My intellectual journey is taking me more and more towards a synthesis of the different kinds of thinking I have learned to use during my life. I'm not quite sure what this will be like. I am still developing the skills I need and a stronger sense of theory. I do know that I am interested in a critical understanding of media and of the culture we live in.

The first words I ever heard that had something transcendent about them came from the pulpit of the Bible Baptist Church in my hometown. Our preacher had a deep, rich voice and he liked to intone his sermons slowly, putting emphasis on the important words. While I understood nothing he said, I responded to the sound of his words, and the silence of the congregation. This silence spoke of respect for both the man and the message. And it spoke of power. The power to make others silent, to make them listen.

So, awkwardly, I began my own studies of the Bible. I started to read the Bible through when I was about 10 years old. I plodded on, as difficult as it was at times with its genealogies and lists – and the occasional burst of anger and violence. The god of the Old Testament seemed cruel and oddly blind to the suffering of his chosen people. I managed to get to the Book of Jeremiah, and then gave up. A few years later, I read the New Testament. I found its message of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation much more inspiring than the hopelessness and anger of the Old Testament.

From that point, I moved on to modern Christian apologists like C.S. Lewis and Malcolm Muggeridge. This afforded me an entrance into English Literature and I began to learn what good writing was. Crisp and clear, language used with grace, humor, and pathos. You have to understand that I was always striving to understand my place in the world, while staying within the limitations of my world, as defined by fundamentalist belief and fear. Then I read “Orthodoxy” by G.K. Chesterton and my mind graduated to the next level of awareness. Or, as Henry Miller put it, “another layer of the onion was peeled.” Now I was in the land of the transcendental, the land of the poet. This was a place where words mean more than they mean. The land of the metaphor. In this world, I was free of the restraints of my reality.

So, language, and specifically the higher language of metaphor, was the freeing of my mind from fundamentalism. Things and actions didn’t always mean what they equaled in the concrete sense. This realization delivered me mentally from the harsh dialectic of belief and fear that I knew from church and home.

One key experience was seeing Glenn Gould play the piano on television. I describe that experience elsewhere on this blog. Another, visual, influence would be Orson Welles. I was excited as I watched Citizen Kane for the first time. Up to that point, my movie watching had been pretty mainstream, simply consisting of the occasional movie at church or school, including a movie I have loved ever since, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. But mainly I had looked at movies as a form of entertainment, a way to pass the time, a bit like television. Citizen Kane was not like that. This movie had a vision; everything mattered, visually, aurally, in the narrative. But mainly, this movie had a maker. Orson Welles had put his mark on every aspect of the film, had stamped it with his identity. I had never seen a movie made in that way. It was as if Welles felt as important to his work as any great novelist of the 19^th century did; he was the author of this movie and demanded to be known by his audience. I saw several of his other movies and read a number of books about him.

It was exciting to think something this specific, this “artistic,” could be done in the medium of film. I was used to accepting images as they were, without any sense of who was making them. I think this was the first step towards a critical visual sense where I was aware of what the filmmaker was saying and thus could begin to do more than merely accept his values and aesthetics. I could think and talk about them, analyze them and then see how I felt about the subject. I began to think about how I would tell a story in the medium of film. I remember how as I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy I kept imagining how I would shoot this story as a movie. I thought about actors, tone, style of editing, etc. I was a bit upset when the Peter Jackson movies came out, though I enjoyed the first one greatly. The next two movies looked so different from my own vision that I found them hard to take, though out of jealousy more than an informed criticism.

I also had a period of fascination with David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, which may have been more of an adolescent crush on both the maker and the actor Peter O’Toole. Leaving one’s boring home, the “fat people of a fat country” as described in the movie, and having life-altering adventures, while nearly bringing freedom to an entire people -- it seems like a respectable adolescent myth to me now. I also found something of Lean’s aesthetic “clean” in a way similar to Welles and Gould. It was an approach to art made free of any filler (that’s the way my adolescent eyes saw it). These artists shared a formal precisions. It seems interesting to me now that all of these artists have at times been accused of being obsessed with the form of their craft.

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Fast forward 10 years: I go to a small liberal arts college in Vermont. There I take a class in Greek and Roman Classics taught by Jim Doyle. A short, wiry man of Irish descent, a troubled yet committed Catholic, a man of great brilliance, humor and feeling. He becomes the only mentor I have had up to now. We mostly communicate through my papers and his corrections. I pull, trying to remain within my constructed world, and he pulls back, trying to draw me into reality. We read The Iliad, Sophocles, Aeschylus. He talks about faith and meaning, metaphor, death, escape, silence. He screams at us for our lack of feeling for what we are reading. He makes sharp jokes. He sometimes plays a whirling bit of Beethoven on the piano. The fact that he is recently diagnosed with terminal cancer informs every word he says.

When I leave that school, I go through a period of great change in my personal life and have to take some time off from school. I eventually finish with my Bachelor’s Degree and move to New York City. There I start work as an editor at a small publishing company and read Marshall McLuhan. Something clicks and I decide that Media Studies at the New School would be the right place for me.