Author: Thomas Degroat

Everyone needs to find their own way to escape themselves and see the world as something more than just a place to live. Sometimes it’s a person, sometimes it’s a story, and sometimes it’s a particular place. For me, one of the places is the Detroit Institute of Art. Seeing all the art and the various times and places they come from helps me to connect with the world and see all the beauty and ugliness within it. This world is more than just me, it is a society of millions of people with billions of ideas and never ending possibilities. I find it truly beautiful to see all the diverse artwork in a single place. This where I can truly find the world outside of myself.

I had a very powerful moment in the DIA the last time I visited. I went to my favorite exhibit, the Islamic Art collection. I love this part of the museum because the exuberance and detail that they put into their masterpieces. My favorite display is this absolutely gorgeous Qur’an with colored pages and flecks of gold. I find it stunningly beautiful. This piece is my favorite part of the entire DIA, it is what I think of first when I think of the DIA. This is what connects me to the rest of the world. Through this Qur’an, I see the history of mankind, our struggles, our triumphs, and the incredible beauty that we try to infuse in our everyday lives. This was an incredibly powerful moment for me. It’s a little embarrassing, but I was honestly on the verge of tears. The recent tragedy at Chapel Hill did not help in this matter either. Through this incredibly art, I saw the beauty that mankind can make, but I was also reminded of the horrors that we inflict. I was no longer myself at this point; I was part of a collective of minds that survived until today.

Through this art, I was able to leave myself. I think this is a necessary for every person to experience and be able to return to. It is incredibly helpful to leave yourself and see the world outside of your personal struggles. So find the thing that makes you see the world and not just its parts.

The Qur’an: http://www.dia.org/object-info/edae52d5-4d47-4321-be4a-e99ee48f0f10.aspx?position=53

We need to stop acting like we are better than others. This is a rampant issue on campus and off it. We are not better than another person who chose another major or someone who decided to join an organization that we don’t like. We all made it to this university and we all deserve to be here. We should not judge others based on these shallow labels, it takes a lot more than that to deem what someone else worth is. A pre-med major is no smarter than an English major and I really don’t see how we can make these comparisons so easily.

Let’s get back to the fact that all of us went through the application process and all of us were accepted. This wasn’t a mistake, we’re here because we deserve to be here, not because we chose a major that is easy to be accepted into. Sure, there are different applications for the different schools, but none of them are easy to pass through. We made it here and we deserve to be proud, but we should not be proud because we are better than other students on campus.

In addition, your hard classes do not make other classes easier. We all take hard classes and we all struggle with our majors. Even if you do happen to struggle harder than other students, that won’t make you a better or worse student. We all can succeed or fail here and our quality as people is not the reason for that. We are all worthy and we deserve to be treated with worth.

The human mind likes to put things into categories. It makes life much easier when we can separate and compare. It allows for very complex systems to be simplified into manageable pieces. We turn the gradience of the universe to be transformed into parts we can comprehend. It’s a beautiful system, but it is inherently flawed and nothing is more flawed or beautiful than the concept of the dichotomy.

Dichotomy and true opposition essentially doesn’t exist in our world. The only time we can see the idea working is the dichotomy between existence and nonexistence, everything else is much too complex to be described by two opposites. Even with this general truth, we still force ourselves to see the world through opposing lenses. This could just be an extension of our categorization, but why is two our magic number? A lot of nature functions in twos and a lot of aesthetic functions the same. Equal and opposing, but as described before, dichotomy doesn’t really exist as we define it. The world couldn’t work through opposites, it works through gradients. Colors flow into one another, numbers are infinite and indiscreet, and languages are variations of a universal grammar, but we force our perception into seeing these in distinct categories. This happens with almost all of humans’ discoveries. We must make categories, we must make opposites, we want our world to be dichotomic or classified and this can be helpful or harmful.

