You just can’t stand it. An unprincipled boor is at the helm, spouting hate and blaming others for reporting it. Worse, people you know and usually respect defend him and declare false equivalence with claims of terrible things “your side” has said. Every day you are bogged down in the mire.
I hate to say it – but while it is all real and terrible, you’re being manipulated. The constant spew is designed to keep you unnerved, appalled, angry – and engaged.
Yes, it’s important to pay attention – but not all the time. It’s more important to pay attention to what’s, well, important. And let me tell you: paying attention to the constant caustic blather is NOT important.
OK. Fine. So what does this mean? For one thing, it means flying below the cloud of gas and looking at what’s actually happening, what’s actually being done down there on the ground in the actual government.
But while that can be satisfying, while it can energize you, it’s still going to cause frustration and dismay, just of a different sort. You need to seek something that renews your soul, something that gives you a sense that the world isn’t imploding and about to suck you into the vortex. Call it a relief, call it a respite, call it what you’d like. What you call it is not material. Finding it is.
I have a suggestion. Go find some art. You know that weird sculpture in your city that nobody can explain? Take a stroll over to it. Look at it. Put yourself in the place of the artist and ask what she was thinking as she made it. Why go to all that trouble? Why work so hard on that mass of metal? There it sits. What does it do in that space it’s in?
Don’t like that one? Go to a museum and take a guided curator tour of a single work or a whole gallery. Let someone show you what’s going on. Believe me when I say that you’ll find yourself almost literally – and suddenly – diving into the interior of one or another work and it will change you. I do art tours and I often say that people easily dismiss art they don’t understand, especially what we call “abstract” art. They look at it and say, “Anyone could have done that” or “That makes no sense.” And I say that “anyone” didn’t do that. A single person did – and nobody else could have. Whatever it is, it’s a structure directly out of someone’s mind, expressed by her hands. So what is it, why is it, how does it work (or not)? What sense did it make to the maker?
The real reason for any art object is that an artist has tried to bring order out of disorder, to give shape to random thought, to put something in space that wasn’t there before. An artist, in so doing, is an optimist,no matter how trenchantly shocking or pessimistic the particular art might seem. The very act of expression, of bringing a work into being is an act of optimism. To do nothing, to say nothing, to make nothing is the pessimist’s path. The artist is creating in the face of an impossible world, a crazy miasma and saying, “I can’t just do nothing. I have to speak! I refuse to go quietly into the dark!” And that’s really why art is the answer. The best art speaks volumes to us if only we listen to its language and open our minds to it. Even better, though, really good art surprises, delights and engages us in ways nothing else can. It truly “broadens” the mind in the sense that it demands a level, a depth of thought that little else does and this alone can be exhilarating.
This does not mean that all art will speak to you or that you’re going to like everything you see. But it does mean that when you find something that does speak to you, it will elevate you. It will be antidote to the things that drag you down, to the anger and the sense of powerlessness.
Artists have persisted through the ages in doing what they do in the face of a world that tries not to care, or worse, exerts the power to destroy. And still they persist. They have left behind long ago and just yesterday work for the rest of us to contemplate. What they’ve left us are auguries, signs, omens for us to parse. And it’s far more worth our time to parse these auguries than it is to be mired in the quotidian swamp of lies, hate and misinformation that eats away at us.
So go find some art. Be diligent. Don’t give up after the first thing you find or even after the one hundredth. Keep at it. When you have found the one that burrows into your mind, you’ve found the path to a new sort of enlightenment. Stay on the path, the road to the better angels of our nature.
This is the Haymarket Memorial by Mary Brogger. It sits
on Des Plaines Street near Randolph. It commemorates
the workers and protesters in the Chicago Haymarket
Riot of 1886. It replaced a statue of a policeman, which
bombed several times and now resides behind a protective fence at Chicago Police Headquarters.
Aon Building (from the Standard Oil Commission)
© Edmund J. McDevitt
December, 2018
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