On Doing Art in Terrible Times

I am fortunate to have in my life artists of many kinds - writers, musicians, actors, poets, painters. These people, the successful and the struggling, the purists and the experimental, all bring to my life, and to the world around them, an energy and inspiration unequaled by any other influence. Not to mention that I love them - love them not with an ain’t-my-friends-grand kind of affection, but a kind of collective you-are-part-of-my-heart kind of love. 

I don’t see them all regularly, some only when we’re involved in creative projects together, others when the spirit moves one or the other of us to call and say “I need to see you.” But they are always there. More than any other professional or personal community I belong to or have ever, they are always there in my thoughts and in that deep sense of who I am in the world, and they are the kind of people, more than any other professional or practical community, who have literally been there when I was in need.

I love them, and, lately, when I do see them, they’re hurting, doubting, struggling. 

The conversations we have invariably goes more or less like this: 

Me: What are you working on lately?

Them: (shrug) I haven’t been able to do much work. 

Me: (knowing the answer) Why? 

Them: With the world the way it is, it feels (insert: futile, senseless, a luxury, self-indulgent) 

Me: I think there has never been a more important time in our lifetimes to do art. 

Them: Why? 

Me: Precisely because of the state of the world. 

Them: But my art isn’t political. 

Me: That doesn’t matter. 

Them: But…..why? 

Me: Because art makes us more human than any other element of life, and we need that now more than ever. 

Them: (shrugging) I want to believe that. 

Me: Me, too. 

I have had this conversation in the last many months with poets, writers, actors, musicians, close friends and even more casual acquaintances. Each time I walk away feeling inadequate to the task of shoring up them and their belief in the work they do, because, truth be told, I have been, more days than not, having the same struggle myself. 

All of this has led me to read multiple pieces written on the essential nature of art to a democracy, and, actually, to any culture or political philosophy. Art (literature, theater, visual arts) has been shown in multiple studies to increase awareness both in the creators and the observers, to heighten cognitive process, to increase energy, to sharpen analytic ability, and to decrease depression. 

All of that is wonderful, and as a college teacher I have seen evidence of this in the attitude and skill of art students who took my math classes, my critical thinking classes, my classes in logic and argumentation. So these studies don't surprise me, but I think art is much more, and much more important. 

I have been writing as long as I could put pen to paper - immersing myself in a sea of words, in love with the rhythm and clarity of verbal expression, the freedom words bring to create truth woven in words, and to, in fact, create authentic people, places, and passages of life. Two periods of my life as a

writer have been wildly productive: the couple of years of my creative writing graduate program, and the years from around 2010 until November of 2016, when the rise of insanity in our world beat its unwelcome way into my consciousness, as it did for so many others. Suddenly, when I’d sit down to write, I’d find myself staring at the page, thinking of the images and stories and characters swirling in my head, and have them feel futile, senseless, a self-indulgent luxury. What got me out of it?

I’ll let you know when that happens. 

In the meantime, I get up each day and face the page, and continue writing, because I do believe, somewhere in my battered-writer’s soul, that it is an essential act of resistance against darkness. It is a deep refusal to let go of what is best in the human spirit. Someone once said that those who control the storytelling of a culture control the culture, and we have seen lately the impact that stories pushed on the public consciousness, however false and fabricated, have on our world. People respond to stories in myriad ways - out of fear, out of hope, out of a deep connection to a truth being told. For me, continuing to write is an act to appeal to the last two - to get people to deeply connect to truth and by doing so to increase their hope. Stories told in any way - through paintings, poetry, music, or on the stage, can and should do the same. 

Doing art is a deeply political act, regardless of the story being told. It can open eyes or put blinders on them. It can turn people toward the dark or toward the light. It can show both beautiful and terrible truths, or it can create false hells for us to burn in. At its best, it can show people immersed in a dark world how to see the world illuminated

What Happens at the (Expletive Deleted) Intersection

  I’m a word-nerd, and a science geek. I also am a fan of comedy. Add all that together, and I was doomed to be a fan of science fiction that’s comedic (the ‘word-nerd’ part will be back in a minute). I loved Galaxy Quest, and, more recently, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel. I loved the comic moments in Star Trek and always thought Star Wars could’ve done better in that area. So I quickly became a fan, a few years back, of a quirky science fiction TV show called Eureka. What was great about that show was not the science, but the humor. The basic premise was this: a US Marshall gets stranded after his car breaks down in a small Oregon town, which turns out to be a community hiding a top-secret facility where the best scientists in the world are allowed to do their work, as long as they also work for the DOD.  Because of this Marshall's skill at solving two mysteries while he's there, the managers of the community convince the government to "promote" him out of his US Marshall's job and into being their town Sheriff. So, a man of average intelligence (as we find out in one episode - of 111) is in charge of enforcing the law in a community filled with the highest IQs in the world.

