The LOVE project: A Collaboration

Interested in collaborations? Yeah, me too. In fact, Jon Powles' (@JonPowles on twitter) project, in which he sewed together micropoetry written by various authors on twitter to create lyrics to a song, has captured my interest. I think that his project is genius and I cannot wait to hear the performance of the song. That said, I am interested in creating a collaborative project, too. I would like to use twitter as a platform to find others who might be interested in contributing to this project. Please know that you will receive proper recognition for your contributions. Unlike Jon Powles, I do not intend to make music, though there might be a musical component to this project. Instead, I am interested in creating a creative multimedia project, which could include written prose, poetry, spoken word, music, sculpture, paintings, sketchings, film, photographs, performance, etc. The topic of this collaborative project is love. If you are interested in being a part of this collaboration this is what you must do: 1) Create your contribution (ALL WORKS MUST BE ORIGINAL AND OWNED BY YOU), 2) Put your contribution on the internet (i.e., blog, youtube, twitpic, twitter, etc.), 3) Send me a link to your contribution via twitter (I am @StarOfSavannah), and 4) You must give me permission to use it in this collaborative project. Please know that if you send me a contribution I may use any part of it, or all of it in this project. Once the project is completed, I will put it on the internet, giving credit to all contributors.

BUT WAIT! That's not all!

Once the project is completed, I intend to analyze the methods used to complete the project and I hope to write a scholary essay on the ways in which twitter has made creative collaboration at a global level possible. I also hope to be able to analyze the limitations of this type of collaboration and consider the potential opportunities that twitter can offer in the future.

Now that you know what I'm hoping to accomplish, are you interested in contributing to this creative collaborative project? I can only hope so.

Questions that might help to get you started: What is love? What does love mean to you? Where can you find love? How does love look, smell, feel, etc.? What do you love? Who do you love? If love were a color, what color would it be?

I hope that you'll contribute to this project. Remember, you can send any type of artistic contribution as long as it is your original work and it pertains to the theme of this project. Further, remember that you must give me written permission to use your contribution in this collaborative project. All artists retain full rights to their works. Finally, if you're interested in participating in this project, remember to use twitter to send @StarOfSavannah a link to your work. Deadline for submission for this project is December 10th, 2010.

Hope

Emily Dickinson once said, "Hope is that thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops... at all." I think that's a beautiful description of hope, though perhaps not quite accurate. Perhaps it was accurate for her. After all, hope represents something different for each of us, thus, it is only logical to consider the possibility that perhaps hope is represented differently to each of us as well.

Hope is something that I carry with me everywhere that I go. Even in my darkest hours, my hope of better days exists. I have never been utterly and completely hopeless and my heart hurts for the people who are. It must certainly be a terrible thing to experience -- the loss of hope. I wonder, what must go wrong in a person's life for them to abandon all hope for improvement in much the same way as a sailor might abandon a sinking ship. Or to twist the question about, what could bring a person to decide to cling to a sinking ship when there are lifeboats within their reach?

I hope. Even now, I hope. I hope for so many wonderful things that some days I think that I might explode with optimism.

Silly as it may seem, what I hope for the most is to find you... whoever you are and wherever you are. I don't believe that I know you yet, but one day I hope to know you. One day I hope that you'll fill me up with happiness and love and that I will do the same for you. I know that you're out there somewhere and I'm hoping hard that I will find you soon.

Quiet

I like when the world is quiet,
Which it seldom seems to be.
Oft discordant.
Oft too loud.
Plagued by warmongers' hate speech.
Anti-everything,
Anti-you and anti-me.
This is the world that I've grown up in:
A world that knows no peace.
I am old enough to understand this,
Old enough to know what it means.
I am young enough to change it,
To stand apart in peaceful mutiny.
I will not acquiesce to the status quo of war,
For I like when the world is quiet.



"There is only you, and you are but a thought." -- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts

Is this culture shock?

I guess I never stopped to think about how moving 2150 miles from the place I've called home for much of my life would affect me. I've done so much traveling around the US that I've become accustomed to the instability, or so I thought. What I didn't realize is that this is an entirely new type of instability. In the past, whenever I traveled to a new place, I always knew that I would be returning home, that this new place was not going to be my new home. Being in a new place becomes a much easier experience when you know that you are just a part of the transient population and that this isn't a long term situation. And there is something about the simple enjoyability of being a member of a transient population that I've always loved.

