The Light of Art Amid Darkness

In troubled times, it’s artists who can offer clarity and a sense of possibility when everything around us appears to be crumbling.

What I read: “A Lighthouse for Dark Times” by Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

So, the worst possible outcome happened to our country. Enough people voted for an avowed authoritarian with an extremist right-wing ready-to-implement playbook that will make life miserable for millions of Americans.

Yes, I’m sure there are those reading this who are elated. I am not. My LGBTQ friends are not. The women in my networks are not. People of color I know are not. The white men I know who support those people and other marginalized groups are not. Those I know with immigrant friends and loved ones are not.

We are grieving. We are angry. We are shellshocked. I never thought I’d live in a country that would decide to emulate 1930s Germany. But here we are. I hope we can avoid a similar fascist and dictatorship fate. Time will tell if we can.

All that said, we must find a way to move forward. We must find smidgens of hope and possibility. As I often do, I found some solace in the writing of Maria Popova. If you don’t follow Popova’s writing in The Marginalian, I recommend you do so. I consider her one of the best intellects and writers working today.

In her post, Popova points out how important artists are when chaos and uncertainty rise up to crush a society’s joy and stability.

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.

The power of art and the importance of art has been written about since the written word existed, but it’s important to emphasize that importance yet again, especially now. We need our artists and the work they do now more than ever.

We need the writers, comedians, actors, painters, sculptors, poets, dancers, musicians, photographers, performance artists, content creators, and filmmakers. They can buttress us from despair. They can see clearly when so many do not. They can encourage thought and emotion in positive ways to perhaps spawn better times ahead.

Popova references the writings of Hermann Hesse to offer us some hope as “we too are living now through such a world, caught again between two ages, confused and conflicted, suffocating and suffering.”

Hesse observes that artists feel these painful instabilities more deeply than the rest of society and more restlessly, and out of that restlessness they make the lifelines that save us, the lifelines we call art. A century before Toni Morrison, living through another upheaval, insisted that “this is precisely the time when artists go to work,” Hesse insists that artists nourish the goodness of the human spirit “with such strength and indescribable beauty” that it is “flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment.”

If you are an artist of any sort, keep making art. Keep speaking your truth. Maintain your artistic integrity and let your work be a beacon of hope in these troubled times. Rally beauty. Encourage thought. Disrupt damaging paradigms. Spawn action to push back against the forces of evil.

That is the power of art. Art can serve as a sea of light amid the darkness so many of us are feeling and experiencing right now. If you’re an artist, thank you for what you do. If you’re not an artist but now feel compelled to make art, do so. Perhaps in the act of artistic creation you can be empowered, and your work can touch the hearts and minds of others.

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