Writing Prompt #4: What is your favorite work of art? What do you love about it?

The interesting part of this question, to me, is how to define a “work of art”. Is it a painting? Is it a selection of music? Is it a statue, a piece of architecture, a poem, or a novel? Could it, perhaps, be a dance performance, a script, a play being performed, a film or television show? Maybe it’s a mission patch from one of NASA’s Apollo missions, or a logo designed for a company. Maybe it’s even a spraypainted mural on the side of a building.

There’s so much art to choose from that it’s nearly impossible to make a single decision. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I see art everywhere in nearly everything. We express ourselves in so many myriad ways that it can be overwhelming.

One possibility for me is The Starry Night, a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. There’s something about the colors and the swirls and the darkness juxtaposed against the light that’s always appealed to me. Painted in 1889 while Van Gogh underwent self-commitment to a mental asylum, it is considered one of the most recognizable paintings in modern art.

Another personal favorite of mine (and here’s where my nerd shows through) is a concept-painting of the USS Enterprise-D created by Andrew Probert and Rick Sternbach during the development of Star Trek: The Next Generation prior to the show’s premier in 1987. Originally intended to demonstrate the proposed look of the new ship, it was so well-received that it was hung on the wall of the captain’s ready room set for the entire seven-year run of the show as well as the film Star Trek: Generations.

If anyone is ever wondering what to get me for Christmas, a framed print of either of those would make me very happy.

At the end of the day, though, I’m such a voracious reader that my “favorite” work of art has to be a story, either something written in prose or something filmed. Even narrowing it down that far leaves almost too many possibilities to think about. There are so many short stories, novels, comic books, television shows and films that have moved me over the years that I could teach several college courses on the subject and still only scratch the surface.

Of all the possibilities, I’m going to go with a simple one. It’s a comic book limited series called Midnight Nation, written by my favorite author, J. Michael Straczynski. It’s the story of a detective, shot dead by a suspect, who gets stuck in a place between life and death and who goes on a cross-country road trip to regain his soul from the Devil and in the process discovers who he really is as a person. Along the way, he discovers a multitude of lost souls who have been discarded, ignored, or forgotten by the daylight world we all inhabit. I won’t spoil it for anyone who hasn’t read it, but in my twenties the ending struck me in a way that I don’t think anything else ever has. The thing I love about it is the self-discovery: our hero starts his journey wanting one thing, but at the end he realizes what he actually wants is something very different.

Even so, at the end of the day, I think trying to choose a favorite is an exercise in futility. There are far, far too many works of art out there that demand our attention, that demand our respect, to ever narrow the list down to just one or even two or three. If life is an exploration of possibilities, of ideas, then surely art is one of the tools we use in that endeavor. No matter how much we expose ourselves to, there’s always more out there, and I take comfort from that. The exploration will never be over.

Who Are You?

My family never attended church. My father is a devout atheist and my mother is, at best, a non-practicing Catholic. The only times I remember being in a church before my thirties were weddings and funerals. Religion was an alien world to me, one that I felt little need to dip my toe in.

That’s not to say that I didn’t find ideas and philosophies that influenced me and continue to influence me to this day. They weren’t what anyone would call “books of faith” or anything like that, but they were important to me and gave me a lot to think about. They helped me find my way and establish something firm to stand on in a world where the people I knew all seemed to have conflicting beliefs and convictions, and where I had a hard time deciding who was right and who was wrong.

In 1989, I was eleven years old when I bought my first comic book and really discovered Spider-Man. Actually, if I’m being honest, my first comic book was an issue of a licensed Real Ghostbusters comic that I found at Stater Bros. while my mom was grocery shopping. I begged and pleaded for her to buy it for me, as only an eleven-year-old can, and she finally relented. I loved it, but there were only a few issues available on the spinner rack at the time, and once I finished those two or three comics I was hungry for more. Not knowing much about the other titles on display, I picked a character I at least recognized from Saturday morning cartoons. Outside of a children’s read-along book I had when I was younger, The Spectacular Spider-Man #150 was what I consider my first “real” comic book.