When I moved to Louisiana, I thought that I would find the same enjoyability in moving that I do in traveling, and for a time I did. However, it's now occurring to me that I am not a member of the transient population here, that this is my new home, and I've lost the comfort I take in knowing that I can always go home. I think that I am finally being affected by culture shock. And homesickness is really setting in.

In effect, I've had to recreate myself and begin building a life for myself from almost nothing. I've left my large network of friends and acquaintances behind and I often find myself working much harder to make friends than I would have in Pennsylvania. I mean, making friends and being social has always been a natural and easy thing for me, but in Louisiana that's not the case. There are a different set of rules and requirements to make friends here. And signals that meant one thing for me in Pennsylvania have an entirely new meaning in Louisiana. Navigating social activities has become something of a chore and it's completely exhausting to present myself as a potential friend to someone when at this very moment, I'm not even sure that I know who I am or what I want. That's not to say that I'm giving up, because I'm not. I'm just frustrated and tired and occasionally, I'm lonely.

I miss my old life in Pennsylvania. It wasn't always an easy life, but it was comfortable. I had a routine and I almost always knew what I could expect. Here, I am unsure of almost everything. I feel like a piece of driftwood being tossed around in the sea. I'm sure that after a certain amount of time I will adjust to life here and be comfortable again, but for now, I just pine for my memories of ease and comfort.

The mutterings of a sleep deprived girl

It's late night here. Or maybe it's early morning. Is this what they call the pre-dawn hours? I suppose the time of day doesn't really matter though. What matters is that I'm sitting here, alone with my thoughts, in a room that feels more like a prison than a sanctuary. And I'm lonely. I'm not often lonely, though when loneliness strikes it always seems to find me at night when everyone else is happily dreaming. Even my cat is comfortably snoozing at my feet. Maybe if I hadn't drank so much coffee today, or was it yesterday already, I'd be able to sleep too.

I'm not being fair though. The coffee that I drank is only partially responsible for my wakefulness. Mostly, I am plagued by racing thoughts that follow one after the next, as though attached to each other like a train. The worst part is that these thoughts have little substance. They aren't important. I am not awake in the middle of the night because I am solving some great mathematical equation, or because I have just composed the next Moonlight Sonata. No, I'm awake because of thoughts like these: "I wonder if they have a lot of mosquitoes in Louisiana," and, "How many germs and how much bacteria does chlorine really kill when it's used in a public swimming pool?" and "Why does my ionizer make that annoying hissing noise even after I've cleaned it?" Why is it that these are the questions keeping me awake at night?

I'd play my guitar to help me relax, but it's almost four in the morning and I don't think that the other people who live here would take kindly to rock 'n' roll interrupting their slumber. I'd paint in the basement, but it appears that I am out of paint thinner right now. I'd read a book, but that would only give my mind more material to think about. So instead, I'm blogging, which doesn't seem to be helping much either. Rather than moving smoothly through my mind, my thoughts seem to have become a jumbled, tangled mess.

I suppose that my thoughts will fade away as I drift off to sleep. Until then, I will wonder if I should repaint my toenails with a bolder shade of silver glitter. I'll wonder if my impending move to Louisiana will give me the change of venue that I have been craving. And I'll wonder exactly how many hours of sitting in a car I can endure before my legs begin to tingle, cramp or ache.

Kenneth Burke's Dramatism: Overview and Application

What better way to begin a story than at the beginning? But which beginning is worthy of the reader’s careful eyes? After all, there are potential beginnings to stories coming to existence every second of every day. How should anyone know which story to tell, or where a story really begins? It seems that there are so many questions that need to be answered, but let’s not waste our time with those questions. Instead, allow me to tell you a short story of my own invention, which may or may not begin at the beginning.

I walk out of the door and onto a small bus with comfortable chairs. There are televisions buzzing with static in a quiet way overhead. This bus is already nearly full with people chattering to one another. In less than five minutes we will be on our way. I don’t know the destination of this bus, nor do I care. I just look forward to the beginning of a new adventure, as this one has grown tiresome. I pull out my iPod, slip my ear buds into my ears and blast classical music into my brain. As the Moonlight Sonata plays and the bus begins to move forward, I drift off to sleep. The darkness envelops me like the arms of an old friend and the conscious world drifts away. I am standing alone against a blank canvas that is mine for creating and somewhere above me Barber’s Adagio for Strings begins to play its melancholy strains. I pick up a paintbrush, dry and soft, and begin to paint the nothingness into something.

