Part 1: Intersecting storylines

W.B. Macomber captured higher education in a nutshell, then cracked it wide open. Add Dr. M to your list of favorite outlaws in this regard: he had a loving disdain for "academics or intellectuals or professors who find nothing in life and tell us about it." He himself was anything but this type of professor. Life itself was his topic, his point, and also I would say, his creative medium.

Meeting Macomber is the name of a personal story I'm going to tell you (actually I am already telling you) as a way of introducing you to the life of the mind, passing on to you a gift that was given to me. Telling you the story of Macomber (pictured at right) is the best way I know to introduce you to the creative liberal arts side of the general creativity equation. He was a professor of philosophy I had when I was a student at the University of California at Santa Barbara in the early nineteen-seventies. It's a old expression but I must insist it's true: I remember Macomber's Introduction to Philosophy course, which I took as a freshman in college in 1971, as if it were yesterday. Nah, as if it were RIGHT NOW. And RIGHT NOW might be a good place for me to try to describe what Macomber actually did. He performed the life of the mind, using philosophy as a kind of excuse or vehicle. He would stroll around on a large stage, or sit on a wooden stool at the front, and talk extemporaneously and brilliantly, weaving connections between his personal life, his knowledge of and passion for philosophy, his love of learning, his critique of education (i.e., he referred to the required History of Western Civilization course as "Western Sieve"), the culture of ancient Greece, Christianity, and much, much more. He related his performances to a single work of Philosophy --Plato's Symposium-- which is a dialogue about love, set in the context of a dinner party in which each speaker presents a different perspective on the topic. With large dual-projection screens as a visual backdrop (pretty cool tech for the time) showing a changing array of images of Classical Greek art, Macomber performed for roughly 600 people in Campbell Hall (pictured at left) on the UCSB campus, MWF 9:00-9:50. We were all extremely fortunate to catch these performances. They were like feasts or deliverances. Martin Scorsese made a documentary film in 2005 called No Direction Home about a particular period in the career of Bob Dylan, from roughly 1961 to 1966, in which Dylan was moving forward extremely rapidly, throwing off sparks all along the way, but doing so almost as matter-of-factly as breathing in and breathing out. In fact in the movie there is a scene where Scorsese is heard interviewing Allen Ginsberg (a famous poet and hipster from that era) about his perceptions of Dylan at the time. Ginsberg says something that is really fascinating. He says Dylan appeared to be moving about the world in those days as a kind of "column of air". Everything about him --his music, his beliefs, his aspirations, his everyday life, the way he dressed, all of it-- was completely aligned, completely undifferentiated, completely pulled into an absolute vertical in his speech and breath, leaving others breathless in a way. There was a similar "column of air" aspect to Macomber's performances. He was absolutely incandescent, and he too embodied speech and breath as a kind of spiritually unifying medium. In fact Macomber talks about the unity within himself in one of his performances:

"What I mean to do here is to shock you with a great deal of things to talk about. I want to draw you into activity, thinking about the things I talk about. There will be loose ends all over the place; the challenge is to tie them up, find the unity. There is an immense unity pervading all of this. That’s why I can just sit here and talk about it off the top of my head, because it has become so unified in my experience."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.

This reminds me of a related story, set in the same time-frame of the sixties and early seventies. A person I met in Los Angeles when I was around thirty or so recalled for me how he and a friend once went to a concert to see a particular band (I'm not sure which one, even the second-tier music seemed pretty good in those days, in retrospect and with rose-tinted glasses anyway). He described how the opening act walked on stage --an unknown three-piece from the UK-- and immediately lit the place up, stealing the show completely. It turned out he had happened upon the first tour of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (and my surmise is that it was the last tour in which that group would be the opening act). This was something like the effect of seeing Macomber perform philosophy at the height of his alignment. He stole the shows of all of the main acts to follow for me as a philosophy major. He really didn't teach philosophy, he did philosophy --in a very creative way-- right in front of us. This obviously left a lasting impression on me.

