Silence and solitude matter as well. The third is the Via Creativa itself. The
Via Positiva and the Via Negativa together give birth to the Via Creativa. Falling in love, letting go, experiencing emptiness and darkness is paramount to entering creativity—it gives us depth in art. It is not just our experience, but universal experiences of falling in love and of grief lie within all art. Creativity is as much a path to the divine as the other two paths. The fourth path is where we take our creativity, love and grief. The Via Transformativa provides contours for our creativity, and those contours are compassion and justice. That’s what we’re supposed to do with our creativity. Obviously, we humans can take our creativity to negative places. We can create bombs, gas ovens—all these things that we’ve been known to do. Misusing our creativity is the basis of injustice and of neurosis. According to Rank, we use our imaginations to abuse ourselves. We can use it to make people obese with dangerous food that is addictive and bad for our bodies. Creativity needs direction. That’s what the great spiritual teachings of the world teach us: that creativity’s purpose is to create justice, compassion,
celebration and healing. That’s what the artists’ gifts are for.
Your third talk on “The Prophetic Role of the Artist” is set for Saturday night the 2nd. Describe how the artist might speak to our despair in the brokenness of the human condition.
Well, Rabbi Heschel says that the role of the prophet is to interfere, so there is that dimension of interference to the injustices of our world. Or, to put it differently, every prophet was an artist— Isaiah, Josiah, Jesus and his teachings. It is about blowing the whistle on injustice and about how Jesus put it in Isaiah’s teaching on compassion in Matthew 25: “Just as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.” That’s a profound teaching. Truly, Jesus himself was an artist. He
chose the method of creating stories and parables to wake people up, not to give them lists of dos and don’ts and commandments, so much as to leave them with images that sparked the imagination. That’s how he chose to implement his practice of interfering with suffering.
So, the artist does speak to despair because, fi rst of all, despair is a very heavy situation psychologically and socially. Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, says despair is the most dangerous of all sins because when people are in despair they don’t care about themselves, and certainly not others. When you lose the love of self, that’s where despair takes you. I call it “adultism” where adults are running our institutions including religions. Adultism cannot appreciate playfulness and the spirit of the young. Artists have to interfere with “adultism”—that kind of despair. We all need to stay in touch with our own playfulness. Playfulness is important to musical and artistic being. Art brings another dimension to awe.
We can experience awe in sunsets, mountains and children. There is also awe involved in music—in listening to Mozart, or participating in dance, or observing dance, or in many paintings. Awe is there. That’s the gift the artist brings. It’s like upping the ante on the awe of nature. After all, humans are nature, too. Humans can contribute to the lineage of awe. Joy fl ows from that.
January 2013
31
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48