Muskegon Area Arts & Humanities Festival joins hundreds of arts and humanities organizations and communities across the nation in celebrating National Arts and Humanities Month throughout October. The Festival will carry this message to the people of our communities through activities that honor the efforts of artists, historians, and cultural groups working to make the arts and humanities a part of everyone's life.

October 2011, various arts, humanities and community groups will collaborate on Muskegon's Eleventh Annual Muskegon Area Arts & Humanities Festival. The festival's mission is to celebrate, acknowledge and examine the world of ideas as they are expressed in the arts and humanities. The festival encourages the entire community to explore cultural, artistic and educational events centered on the theme.

The theme this year is "Home". (See more about this theme below.)

Plan on attending Muskegon Area Arts & Humanities events during the month of October 2011. Invite your family and friends. To learn more about the festival contact the Festival Coordinator Shelia Wahamaki at 231-777-0324.

Please contact us with any questions and/or your ideas! We look forward to hearing from you.

Muskegon Area Arts & Humanities Festival was founded in 2001.

Home

Thoughts on the 2011 AH Fest Theme by Foley Schuler

 "I worried that a great love would make everything else an exile."  --Jack Gilbert,"Living Hungry After" from The Dance Most of All

Ev'ry day's an endless stream
Of cigarettes and magazines.
And each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories
And ev'ry stranger's face I see reminds me that I long to be,
Homeward bound,
I wish I was,
Homeward bound,
Home where my thought's escaping,

Home where my music's playing,
Home where my love lies waiting

Silently for me.                         --Paul Simon, "Homeward Bound"

It's "where the heart is," says the familiar old adage. "Any place I hang my hat," according to a Johnny Mercer song lyric. There's no place like it, coos Dorothy with a triple click of her ruby heels in The Wizard of Oz. Certainly much more than the requisite four walls and a roof that satisfy the basic human need for shelter--and a good deal more elusive too:

HOME

To be severed from one's familiar surroundings can be one of life's calamities. We have all experienced the pangs of homesickness--gentle or piercing--at one time or another, and the loss of a home can be the cause of genuine grief. It is no mistake that having to move ranks high on the list of life's most stressful experiences--up there with a death in the family and divorce. When Gertrude Stein, returning to the United States on a lecture tour in the 1930's after years of living in Paris, wanted to visit her childhood home in Oakland, California but could not find the house,  she made her famous pronouncement: "there is no there there." All of which leads one to wonder, where is there a "there"? Why this powerful pull of place?

We might do well to begin (as we all do) with those cozy nooks and corners of childhood--essential, as Gaston Bachelard so elegantly outlined in his seminal study, The Poetics of Space, for offering those spaces in which we were first allowed to daydream. "The chief benefit of the house," he tells us, “is that it shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.  Thought and experience are not the only things that sanction human values. The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depths." Who hasn't felt the comfort and solace of such interiors, whose dimensions are so beautifully illuminated in that introspective opus by pop music genius and Beach Boys bard, Brian Wilson:

There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming,

lie awake and pray

Do my crying and my sighing

Laugh at yesterday.

Now it's dark and I'm alone
But I won't be afraid
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room

Such reveries derive pleasure from their own being, granting them a special autonomy, which lead Bacehlard to conclude that "the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling places are relived as daydreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time."

Old as humanity itself, this connection between people and place is as expressive as it is protective. We define ourselves by our surroundings. Where we are is often who we are. Our interiors reflect our...interiors. Even home decor is never merely home decor. To survey the books on someone's shelf, their comfortable chair in a corner, the knick-nacks on the mantle and curios on the countertop is to see their soul turned inside out. 

Home, in both its inner and outer dimensions can take as many forms as there are people on the planet. Whether by nature, choice or by sheer force of circumstance, home is for some highly portable, carried inside. For many others it is something one longs for, searches for--perhaps for an entire lifetime. Few have been more at home in their homelessness than the Romanian-born philosopher E.M. Cioran, who penned his odes to displacement in Parisian exile, writing from his garret apartment on Rue de l'Odéon, among countless other missives: "I am not from here; condition of inner exile; I'm nowhere at home--absolute rootlessness. Paradise lost--my constant obsession…" further sharpening the point in The Trouble with Being Born: "I have lived all my life with the feeling I was chased away from my true place. If the phrase 'metaphysical exile' had been deprived of meaning, my existence alone would have sufficed to give it one."

Across the ages all exiles, especially the metaphysical ones, seem kindred spirits. The great Basho, the archetypal wandering poet-sage of 17th Century Japan, knew this feeling well--giving it especially succinct expression in his celebrated haiku:

Even in Kyoto

hearing the cuckoo's cry

I long for Kyoto

After all, "home" by nature always contains and reveals its seeming antithesis--"away."  The delectable mysteries of travel would be unthinkable--or become something else entirely, if not cease to exist altogether--were these wonders not constellated by the concept of home, travel being inseparable from the fresh perspective on the familiar it affords. It takes being away to sharpen and sometimes transform our sense of home, which only grows more luminous the further away we get. It was only while living in exile in Zurich that James Joyce would begin serious work on his epic love letter to his native city--with more than a nod, of course, to that great homeward-leaning wanderer of Homer. Now it is said that if Dublin were to suddenly fall into the sea today and disappear forever, it would be possible to reconstruct it to exact specification (at least as it existed in 1904) from the pages of his Ulysses.  

We are each a modern day Odysseus searching for home, whether sailing the Agean sea, traversing the streets of Dublin or running errands in Muskegon--whether we are pacing our living room or the confines of our own mind. And the moment one appears to have arrived is really just the beginning of that search. "Live like a traveler in your home town," Thoreau advised (remarking elsewhere, in a telling double entendre, "I have traveled widely in Concord."). And rarely if ever is such wandering done completely alone. Home is not only something to be protected and defended, but, inevitably, something to be shared. Our notions of community and diversity begin here. The immigrant's story and song are at home here too. The circle we have drawn around ourselves is always intersecting and overlapping with countless others.

We begin our lives with an exile--thrust from the womb to spend our lives seeking something of the unity of that first world. The "human dream of leaving," however--as Salman Rushdie reflects in a personal and penetrating essay on The Wizard of Oz--"is at least as powerful as its countervailing dream of roots." We are bound by the tension between the two. There's no place like home...When Dorothy clicks the heels of her ruby slippers and utters the celebrated mantra, she finds herself suddenly back in Kansas, as if all else had been "only" a dream. But is she home? The deep longing in her voice--to venture somewhere "Over the Rainbow"--still resonates too strongly in our ears for us to ever be completely sure.

The Muskegon Area Arts and Humanities Festival invites you to discover and explore what HOME means to you, both as a physical place and as a state of mind--where it is, what it is--during a month-long series of events in October, as AH Fest enters its second decade by taking a long, hard and loving look at where we are and where we want to be.

The Muskegon Area Arts and Humanities Festival is funded in part by...