Some things I know
Meditations on misery and art
Hello from the aftermath of a big national shock. I’ve spent the last couple of days cycling through numbness, grief, and betrayal (and a million other things too numerous and painful to identify), and I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever experienced a mental fog this thick. I keep forgetting things: what I was about to do, what I was just thinking, the fact that I haven’t eaten; it’s like my brain, knowing it holds information this distressing, keeps flushing out everything it holds in a futile attempt to save me. (It doesn’t work; even in the moments of forgetting I am vaguely aware of being haunted by a heavy sadness.)
Here is what I know: we’ve been strapped in for four years (probably) of misery. I’m not using the royal “we” here in the liberal bubble sense—I’m referring to the true, collective “we,” the “we” that includes not only me and people who agree with me politically but also the millions of people who voted for the false dream of a country that doesn’t include me. What I saw from 2017 to 2020 from being involuntarily subjected to the feelings of people who voted for that cosplay businessman was that they were perpetually miserable (and outraged, and scared). They were told all their problems would be solved by punishing those responsible—immigrants, women, queer and trans people, etc.—and in the four years their god-emperor was in office, their problems continued to not be solved and they were told it was all the fault of immigrants, women, queer and trans people, etc.
Every day there was a new bogeyman, ripped from the lexicons of the oppressed and twisted beyond all belief to justify their victim complex: “woke,” “critical race theory,” “identity politics,” you get it. Every week, coincidentally, there was a new crisis (an eloquent person of color to flay in the public eye, a child playing sports to demonize, a movie to boycott for its dangerous messages) to distract everyone from the fact that actual governance and problem-solving wasn’t happening. How curious, how convenient, that there were so many crises, always with a scapegoat at the ready! This was a nonstop train delivering fear and panic on a schedule so routine that Mussolini could have taken notes, and as a result the people who voted for “getting tired of winning” were so perpetually afraid and panicked that it cooked their brains. In a really messed up way, I could kind of understand if this had all been for some kind of national Faustian bargain where it was my happiness traded for theirs, but the fact is that they were miserable the whole time. No one actually got any more happiness out of the deal.
Another thing I know: there isn’t a “told you so” moment coming. It didn’t happen the first time—even though we (and there’s the collective “we” again) are all still experiencing the consequences of the first go-around, and the people who voted for leopards eating faces weren’t immune from their own faces being eaten. I’ve seen again and again that people are really bad at drawing connections between their choices and the horrible consequences. Why would you when there are so many tender-throated scapegoats to sacrifice? We are all doomed to be Cassandra in this moment—warning of tragedy that will come, but never to be believed. All the suffering, it seems, will be for naught, and we’ll just have to keep starting the story over again. It's a sad song, but we keep singing even so.
In times like this, I have existential moments where I wonder what the point of making music even is: sure, music is great, but it won’t save someone from deportation, won’t help someone unable to get aid because of means-testing, won’t save a pregnant woman denied medical care. Hokay so here’s the earth, here’s a country about to be ruled by a tyrant who’s already launched one coup, here are all the people suffering as a result, and here’s me at an inconveniently large, single-purpose piece of furniture, practicing my stupid scales. What’s the point?
Right now I see other musicians and artists wondering the same thing (as we do after every disaster and act of violence), feeling guilty and ashamed for prioritizing something that seems so selfish, so unhelpful. And look, I think about the purpose of art a lot for someone who hasn’t read enough philosophy books to be qualified to expound on the subject. The irony is that when times are good I don’t have an answer for what the point of art is, but when times are bad it becomes so much clearer to me. And here is what I know:
Art doesn’t have a point. And that’s what makes it so damn precious.
Art doesn’t have a place at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. As much as I love and adore and live for art, as much as I am an utter fool for beauty, I can’t argue otherwise. Art requires artists to devote energy, time, and resources that could be spent in more [extremely ironic air quotes incoming] “productive” ways.
The people who get off on cruelty and subscribe to the belief of innate hierarchies would have the people around them divided and distracted by the mere act of serving their most immediate needs and having to prove that they deserve to exist. This quote has been shared to death over the last several years, but Toni Morrison really nailed it:
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.
