunday, I participated in the Open Div Summit. This was my first “pod conference,” a mix of live events facilitated via Zoom and podcasts that captured interviews of a really wide range of scholars and practitioners.The conference attracted divinity school alumnx and students and others interested in engaging spirituality, meaning, and connection outside the traditional contexts of religious communities. Conversations among panelists and participants also revealed a shift - the search for meaningful connection and practices isn’t limited to traditional religious communities, and the ideas and techniques that fuel religious practice aren’t proprietary to those communities. Taken together, these experiences demonstrate for me that we’re at or past a tipping point, that we’ve left the modern world and entered the postmodern.
The crises and revelations of the past year exacerbated that change, but they also highlighted innovative ways of understanding ourselves and each other. As much as we all (love to) hate Zoom meetings (right, Golden Globes?), I can’t help but wonder (#carriebradshaw) how virtual interpersonal engagement will shape us. We can curate our appearance on screen like a piece of art - our lighting, our setting, our bookshelf demonstrating the things we read (or at least want others to think we read) - but we are also forced to connect with each other face to face, and we’re forced (until we find the “hide self view” option) to see ourselves the ways others see us. This is something an in-person conference around a big table or a book club in someone’s living room can’t do. Sure, physical proximity affords other ways to connect, but we can use things like body language and where we choose to sit to manage our engagement. In person, it’s easy to lean back and doodle and remain engaged in conversation, but via a camera fixated on our shoulders-up selves, it’s harder to retrench into thoughts and to let our bodies communicate the need for space, for process, for pause. We [gasp] might actually have to learn how to articulate the things we are feeling and need in the moment.
Guided meditations via Zoom continue! Mondays at 4:00pm PST. The aim is to practice being present - to ourselves, to others, and to the world. If you or someone you know could use a 20-30 minute dose of peace and quiet on Mondays,visit the meditation page on my site to sign up.
Last week, we launched the Religious literacy symposium, and yesterday the first session of the Good Stuff II symposium dove deep into a little art, a little theory, a little text. Next month, two new symposia are scheduled to launch: Good Stuff III (starting on April 5) and Good habits: understanding nuns through film (starting on April 6). If these topics pique your interest, or if you’re just looking for some meaningful conversation, consider joining a symposium. Full descriptions of all symposia are on my website. Symposia are limited to 10 participants and need 4 to run - if you’ve thought about participating, please sign up! For more details and to register, click here.
GOOD STUFF
See
Melody Postma is a Savanna, GA, based artist whose work I first encountered at the Lanoue Gallery in Boston. I popped in during a visit, and as I was about to say hello to the gallerist I caught the image of Wonder Woman in the corner of my eye. I could feel my entire body turn to follow my gaze and start to move toward it, finding the repeated image of the supershero juxtaposed with images of a woman in an apron, an explosion of color, and the words WONDERS OF THE WORLD. I was enchanted, and that painting has hung over my living room couch ever since. Postma’s style takes me through a range of responses - levity, nostalgia, politics, self-awareness, and back to levity - because of the way she juxtaposes disparate images and materials. She’s recently started to apply her creations to various accessories, adding another layer of juxtaposition by making her creations wearable and useable art. Check out her website or Instagram to get a little taste of her work.
Listen (and Watch)
If we’ve met, you’re probably aware that I’m a fan of Madonna. If the music video for “Like a Prayer” played in our proximity, you’ve probably been subjected to an impromptu lecture about it.
My fandom (I’m from before “stan” was a thing) didn’t just lead to obsession. It led to a degree. In a course on the intersection of mysticism and eroticism in different religious traditions, I pursued a research project about the intersection of religion and pop culture. Not a surprise, since at the time I was a) in Divinity school and b) hitting the clubs frequently. Madonna’s Ray of Light album was dominant at the time, and her explicit integration of religious ideas, practices, and images in the album’s tracks and music videos made it the perfect subject. What started as a mildly frivolous project took me on a journey through Madonna Studies to a nearly-30 page paper, and in the 20 years since, I think about and apply the insights I gleaned from that research every day.
“Madonna Studies?” you ask, with an eyebrow raised. In the 80s and 90s, there was an explosion of academic interest in Madonna. Anthropologists, theologians, gender theorists, sociologists, and others weren’t sure what to do with her because she didn’t conform to the assumptions governing women in pop music, and they published a bevy of essays about her. She was inspiring to some, problematic to others, but across the board they recognized that Madonna’s body of work and ever-reinventing public persona reflected a significant shift in American (and, for some, global) culture. To me, she continues to inspire reflection not only on religion and pop culture but also on the construction of gender, the development of culture, and the juxtaposition of our experiences.
I’ve led a couple of PD sessions for colleagues on this topic, and more recently I’ve developed a symposium on Madonna. In this contexts, I ask folx to consider Madonna as Social Commentator, as Cultural Parasite, as Reinventor, and as Catalyst of Postmodernism through a selection of tracks, lyrics, and videos, and I pepper our conversation with insights gleaned from my research. I’ll be offering the Madonna symposium twice in the coming months - starting April 15th as part of Tacoma Arts Live’s Adult Conservatory (registration info coming soon!) and through my own consulting practice in August (to overlap her birthday, of course).
This week, though, I want to highlight one of the tracks from her most recent album (and reinvention), Madame X. “Batuka” features the Batukadeiras Orchestra and mimics a distinctive form of music developed by women in Cabo Verde. The video pays homage to the women who taught Madonna the style, the women who developed and continue to perform batuka, and to the historical persecution and enslavement of the people of Cabo Verde, which was a hub for the transatlantic slave trade. It’s a catchy tune with a call and response that is easy to start singing along to, but the video’s images of women preserving their much-persecuted practices with joy and abandon juxtaposed with the ghosts of slave ships crossing the ocean adds a depth that I didn’t anticipate. I’ve watched the video a hundred times by now, and I have yet to make it to the end without chills and a well of tears.
If you stream music on Spotify, I’ve started a playlist called “Bill’s Good Stuff,” including music I’ve loved for a long time as well as things I’ve come across more recently. Feel free to add the playlist to your favorites! Bill’s Good Stuff Spotify Playlist
Read
In this week’s meditation, I used a meditation by Kara Ingraham, titled “Building Home(s).”
“Building Home(s)”
If the life you are building looked like a house, what would it look like? What would it feel like?
How did you build it? From love? Necessity? Both? Neither?
Did you make it a home? Does it feel like it is your own? Does it feel strong and vibrant and changing and fulfilling? Does it feel suffocating? Airy? Expansive? Exposed shiplap? Does it feel like a place we can welcome others in? Does it feel safe? Do you?
I want to build a home out of my life that is beautiful at its core. It is warm. It is inviting. Solace and peace whisper in the paint color. It is vibrant and steady. The beams are strong and radiant. The ocean is nearby. Salt speaks to the foundation, teaches it how to cleanse; how to endure. The patio has fireflies and crystal lights. Everything, illuminated. It is my own. It is awe-inspiring.
We can’t build homes out of human beings.
Maybe we can build them out of our souls.
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