I read something recently that a friend of mine posted online:
Lean on the artists. They gift us reprieve, respite & often a way forward.
— Grateful David âđŧâ¤ī¸âĄī¸đđđš (@gratefuldavid.bsky.social) February 24, 2025 at 7:19 PM
It impacted me. I thought about every major tragedy that has happened, and about the art that people kept making through those things. The violinists on the Titanic, bravely creating with their last moments. Composers during the Holocaust. Anne Frank, writing in her journal.
I’m thinking about how art connects people, and how this has always been true. It’s a little bit of a time capsule being sent into the ocean, or a life raft being tossed out, connected to a rope. Before social media and letters and all of those things, it was a way to be seen and to see others who aren’t even with you in the moment of creating the art, like how people today are connecting with every artist who has ended up with their art in a museum, or with art archaeologists find on cave walls, etc. I dunno. I used to get really excited, playing classical piano music, thinking about the composer and thinking “I bet he had to really stretch his hand to reach that interval, too.” How it’s kind of a love letter to the future, to create art. Love or any other emotion. Maybe it’s more of a “human connection letter” to the future. That seems more accurate. A human connection letter, a lil time capsule of “I was here, you are here too.”
It can be challenging to lean into art when going through difficult things, because it goes against the fight or flight response to do anything slow and “optional.” Maybe that’s part of its power, to remind us we’re human in the midst of whatever is happening, and to remind other people that we’re human, too.
Maybe this is why so many regimes try to crack down on art, first. So many oppressive governments focus on self expression as the first thing that must be regulated. Crimes of the heart, crimes of disloyalty, etc.
I’m not really sure what else to say about this. I guess I just was reminded about the power of art to do all these things- art of all types. Art defined as creation.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Jean-Dominique Bauby) is a story by someone with locked-in syndrome, who wrote the book by moving his eyes. Who he was is known to so many now.