Let’s look towards politics. In America, politics is the one of most polarizing subjects we have and we are too often forced as a society in to the two directions, left or right. The issue arises that political topics are extremely complex and there is almost never two distinct answers to the problem. Unfortunately we force ourselves into these molds and that seeks to simplify discussion and pacify our need for debate. There is no gray area in politics, you are either liberal or conservative and we judge those labels harshly, but the truth is that if we truly looked at every single area of debate and look into ourselves for our answers, most of us would fall much more closely to the middle. A large portion of society already does that, but scorn them and refuse their participation. Instead, we like the fight. We like have an opposite and fighting against them. There may not be only two answers, but we will choose only two and position ourselves along the line and throw insults to the other side. You don’t hate the other side, you hate the chance of your position being proved wrong and the dichotomy falling apart. You need your rival, otherwise it becomes too much to handle. In our political system today, our government thrives off of this. This is how we win elections and stay in power, by being on your population’s side and fighting for the dichotomy to still exist.

Now we can look at the other side of dichotomy. There’s the saying about “too many cooks in the kitchen” and dichotomy lessens those cooks to just two. We need this in our everyday lives. To lessen our decisions to just two options, we can make the right choice for ourselves. This is another situation where there are often a lot of more options than we choose to realize, but if we were to debate every single one, we would remain comatose. Sometimes we need the dichotomy in order to advance. More often than not, our questions are complex with many answers and we need to lighten that weight for us. “What class should I take?” gets boiled down from the entire course guide to “Linguistics 111 or Anthro 101?” We need opposition and categorization in our everyday life because it would be impossible to live in the gradient, seeing infinite possibilities and debating amongst them all.

Categorization is necessary, but harmful. It is too powerful a tool to use and too powerful a tool to not use. We should keep the dichotomy in our everyday lives, but expand to the gradient when get to the general public. Our society should not be forced to choose between only two options and the individual should not be forced to debate an infinite number of options. We need this concept, but we use it far too often for our own good.

3D movies have sort of become the joke of the cinematic world. They are a clear economic tool that the company uses as a way to sell their tickets at a much higher price. The thing is, though, that 3D effects could be used to enhance the experience of a movie. It would be very easy to make the necessary changes in order to make this a true artistic form of expression. It has happened with other media and we can see examples of 3D’s powerful work today.

Let’s start off with some history. If we look at past examples, we can see that innovations like 3D can be very successful as an artistic medium. Film is a great example of this. It first started as a sideshow at carnivals, just for shallow entertainment. It remained that way until someone decided to make art out of it. We can also look to television as another example of this. Nobody thought that television would be anything more than a passing fad, but now we see that is clearly much more than that. We are currently in the middle of the second Golden Age of television and looks like it is only getting better from here.

We should try and make 3D have the same effects as television and movies. It’s a relatively new technology and we should learn to use it correctly. It could be a great tool for building atmosphere, a new way to present comedy, and a creative approach to producing scare. If we, as an audience start demanding this use of 3D, then I think we would all have a better time at the movies. It’s not like it has never been tested before either. This approach has worked in other films. Look at Avatar. While it may not be the best movie ever made, but its use of 3D is stunning. It created an amazing world that seemed real and tangible. We should start working towards. I want 3D to be art and I think a lot of people would agree with me.

I have always been hiding myself. It sort of comes with the territory of being gay. You hide from your family, you hide from your friends, and you hide from society. You learn to store things away because someone else’s reaction may be harsher than the consequences of bottling it up. It becomes easier to lie to yourself than to express yourself. This is part of the danger that society imposes on those that are deemed lesser. This is not an experience shared just within the Queer community and I’m sure many of us have this same experience, but I can’t comment on those perspectives, I can only comment on my own.