That leaves a lot of room for humor, which they pull off in every episode, to the delight of fans.  A Particular schtick that the writers regularly use on this show is that when the IQ types are discussing the failure of some experiment and the problem created, and letting out a string of quantum-enveloped thingamajig terminology, someone, seeing the blank look on the sheriff’s face, will say, for instance, “an ice ray of death.” And he will say, “why don’t you just say​ ‘ice ray of death’?” It comes off much better with the skilled actors in the show (Colin Ferguson, who plays Sheriff Carter, is a master of these moments, and much more). 

This particular schtick is relevant to us, today, in our normal lives in an important way, and the problem created has come more and more to my attention lately. In an effort to make language more specific, we have not only sacrificed clarity, but damaged our collective cognitive function. Those were big words I just used, meaning (with - I hope - at least some clarity) we try to have a specific word for everything, and in the process have become less and less able to communicate with any expectation of shared meaning or understanding. 

There are several examples of this, the most recent of which (and the one which got me thinking) is the word “intersectional.” This word started with a really good idea. (see article link at the end). In a 2016 TED talk, (just two years ago) a woman examined a case where a court had declined to find on a case of combined racial and sexual discrimination, saying (unfortunately, correctly) that they were not allowed by the existing law to consider them as combined influences. The speaker asked the audience

to imagine this situation as an intersection of roads where two lines of traffic come together. It was a great idea, the colliding lines of racism and sexism, like vehicles colliding at an intersection, creating damage exponentially greater than any one vehicle alone. It was a really good idea, because it allowed those without direct experience to imagine (inadequately to the actual experience) what happens when layers of prejudice are piled on a single person. It was a useful idea for persuading the legal system about the necessity to examine multiple prejudices combined. A useful idea - and soon co-opted.

A while back, I ran into a friend at a local store, who introduced me to another friend of hers, visiting from out of town. On hearing (from my friend) about just some of the elements of my life, this visitor gushed to me “your life is so intersectional!” 

I was taken aback - this woman’s connotations of the term were positive, it was a compliment to her. I thought perhaps I’d misunderstood the term, as I understood it the way Crenshaw (the TED talk presenter) had voiced it. So, I looked up a bunch of references to intersectionality, examinations of the term, explanations and critiques. (Amazing how many there have been in just two years), and here’s the conclusion I came to: the exact conclusion in the piece I’ve linked at the end of this post. That is, people taking on this word have tried to expand its meaning and have in the process actually muddied meaning to the point of it becoming a hard impenetrable clay. It means different things to different people, the end result being no one hearing it can be sure what the speaker means when they say it. 

This brings to mind a particular conference I had with a professor as an undergraduate. It should be no surprise to anyone who’s read …. oh, pretty much anything I’ve written… that I’m a wee bit of a science geek. I was in an undergraduate class in Microbiology with a professor who became one of my mentors and friends (and, later, when I was teaching, a colleague). We had as assigned reading a portion of a classic microbiology text that dealt with Koch’s Postulates, and which was written in entirely incomprehensible blather. I went to the professor’s office to try to get clarity. Like any good teacher (and he was very good) he wanted me to find the answer for myself, and sent me off with a couple of resources I could begin with to get to understanding. I read them, and five or six others I found myself, and went back to his office a couple of days later with a definition I’d written out in a couple of sentences of what the Postulates meant. He beamed and nodded. I looked at him, down at the copious notes in my lap, and at the text sitting between us on the table. My professor, Dr. Parson, waited. 

“So it’s really just about something the organism produces itself rather than a microbe that can be cultured or produced in a lab?” He nodded again. I looked down again, up again: “Why don’t they just say that?” 

He laughed loud and long, and we got into a long discussion of specialized terminology, how linguistics look at them, how scientists look at them, and what they do to create a sense of mysticism that blurs or actually hides the fundamental meaning from most people. 

My point is that complex ideas do not and SHOULD NOT attempt to have simple or single words to express them - they should require a complex mix of words and phrases, descriptors and qualifiers to bring them into full understanding. Science needs all the words it can get. Racism needs all the words it can get. Philosophy needs all the words it can get. Diplomacy needs all the words it can get. Sexism needs all the words it can get. We should not -- I am begging the world and readers and academics (particularly) not to-- reduce ideas. We should instead take time and effort and force of will to weave clear, fundamental words into a sharp understanding of their wonderful complexity.

Speak truth to me all you want, but don’t think it’s truth when you try to make complex concepts simple. Struggle with words and ideas, talk and talk and talk until you have clarity, no matter how many words it takes, and don’t -- DO NOT -- try to cover beautifully complicated concepts by using a single popular, vague, or trendy word. When you do that, what happens at that intersection is that two lanes don’t just collide, a bomb is also dropped on top of them. No, my life is NOT intersectional - it is (as is any one person’s life) too complex and rich to be reduced to a single word. 

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ENDNOTE:  I completely agree that intersectional resistance is essential. I'm just not sure - no, I'm fully convinced - that not everyone means the same thing when they say that.

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Article referenced in post:

Intersectional - what?