Barrett Dorko
12-02-2007, 03:39 AM
It’s been a quiet week in Cuyahoga Falls…
In the Medford Oregon airport the only place to eat has a small counter, a refrigerator, a few bags of chips, the kind of hot dog cooker invented for 40s vintage movie theaters and a friendly but laconic high school kid apparently in charge of everything. Just inside the door hanging next to the counterman’s sleepy expression there’s a sign: “Jet Fuel Café.”
I’m not kidding.
I had to wait there for a couple of hours before boarding my flight to Portland so I had plenty of time to think about why I found all of this so compelling and just maybe I have it. Please bear with me here. I swear that this will all make sense by the time you get to the end of this entry.
On a desk in my office is a Lobster Telephone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster_Telephone) modeled after the surrealist object by Salvador Dali and co-created by his patron, Edward James. At least, it’s famous to me. My twin Leah built this for me a couple of years ago after she visited a Dali exhibit in Philadelphia, and, as with many of Leah’s presents over the years, it came as a complete surprise, revealing how well she knows me and how little I understand about myself all at once. This is a complicated relationship, and I appreciate that, believe me.
People attend my courses expecting one thing and they get something very different. Ordinarily this would be worrisome, but I’m a student of surrealism and understand that juxtaposing two disparate and unlikely elements can actually attract our attention, compel us to attend to things we’d ordinarily ignore and, if it’s done just right, give us an opportunity to look deeper into ourselves. Often there’s humor involved, though, as always, not everyone gets the joke.
I speak for over an hour at the beginning of every class, and, for the most part, those seated before me listen intently and never interrupt with a single question. This despite the fact that I systematically question and often destroy many of their dearly held beliefs about why their patients complain, how and why they’re so commonly unsuccessful and how a transformation of their thinking and practice is long overdue. For good measure I make it clear that they’ve ignored almost all of the evidence in the freely available scientific literature that would have led them in the opposite direction their practice has taken them.
Now, I suppose you can imagine that this would be hard to do without truly irritating most in the audience, but in fact what I see is quite the opposite. What I haven’t told you is what I include alongside the elements of disapproval and negative admonition. There’s humor, challenge, and an interrogation of reality that is undeniably true. Oh yes, there’s also an appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I think I get away with this, when I do, for the same reason that surrealistic art continues to endure and influence the way we see things. Literally, it forces us to stop and consider common things in an uncommon way. When it succeeds we see the contradictory nature of our own being in a way that wakens us, urges us to move these elements around and find what harmony we can, and when we can’t, acceptance. I think there’s a connection here to the manual care I provide, but perhaps that’s a whole other essay (http://www.barrettdorko.com/articles/persistence_of_memory.htm).
On the plane from Medford I opened Newsweek and read an article about the nature of the brain’s timekeeping ability (The Time Is All In Your Mind, in “Periscope” February 12, 2007). The graphic was one of Dali’s “soft watches” first made famous in The Persistence of Memory (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79018). Obviously, we can’t escape the culture’s fascination with the disparity of our experience and I don’t think we should ignore it.
Next time you’re in Medford check out the Jet Fuel Café. At the very least, it will bring a smile to your face.
And perhaps like that first hour of my workshop, it might do a whole lot more.
In the Medford Oregon airport the only place to eat has a small counter, a refrigerator, a few bags of chips, the kind of hot dog cooker invented for 40s vintage movie theaters and a friendly but laconic high school kid apparently in charge of everything. Just inside the door hanging next to the counterman’s sleepy expression there’s a sign: “Jet Fuel Café.”
I’m not kidding.
I had to wait there for a couple of hours before boarding my flight to Portland so I had plenty of time to think about why I found all of this so compelling and just maybe I have it. Please bear with me here. I swear that this will all make sense by the time you get to the end of this entry.
On a desk in my office is a Lobster Telephone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobster_Telephone) modeled after the surrealist object by Salvador Dali and co-created by his patron, Edward James. At least, it’s famous to me. My twin Leah built this for me a couple of years ago after she visited a Dali exhibit in Philadelphia, and, as with many of Leah’s presents over the years, it came as a complete surprise, revealing how well she knows me and how little I understand about myself all at once. This is a complicated relationship, and I appreciate that, believe me.
People attend my courses expecting one thing and they get something very different. Ordinarily this would be worrisome, but I’m a student of surrealism and understand that juxtaposing two disparate and unlikely elements can actually attract our attention, compel us to attend to things we’d ordinarily ignore and, if it’s done just right, give us an opportunity to look deeper into ourselves. Often there’s humor involved, though, as always, not everyone gets the joke.
I speak for over an hour at the beginning of every class, and, for the most part, those seated before me listen intently and never interrupt with a single question. This despite the fact that I systematically question and often destroy many of their dearly held beliefs about why their patients complain, how and why they’re so commonly unsuccessful and how a transformation of their thinking and practice is long overdue. For good measure I make it clear that they’ve ignored almost all of the evidence in the freely available scientific literature that would have led them in the opposite direction their practice has taken them.
Now, I suppose you can imagine that this would be hard to do without truly irritating most in the audience, but in fact what I see is quite the opposite. What I haven’t told you is what I include alongside the elements of disapproval and negative admonition. There’s humor, challenge, and an interrogation of reality that is undeniably true. Oh yes, there’s also an appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger.
I think I get away with this, when I do, for the same reason that surrealistic art continues to endure and influence the way we see things. Literally, it forces us to stop and consider common things in an uncommon way. When it succeeds we see the contradictory nature of our own being in a way that wakens us, urges us to move these elements around and find what harmony we can, and when we can’t, acceptance. I think there’s a connection here to the manual care I provide, but perhaps that’s a whole other essay (http://www.barrettdorko.com/articles/persistence_of_memory.htm).
On the plane from Medford I opened Newsweek and read an article about the nature of the brain’s timekeeping ability (The Time Is All In Your Mind, in “Periscope” February 12, 2007). The graphic was one of Dali’s “soft watches” first made famous in The Persistence of Memory (http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=79018). Obviously, we can’t escape the culture’s fascination with the disparity of our experience and I don’t think we should ignore it.
Next time you’re in Medford check out the Jet Fuel Café. At the very least, it will bring a smile to your face.
And perhaps like that first hour of my workshop, it might do a whole lot more.