That started a lifelong fascination with superheroes. From Spider-Man, I learned that with great power comes great responsibility. For those who don’t know, Peter Parker at first squandered his powers trying to make a profit and looking out for himself until, one day, he refused to stop a mugger he could have easily apprehended, a mugger who shortly went on to murder his Uncle Ben. As Spider-Man, Peter vowed to never look the other way again. He realized that if it was within his ability to help, he had a responsibility to do so, especially when people couldn’t help themselves. For an eleven-year-old, that’s heavy stuff. It goes deeper than just watching people in colorful pajamas beating each other up. It’s a way of life writ large. From Spider-Man, I moved on to other comics: Thor, The Infinity Gauntlet, The Avengers, Captain America and others. I found myself mostly drawn to Marvel characters, but I also collected a lot of comics from the Denny O’Neil editorial run on the Batman titles. One of the things I learned from all those writers, artists, and characters was that the differences between us all as human beings, whether they be ethnicity, nationality, language, religion, or any number of other differences were inconsequential. What mattered was that all people are important, all people deserve the chance to live in peace, to live according to what makes them happy and what they believe, and to be protected. Most of what divides us as people is trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Then came 1990. Over the summer between 6^th and 7^th grades, I was at a family event at my aunt’s house. I’ve never been a hugely social person, so I wandered into a side room and turned on the TV. This was well before the age of hundreds of cable channels, so the channel-surfing options were limited, but it just so happened that one of the local stations was airing a rerun of the most recent Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. I had never seen it and I was barely aware of the show in general, but that afternoon I was hooked. There was something about this group of people who were very clearly an extended family and their determination to do the right thing, save their father-figure, and protect the innocent people on Earth that captured me. I spent the whole summer watching every rerun I could and awaiting the Fall premier that would wrap up the cliffhanger that ended the previous season. It was the Summer between parts one and two of “The Best of Both Worlds” and the start of my attachment to Star Trek in general. Those themes of progressiveness, inclusion, scientific curiosity, and duty have been a part of my life ever since.

A few years later, Babylon 5 premiered, and provided me with a five-year run in which the stories and themes resonated on a similar level while giving me even more to think about: media bias, faith, fascism, good and evil, order and chaos, whether we are bound to follow one of two divergent paths or whether we have the freedom and responsibility to forge a third path, our own. It was J. Michael Straczynski whose writing first taught me the two most important questions in anyone’s life. “Who are you?” and “What do you want?” It was through his work that I realized it matters what order you answer those questions. Deciding what you want is much easier than figuring out who you are, but if you decide what you want before you understand who you are you can end up going wildly off-course and finding yourself in places you never thought you would and where you never wanted to be. That’s something that happens all too often in our goal-oriented, materialistic society. Wants are much easier to define than identity.

In the years since, I’ve been exposed to a lot of religion, mostly in the form of evangelical Christianity. That’s an entirely different ball of yarn to unravel, but one thing I’ve heard over and over again is that you have to read your Bible every day, every single day, to feed your faith and maintain your identity. And they’re right. They’re absolutely right. But it’s a broader truth than even they realize. I struggle every time I stray from the things that shaped me, that I truly believe in, even if I don’t believe in the literal, factual truth of the stories. I don’t believe superheroes are literally real or that Star Trek or Babylon 5 represent our actual future. But those stories don’t have to be factual truth to have power or for the themes and ideas they represent to resonate. If I don’t constantly reinforce those ideas in myself, I start to wander and forget what shaped me. But eventually, I always come back. I always come full circle. And I’m starting to realize how important it is to stay with those ideas in some form, to keep reminding myself who I am. Because that’s the first, most important question of our existence: “Who are you?” Without that, it’s all too easy to get lost.