“Poets are shameless with their experiences – They exploit them.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche)
For a few brief weeks, the FaceBook posts of many of my a capella-singing friends have been filled with references to a show on TV called “The Sing Off.” Apparently, it was a show featuring all-vocal groups and was very popular. Good.
Those of us who grew up singing a capella music (whether in church or school choirs or on street corners or even semi-professionally or professionally) have long known the joy that singing brings. There just aren’t many more fulfilling things in the world than hitting a beautiful jazz chord with a 13th in it in the format of an all-vocal group….
But, alas, i digress (kinda). Today, i wanted to write about (at least in a broaching-the-subject kind of way, even though there will undoubtedly be many other references to this topic) what has been happening for a long time in our culture regarding the exploitation of artists, the commercialization of art, and the culture of beauty.
The world has never been a painless place. Even in the Garden of Eden (which many people ignorantly imagine as some kind of Utopia), there was pain. When i was a youngster, i grew up in a religious tradition that was borne out of a simpler time and in a part of the world that was largely poor. One of the theological impulses of that movement was to look to God as a comforter Who would take away all pain, and, therefore, the movement adopted an unhealthy focus on the afterLife. By the time i arrived on the scene, almost all the hymns we sang in the church services were either about the suffering of Y’shua Christos on the cross (also an unhealthy focus) or Heaven (a supposed Utopian place where there is vindication, ecstasy, and other unfathomable-while-here-on-earth kinds of notions). In any event, the fact of the matter is that pain has always existed on the earth and always will, despite our objections to it to our Creator (Who seems to know what He’s doing, so i’m inclined to trust Him that there must be a “good” purpose in the existence of pain and probably one that would indicate that pain itself is not evil, but, alas, that is for another time…) or our celebrities’ attempts to decry it or our governments’ foolhardy endeavors to eradicate it or whatever…
Pain. OK…deep breath. Gasp of reality. Yep, it’s still there in all its splendor. Pain.
So, what do we do about it? Isn’t that the question everyone asks?
Personally, i don’t worry much about pain these days. i’ve experienced so much of it in so many ways, that frankly i guess i’ve come to be a bit numb to most of it. Even when i recently visited the dentist about my tooth, he just shook his head and said, “i have no idea how You have managed to survive with that for three months, but i know most humans wouldn’t have lasted two days.” And that’s been a recurring and typical thing for doctors to say to me over the years. Pain is just part of the equation to me, and i’ll address it when and if i can. Otherwise, no sense in lamenting it – just get on with what Life You have and do something useful…
Instead of focusing on pain, i think we’d be better off focusing on the opposite of pain. Obviously, that begs the question, “Well, then, what is the opposite of pain?” The answer, to me at least, is beauty.
Now, at first that may seem strange. Consider, though, the notion of Love and what the opposite of Love might be. Many people would immediately presume the opposite of Love to be hate, but most thinking people agree that the opposite of Love is apathy. So it is with pain – it’s opposite is not immediately obvious.
Pain. i would argue that pain is most successfully counteracted with beauty. This was the point of a well-known movie called “Life Is Beautiful.” The thing about pain is that it exists as the focus of our attention until something overtakes it as the object of our consumption. Normally speaking, nothing can compete with beauty as a means of diverting, distracting, or capturing the attention of a human being.
Beauty is best expressed in humanity via the conduit of “art.” Now, art can be a lot of things. In fact, art isn’t any one thing as much as an approach. You can be artful about engineering or programming code infrastructure or organization of a government as much as You can about music or poetry or painting. Ask any woman if there’s an art to being wooed, and You are sure to discover either a fulfilled woman who has been pursued and won over or a sad woman waiting to be….
In our culture (since that is what Tuesday posts are about), we have reduced everything to a science or a business or a power play and left very little room for art. Instead of seeing science or business or politics as endeavors which would be enhanced by an artful approach, we have roped off certain activities and called them art and then declared that they aren’t worthwhile on their own without being commercialized in their purpose (business) or enhanced in their usefulness (science) or co-opted in their progress (politics).
That saddens me. It saddens me, because art is not the point. Beauty is the point, and art is the means. Art is the process that our Creator bestowed into each of us, so that – from an innate intuivity – we might infuse every endeavor of our Life to be not just purposed, useful, or progressive but beautiful as well. Why? Because beauty shifts our focus off of pain. Beauty makes us remember. Beauty inspires us to dream. Beauty reminds us of our Creator….
No human has the ability or the right to banish pain. Instead, we were given a greater calling: to render pain secondary to the beauty we create around us. Creating beauty in the midst of circumstances laced with broken people, painful circumstances, and arduous opposition is our gift to one another. It's a kissing cousin to God's gift to us: redemption. And if we could all learn to appreciate the art in each other before we die (since our track record says we value artists more once they're dead but oftentimes only once they're dead), then maybe we wouldn't have to resort to pimping out certain activities by shock-jockeys, hot celebrities, and eccentric jerks in order to see a point in it all. After all, if Your idea of art is a cross in urine or spray painting someone else's property or an auto-tuned karaoke track to pornography masquerading as a music video or a play about the virtues of homosexuality or rebellion or whatever, then i feel really sorry that You have so little beauty in Your Life, because beauty might cause You to rethink some of that....
Carry on my wayward son....
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