February 9, 2009

Who is Murad Saÿen? And, what can he offer that will support you in your quest for insight?

Well, let me tell you a little bit about myself, and you can make up your own mind whether or not what I will be sharing here is worth your time.

Welcome to ShadowChasers—Gen II. This site has been up for just about a decade now. It has served primarily as a virtual portfolio, to showcase the work of a single artist, in several different media: myself, Murad Saÿen. I am an American artist/writer/philosopher. Born in Philadelphia in 1945, I barely ducked under the line to qualify as a ‘boomer’. I have a snowy beard and a shiny pate, and a wife, Abigail, who will someday be beatified. At least, she deserves to be. I have been blessed to have two biological kids and two step-kids, all four of them remarkable and fine people. By any reasonable standard I qualify for the honored status of ‘old fart’, (I began to realize this was so when servers in fast-food and coffee places began just giving me a senior discount without my asking) but, curiously, I don’t much feel like one.

I have been an artist in one medium or another for all of my life, having started painting in oils at age 6, with the encouragement of my mother, a casual artist herself. I was a ‘mirror writer’ in my formative years. Today, I would quickly be categorized as ‘dyslectic’, but in the early 50s I was repeatedly labeled as ‘smart but lackadaisical’ (why the hell they couldn’t just say I was ‘lazy’ escapes me to this day). The truth is I was bored out of my skull with everything from, “See Spot run,” right on through Latin and quadratic equations), and I was the proverbial square peg who was never quite successfully hammered into the round hole of the left-brained society we live in. I am also left-handed, which is another way in which this society reminds you that you aren’t ‘normal’. All the desks in my early classrooms were for right-handers, requiring those of the ‘sinister tribe’ (did you know that the word ‘sinister’ is taken from the Latin word, ‘sinister’ meaning, ‘on the left’, or ‘unlucky’?”) to write in contorted positions. But thankfully, nobody ever tried to force me to change over into being right-handed. Aside: Had I been more astute in the ways of the world, I might have recognized an omen that my relationship to the education system of my day was going to be a rocky one. On my very first day of Kindergarten, a catbird, sitting on a phone-wire, shat on my young head as I walked to school, nailed me dead center. True. I eventually learned to read, sometime around grade four, because I just had to know what the captions in National Geographic and Life’s Pictorial History of World War II said. Apparently the dyslexia worked itself out because in later years I was able to score 1395 out of 1600 on my SATs.

After barely squeaking through high school in Princeton New Jersey, I spent 3 years in the U.S. Army Infantry during the Vietnam war, but although I was on orders for ‘Nam FOUR times, I never went. A friend claims that I must have had a guardian angel who worked in the personnel section of Army HQ in the Pentagon. But, for many years I felt a deep sense of guilt--even shame--that I didn’t go to war while so many of my friends and squad-mates did. And some of them didn’t make it back. Almost all who did were changed forever by their experience. (More about that at a later date.) Eventually, I came to terms with the fact that it simply wasn’t in the cards for me to go. It is no exaggeration to say, however, that war--and the conundrums surrounding it--has been central to my efforts to understand human nature since I was about ten years-old.

After the military, I went to college on the GI Bill, got a bachelor’s degree in the philosophy of ethics from Penn State—a wonderful school, in fact—and spent much of my undergraduate time taking courses in the arts. I continued on to the University of New Mexico intending to get an MFA in fine art photography, but I quit after the first year when I realized that matriculating the program was a highly politicized process, and their notion of what constituted ‘fine art’ was seriously at odds with my own. We’ll deal with that in great detail and nuance in the coming months, to include questions such as: “ What is it that makes some art ‘fine’, and a lot of art ‘not so much’?”, and “What is the purpose of art anyway?”, along with even more grandiose questions about the meaning of not just art, but life itself.

In the late spring of 1971, the siren call of the so-called ‘counter-culture’ was ringing loudly in my ears, and I soon migrated to the Bay Area, took up living with an ‘extended family’ of souls in Marin County, where I underwent a dramatic transformation: from a very straight, upper middleclass wannabe artist, to being a full-blown, long-haired, dope-smoking hippy artist. I embraced being a ‘freak’, as we proudly referred to ourselves, and explored everything from doing art without any intellectual or other constraints, to psychedelics, to free love, to rejection of the war and of mainstream society in general, with all of its increasingly vivid hypocrisies and failings. By that time everything I owned fit into a ratty backpack, and I hitched across the U.S. five times, met Americans of every ilk, some wonderful people, some not so great. I had experiences—including two near-death episodes involving a car wreck and a scaffold collapse in Germany--that I still am amazed and amused by to this day. I went to Europe with $40 in my pocket, and hitched around, then lived there for about half a year, and finally returned to California, which had by then begun to seem kind of unreal, especially in terms of its fantasy-world notion of an idyllic life, getting high and just doing whatever came next. During this time I also realized that being poor is more a state of mind than a financial condition. I even ate out of dumpsters at times. But, I already understood that this was a dead-end. I knew people who had explored the psychedelic path, too far down the wormhole and too often, and had simply ‘burned-out’. These people became, in some cases, like the abandoned farmhouses I had seen in the great American outback: door’s open, signs of life are there, but they’re gone now. I didn’t want that fate for myself and I pulled back from the whole “…if it feels good, do it” thing.

In 1973 I was initiated as a Sufi mureed (student) in a mystical order that had been founded by Murshid Samuel Lewis, an altogether amazing American of Jewish heritage who was also initiated in spiritual orders ranging from Zen Buddhist to Hindu, to Christian. He truly knew that all the world’s religions are like the spokes of a wheel, along with traditions that are relatively unknown as well. The one ‘rule’ in our order was that there could be no rules. The idea that one must listen to their own inner guidance, their intuition, and especially their Heart, was something I had been headed towards all of my life. This has become the primary guiding principle in my relationship to not just creative endeavor, but to life itself.

On a cross-country trip in 1974, I met a woman, and then in 1975 I moved to upstate New York to be with her. I began living simply, out in the country, and eventually I found a job working for the city of Ithaca as a youth worker. I was responsible for helping a growing number of disenfranchised teens to find their way in the world. My very wise and kind boss, Sam Cohen, knew that many of these kids were drop-outs and had been pegged as ‘ne’er do wells’ (God, I hate that term) simply because they were square pegs being hammered into round holes. The kids I worked with looked at the society around them through the clear eyes of youth and simply said, “Hell NO!” Not only did I sympathize with this view, and understood it, I agreed with it.

For the next four and a half years, I worked with a population of young people who would have picked up a pack and a rifle and headed west, if it had been the mid-nineteenth century. But, in the late twentieth century, such options weren’t so appealing or just didn’t seem ‘doable’ to these sons and daughters of the middle-class. Some of them recognized that I had been like them, and that I had literally done just that: gone west. But, lacking that empowerment--born out of near desperation in my case--to ‘sail off the end of the earth’, to simply pick-up and leave home in search of whatever ‘frontier’ they might find, we hunted, fished, camped in wild places, canoed rapids, built a cabin on borrowed land. But, it eventually became apparent that these young people needed both work and social skills. After some casting about and some synchronistic events it became clear that a cottage industry might be key. So, in 1977 I put together a workshop, right in the Youth Bureau, making hand-made knives. Black Oak Knives was run by me and another youth worker--Steve Ballin, my amicable and capable assistant--and we brought in kids who wanted to make knives. Sounds odd, I know. But, they were outdoors oriented, loved using the tools of the outdoors and there is no more basic and primary tool than a knife. Ask any survival expert what tool they would choose if they were about to be put in a wilderness survival situation and could have only one, and the answer is invariably,”… a ‘good’ knife”. Well, I had had some experience with factory-made knives--one of which failed in a moment of great need--and I knew that we could do better. It was just a matter of using the right steel, the right designs, and of learning what really makes a superior knife, for various uses.

Black Oak ultimately turned out a small population of graduates who mostly got jobs working for a local company that made prototype and replacement turbine blades…a somewhat natural segue from making hand-ground and finished knives. Through a very synchronistic connection, we became the subject of an article in Gun World magazine, and suddenly orders came pouring in. This not only paid for tools and materials, it also was the first step in cementing my own reputation as a knifemaker, a trade and art-form I would pursue off and on for the next 30 years. Eventually, I became somewhat renowned, along with Don Fogg--long since become a world-renowned master of the hand-forged blade—for making one-of-a-kind ‘art knives’. You can see a representative collection of them here: (link to art knife gallery on site). And you can see Don’s work at: www.dfoggknives.com.

In 1979 the CETA grant that had funded my position at the Ithaca Youth Bureau ran out and my then wife, Patricia, and I moved to Maine. Ayuh, just put our stuff in a Ryder truck and lit out for the great north woods. We rented a farm outside of Norway, Maine, and I set-up a knife-shop in an unused cow-barn, and damn near froze my butt off that first winter. Wind would come tumbling over the peaked roof and right down the stack of my little woodstove, shooting flames three feet out of the air vent in the door. It was miserable on one level, but it was also an adventure. To her great credit, Patty (a Cornell graduate who now has a masters in education and a law degree) was as adventurous and willing to explore life off of the treadmill of middleclassness as I was. So we persisted and Maine eventually became the first place in my life that I really felt was my home. I have been here thirty years this year, and I love this rugged, most forested of all states with her mean winters and her craggy coast, hundreds of lakes, stunning autumns…and even her black flies and mosquitoes. Maine is one of those truly ‘what you see is what you get’ places, and I love that about her. Mainers are also a treat, mostly, and, after 30 years, I am almost never reminded that I am ‘from away’. Hell, those of us who came here to make a life must just about out-number those who grew up here, mostly because a helluva lot of kids who do, end up leaving the state to pursue careers that seem less inviting or downright unavailable here.

If you would like a clear sense of who I am as a creative person, I invite you to visit the galleries of paintings, photographs, knives, and writing that are to be found through the menus on this site. I will be putting up several novels and some non-fiction books as serial installments here in the coming months. I will be offering my humble—and sometimes not so humble, even downright adamant—opinion on whatever has my attention. I am an ‘ethicist’ in addition to being an artist. Not only did I major in ethics at Penn State, but I have pursued them in the ensuing years. I will never present my viewpoint as the only valid one, but I will present it as the one that I can support with my life experiences and with a sense of knowing intuitively, conscionably, what is ‘right’. Of course, ‘right’ is a relative term never to be used without also recognizing that a viewpoint is just that: one way to see something, anything.

After I turned away from the ‘heady’ days of the Bay Area counterculture, I was initiated as a Sufi. You will never really know what that is, because even Sufis themselves have been unable to fully agree on this point. And, that, somehow, seems just very ‘sufic’ in and of itself. But, let’s say, the ‘brand’ of Sufism I practice is anchored largely in the intuitive sphere, and the inner conviction that life has a definite purpose for each soul. There is also the central practice of looking at the world around one and striving to know that there is no ‘NOT GOD’. That’s right, warts and all, it is all part of the Divine Being. This is not so much a ‘concept’ or ‘belief’ as it is a form of knowledge that one simply acquires from the act of living, of submitting oneself wholly to being human and all that it implies. Rind Sufism, such as I practice, is not associated with any of the formal religions in particular, so please do not think I am a religious zealot of any type whatsoever. However, neither does a student of Sufism reject any religion or path outright. The things I reject—often with a feeling of both sadness and longing—are people acting in violent and other untoward ways towards other sentient beings and towards the planet itself. In fact, I am working on a manuscript for a book that examines aspects of religion the make it particularly susceptible to being misappropriated and misused, by those who would have you believe that their personal and collective will to power is coincident with the Will of God. It is not…..not ever. Just the fact that they are trying to justify malicious behavior by saying that it IS the will of a deity tells you right out of the gate that they are imposters. How much more obvious could this be?

My goal in sharing thoughts, notions and ideas with you here will never be to drop a ‘rant’ in your lap and let you figure out what to do with a load of negativity. I want to share views with you that, ultimately, you might find useful in creating and evolving your own life and your understanding of the purpose and the meaning that it contains.

And, finally, art and life are completely intertwined, so inextricably bound up in each other that any discussion of one necessarily includes the other on some level. My goal here will be to explore art as life, and life as art. We can make art that enriches our lives and those of others, and we can also live our lives in an artful manner. We will look at what these twin concepts mean in terms of not only thought and feeling, but in terms of actions as well.

So, come along for the ride and let’s see where the trail up ahead leads us. These are both amazing and utterly daunting times we live in. But, really, what generation—throughout the entire tale of human history—has NOT been able to say that?

Murad Saÿen, in Maine USA, where the north wind is howling and the deer are getting just a little desperate in the depths of a tough winter.