Remembering Why
To give a voice to the voiceless. To my own sense of voicelessness, I speak and write and sing and move. A collegue once said something tantamount to the beauty of the this civic sentiment, this human sentiment. To be strong for the sake of those who are weak. That is the function of these imbalances. It lends an opportunity for some to tip the scales and reach out, for if all things are equal, then, what's the point in compassion? Why deliver a hug of comfort if there was never any need?
It's not a crusade. Being an artist, it very rarely gets described that way by those who do it, day in and out. For most, it is just a way of making sense out of their own existence, for living is hard and most days, a puzzle. Once I told a friend, there are periods in life when the WHYs seem like a wasted question for the answer is never forthcoming. Then, one day, you read some poet talk about it in a play, not through words that describe precisely your experience, but a familiar essence in the way a chair is lit on stage, or one phrase in a song inserted at the most opportune moment as a director tells you to speak your line. In these intersections, you discover what it was you were so pained by in the past. A light turns on and you begin to understand pieces of your life. Maybe others pray to God and are comforted, but for the blessed and the cursed, those who feel their own voicelessness in this constant flood of noise, the gift is in giving. Jose Luis Valenzuela, once told us, "I always thought that when somebody said you have a gift, it is not that you received it from some higher power, it is not the thing you took, but the thing you give. You have a gift to give." Hence, the civic responsibility rests with that.
Trevor Bechtel said something beautiful about what it really means to be a leader: to be concerned about the least among us. Perhaps we've elected a president who is or is not that man who care to speak for the unspoken, and so we weep a little or a lot for his own lack of wisdom and for our own misfortune; but afterwards we learn to arm ourselves with the strange beauty and strength of our own idealism.
Artaud, in his brilliant defense of art admits that art has never been the thing that feeds a hungry man, and yet, I say, hunger is the thing that feeds the art in man, for he feels his own lack amidst the lack of others. It is in this peculiar state that he pursues his greater self: he learns to speak truth in his work for that remains his only saving grace.
So now what? I suppose, it's time. More urgently now than ever, to go to work.
It's not a crusade. Being an artist, it very rarely gets described that way by those who do it, day in and out. For most, it is just a way of making sense out of their own existence, for living is hard and most days, a puzzle. Once I told a friend, there are periods in life when the WHYs seem like a wasted question for the answer is never forthcoming. Then, one day, you read some poet talk about it in a play, not through words that describe precisely your experience, but a familiar essence in the way a chair is lit on stage, or one phrase in a song inserted at the most opportune moment as a director tells you to speak your line. In these intersections, you discover what it was you were so pained by in the past. A light turns on and you begin to understand pieces of your life. Maybe others pray to God and are comforted, but for the blessed and the cursed, those who feel their own voicelessness in this constant flood of noise, the gift is in giving. Jose Luis Valenzuela, once told us, "I always thought that when somebody said you have a gift, it is not that you received it from some higher power, it is not the thing you took, but the thing you give. You have a gift to give." Hence, the civic responsibility rests with that.
Trevor Bechtel said something beautiful about what it really means to be a leader: to be concerned about the least among us. Perhaps we've elected a president who is or is not that man who care to speak for the unspoken, and so we weep a little or a lot for his own lack of wisdom and for our own misfortune; but afterwards we learn to arm ourselves with the strange beauty and strength of our own idealism.
Artaud, in his brilliant defense of art admits that art has never been the thing that feeds a hungry man, and yet, I say, hunger is the thing that feeds the art in man, for he feels his own lack amidst the lack of others. It is in this peculiar state that he pursues his greater self: he learns to speak truth in his work for that remains his only saving grace.
So now what? I suppose, it's time. More urgently now than ever, to go to work.
posted by rocelyn at 10:14 PM
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