The key is the activity of exchange. The core of artistic power is the place between people, where engagement occurs. This mutuality, “dotted everywhere,” can be found in the most surprising places. Without even realizing it, people who engage in this commonplace mutuality are doing their part to save the world. To keep it—and by it, we mean each other—sane.
It need not take the form of heroics, but of ordinary life carried on with some sense of joy and meaning. Playing a game with a stranger. Repairing a house with honest, careful craftsmanship. Writing a line of prose and then crossing it out and writing it again. Singing softly to a dying friend, or a fellow prisoner, or a frightened infant.
As with the “defiant gardens” created by the British under Nazi bombardment during the Blitz, the growth of green things and the growth of human life are most strongly evident when death is starkly in our faces.
Mental and spiritual states can spread, and sanity can be just as contagious as insanity. We must remember the purpose of our work: the arts are a primary means for the transmission of sanity.
I mean arts very broadly, of course. I include many activities that are not virtuoso expressions of theatrical or musical ability; we engage in many pursuits that wouldn’t win prizes and awards, that might be technically flawed and clumsy, but that still carry some spiritual essence of communication about the nature of sanity from person to person.
Art, tyranny and sanity
The first thing that Hitler did was to get rid of the artists or co-opt the ones who could be bought. The first thing that Stalin did was to purge, imprison, or tame the artists. The first thing the Taliban did was to banish the arts and destroy every ancient statue they could find.
A whole set of negative efforts go together in these controlling societies—suppression of art, suppression of free speech and suppression of women’s rights. All these things amount to suppressing the voice of human relationship.
Art, which may be beautiful or ugly, heartening or disturbing, can put people in touch with the power of their own viewpoint, the validity of their individuality. When perceptions are sensitized, people are less susceptible to propaganda and advertising.
Totalitarian states can’t be easily maintained when you have a profusion of art, when you have free speech, when men and women’s voices are heard as equal—precisely because these states rely on people buying into the idea that they’re part of a machine, soldiers-workers-consumers-childbearers, and not people.
[su_pullquote align=”right”]The more we can do to spread the seeds of sanity, the harder it will be for totalitarianism, for repression, for fundamentalism to take root.[/su_pullquote]
This is why we must pay special attention to attempts at constraining education into narrow “useful” pursuits, movements toward a purely utilitarian conception of life. A country should be more community than machine.
Today in America, we see funding to the arts being slashed left and right, its role in schools being reduced, its importance in society being minimized, and its practitioners being told they’re useless, powerless. Tyrants would very much like you to believe this.
Stalin spent an enormous amount of energy suppressing Shostakovich, among other composers. This doesn’t seem to make sense. Why did the dictator of an enormous continent, with vast armies at his command, controlling gigantic industrial economies, busy himself with a composer of operas and chamber music?
Because art is power. Because dictators are afraid of the power within people that art touches and makes conscious. Such opening is contagious. The more we can do to spread the seeds of sanity, the harder it will be for totalitarianism, for repression, for fundamentalism to take root. This is true in spite of the limitations of our individual voices. Most of us can operate only in one small sphere.
When Herbert Zipper created his secret orchestra in Dachau, he didn’t kill Hitler, he didn’t overthrow or pacify the Nazis; the whole war proceeded with tremendous horror and loss of life. But he created a little area of sanity that affected other people, and some of those people who remained sane because of what he did lived on to affect other people; and some of those, in turn, lived on to affect other people.
What we create can have enormous power. It’s at the very centre of what our society is about, and especially those who work with children have a duty to encourage them to nurture ways to connect with each other. Art is power—it puts people in contact with their own personhood.
[su_divider top=”no” style=”dashed” divider_color=”#000000″ size=”1″]
[su_panel background=”#f2f2f2″ color=”#000000″ border=”0px none #ffffff” shadow=”0px 0px 0px #ffffff”]
Stephen Nachmanovitch is the author of 这个 Art of Is 以及 Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art. He performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and lecturer. Having collaborated with other artists in music, dance, theater and film, he’s passionate about creativity and exploring the spiritual underpinnings of art. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia (U.S.). Find out more about his work online at www.freeplay.com.
摘自书籍 The Art of Is: Improvising as a Way of Life. Copyright ©2019 by Stephen Nachmanovitch. Printed with permission from New World Library—www.newworldlibrary.com.
图1： Pixabay；图2： Wikimedia Commons；图3： Wikimedia Commons
