Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Peace Essays

Matter of Perception

To see new things, it is a matter of perception, opening the mind and spirit to new ideas, concepts and visions. That is the way that we will find peace: changing the perception of the majority of the world’s people. It is a simple thing and yet the hardest in mankind’s history: to change mindsets. What it requires is an openness to the “new” and an acceptance of “change”. Peace starts with a matter of perception.

“Getting it” requires thinking beyond one's own beliefs, views

  In 1998, I had emergency quintuple heart bypass surgery. It did not change my perspective on life and death, although it was a wake-up call to take better care of my body.

  I discovered the writings of Rumi, a 13th century Islamic mystic poet, who helped me understand the marriage between death and life. He wrote:

   I would love to kiss you,

   The price of kissing is your life.

Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,

   What a bargain, let's buy it.

   Don't get it? Many times, I don't get it, because of "The Skin I'm Not Livin' In." For example, I say to my son's roommate, who is mentally retarded:

  "I just learned that your brother died."

He replies: "He died two years ago. I am going to his funeral this Friday."        '

Translation: My brother's death is painful. I need to put it in the past but I must go to his funeral this week.

   It's all perception. Rumi examines this:

 To the frog that's never left his pond the ocean seems like a gamble.

 Look what he's giving up: security, mastery of the world, recognition!

    The ocean frog just shakes his head:

 "I can't really explain what it's like where I live, but someday I'll take you there."

  Robert Wilson took in two boys who society called mentally retarded. He accepted their language of sounds and images then used their image and word patterns to create avant-garde works in theater that have transformed the end of the 20th century and began to shape the 21st century.

 That's what genius does. It can take the works of retarded children and make them into art.

  More from little: Wilson found a pattern in the way Einstein would hold his thumb and forefinger. He cropped a collection of photographs from childhood to old age, showing those fingers, and created Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass.

   Recently, on a trip to New York, I went to two interesting productions, the off-Broadway Stomp and the Robert Redford Sunshine Film Festival Winner, Groove. I had seen Stomp before on video with its Australian company: 14 white performers and two blacks. This production, numerically, was the opposite. It did not change the performance, which was rich in what art is all about: Art is how you do something, not the story.

  One scene has three women pulling things from a garbage bag and making music.

 The things they pull out are just "stuff" but in the hands of these special performers it is pure art which transforms the act and the audience.

Getting to there from here

  They get the rhythms because they were the rhythms. The last scene has a lone African-American performer on stage, making music with his clapping, rubbing hands and snapping fingers while directing the audience to follow.

  At the end, all that is left is the snapping of fingers by the audience as the performer stops his snapping and begins stylistically to sweep the floor (in the same manner as the performance began.)

  When he stops the audience applauds. He shakes his head, snapping his fingers again. He stops. They applaud. They do not get it. The play is meant to end with the snapping of fingers until the performer disappears and lights fade to black.

      Suddenly, we get it: The art is in us.

  In Groove, the whole film is one long night's party where the actors are on the illegal drug ecstasy. It took my wife and me an extended time after the performance to get it. We discovered that the film was an experience that was not to be judged, but lived through the young dancers.

  It was not until I read the June 6 Time Magazine that I knew about this new drug of choice spreading across America.

  We got it because of the artistry of the film. Many of my friends who also are older may not get it in Waco because it will not make our movie theaters.

    Rumi, again, helps me get it.

 Birds fly in great sky circles of freedom.

 How do they learn this?

 They fall

 and having fallen, they are given wings.

The idea of changing perception is not easy. It means seeing the world in new vision that is foreign to how we are educated, brought up in our society and how we see the world: mine or ours! To frame the ideas that will lead to peace, we must take the best of what has been given to us and leave the rest behind.

19^th-century minds

John Rocker was just ignorant of modern thinking

  I am upset with the treatment of John Rocker. When John, a relief pitcher for the Atlanta Braves, spoke out in Sports Illustrated against foreigners, aliens, homosexuals. Asians and blacks, he was showing that he was a product of the 19th century.

As my father used to say, "There are three ways that Americans get rid of things which they do not understand: Name it. Ignore it. Or give it to a Committee."

True, Rocker would have been better if he had given it to a committee. He spoke from ignorance and a southern "naming-it" background. John missed his anthropological history. He did not ask, "Who came first?" If he had, he would have, known that we are all relief pitchers on this mound.

Myth and some shreds of history say it was the Chinese who came first, coming across the land bridge which is now the Aleutian Islands. The Northwest Indians have a story about slant-eyed, people coming across a rainbow bridge. An ancient Chinese ship was recently found outside of Vancouver, Canada, from around the time of Christ. That is long before Leif Eriksson "discovered" Greenland or Columbus "discovered" America.

Who were all those colored-skin people standing on the shore waving when Rocker's^. pale-skin, Eu­ropean ancestors came to Virginia and Massachu­setts and Georgia?

Theories of discovery

One theory of how art forms happen from China to the Americas, from Africa to Europe, is "cultural drift" — people migrating in prehistoric times to new spaces as the glaciers came and then receded. The Aleutian land bridge is one theory for the ancestral origin of the Eskimos, plains Indians of Canada, American Indians, Mayan, and Aztec cultures.

Maybe it was Rocker's education, or lack of it, that made him say what he did. We all got a 19th century education where it was still acceptable to name something and think that you know it. John, you think other people are an "it"? The question for you, then, in the 20th century is not: "What is it?"; it is: "What does it do?" Picasso and others changed the question in the first years of the 20th century. You may not have noticed but people are not "it" anyway — they just are.

   As I teach art appreciation to students in Waco, the hardest question to get into their storehouse for tools to use in the present and the future is "What does it do?" I have had a few John Rockers in class.

Is vs. does

     Up to the late 19th century, naming things was the rule.

     Now knowing what something or someone does is essential to living modern life. It is not important that I know what ".com" means. It is important that I use it. In fact, the computer helps me use it as an address. All I need to do is type in a name, like "Yahoo," and the computer will give me "www." and ".com". To make it work, I have to know what it does. I have to be able to use "it." Just naming it is not the solution (although it can give me the process through the name). .

  Two years ago I had to have heart bypass surgery. I did not look at the skin of the surgeon or other things to which I could give a name. I wanted someone to save my life, not an "it." I wanted the best surgeon who could answer, "What are your qualifications? Do you have extensive experience in doing this kind of thing? Are you the best in what you do?"

 There is a marvelous cartoon which sums up the 20th century. It states the obvious from the present century's point of view. It has two dogs talking in front of their computer. One says to the other, "On the Internet, no one knows that we are dogs."

John Rocker is someone who throws a baseball very hard, and when he opens his mouth, he speaks from a head of stone, ignorant that he does not live in this century. That is what he does. He is not alone, so please do not call him names.