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siouxempirepodcast · 8 years ago

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Art in the Darkest of Times

I didn’t expect this to be a dark time. As I approached the end of my 5th decade of life, there was a certain assurance of good ahead. I had overcome many struggles and had worked hard to better myself, to enrich myself of experience and to share the wisdom of that experience with others. My personal evolution seemed to mirror the progressive and positive change I saw in the world, as well. The most formative part of my personal experience and self-identity started with music. Punk Rock was the big galvanizing force of my young life, the influence that would determine the kind of adult I would be. I bristled under authority (and still do) and recognized the efforts of people who acted independently. In the early and mid-1980’s most of pop culture seemed to reflect the “norms” of our society. White, middle-class, picket-fence, Reaganomics, the Christian Coalition, “Greed is Good,” Billboard’s Top 40. None of that resonated with me in the slightest. Give me a barely-lit hole in the wall club in Hamtramck, Michigan with dollar Rolling Rocks, LOUD music and a crowd full of people all dancing together. The punk clubs were a melting pot – predominantly white, but not exclusively so. Ostensibly heteronormative, at least on the surface, but in the dark who knows (or cares) what went on? Punk had a decidedly F-you attitude that resonated for this chick and those I associated with. Weird? Good. Different? Well, okay. This was the counter-culture, after all. We didn’t care if you had a Mohawk, black or white skin, piercings, money if you lived in a nice house out in Rochester or you slept in your car down in the seedy Cass Corridor. We weren’t necessarily all equals (gender norms were still in swing, for instance) but it was close. Sure, there were also dark moments during those punk years. There were those who took excess and experimentation too far, and never came back. There were those who burned out, faded away and now live in some unknown small town in Arizona or Ohio or the Far East. But you got through those dark times with your friends, and whatever talent you could cobble together. For many of my friends, it was music. Sharing whatever raw space on a late weeknight to practice and whatever bar or tavern or club would let you play live on the weekend. I wasn’t a musician (although I did briefly sing in an all-girl punk band when I was sixteen). Nor was I an artist, but I had many friends who drew and sketched and sculpted. No, I was a writer. I wrote and edited a local fanzine, all about the local scene, and I dreamed of being a successful author someday. I had lots of ideas, but it’s hard to get focused when you’re hitting the clubs, hitting the Rolling Rock and trying to be “cool.” It took a long time in life to get serious about my writing practice. But I got there – I’m working on my fourth book now. I’ve long identified with the artists, the weirdo’s, the “others” in our society. I’d rather have a smaller house and a bigger travel budget. I have forsaken corporate work in favor of PBJ sandwiches and a sense that my destiny is MINE. The compromises I’ve made are still acceptable to me and would be even if I hadn’t finally broken through those roadblocks to writing. And I recognize that artists are often the saving grace during times of trouble. Until this past November, I had reached the place I was freaking happy. I mean, HAPPY! Not just content or satisfied or resigned, but truly happy. Life wasn’t perfect, and the world wasn’t perfect, but I said to friends last year that it felt like I was in “the home stretch.” Now, it feels like I’m sitting at the bottom of a massive hill and I can’t even see what’s ahead, let alone how hard it’s gonna be to get there. This made me think about the other times in history when chaos came along and tore up the plans that our ancestors made in their personal journeys. What becomes of society when you can’t make sense of what’s happening? You make art, that’s the simple answer. You paint or your photograph, you dance or your design. You write your way through that nonsense like your life is at stake because of my friend – it is. If you look back at the bleakest and most chaotic times in history, you’ll see that what remains, what is remembered is the beauty that somehow managed to slip through the cracks. You’ll find the desperate souls that fought to write their little stories, songs, plays and performances and then fought to share them and preserve them. If we examine some of the darkest moments in history, you’ll find that what rose out of the ashes of those times were the powerful creative efforts of those who survived. Often, they were those who had to hide in the shadows because they faced imprisonment, banishment or death. When you talk darkness, it’s natural to default to the Holocaust. The years of Nazi oppression, the concentration camps, the brutalities, and atrocities seem to be present with us these many decades later. Not just because of film reels, but by what was left behind. We know and understand the Holocaust interpretively through art. We understand the Nazi uprising as it responded to the earlier Weimar Republic years – the Gay Thirties of Berlin, the era of Christopher Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” and of Marlene Dietrich, flaunting and tormenting through “The Blue Angel.” We understand the brutality when compared to the Bauhaus art movement, through Dadaism, through Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop. We understand the seduction of Fascism as viewed through the lens of the works of Paul Klee and the operas of Kurt Weill (“Threepenny Opera”) and Alban Berg (“Lulu/Pandora”). We certainly understand the