In some ways, as was the case with seeing Fellini movies in middle school, I could only grasp what the divine Dr. M. was doing on an aesthetic level. I knew what he was doing was the real thing, but let's face it, at eighteen years of age I could not possibly grasp the nuances of the conceptual content what he was on to and sharing with us about the Symposium or anything else. What I could grasp, though, is that this is the way things ought to be done in higher education in the liberal arts: not with just a touch, sprinkling, or occasional flourish of creativity, but with creativity as the beating heart of the whole deal.Thankfully he gave many examples in his talks that tied into our experience as students in K-12, so we often at least had a toe-hold on what he was up to conceptually. Much flew right over my head anyway, though. Yet again, this didn't matter because I got it in a different way. Blending the aesthetic and the intellectual opens up two paths to understanding. It's a good mix, and it's good to talk about it here at UNCSA where we ask you to become creative liberal artists as well as intelligent fine artists. So IMO Dr. M. was an interesting person if there ever was one, and a person deeply interested in life and in other people. He is quite simply one of my life's heroes. Maybe you can already understand why, but Meeting Macomber will unfold a bit anyway, across a few additional pages of digital text. Speaking of unfolding... oh, never mind, I will tell you about that later. Meeting Macomber, as a story, has several intersecting storylines. In one sense it is an homage, dedication, or tribute to a person who has ended up mattering a great deal to me. He was one of my teachers, and now I am a teacher, teaching about him. At an art school in particular I feel comfortable saying there is something beautiful in this.

It also has storylines of mystery --detective mystery and just plain life's-mystery. I tried off-and-on over the past four years to locate him, after thirty-eight years of no contact. I mean I thought of him fairly often, but it didn't occur to me until several years ago that I might actually get in touch with him and thank him. Eventually (thanks to our friend the internet) I determined his whereabouts in late May of 2009. I wrote him a thank you letter in early June (there is a link to this letter in the supplemental pages navigation box on this site).

I was informed about three weeks later via an email from his next of kin that my thank you letter arrived just a few days after he died, at the age of seventy-nine, on June 21 (father's day) in Redlands California, which is about thirty miles from my hometown. A disconnect of thirty-eight years, a connection missed by only a few days. I was staggered by this, and by several amazing coincidences along the way (which I will tell you about in due course). So in some ways Meeting Macomber has a strong element of tragedy. And yet, given that Dr. M. was immersed in the life and culture of ancient Greece (the birthplace of tragedy) when I knew him, even this tragedy seemed mysteriously fitting and okay. My search for him also turned out be somewhat redemptive in that am now in contact with a small community of people whose lives have been impacted by Macomber much as mine has been.

Meeting Macomber also has elements of biography and autobiography. I mean I want to tell you at least part of the story of his life, but this is also inevitably part of my life story. This is the personal-story storyline perhaps. Reconnecting with him is in part informed by a desire to re-connect with a part of my own life, or perhaps reassemble one of my former selves. I am now fifty-six years old and I had Macomber for a teacher when I was eighteen years old (the age many of you are in the vicinity of now) and there is something of who I was then that I want to revisit and/or reconnect with now.

There is also a scientific storyline to explore in my Macomber story that, in turn, includes a digital media element and a coincidence. I was part of an ARTStem symposium during the summer in which the topic of parallel universes was introduced via a short digital-story. The scientific connection adds dimensions to my thinking about the autobiographical aspect of Meeting Macomber. It may be that in reconnecting even to my memories of Macomber I am in effect and in reality (reality as understood or speculated on by contemporary quantum physicists) moving between different whole universes, each of which has continued to develop on its own. It's an interesting theory, one that is being debated in the scientific community right now. Some think the theory holds water, others think it's just hot air, but that's how it goes, knowledge is constructed in such conversations --in this instance, among scientists who engage in conversations with nature, and with each other, at a fairly high level, using regular language and also the language of mathematics. I can barely add and subtract, but this is a theory worth looking into I think. The digital-story about parallel universes I want to share and talk with you about is, somewhat coincidentally, about a son (who happens to be the founder and mainstay of the band Eels) trying to reconnect with his father, who is a famous quantum physicist. It's called Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives.

You can also look on the Center for Digital Storytelling website to see other examples of personal digital-stories, as well as the Pedro Meyer story I Photograph to Remember.

There is also a connection between the topic of parallel universes and my own fine arts practices. I have been very involved for some time in producing (and assigning) work within the aesthetic forms of collage, montage, remix, intersections/weaves, and multi-layered paintings. The connection is that, for example on a formal level, each element of a collage is in some ways complete unto itself (as in a complete universe) and a collage is of course a collection of singularly complete elements (as in parallel universes) that form a larger unity. And now I'm intrigued by the prospect of writing an autobiography from the point of view of parallel universes. Could that be done? Given how busy I am, I will definitely have to get this started in another universe and let it develop on its own :)

AND there is also a connection between personal digital-stories and my liberal arts practices. My doctoral dissertation (the big paper one needs to write and get approval on in order to get a PhD degree) was called Personal Effects: Education in the Era of Personal-Industry Technology. So I've been thinking about the ways that digital media drives us towards personal perspectives, personal ways of organizing things, and personal stories, for some time.

So I'm talking about lots of intersecting storylines in Meeting Macomber. I'm also talking with you creatively now, making connections between disparate points, not between sequential points. What I'm doing now is much more like laying out a circuit board with a lot of different ways to connect, and many hot-spots. It's not random, but it's not determinate either. The unity is random+nonrandom --otherwise known as a stochastic unity. In some places it is more like connecting pointA to pointQ rather than connecting pointA to pointB, and that's okay. It may seem to you like the connection-making here = a lots of words. And it does (compared to texting for example). But some pieces of music = a lot of notes, some movies = a lot of frames, some costumes = a lot of stitches, some hip-hop tunes = a lot of words. There are lots of connections here, lots of intersections and storylines What does that make it? An homage-story, a detective-story, a personal-story, a professional-story, a scientific-story, a collage story, a technology-story, a personal story? A unity of all of the above? What would that be called? I'm not sure, maybe (hopefully) it would be called a good story. Nah, more. A good story well-told. Nah, that bar is set way too high and could give me writer's block or athlete's foot, or some other dreaded performance-related affliction. Let's just call it a story.

I finally located Macomber via two websites that came up when I Googled his name for the umpteenth time and finally got some hits. One of the websites I found was maintained by Lester Hunt. I emailed him, telling him of my desire to thank Dr. M. for a class I had in Santa Barbara in 1971 and he wrote back telling me he was a TA in that very class. Lester now teachers Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. The other site was maintained by Greg Desilet. I emailed him, too, and he wrote back as well, saying that he was a volunteer discussion leader in the same class, the same year. Not only that, he and another discussion leader had gone to the language lab after each of Macomber's performances and transcribed the audiotapes that Macomber had the lab staff make of his talks. Greg is now a writer and lives in Denver. He is in the process of making the transcripts of the same talks that I heard in 1971 available online. Then last week, at the ARTStem symposium I mentioned above, UNCSA's own professor of Philosophy, Rick Miller, gave a wonderful guest presentation on aesthetics and psychology --and distributed an article in advance on this topic written by Denis Dutton. Guess what? Denis Dutton was also a TA in the Philosophy class I had with Macomber. After all of this, it was time for me to write this story.

I'll bring this first installment of Meeting Macomber to a close now with a statement from one of his talks that turned out to be not only true but prophetic for some of us who were present:

"You won't understand your other profs as readily as you understand me, and you won't see them thinking right in front of you, for the most part, but reporting thinking which they've done all by themselves in the Cartesian posture, in the privacy of their isolated study. I'm thinking for you right here, right in front of you. It's like Michelangelo's Prisoners. We both learn what I think about things at the same time. That's the way you should eventually learn to think."

--William Macomber (1972). Love and Culture. Unpublished: available online.