May 18

In art, we can find a humbling sort of wisdom. We see themes and ideas repeat over many lifetimes . . . our lives on this earth will always be part of something bigger. — Sonny Rollins

The pandemic, staggering into month three. I increasingly felt the need to push myself creatively, to stoke the fire within. It may have just been the circumstances, the relative isolation, the lack of the tactile, but those inner embers had blown up into a three-alarm blaze. It was, for sure, rolling out of having recognized the moment for all of its most fucked-up tonnage and historical weight (atonal grating things often found in tandem). It was no new thing, this arms out “get on with it” urging of self. I had had this thought bobbing about the rolling boil of consciousness since I could recall. A single line journal entry from about 15 years ago, having stuck in my head since and available in just such moments, says it plain, true. A chipped exasperated spike, I wrote:

“Create, dammit!

Here, now, the miracle of living so so obvious, infection and mortality out there and spreading. Too close, too close. The seconds ticking away, a hammer-clang immediacy. Here, now. And I had damned well do something meaningful with it . . . Get on with it!

The tone was set in the first paragraph of that day’s entry, “Every day: create. Every day: try something in the moment.” The heightened sense of the instant was revealing nooks and niches that were always there, but had fallen outside the normal light of day, the ability to see it clearly from within the normal thrum and rush of before times’ busy-ness. But this, now, the heightened sense aiming flashlights into dark corners, the unknown reservoirs of things needing attention, of national possibility unrealized. All of it: anxious, eager. There was the gnawing sense that it was right there in front of my face, in front of our national eyes, things neglected, things having not lived up to their promise: my creative output, my nation asleep at the wheel. This required urgent action, things long shoved into recesses for their seeming incurability, the everyday headache they would bring, the crude reveal of who we actually were as a people, as humans. We were not living up to our potential. I was not living up to my potential. This here and now was a time for art, for creative light to flood in and step up. Its tried-true ability / utility to shine light into corners, to illuminate in a way that allows a side entrance into difficult subject matter—personal, national—showing where and how light can enter, reveal, cleanse, remake.

Of course creativity and art could do this. It would make the most of this moment that it could. It already was. We could see the lid gurgling atop a nation locked down, locked up, bored, fed up. The creative use of time and talent underwritten by effort and ingenuity. A guy created an amazing playground for his kids out of hardwood lying about his property, having used nothing but a chainsaw. Photographers criss-crossing the country: four wheels, tents, recording the isolation, the beauty within it and just at its periphery. Musical groups recording in separation, creating the unity and synch of song after-the-fact with post-production software. My own band, our weekly practice night a rarely missed ritual—its moon-howl therapy, its recharging of the bone-bag batteries having just entered its twenty-second year—blown up. But, how we quickly sub’d in weekly video hangouts (something not even fathomable to those isolated in 1918). And this, followed by our own ambitious recording project: one member at a time, one track at a time, record and upload the digital master, hand it off to the next, and then the next, until the song is finished. . . . Art is the ultimate survivor. It has survived the purges and partisans, the puritans and executioners, the small, the petty, and all those come-and-go egos humanity must endure and has long endured. Art has survived wars, plagues, and fanatics, the church and the putsch. It has outlived them all. Art will never die.

But at that moment, there was legitimate worry about so much art in the moment dying. All of the shuttered venues: all of the live music, comedy / improv troupes, dance, theater; all of the movie theatres, the chains and independents; all of the symphonies and ensembles and operas and choirs; all of the museums large, small, in-between. It was a cultural wipe-out in the making, the hit landing hard on ventures whose profit is not measured in massive fortunes, but the flush of creating a rich creative world worth living in. There are the brain numb down through history, and to this day, that would dismiss the arts as “not real work.” And this, as they listen to music on their way to work, watch Netflix at the end of their days of work, consuming art as if another bag of chips. It has always been so. And yet, what is the first thing marauding conquering hordes have done throughout history? Destroy the culture of the vanquished. Destroy the heart of the vanquished by appropriating their culture. Kill culture and you kill the soul of a people. In step (if in a less dramatic slow-drip frame), allow the die-off of culture and you are but a pallbearer for the soul of society. What’s the point if the only point is money-making and bill paying? Art is the sun that clears out the grey. It is the soft halide glow of the moon in the bone-dense dark. It is the light we seek, if not fully recognizing that fact. It is as indispensable as clean water, a roof over your head. It is the heartbeat of any nation professing to own greatness.