Holocaust through the prism of the art that was created during the War years – Picasso’s “Guernica” alone speaks volumes about man’s inhumanity to man. But we also understand the Holocaust through what came in the immediate aftermath. After that, the world began to process what it learned about mankind’s ugliest extremes and our ability to survive those extremes. In fact, composer Bertolt Brecht wrote, “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will be singing. About the dark times.” World War2 was followed by a period of unprecedented cultural impact by Jews. Writers like Philip Roth and Elie Wiesel, artists like Marc Chagall, entertainers like the Marx Brothers and Bob Dylan. It wasn’t just that Jews were valued, in our society, after having nearly been obliterated. More importantly, it is that they had something incredibly valuable to share, having survived that experience. When you survive the unthinkable, you are poised to become one of the great thinkers. The Holocaust was a striving for perfection. The Great Leap Forward in China was more about uniformity. Historian Frank Dikotter explained that “coercion, terror and systematic violence were the foundations of the Great Leap Forward” and that it “motivated one of the most deadly mass killings in human history.” It is believed that somewhere between 18 and 55 million people died, including during the years of the terrible Famine that plagued China (1958-1962). During the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese Communist Party did permit criticism of the government (including the infamous “Gang of Four”). A tsunami of Chinese literature emerged during this time, including painful accounts of life under Chairman Mao. These included short stories that appeared in official government publications. The Maoist system, like the Nazi’s before, believed in a policy of agrarian reliance. The images, in both totalitarian systems, publicly presented include robust farmers and plump housewives, darling children and industrious teens –all working toward the greater good of self-reliance and integrity of resources. But the Great Leap Forward pushed agricultural reliance to the extreme, resulting in the failure of crops across the countryside. After the famine had ended there was a period in which the Chinese leadership embraced a cultural wave known as “Scar Literature” in which the people of China were able to write honestly about their experiences. Scar literature was cathartic and depicted truly horrific accounts of life during the Cultural Revolution – of persecution and violence, including the state-sanctioned executions of their loved ones. Examples of “scar literature” include “Red Azalea” by Anchee Min, “Mao’s Last Dancer” by Li Cunxin and “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China” by Jung Chang. In “Wild Swans,” author Chang relates “Father said slowly, “I ask myself whether I am afraid of death. I don’t think I am. My life as it is now is worse. And it looks as if there is not going to be any ending. Sometimes I feel weak: I stand by Tranquility River and think, just one leap and I can get it over with. Then I tell myself I must not. If I die without being cleared, there will be no end of trouble for all of you… I have been thinking a lot lately. I had a hard childhood, and society was full of injustice. It was for a fair society that I joined the Communists. I’ve tried my best through the years. But what good has it done for the people? As for myself, why is it that in the end, I have come to be the ruin of my family? People who believe in retribution say that to end badly, you must have something on your conscience. I have been thinking hard about the things I’ve done in my life. I have given orders to execute some people…” Today’s current literature trend of purging the soul owes a great debt to those Chinese writers, many of whom wrote their true stories under the most horrendous of experiences, often hiding their works until they could be free, or defect, and share them with the world. This included stories of forced labor, brutal rapes, and cannibalism. But perhaps no time in history had as great and as long-lasting a cultural impact as that of the years of the Great Plague. The “Black Death” raged from 1346 to 1353 and claimed the lives of as many as 200 million humans. Our cultural understanding of Death itself, from the image of the Grim Reaper, of Heaven and Hell and Purgatory, stem from those years. Dante’s works bear the marks of the plague all over them. The artistic descriptions of fair maidens languishing away and the bird-beaked plague doctors, aromatic herbs warding off the bug. In fact, our very understanding of the nature of insects in the lives and health of humans came from the Black Death. Whatever would Kafka and Burroughs have written about without first the concept of the insect as the enemy? With every tragic and terrible moment in history, you’ll find a creative burst that enlightens and entertains. World War I brought us Jazz. The Crusades gave us Islamic art. The Depression gave us the works of Dorothea Lange. The Slave Trade gave us Gospel, and later, Rock and Roll. I didn’t expect this to be a dark time in my life. As a writer I understand that my responsibility is to document, to chronicle, to “bear witness” as Victor Klemperer (the German Holocaust-era journalist) wrote. But as a creative soul, a left-brained, punk rock weirdo, I have to find an outlet for my despair and not just an inlet. There’s a tiny part of me that is fascinated by what may emerge, in our future. Like other darker moments in our history, I know that it is because of the determination of our artists, that the future can be brighter.

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#Art in the Darkest of Times

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