People always ask me when I knew I was gay. Maybe, I’m a special case, but I always knew I was gay, the only issue was coming to accept it. Again, I might be a special case with this, but I accepted it when I was in 6^th grade. That was the first time I stopped really lying to myself. Before then, I was absolutely terrified of who I was. At that time, the representation in media was either very stereotypical/negative or shielded from me because they hit on some very adult themes that I probably couldn’t handle at that point. I had nobody to look up to, nobody to show me that life in the Queer community can be happy, comforting, and safe. I did not want to accept myself, but I knew that life would be even more difficult to survive if I didn’t. I came out to myself and that was my first step to being tired of hiding.

The next step came during high school, the first time someone learned that I was gay. I wouldn’t call it my first time “coming out” because I didn’t really decide to do it. I was asked if I was gay and I didn’t want to lie to them. That’s how I operated for a long time; if someone wanted to ask me, I would answer as truthfully as possible. This was my way to stop lying, but not be open. I didn’t get a lot of questions during that period of my life, so it wasn’t very satisfactory for me. I had actively come out to a person during this time, but I was not ready to actually come out to others. I was moving forward, but very slowly.

My (hopefully) final, and most important transitional step came with college. When I went to college, I decided to be fully open with myself and others. I was completely out to all my friends on campus and I started living my life in the way that I truly wanted. In addition, I started coming out to my family. That is still an intimidating process, but I will continually work towards it. With this new transition, I can finally do some true introspection and find out who I am.

Now a lot of the people reading this are probably wondering what this has to do with art. This blog is a part of Arts at Michigan, so I should make some reference to art. I will do more than that. Unfortunately, I believe that my artistic development is stunted from my experiences. A lot of art concerns looking into oneself and I wasn’t really able to do that for most of my life. I wasn’t able to express myself like others could and I think has negatively affected me. I don’t believe my creative endeavors are as mature as my peers and I don’t know if they ever will be. At the very least, I can express myself now and that is a miracle.

Many artistic people are inspired by their dreams. It makes absolute sense. The dream world is full of impossibilities and infinities; it is the very essence of human creativity and art relies on that. There are even people who practice the belief that dreams are extensions of our personalities, our hopes, and our wishes. So, what does it mean when one doesn’t dream, or only dreams in banality? What does it mean when one wants to live creatively, but in the perfect place for it to happen, they only get blackness?

I have always wanted to pursue creative endeavors. Even being a Neuroscience student now, I only pursue that field because the brain is astoundingly beautiful. In addition to that, I still want to write a novel, a novel that would be full of metaphor and quiet emotion. Unfortunately, my dreams (or lack of) want to force me into bleakness. They say everybody dreams when they sleep, we just may not remember them. That may be true, but even the dreams that I do remember are sadly mundane. Most of the time, I wake up from blackness, but those special times when I do remember something, they might as well have not happened. My nightmares consist of me waking up too late for an exam review and my dreams find me finding an extra pencil when I thought I had forgotten one. How absolutely, terrifyingly boring.

What does this mean for me? As a child, I was full of creativity. I constantly doodled and spent hours in imaginary worlds. I loved reading fantasy novels and writing my own fantasy stories too. This reflected in my dreams as well. They were fun and exciting and scary, but it’s not the same anymore. Now, when I doodle, all I end up with is spirals and squiggles, I stick to reading classical fiction, and when I write, it only ever ends up as a personal fiction or a personal essay. I can’t get outside of myself in my dreams and I can’t escape myself in my real life. How do I move on from here when I spend every night in a void?

Maybe it is only because I’m in a transitional state in my life right now. This is the first true time I’ve ever really embraced my emotions and didn’t try to run from them, this is the first time where I’ve ever really been truly open to another person, and this is the first time where I’ve really tried to think about who I am as a person. Perhaps it’s good that I am spending more time for myself than hiding behind imaginary powers and landscapes, but I have the urge to create something that is not about myself. I want to leave my body and create something outside of it, but it has become impossible. Well, for right now, I’ll be working on myself some more. This is my farewell to dreams and the hope that they come to visit me again someday.