a beautiful mess
Music: Blak Audio: Cexcells
Day three of the National Communication Association conference in Chicago. Tired. There are parties to attend here in a few. It’s great to see old friends, to ruminate and recall. A common theme that has come up is about so-and-so, you know, what ever happened to her/him? How is such and so? The theme is the answer, said so well by my roommate: “A beautiful mess.”
There are so many beautiful messes walking about these conference hotels. We discuss their tragic beauty over drinks, over coffee, over dinners and in the hallways. I worry that I am someone’s beautiful mess. If so, I hope the stress is on beauty, since I did cut my hair and shave (as for the mess, is it as well hidden as I presume?).
One thing that goes so well with the theme of “the beautiful mess” is the cover of the conference program, which, alas, I cannot locate online to present to you, dear reader. It is a swirl of disembodied body parts---mouths, eyes, teeth---and various faces coded ambiguously ethnic, like a sort of fleshy black hole, leading to a center that resembles . . . well, it resembles an anus (the hues are browns and reds). The art is perhaps some of the worst I have yet to see on an academic conference program. Just inside the program cover is an essay, presumably by the artist---it is unclear---under the title of the conference, “Faith-Intellect-Ethics: About the Program Cover” (I honk for hyphens, don’t you?). The essay begins thusly:
How did the world begin, swirling matter arranged by intelligent design or ignited from a cosmic explosion? What about me? Am I a divine creation or the result of a big bang---two cells colliding in the night? Around these questions of birth, creation and existence, fragments of humanity orbit, sucked into a vortex of dialogue, thought, and feeling
I am reminded of my post about how other fields see communication studies from the outside. It is true I would not want my colleagues in political science, psychology, and English studies to see the cover of my own professional organization’s program. Nor would I want them to read the accompanying essay---or at least I would not want them to read “Am I a divine creation or the result of a big bang” without my and my roommates passionate delivery and reenactment of this mind-blowing rumination on the meaning of it all in our William Wegman heavy hotel room. (If you are reading this, dear artist, yes, your folks banged you out; it’s gross, I know).
What this world needs now is a new drug, a new organ, not a folk singer or those who aspire to be. What my world needs right now is irony, not cynicism, and it would secrete the kind of critical self-awareness that ends in laughter, not the tears of self-importance.