cruelty

i don’t think i have anything to say that you haven’t already felt, so my posting this here is only because of the very human instinct to make something, anything, in the wake of cruelty.

as a musician the first instinct is to make music, or an artistic gesture of some kind. that’s the way i usually dealt with what still seems the inhuman nature of murders, rapes, genital mutilation, utter apathy, even break-ups. somehow i can’t do that right now; maybe not any more. it’s too big for me, and it would be morally wrong to make a disingenuous artwork about suffering. so this post is also because of my failing as an artist to work with this medium. it’s not that i haven’t tried—the theme i built my solo show around (the one that didn’t happen on 11/30) was ‘a way to deal with bullshit and cruelty.’ it’s emotionally simple to write or improvise complex, spastic, aggressive, dissonant music about cruelty; but that’s almost always bullshit and condescending. i genuinely hope it helps its composer, but it’s the ego giving the id all the chocolate it wants, just beucase it wants it. it’s what happened to us as a country after september the eleventh, 2001.

as a human, artist or not, you are obligated to at some point ask ‘what is the nature of cruelty, what is it’s relation to everything around us, why do good people do wicked things or have wicked things visited upon them, how do we deal with it?’ i have found no answers, but that does not relieve me of asking the question. we would not have picassos’ ‘Guernica’ without first having the spanish civil war, in which the town of guernica was bombed, killing at least 200 innocent people. we would not have the sistene chapel or its ceiling if not for the successful crusades of the roman catholic church and the ‘sale of indulgences.’ we would not have a single note of western popular music in any genre if not for the four-hundred year enslavement of black men, women, and children. would the world be more beautiful and less cruel without slavery? would the world be more beautiful and less cruel without jazz?

those thoughts still hurt me.

at least one child from sandy hook elementary school in newtown, ct will be an artist of some sort; a painter, a sculptor, a chef, a magician, a comedian, a dancer, a composer, etc. what happened to that school yesterday will be in some way etched on their every work. they may not be defined by it, but it will be there. it might be work that changes the world. would we be better off without it?

in the impossible perfect world, i don’t think ‘art’ as a concept would exist or need to exist in the way it does today. every action would be performed with the knowledge and care of an artist, rendering everything from painting in oils to cleaning vomit a ‘craft.’ i’m reminded of the pianist glenn goulds’ quote: ‘in the best of all possible worlds, art would be unnecessary. its offer of restorative, placative therapy would go begging a patient…the audience would be the artist and their life would be art.’ and a quote by the chinese artist ai weiwei in a recent issue of w magazine, ‘i spend most of my effort liberating myself from being an artist to becoming a real human being.’ the first time i read that quote i was thoroughly confused. since then, i think on some surface level, i’ve begun to see what he meant.

i do not own a gun and do not wish to, but i believe gun control is less the issue in the connecticut case than mental health care, than the cultural constructs that engender the behavior we’ve seen. and the same is true of every shooting for which i know the names of the triggerperson(s) but not the victims. posting a prayer, condolence, or rant about gun control, on facebook or twitter relieves no ones suffering but that of the poster. and that’s okay, so long as that’s not the extent of their empathy.

leonard bernsteins’ quote has been making the internet rounds among musicians: ‘this will be our response to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.’ i think it applies to every art and every craft.

i don’t know how do deal with cruelty, at all. so i deal with it by continuing to work hard at things i love—music, my friends, my family—and by not ignoring its presence, but by being very aware of it, and refusing as best i can to let it rot my mind.

i also usually listen to solo bach.

but again, i don’t know.

i hope you are able to be with friends.