by duane sharrock
Some people can sit at a fine, well-prepared meal, and appreciate nothing about the table setting, the placements, the atmosphere that was detailed and precisely prepared. They are oblivious to the floral arrangement, the unique designs in the plates or the choices of silverware and glassware.They focus only on the food, on how it tastes.Only on the dish!
But the dish as a whole should be acknowledged. Some chefs feel appreciated when an unusual use of a seasoning is noticed or that a traditional side dish is prepared in an unusual way. Their creativity is missed, overlooked. It goes unappreciated.
Also, the guest might not know how the wine was chosen–paired–with the meal, either. They might know nothing about the wine, how to taste wine, how to smell it, or what to value in the wine as it is sipped with the meal. And great wines have histories as well. The histories are unknown. The winemaker or vintner (the person who made the wine) and the events around its vintage are unexplored as well.
Then the guest rejects the dessert, the denouement, the conclusion.There can be creativity even in this. Instead, it is missed, overlooked, unappreciated.
We do this all of the time. I have only recently changed my ways. Before the movie, Ratataouille, I was ignorant, even after watching various movies about restaurants.
Sometimes, restaurants and hosts offer supports and interventions to help dinner guests appreciate a fine meal. Conversation can provide what educators call “scaffolding” in the form of a skilled host or wait staff (waiter, waitress). A host’s, or a wait staff’s, greatest gift to guests is to tell these stories—about the wines, the tradition of the dish and what the chef did differently, and the relevance of certain settings. The courses have stories but there are also relationships to the host or the guests in terms of cherished memories of eating this food, the gathering of people, the event being celebrated or mourned, and the skills of the person who prepared this dish specifically for family gatherings. In this way, we honor our parents, our matriarchs and patriarchs, our friends and family.
This can be learned from many sources, as well as (hopefully) from our own life experiences.
I have learned this by reflecting on the animated movie Ratataouille, a movie that seems so simple and humorous, but it is layered with wisdom and valuable insights.
First off: If you haven’t seen this movie, then watch it immediately, (check my “flipped classroom” stylo). Here’s the trailer acting as my introductory summary:
Much about the life of the artist, creativity, and about the power of appreciation, can be learned from the movie Ratatouille.
For example, Remy is a talented chef. We learn about isolation and from the isolation of the skilled rat chef whose own family and community cannot appreciate foods and flavors or the complexities of taste. They just eat.
Django, Remy’s father explains sagely, “Food is fuel. You get picky about what you put in the tank, your engine is gonna die. Now shut up and eat your garbage.”
There is another exchange, but is between brothers this time.
Remy: [observing what Emile is eating] What is that?
Emile: [pause] I don’t really know.
Remy: You dunno… and you’re eating it?
Emile: You know, once you muscle your way past the gag reflex, all kinds of possibilities open up.
Remy: This is what I’m talking about.
In that scene, you can see the differences between brothers, but you can also recognize the isolation, the loneliness, that Remy must be feeling. No one understands him. He appreciates fine food, flavors, smells, complexity over simplicity, and the complexities that SEEM simple. His family as well as the community he grew up in is ignorant.
Therefore, the inability to appreciate the art of food is ignorance.
Here is another scene illustrating one of the conflicts and challenges of being talented and operating at a “higher level” in Maslow’s pyramid, “The hierarchy of needs”.
Remy says, “This is me. I think it’s apparent that I need to rethink my life a little bit. I can’t help myself. I… I like good food, ok? And… good food is… hard for a rat to find!”
His father, Django, replies, “It wouldn’t be so hard to find, if you weren’t so picky!”
Remy is unable to explain himself to a art who doesn’t understand that there is more to food than its function and nutrition. There is more to food than just eating. So all he can say is, “I don’t wanna eat garbage dad!”
We, the audience, might feel pity for Remi’s dad, Django, who is only focused on food as fuel for the body and as a means to survive, but we don’t see the implications in our own lives. We offer the same advice to people whenever we reject appreciation and focus on base purpose and function rather than appreciation for beauty and form, rhythms, the leaps of inspiration and insight that take us beyond base experience.
This is what happens when we look at a phone and can’t appreciate the network it connects us to. We don’t appreciate that someone figured out a way to define specific combinations of numbers as a means to connect to a specific location, a specific machine anywhere in the country or the world. We just see a magic box that does what it was designed to do. We look at water bottles and are ignorant to the fact that water is just water but that the bottle’s design attracts us to one bottle more than another bottle. We are oblivious! We listen to our favorite songs with self-hate because the song is popular, because we believe it shouldn’t liked BECAUSE it is popular. We tell ourselves such things because, supposedly, all things POPULAR are base and commercial, even though we couldn’t write such a song or even perform it as a singer or as a musician.
Appreciation depends on a set of skills but also on a set of experiences, of memories. For example, regarding our maturity and child development, Mark Twain is quoted saying: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished by how much he’d learned in seven years.” This says a lot about the observer, right? He thinks his dad has changed, but it was really the observer who had changed. This is a simple example that can be analyzed for insights into our own lives.
For example, what did the 14 year old know? Then, at 21, what has changed in the boy’s life? What might he have experienced that made him appreciate his father more? What lessons do you think he learned? What losses and challenges?
The same can be said about him when he becomes a father, right? My parents “don’t understand” and they are “ruining my life” until I become a parent and start doing the same for my kids to keep them safe, to guide them from bad habits, from self-destruction, and to help them enjoy life better and for more of their lives. As a parent, we recognize the sacrifices our parents had made for those family trips, the experiences we most prize, for the educations that helped us make the careers we both love and complain about. When trying to get the wording of the Mark Twain quote correctly, I came across this article, which has a detailed exploration of my point.
But this is the point that I am making in a nutshell: Our senses are limited to what we know at the time we use them. Learning, imagination, and self-reflection opens our senses to greater awareness.
This also brings me back to the use of intelligence, imagination, and awareness as responsibilities of the observer. All of this combines to describe appreciation. But I am adding that appreciation is the most important quality of an observer seeking creativity. It is more than simply an understanding of the creative process or even the finished product. Appreciation is, after all, the ability to value what is observed or experienced, whether it is one’s life that is experienced, one’s friends, one’s neighbors, as well as the experiences one is exposed to through stories, songs, or photographs.
Appreciation is at the heart of learning. Appreciation is at the heart of creativity. It is a goal that can only become more sophisticated with experience, learning, and experience. Appreciation is developed and improved with the emotions, the imagination, as well as with the intellect. Just as this is so, ignorance is an act and a decision NOT to appreciate.
Except when it’s not.
Out of the Weaving Secret 