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 2010, various arts, humanities and community groups will collaborate on Muskegon's Tenth 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 "Self". (see more about this theme below)

Plan on attending Muskegon Area Arts & Humanities events during the month of October 2010. Invite your family and friends. To learn more about the festival contact the Festival Coordinator Bill Seeback 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.

SELF

 A Note on the Theme by Foley Schuler

 

“All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”

 —Federico Fellini

When the child was a child,
It was the time for these questions:
Why am I me, and why not you?

—Peter Handke, “Song of Childhood” (from the film  Wings of Desire, by Wim Wenders)

 

 

              I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

              And what I assume you shall assume,

              For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

 —Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

 * * *

 

In 1571, a respected French lawyer and civil servant marked his 38th birthday with the following inscription on the wall of his ancestral home in Bordeaux, crowning the bookshelves of his working chamber:

 

At the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out. If the fates permit, he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.

 

With these words Montaigne entered into a nearly ten-year period of rigorous, self-imposed reclusion that would result in, among other things, the birth (or at least reinvention) of a literary form: the essay—named for the French essai, meaning “try” or “attempt,” and, simultaneously modest and magnificent, just the tool needed for such an endeavor. “The bosom of the learned virgins” on which he would lay his weary head, by the way, was an unusually well-appointed library and “freedom, tranquility, and leisure” code for a program self-study of almost unprecedented intensity. To those who deemed the project indulgent, he shrugged, saying, “I am myself the matter of my book.” Few writers indeed have been more palpably present in their work. Once remarked Emerson of The Essays: “Cut these words, and they bleed.”

 

To study oneself, however, was to study the universe, and in doing so, Montaigne was following a deeply-rooted human imperative that went back at least to the ancient Greeks (with their oracular inscription—“Know Thyself”—looming over the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi) and likely reached back as far as that first human to catch his or her visage quivering in a pool of water and realize what it was—and then wonder what it really was. All times and traditions have weighed in on the subject. “Knowing others is wisdom. Knowing the self is enlightenment,” Lao Tzu, tells us, in the Tao Te Ching, adding, “Mastering others requires force. Mastering the self requires strength.” And Shankara, in his commentary on Bhagavad Gita, goes so far as to say, “Self-knowledge alone eradicates misery...Self-knowledge alone is the means to the highest bliss...Absolute perfection is the consummation of Self-knowledge.”

 

Dropped into the wellspring of existence, the pebble of the self has sent ripples of awareness throughout history—and across a small pond in Massachusetts, on whose shores Thoreau, in his book named famously for that pond, would write: “In most books, the I, or first person, is omitted; in this it will be retained; that, in respect to egotism, is the main difference. We commonly do not remember that it is, after all, always the first person that is speaking. I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

 

 “Self” has come to stand both for what is biggest and what is smallest in ourselves—both deity and dirty word, depending. (Who, for instance, would ever wish to be called selfish?) Too much attention to it is derided as navel-gazing—the nadir of self-indulgence—but what is the navel is after all, before all, but the source of life itself? Carl Jung would capitalize it, in fact, adopting the term “Self” to signify the unified consciousness and unconscious of a person—the coherent whole of one's being—to be realized as the product of individuation, the process of integrating one's personality.

 

With the advent of the Internet and subsequent social networking, we of the 21st Century live in an age of unprecedented self-expression and disclosure, of self-exploration and realization: the age of memoir, self-help, self-portrait and self-improvement—in which everyone is a potential autobiographer, and the means of giving voice to this most basic human impulse are instantaneous and omnipresent. In our present era of Twittering, blogging, Facebooking and MySpacing, a tantalizing blank canvas of pixels and megabytes beckons at every turn, and the theft of one’s identity itself now ranks among our greatest fears. The Muskegon Area Arts and Humanities Festival invites you look inward during the month of October and then make the inner outer, as the Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary by shining a light on the myriad of ways in which our identity is created and perceived—in a month-long series of events exploring what is, deep down, always everyone's favorite subject, the one of which we never tire: SELF

            January, 2010

 

 

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