Finding beauty in a fractured world

On the role of art and creativity during difficult times, featuring words of wisdom and comfort by Wendell Berry, C.S. Lewis and Howard Zinn.

I’ve been staring at the blinking cursor since the last 30 minutes, my mind blank, fingers frozen over the keyboard. My eyes keep darting to the news on the other tab. The horrors of the past few days lie like a heavy mantle over my heart. What is the point of art in a world that feels increasingly fractured and broken? What words can I possibly write in the face of so much suffering, grief, and injustice?

Giving up, I get up and go over to the painty table. To the painting I’ve been working on since the last few days, in bits and pieces of stolen time. I pick up a Sea Blue Inktense pencil. Sketch a line in the shape of a wing. Start to fill in the wing with color — sea blue mixed with white, painted over with gold, with a glaze of Sanguine ink, and another glaze of teal blue and white.

I reach across the table for a white pen. My hand draws a pattern of dashes and lines. Without much conscious thought, I pick up a black stamp pad, choose a script stamp, and stamp in the background. I consider if I want words. Decide not now. Step back and take a look at the painting that has unfolded beneath my fingers.

Bird woman, I think. My gentle Rumi-esque angel. Bringer of a quiet calm even in the midst of a raging storm. A line from a Wendell Berry poem comes to mind, “I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

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I see that as a clue — to rest my gaze on the tree outside my window, to watch the squirrels scamper through its branches, the mynahs fluffing their feathers, the big black ants marching along in a row, gathering the last scraps of food before they bed down for winter.

And I leave you with three pieces of writing that I hope bring you some comfort and give you the encouragement to create, even in this beautifully fractured world of ours.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

On the human love of transcendence

C.S. Lewis, From a sermon preached in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, Autumn, 1939.

“The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.

If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.

Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for [a] suitable moment that [may] never come.

Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffold, discuss the last new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.”

On the relationship between artists and society

Howard Zinn, from a paper titled Artists in Times of War.

“When I think of the relationship between artists and society — and for me the question is always what it could be, rather than what it is — I think of the word "transcendent."…By transcendent, I mean that the artist transcends the immediate. Transcends the here and now. Transcends the madness of the world. Transcends terrorism and war. The artist thinks, acts, performs music, and writes outside the framework that society has created. The artist may do no more than give us beauty, laughter, passion, surprise, and drama. I don't mean to minimize these activities by saying the artist can do no more than this. The artist needn't apologize, because by doing this, the artist is telling us what the world should be like, even if it isn't that way now. The artist is taking us away from the moments of horror that we experience everyday — some days more than others — by showing us what is possible.”

I have so much more to say about our fractured world. About this conflict and other conflicts and how race and racism impacts the narrative. And about empathy, compassion, and love. You can read my thoughts here.

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