One Standard Deviation from the Mean

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

--Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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What becomes of the man bearing that image? Anything? Nothing?

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Why is it that genuine creativity is so thoroughly damned in our culture? I'm not talking about the schlep who picks up his easel or camera on weekends, the corporate cog undertaking a novice's approach to art or science or whatever; but the person who truly and with both feet steps through "the narrow gate" Jesus spoke about and starts walking the path behind it:

Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to suffering, and those who go through it are many. But the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to true life, and those who find it are few.

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Look around you. If you live as I do in a blighted part of town, doesn't it ever press upon you why it became like it is? San Diego has many blighted areas, areas where sprawl and congestion and strip malls and cookie-cutter suburban swaths of anomie and dystopia have spread like a cancer over the hills and through the valleys. Art is confined to corners and behind glass; music and film are standardized, homogenized, and commodified (even the so-called "fringe" genres and indies) to satisfy the survey groups and test audiences; architecture is for Europeans and the very rare wealthy municipality that can afford it; the vast majority of contemporary literature is mass-produced and pulp-induced, designed to weaken the brain and to be shot up through the rectum; even the aesthetic of a well-lived life, the authentically moral life, is force-fed, diluted, and strained through the filters of pop culture and sterilized religion (New Age, anyone? Megachurches, anyone?). It's perfectly okay to talk endlessly about the Kingdom of God; but try to walk in to that Kingdom, and watch the hell out. And if you actually live there, be happy the gate Jesus talks about is narrow, because on the other side of it are boiling masses of really pissed-off folk trying to bust through simply so they can drag your sorry behind back through it.

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I see a client once a week or so. We meet up in Mission Valley, in a Starbuck's located within (of course) a strip mall. There's a library next to the strip mall, and a pleasant path between them. Cross the mall's entrance road, and you're there.

This strip mall is far cleaner, far more modern than the bajillion South Bay varieties. Too, there are trees all around, and the parking lot has got that fresh black look of new asphalt, and the air smells cleaner somehow, the breezes friendlier. Inoffensive corporate soft rock lilts down upon you as you make your way to the 'Buck's.

So what's not to like?

For me, everything.

I think to myself, scowling: One standard deviation from the mean. One standard deviation from the mean is the fetid borderland between which 68 percent of humanity exists--where they want to exist. One standard deviation represents safety to them, security. One standard deviation represents fresh black asphalt and appropriately white faces; one standard deviation demands inoffensive corporate soft rock and Subway and Starbuck's and Barnes and Noble and Victoria's Secret.

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One standard deviation from the mean not only explains blight and sprawl and the crippling apathy that necessarily precedes, suffuses, and follows both, but mandates them, demands them.

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Apathy is a bi-product of sloth, in my opinion the deadliest of the Seven Deadly Sins, for it engenders all others, most notably greed. It allows for blight and sprawl; it allows a greedmongering, violent, below-average drug abuser to steal the highest office in the land--twice; it allows for big-box retail stores to destroy local communities, local businesses; it allows for genetically modified crops and poisons in our food, air, and water; it turns away from resource wars that have killed millions in places like Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo; it turns away from the commonweal and from civil polity and refuses to see past the end of its own nose. It talks endlessly about the narrow gate, and listens to well-oiled hucksters preach endlessly about it whilst sitting just outside it; but listening is all, in the end, that's allowed, that's desired.

Pay the well-oiled huckster--make sure you put money in his collection plate; just don't walk past him and through. Because you can't take your sloth with you if you do. Or your apathy. Or your cowardice. Or your poor spending priorities.

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Or your safety and security.

Or--I should say--your illusions about safety and security:

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.

--Helen Keller

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A man bearing within him the image of a cathedral is not bearing an image of blight, of sprawl, of apathy. He's not imagining a strip mall or soft corporate rock; nor is he imagining in any way anything within one standard deviation of the mean. If he's honestly bearing that image--if he has honestly assumed the burden of it (as opposed to most, who blithely quote Antoine de Saint-Exupery)--then he is no longer within that standard deviation or even within two (where the fashionable--and just as cowardly--nonconformists languish); nor is he within the third (the hesitant, indecisive, halting, faltering interface between Doing and Cowering (I've known several that fall here)). He has taken himself and his burden and jumped four standard deviations out. He has walked through the narrow gate. Because with the honest burden comes the very hard work that follows: taking that pile of rocks and creating from it the glory he imagined, the cathedral that one kneels before, kneels in.

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Within the soul of such a man or woman blight, sprawl, and apathy can no longer exist, if they existed there at all.

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Fractal Image: Storm by SM Montaigne