The brush moves with the sound of the strings, long slow strokes of disembodied enchantment. The mood a soft blue, a quiet sadness in the tone offers a look at a somber world in the process of becoming. Then the brush strokes shorten, not quite staccato, and whites and yellows dot the background of what will surely be a masterpiece. I close my eyes and let the music guide me. My hand moves across the canvas, as though a dancer sashaying across a stage. The haunting music builds… crescendo… and hold. I tremble. Sustaining the note… release and rest… and then, pianissimo. As the song ends, the brush falls from my hand and disappears. My muscles pull my eyelids upward and light floods into my pupils. They constrict and I can see what I have created. The canvas of this dream? A quiet nightmare of horror and sadness. An interrupted New York City skyline bathed in blue with smoke billowing in the place where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center once stood confronts me. Is it really September 11th again?

A story of a dream, which reflects a day I will never forget, is the story I have chosen to share. Yet, this story, as all others is significant. While it seems to be a small story of nothing more than a dream, it might be so much more when considered through the lens of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism.

Kenneth Burke’s dramatism became a part of communication theory in the late 1950s. However, even before dramatism was acknowledged by the field of communication, Burke was using the word, “to describe what he saw going on when people opened their mouths to communicate” (Griffin, 2009, p. 289). Burke concerned himself with the drama of life. In order to better understand this drama, he went on to define the term identification as it pertains to dramatism and he created the dramatistic pentad.

Burkean identification is the ability for a speaker and the audience to connect with each other through such things as, “physical characteristics, talents, occupations, experiences, personality, beliefs, and attitudes” (Griffin, 2009, p. 209). It was Burke’s belief that a speaker could not persuade his or her audience without identification, which could work to unify and/or divide depending upon the cause of the speaker. In accordance with Burkean identification, I, as the speaker, have expectations that the reader(s) of my story, the audience, will be able to identify with me. In particular, I play upon the idea that my readers and I will be able to relate to one another through the shared experience of falling asleep and dreaming, through the shared experience of remembering the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City, through the shared experience of listening to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” and through the shared experience and talent of painting. If my audience is able to identify with me on the basis of our common ground, our shared experiences or similar talents, then perhaps I will be able to persuade them to see the verisimilitude of my story.

Further, Burke’s dramatistic pentad is “a tool to analyze how a speaker attempts to get an audience to accept his or her view of reality using five key elements of the human drama – act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose” (Griffin, 2009, p. 291). It was Burke’s belief that when a message used one of the five elements more than the other elements, or when a message placed more stress upon one of those five elements than it did upon the other elements, that the speaker’s worldview or philosophy would be revealed. Based upon the pentad, my story can be analyzed to find out how I attempted to get my audience to accept my view of reality, and my story can be analyzed to reveal my worldview or philosophy.

Act considers what is done, or what has taken place. In my story there were three acts. The first act was the boarding of a bus, the next act was falling asleep, and the final act was the creation of my dream.

Scene considers when and where the act is taking place, thus giving context to the act. In my story there were two scenes. The first scene is the scene of the crowded bus bound for an undisclosed location. The second scene is that of my dream, which is described as a canvas in various stages throughout the progression of the dream. The canvas goes from being a blank canvas to becoming the interrupted New York City skyline.

Agent is the person who is performing the act. Within my story, all acts were performed by only one agent: me. Though often I was carrying out an action using only one part of myself, such as my hand or my eyes, in my story.

Agency considers the means the agent employs to carry out the act. There were several types of agency within my story. First, I walked onto the bus. Then, I used music to help me fall asleep. Once I was asleep, I used music to help me create my dream by painting on a canvas.

Purpose is the speaker’s stated goal or the speaker’s implied goal of the story or address. While there are no clear goals of the story, I could argue that there were two implied goals of this story: reminding my audience of the September 11th attacks in New York City, and encouraging my audience to believe that we create our own dreams out of memories, symbols and sensory experiences.

Simply based upon this analysis, it is possible to argue that the pentad has revealed my philosophy or worldview to be a commitment to realism or pragmatism, as I do favor the elements of act and agency. I, however, disagree with that. Knowing myself as I do, I find myself quite often avoiding pragmatism. Quite often I enjoy the most complicated and least practical means of arriving at my destination, whatever or wherever it might be. But, I digress…

So you, dear reader, did you experience identification? Did you accept my story as a view of my reality? How did my story make you feel? Using Burke’s pentad, what did your analysis of my story yield? And what does my story make you think of me?

References

Griffin, E. (2009). A first look at communication theory (7th ed.).
New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.