CityView Magazine

58 | September/October • 2014 W e encounter great balance in the universe. e sun and the moon balance the day and the night in our lives that are marked by moments of laughter and of tears. Yin and Yang volley back and forth like the pendulum of the grandfather clock. So it is that this issue addresses life's balance through Arts and Technology. My household is one of symmetrical balance. My wife plans her every day. She wakes with a mission envisioned at minimum the day before. I awake with very little knowledge of what will befall me that day. I am impulsive, perched on life's limb waiting to pounce on what the day sends by. She would be the Technology of our marriage; I would be the Art. Art in its classical sense began with our oldest relatives. Long ago, hairy humanoids wearing bear skins invented stick fig- ures and depicted them on stone canvass as they cast spears into what would later become the very overcoat that artist was wearing. (In a nod to Technology, those same stick people live tens of thousands of years later on minivans worldwide.) Rembrandt and Re- noir are their direct descendants. Episodic moments in life are recorded for all to see. Art is easily recognized in musical instruments that produce individual notes, and those notes blend together By Bill mcFadyen & Technology Art to form harmonious sound. Some of those collected notes, like Beethoven's Fih Symphony, live in our brain for the duration of our time here. My father said it was not so har- moniously recognizable when it clanged up the stairway sweeping in front of it the voice of Alice Cooper, but is that any different from what would surely be the Caveman's pre- dictable disdain to a Picasso? Time passes; we push limits; normalcy changes. Technology first took shape in human history when a fast- moving, lightning-inspired prairie fire charred to death some pre-historic jack rabbit. Its medium-rare corpse was thereaer dis- covered by some unsuccessful (and therefore naked) bear hunter. e rabbit smelled differently from the one of last week that his family ate raw, surprisingly more pleasant even. Aer making sure no one else was looking, he tasted it, de- spite the blackened stuff around the edges, and (in what was very likely the birth of mathematics) two and two were put together in his mind. Or even more likely, he came back to the cave confused, told his wife about it, and she invented both mathematics and roasted red meat while he continued laboring in his mental haze. us, fire led to master chefs. Spears led to Parker shotguns. Language matured in literature. Why, be- fore we knew it, there was a loaf of sliced bread right there on the table next to the printing press. Fayetteville embraces the Arts. In its more conventional FEATURE The Yin and Yang of Life

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