A society that inexplicably makes space for art is a society that places value on something bigger than our basest and most violent desires. When we keep art going in threatened times, it means we haven’t abandoned our vision for this better society, this better world.
To study music is to study stories of survival. I think about Hélène de Montgeroult saving her own life during the Reign of Terror, of a pregnant Clara Schumann rescuing her entire family during the Dresden Uprising, of Florence Price fleeing the danger of a South she once comfortably inhabited. Music was made and protected through countless instances of violence and hardship, and all of us who play and listen to that music are continuing the chain even through our own times of struggle.
I remember also that music is a means of escape. Obviously it provides an emotional reprieve from the horrors of the world, but it can also be a very real escape hatch for people trapped by ideology. I noticed a curious repeated motif in the stories of women who pulled themselves out of repressive environments—Tara Westover’s Educated and Susan Fowler’s Whistleblower come to mind, as do observations of classmates I had at music school who came from fundamentalist and insular communities—that pursuing arts studies was how they were allowed to leave. The sneaky thing about the performing arts, particularly the feminine-coded ones, is that they’re seen as “safe,” “untainted” fields (and that music in particular has value for worship practices), but they’re also secret portals to the wider world. Allowing the arts to be diminished in a profit-minded society severs those pathways, and so continuing to not only practice art but to also never shut up about its right to exist is how we hold those pathways open.
Finally, artists—even us little ones—wield cultural power. When law and political processes let me down, I find immense comfort in the knowledge that law is led by society, not the other way around. And society changes. I learned this from reading an interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg:
There was a great constitutional law scholar named Paul Freund who said “[t]he Court should never be influenced by the weather of the day, but inevitably, it will be influenced by the climate of the era.” That is, this is a constitution, not a law meant to last a certain period of time; it was meant to govern through the ages. And of course, to govern through the ages it has to be kept in tune with the people that are governed.
You can’t change what people want by forcing laws on them; that’s just not how it works. It’s artists and storytellers who shape viewpoints and, in doing so, change culture. There’s a reason there have been so many attempts to make conservative-safe media (they know how much power art holds) and yet why they’re all so bad. It’s all empty vibes and no vision, no commitment to greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts excellence. When the whole point of a piece of media is “make something that fills the time and doesn’t shatter someone’s extremely fragile belief in a world that doesn’t actually exist,” and not “tell a story true to who you are,” you have lost the plot, figuratively and often literally. By making art, by telling your stories, you change people.
What a beautiful paradox art is. Its value can’t ever be measured (auction houses may try); it’s worth nothing and yet it’s worth everything. Art is order in the face of chaos and disorder in the face of authoritarianism. Art is fleeting and yet it endures.
Above all, art is communion, a small hand reaching out in the dark. This connection is the closest thing I know to magic. I think all the time about this poem, “Small Kindnesses,” by Danusha Lameris:
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”
One heartening, beautiful thing I’ve seen this week is the love and connection being shared between friends and strangers, the refusal to reflect hate when you know you are hated. People are already helping and holding each other. “The true dwelling of the holy” indeed—and silly as it seems, I think art amplifies this holiness.
Look at how we hear divinity in music from the past. [Bach and Beethoven stans have entered the chat.] Those works, as I keep reminding people, weren’t handed down from God or heaven or angels. They were etched out by flawed mortals carving out an existence in a dirty, cruel, corrupt world, and yet now we listen to them and we hear holiness. I listen to and play the works of composers like Chopin and Farrenc, Ravel and Bonis, and in doing so I feel as if I am communing with them across centuries and oceans, stirring my fingers in the warm shadows of their memory—an intimate connection no government can touch.
I know many of my fellow artists feel hopeless right now, as if there is a fresh wound that seems impossible to heal. Please remember that your capacity to feel this deeply is your greatest strength, and you can use that strength to endure. Endure to help those who are the most vulnerable, to nurture and shelter your love for other people. Let's not waste time yelling at the monsters who smash things and glory in harm (they're not listening, and they don't care), but instead let's build fleeting temples for each other and continue the unbroken chain of survival and beauty handed to us by artists before.
The future looks bleak, but keep making art that tells the story of your own survival. Allow yourself joy and delight in your own existence, because there’s going to be enough misery to go around.
😥