Why do human beings continue to create art? Especially now, when democracy and the rule of law are under such threat in many places in the world? Especially now, when the very life of our planet is treated cavalierly by some while others make, over and over again, all the valid arguments for saving it? Why spend our time doing something that requires a future to have any meaning? Especially when it's so hard. When many of us walk a narrow winding path up a mountain, with our goal just ahead of us, around the next turn, while our inadequacies as artists are so clear in the edge we could fall over with the least misstep?
There are probably as many answers to that question as there are artists. To celebrate. To understand humanity and our place in the world more fully. To mourn. To grieve. To criticize--nay, to excoriate. Some satirist full of fury needs to tell us how stupid and blind, how selfish and short-sighted we are being. Creating art disciplines us to look carefully at our complicated world and our byzantine humanity. It forces us to explore a whole host of existential questions: Why? My 17-month experience of long Covid has posed this question with an exquisitely sharp scalpel. If I can't know how I'm going to feel when I'm going to get up in the morning, why would I plan on trying to make something meaningful? Why not--I'm 76, after all--just settle into a life of reading and quilting and gardening, accompanied by tender cats and a very generous, helpful husband? Because I can't. Talking back to long Covid has helped me realize that I get up each morning trying to create a small space for clarity in a chaotic world. I get up each morning trying to untangle the human fankle and find a thread I can pull out of the jumble to understand and celebrate. And I hope, as I create a bit of clarity and order, that I can also make something beautiful. After all, beauty is the engine of awe, of surprise, of hope.
At the end of May, I went to the wonderful City of Regina Writing Award reading at Artesian, which included Keegan Grandel, Carla Harris, and Medrie Purdham. While all three thanked the City and the SWG, Medrie's remarks were the fullest, describing the many ways the Guild improves the lives of writers and offers them meaningful support. She didn't do what writers often do at reading: offer a brief thank-you and set up her first poem. I thought at the time that her thanks were, in fact, the best set-up of her intricate, imaginative work. The next day, Bill and I went to hear Daniel Champagne. It was a hot night and we didn't know anything about him except that a former student said we just had to hear him, and she was right. After his first--I don't know what to call it. It wasn't just a song. It owed as much to contemporary classical music and jazz as to folk; it was as much percussion as guitar. Anyway, he took time to thank all the people who helped him get set up. He named each of them. Later, he played pieces written to thank his guitar teacher and his grandmother. At the end, he thanked us for being a fabulous audience on a very hot night and thanked, by name again, all the helpful people at Knox Met.
These two artists, so completely different from one another, juxtaposed by mere accident of timing, prompted me to think of art as a gratitude practice. There's a lot of science exploring how gratitude is good for us. I'm not going to do a chapter and verse thing; you can simply Google "Why is gratitude good for us?" and find lots of information. Gratitude is good for our brains, lighting up our circuitry. It releases neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin, reducing depression and stress. Gratitude is profoundly social: it binds us to others and to the life we living. When we are grateful for the richness of our relationships, we don't take them for granted, but take better care of them. There is some evidence that people who are regularly grateful live longer lives.
When I think about poets who are grateful, Don McKay and Mary Oliver come to mind. Don's ongoing practice of writing "songs for the song of ..." the cedar waxwing or the rose-breasted grosbeak, to name a couple from his 2021 book Lurch, you would find pearls strung on a thread of gratitude for a natural world that is so rich and varied and innovative and creative in its own right--quite apart of the human beings that happen to live here and try, like Don, to enter that richness with our attention. In "Song for the song of the Rose-Breasted Grosbeak," Don writes
Ella Fitzgerald in the shower singing
"You are my sunshine," loving the notes,
but letting them swell into surprises
all their own, music with mischief in its back
pocket.
As Oliver's poem shows, gratitude is a big picture feeling, akin to awe. In the moments when you are grateful, you are living in the right time and place. You are living the right life.
When I am grateful for Bill's steadfast support over the last 17 months; when I am grateful for the simple, loving relationship I have with my delightful daughter; when I am grateful for Lyra once more reading my mood as he puts his paw gently on my throat and looks straight into my eyes, I am aware that this is my life and I have done some wise things to get myself here. Things besides grouse about being tired and complaining about the knee that kept me awake yet again. Things besides staring at a paragraph for half an hour without understanding how I can sort it out, how I can get it to sing rather than limp towards the half-formed ideas I have rattling around in my brain. If I can find the words and the right order, I will know what I think. And when my patience and doggedness pays off, I am grateful for a world that, momentarily at least, makes sense.
But gratitude is also found in the small and is connected to our curiosity. The feeling provoked by the two-year-old girl with her hair in startling pigtails who is dancing into her day prompts us to stop and appreciate her joy. Being grateful for the tiny beans in my garden prompts me to see the seed I planted as "a plant in a box with its lunch," a little miracle, in short.* Gratitude for my roses having made it yet again through the winter prompts me to stop and watch the bees wallow in the pollen and to think about the intricate complexity of their lives and the intelligence of the hive. Maybe it's more available in the small, in the everyday things around us if, like the poets, we pay careful attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment