Art is a key to open a door, look at each other, and find something we recognize. Artists take the things we have inside, the things we cannot grasp, and give them a specific shape in a song, or a story. They give us something we can hold in front of our eyes or against our ears, that repeats our heart from the depths of another heart so we find, with enormous relief, that we’re not alone. We’re lost and then, so grateful to be found. We do this all the time, not as creators of art but as an audience. We find our soulmates when a soul reverberates to the same frequency at the touch of a song, or a movie, or a book we love.
Roberto Bolaño wrote about a woman and a man who stopped being friends. The man discovered they both liked the drawings of Grosz, but while she found them funny, the drawings sank him in depressions that lasted several weeks. He couldn’t keep a friendship with someone who found humor in the same drawings where he found despair. Their souls were attuned differently. Without the drawings those differences would have stayed hidden and incommunicable. More often though, art reveals our hidden similarities, and when it does (when you find someone who loves the same book you love, for the same reasons) the glimpse of that bridge feels like magic. The miracle is not about finding a person like an exact mirror reflecting our taste back to us, the miracle is just finding something that feels like a passage between your brain and another brain, your heart and another heart, a way of sharing a set of coordinates to navigate all of which is navigated in darkness, all of which is unmeasurable and uncatalogued.
I am, first and foremost, an audience for art. There is a song there, whispering our humanity back to us, and we tilt our heads and listen and wonder if the stranger on the subway or the street would tilt their head the same way in front of a mural, or a line of graffiti, or a movie, or a poem, and could we be secretly brothers or sisters then, do we have souls attuned in similar ways to absorb the world and its heartbreak, and its beauty.
Whatever art I do myself, I do it in the spirit advised by Kurt Vonnegut when he instructed us to sing in the shower:
“The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
I write (and paint) from time to time not to be an artist but just to hear my own voice, so I can absorb the world, let it cycle through my lungs and my brain and my heart, let it come out as a something with my stamp on it and (once in a while, if I’m very lucky) let it reveal something about my own incommunicable corners. I don’t do these things to be great (which is so firmly beyond my skills ), I do them just to be human. These are letters I write to myself. Moments for a small, poetic license. Acts of freedom, like dancing alone, to the radio.
