Night Float.

While I was in Buena Vista last month, I did a lot of rafting. A LOT. As in, I went on five rafting trips in the span of three days. The second of my five rafting trips was a night float, and it was an incredibly surreal experience that I want to try to put down in writing so as not to forget how profound it was.

As far as I can tell, night floats are fairly common within the raft guide culture (which is another topic all together), and what happens is that when the moon is full, it sheds enough light on the water to be able to navigate the river at night. I felt a little apprehensive about the idea of a night float, purely because in the 48 hours that I had been in BV, I had discovered that when raft guides go through their initial training, they learn how to “read” the river, and once they know how to do that, they’re able to guide a raft full of unexperienced hooligans through the river’s rapids skillfully and generally without causing personal injury to anyone. Once I had already committed to participating in the night float, I started thinking “How can you read a river when you can’t see clearly?” I thought my fears were realized when the moon was obstructed by clouds for half of our trip, but the human eye is very adroit at adjusting to the dark, and while we couldn’t see perfectly clearly, we weren’t rafting blind, either.

The night float created a really strange and conflicted feeling inside of me. On one hand, I was terrified because this was only my second time rafting, and the waves that I had seen during the day seemed one hundred times more ominous and frightening in the near-pitchblack night. But on the other hand, my entire raft consisted of raft guides who had navigated the river hundreds of times before, and even though I had only met them the day before, I somehow trusted them. Two guys, Adam and Curt, took turns guiding, and their approaches were very different: Adam had a really intense energy and was a little terse in his rafting commands, whereas Curt was very laid back and never seemed ruffled even in the most daunting rapids. I felt safe with them, but I was still uneasy.

Going down the rapids in the dark was one of the most visceral experiences I’ve ever had: it was like a perfect marriage of beauty and terror. In spite of the huge dark glassy waves, the river was absolutely gorgeous and I was in constant awe of its personality, as if it were a human communicating with us. It was almost spiritual in that regard. But there was also not a single moment where I wasn’t thinking “I could die doing this.” As the other people in my raft continued to banter and high-five each other on a successful run of the rapids, I found myself growing quieter and quieter to the point of complete silence, because I was feeling so many emotions simultaneously but had no idea what I was actually feeling. It was a very strange sensation.

All of which is to say: I’m 100% glad that I went on the night float, and I think I would probably do it again if I had the opportunity. My description of what was going on internally for me during the trip probably sounds really scary and like I didn’t enjoy it as much as I could have. I think in the moment it was really overwhelming to feel everything all at once, but in the aftermath I felt like I had experienced a profound catharsis, like I went through something intense and came out better on the other side. All in all I’d say it was a supremely positive experience, and if you ever have the chance to go on a night float, I’d tell you to do it in a heartbeat.

Meditations on Art.

For Valentine’s Day, my bosses took the entire office (all six of us) out to lunch. One of my co-workers asked me what my plans were for Valentine’s Day, and I said I was going to eat a heart-shaped pizza, drink mimosas, and watch Shaun of the Dead. And then, for the rest of our lunch, the conversation did not veer away from the topic of movies for even one second. It was kind of bizarre.

Someone brought up A Clockwork Orange, and I was saying that all of the really graphic rape that happens in the film was so disturbing to me that I almost couldn’t finish watching it, and one of my co-workers asked what the point of watching those kinds of movies were. He asked why anyone would want to watch something disturbing or horrifying when they could watch something uplifting that could positively contribute to their lives. He said that that kind of evil stuff could “find a place inside you,” and that he didn’t even want to expose himself to it at all. And then we started talking about horror movies.

I started feeling really sad for my co-worker, that his narrow view of art was keeping him from experiencing some really incredible artistic work.

Good art, to me, is not meant to be good in a moral sense. When art espouses a particular and unbending brand of morality or Truth, that’s when it becomes propaganda. I think good art is meant to be a reflection of reality and of the human condition, which are both infinitely complex and can’t be boiled down to just ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ There are ugly aspects of both that shouldn’t go unacknowledged simply because they aren’t pleasing to look at. As Akira Kurosawa said, “The artist is the one who does not look away.” In order to understand the world we live in, and our place as humans in it, we have to see everything: the beautiful, the hideous, the pleasing, the disturbing; and we have to figure out and embrace how these disparate elements work together. That’s what makes reality whole and dynamic, instead of just one-dimensional. Artists do that better than anyone else.

One way that I judge art is by how much thought it provokes. For example, I mentioned that I was really disturbed by A Clockwork Orange, but I can’t dismiss it just because it was disturbing. I can’t simply say “The fact that there is graphic rape in this movie means that it can’t have any artistic merit.” It’s horrifying and disturbing, but it serves an artistic purpose. The film’s themes of nature versus nurture make me think about the male brain and if there’s a correlation between the prevalence of rape and the license of the male population. It makes me wonder how the male brain can find pleasure in the combination of sex and violence. It makes me think about what facets of a nation’s humanity would have to be neglected for humanity to end up in a world like that of A Clockwork Orange. It makes me think that my being disturbed by the sight, and the idea, of rape says something about me as a human. Thinking and processing is so much a part of what makes us human, and I think any art that encourages intelligent thought is a good thing.

I love that art can make me think, but I also love that it can simultaneously make me feel. I’m an emotional person to begin with, but the extreme outpouring of emotion that I’m able to experience through art is so cathartic. It’s something incredible to experience art that examines the human condition, and through your personal emotional response be able to both be a participant in that piece of art and to recognize the profundity of your humanity through it. It feels like a soul-cleansing, and it’s a beautiful feeling.

Basically, I think art is of the greatest value to the human race. I’ve cultivated these thoughts on art over the course of years of college lectures on art and literature and morality and taboo and the meaning of life, but I would love to hear other opinions or thoughts on the nature and purpose of art. What do you love about art? What do you see as the ultimate purpose of artistic works? Why do you think art is important, or unimportant?