All of this is going on at the same time that technology has narrowed the distances among peoples and countries. Technology has made it possible to see others, talk to, support, or agitate others anywhere in the world. Yet the fear of dispossession, the loss of citizenship remains. We see it in the plethora of hyphenated designations of national identity. In press descriptions and documents birthplace has become more telling than citizenship and persons are identified as “a German of Turkish origin” or a “British citizen of African origin” and being identified as Muslim (at least in the West) takes precedent over country of origin. At the same time a revered cosmopolitanism, a multilayered cultural citizenship, is simultaneously hailed as sophisticated, superior. There is clearly a heightened threat of “difference.” We see it in the defense of the local against the outsider, of unwanted intimacy instead of safe distance.
When the unhoused remain suspect aliens, when the frightened and destitute huddle in beleaguered, garbage-strewn tent cities on land not their own, when “identity” becomes the very essence of the self, then recurring strategies of political construction are demanded. When incompetence and irrationality run roughshod over decency and continue to endanger “lesser” lives, we can anticipate a steep rise in the cost of caring. A cost to be borne if we value civilization.
The ethics of affluence insist upon civic obligations and when we assume that obligation we reveal not our solitary goodwill but our dependence on others. You, all of us, struggle to turn data into information into knowledge and, we hope, into wisdom. In that process we owe everything to others. We owe others our language, our history, our art, our survival, our neighborhood, our relationships with family and colleagues, our ability to defy social conventions as well as support those conventions. All of this we learned from others. None of us is alone; each of us is dependent on others—some of us depend on others for life itself. And it is because of the latter that I choose to share this generous lecture honorarium with Doctors Without Borders—winners of a Nobel Prize for the risks, the direct medical aid, and the determination to serve in the most dangerous places on earth and among the most shattered people.
Your opportunity here and beyond this campus is huge, demanding, and vital. You are singularly able more than previous generations; not because you are smarter (although you may be) or because you have tools your predecessors lacked, but because you have time. Time is on your side, as is a chance to fashion an amazing future. Relish it. Use it. Revel in it.
I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it from even the most tragic of circumstances. Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. My faith in art rivals my admiration for any other discourse. Its conversation with the public and among its various genres is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely. I believe.
The Habit of Art
ARTTABLE HAS complimented itself by choosing this year’s winner. As prestigious as the award itself is, its gleam is located in its choices. Your selection of Toby Lewis is another of its compliments to itself as well as to her commitment to so many avenues of creative art and her special devotion to the visual arts.
It is in this latter, visual arts, that I am most impressed. Her collection at the headquarters of Progressive Insurance: there I saw for myself the fruits of her passionate hard work. How, by placing diverse, powerful, beautiful, provocative, thoughtful visual art in the workplace, where the employees encountered it at every turn, all day and responded to it with deep criticism or desperate affection, she encouraged them to begin to create for themselves their own art in their own work spaces. The intimacy she and Peter Lewis insisted upon made me understand what they understood: that art is not mere entertainment or decoration, that it has meaning, and that we both want and need to fathom that meaning—not fear, dismiss, or construct superficial responses told to us by authorities. It was a manifestation of what I believe is true and verifiable: the impulse to do and revere art is an ancient need—whether on cave walls, one’s own body, a cathedral or a religious rite, we hunger for a way to articulate who we are and what we mean.
Art and access is a much-written-about, much-sermonized-upon subject. Artists and supporters alike see an abyss between elitist and popular understandings of “high” and “found” art and try to span or fathom it. The tools for making art matter to ever larger, ever more diverse populations are many: more and more creative uses of funding, free performances, individual grants, and so on. The perception that the chasm remains may be the fruit of an imaginary landscape made real by the restrictions of available resources or by fiat. It is an unconscionable, almost immoral perception.
I want to describe to you an event a young gifted writer reported:
During the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs, known as the Tonton Macoutes, roamed about the island killing dissenters, and ordinary and innocent people, at their leisure. Not content with the slaughter of one person for whatever reason, they instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was allowed to retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to bury the dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and killed. The bodies lay where they fell until a government garbage truck arrived to dispose of the corpses—emphasizing that relationship between a disposed-of human and trash. You can imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night they repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a gang member, the killer only saw some harmless people engaged in some harmless theatrics. But the play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead.
Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is fierce.
There is one other anecdote I want to share with you. At a conference in Strasbourg, I spoke to a woman writer from a North African country. She knew my work; I did not know hers. We chatted amiably, when suddenly she leaned in closer and whispered, “You have to help us. You have to.” I was taken aback. “Help who? Help what?” I asked her. “They are shooting us down in the street,” she said. “Women who write. They are murdering us.” Why? Women practicing modern art was a threat to the regime.
What these anecdotes represent is the healing and the danger art provides whether classical or contemporary.
Furthermore, these awful stories are meant to impress upon you that what Toby Lewis has spent a lifetime doing, what you are celebrating today, is no small thing.
I want to say a few words about the necessity of organizations such as this one. We live in a world where justice equals vengeance. Where private profit drives public policy, where the body of civil liberties, won cell by cell, bone by bone, by the brave and the dead, withers in the searing heat of all war all the time, and where respect for and even passionate interest in great art can dwindle, can shrink to a price list. It is possible to wonder if we have progressed psychologically, intellectually, emotionally no further than 1492, when Spain cleaned itself of Jews, to 2004, when Sudan blocks food and medicine and remains content to watch the slow starvation of its people. No further than 1572, when France saw ten thousand slaughtered on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, to 2001, when thousands were blown into filament in New York City. No further than 1692, when Salem burned its own daughters and wives and mothers, to 2007, when whole cities are chock-full of sex tourists feeding off the bodies of young boys and girls. It is possible to wonder whether, in spite of technical and scientific progress, we have turned to sorcery: summoning up a brew of aliens, enemies, demons, “causes” that deflects and soothes anxieties about gates through which barbarians stroll; about language falling into the mouths of others; about authority shifting into the hands of strangers. Civilization in paralyzing violence, then grinding to a halt. Don’t misunderstand me. There is real danger in the world. And that is precisely why a correction is in order—new curricula containing some meaningful visionary thinking about the life of the moral mind and a free and flourishing spirit can operate in a context increasingly dangerous to its health. But if scientific language is about longer individual life in exchange for an ethical one; if political agenda is the xenophobic protection of a few of our families against the catastrophic others; if secular language bridles in fear of the sacred; if the future of knowledge is not wisdom but “upgrade,” where might we look for humanity’s own future? Isn’t it reasonable to assume that projecting earthly human life into the future may not be the disaster movie we are constantly invited to enjoy, but a reconfiguration of what we are here for? To lessen suffering, to know the truth and tell it, to raise the bar of humane expectation. Perhaps we should stand one remove from timeliness and join the artist who encourages reflection, stokes the imagination, mindful of the long haul and putting her/his own life on the line (in Haiti or North Africa) to do the work of a world worthy of life.