Art As Antidote

About thirty-five years ago there was a scary fire in the west San Fernando Valley. I remember speaking to a nurse at the time asking how she dealt with it as the flames were seen coming across a nearby hill. She told me she ran in the house and made the bed.

A few days ago, a chartered plane carrying the UCLA basketball team was experiencing a nasty storm causing the aircraft to bounce mightily in its descent. What did the athletes do in their distress? They told jokes. Might as well go as the giggling Buddha.

If poems are serious jokes, jokes may be their nascent first cousins. Both set the scene, create tension and end with an epiphany, great or small.

There is a conflagration in our midst. Making the bed won’t help nor will a pillow over the ears. A wildfire of imbecility and loathing is scorching our land, our decency, our institutions, civil discourse and language itself.

It seems that no evidence to the contrary, no rationality can reach their deaf ears. We are dealing with a confederacy of dunces, a lynch mob, with virulence pathological.

Poetry changes nothing declared W.C. Auden. Yet he also wrote (in 1939) we must love each other or die. How about massive doses of poetry, music, dance, painting et al… and the love it engenders.

Gatherings of liturgical music for the holidays may bring with it a short reprieve as long as assault weapons are checked at the door. We can usually count on the Nutcracker to generate a few hours of consanguinity, particularly if your seven-year-old is in the cast.

Any music from high to low can cut through the vitriol, even mine. There are many rooms in our manor house with unlocked doors. Surely Sondheim found an audience in both camps.

At his colloquial best Robert Frost’s poems reach the heartland. So does Theodore Roethke and Jane Kenyon, Ted Kooser, Barbara Hanby and Jim Harrison. Poetry taps into the commonweal. I would argue that even angry poetry contains within its seed a life-affirming impulse.

As I write this, I’m trying to convince myself. Like that nurse we sense our Democracy being consumed by some hellish inferno. We are reaching for any act to restore order and repel the false idol along with those who are in bed with him.

Mozart’s clarinet concerto is filling the room. I’m looking at a book of Japanese woodblock prints. The arts can be a backdoor to soothe the sin-sick soul.

Sinatra does it his way the year round. His voice along with Cole Porter’s and Irving Berlin’s songs are at the bedrock of our shared heritage. Add to this the creative burst of Handel’s Messiah. These Hallelujahs can bind our wounds, suspend the malice and the fear behind it in ways that political argument cannot.