In the low depths of the Great Depression, the FDR administration rolled out the massive Works Progress Administration. A New Deal shovel-ready program designed to shock life back into private enterprise having flatlined, to curb the mass unemployment and suffering (something here again, too close, too close), the WPA included a sub-project: Federal Project One. “Federal One” was a direct work relief program that provided not only a stage and a voice, but a living for unemployed musicians, writers, painters, and actors. It stands, still, as the most direct significant institutional support the American government (voice of We, The People) has ever considered. Many decried the expense then. “Get a real job,” many said. And then they went right out to attend one of the program’s thousands of musical and theatrical performances staged in cities, suburbs, and rural blink-and-miss-it towns across the country; they went right out and bought one of the 48 state or hundreds of other territorial, city, and regional American Guide tour books, mostly hard-bound guides (some 300+ pages in length including fold-out auto-tour maps) that flowed out of the prodigious Federal Writers’ Project; they went right on without missing a beat to fix pride to the countless civic and post-office wall murals laboriously painted by artists with no other outlet for the skill-set that defined them as individuals. At a bucket-drop 1% of the WPA’s average annual budget, the vast scope of creative output over its eight years in existence places Federal One atop, if not alone on top of the most cost-effective government programs in American history. . . . If we cared about the state of our national soul, we must care about art. Would we initiate a “Federal One 2020?” Could we? . . . Get a real job. Not real work.

Some cultivate their innate abilities to become carpenters or machinists. Some have all the skills required to find steady work in human resources or managing mid-sized companies that makes parts for cars, airplanes, shipping. Some have the frame of build and will to be shrimpers or to farm peanuts. Friends of mine have run restaurants, a few master chefs sprinkled in. In my family alone there are marketers and project managers, electricians and childcare professionals, account executives, an actual executive, engineers and computer scientists (including at least one actual “rocket scientist”), those having served in clerical roles, those working retail, teachers and counselors, a used car buyer, a boiler technician, a lawyer, a postman. A grandfather and two of my cousins gave the title “professional musician” a shot. They were both successful, though their careers in the arts were short-lived, all moving on to “more steady” work. For they found, as so many do, that in step with being a professional athlete, being a professional in the arts is a hard gig. There is little in place to ease the down-turn of fortunes in professions deemed, somehow, “not real work.” And though the pandemic had made clear that we do not, and may not be able to live without the output of creative artists, still, the not infrequent claim: “get a real job.” It is a fatally uninformed view most often falling out of those who have never taken such a risk, have no idea of the raw financial exposure and monastic fortitude required to take such a leap, opting instead to throw weak-kneed shade at those who do and fail. It seems more of jealousy than a realistic op-ed on “legitimate” work, a leveling tactic by those unable and unwilling to understand what makes fellow citizens who happen to be artists tick.

Some have all the innate skills to take up plumbing or programming. Others are artists. And the irony of the mentioned slam is that to be a pro athlete or a professional in the arts, you have to dedicate yourself with near, if not outright obsessive zeal. You have to work harder and longer and for less than the average project manager or general contractor, if only because we are a country that—still—considers such professionalism to be novelty work. Situations and innate skills honed over time deliver ways to make a living. Some have HVAC repair. Some have a plumb account services job or a position in forestry / natural resource management available to them. Some have art. And being forced to wait tables, work retail, deliver packages, is sidebar to the core skills of a person whose product is creativity. No thinking person would say that a hard-working dedicated sous chef should be a full-time grocery store shelf stocker / part-time sous chef. Yet that was precisely the average working artist’s lot in America, 2020.

And then, this thing gut-punching the professional creative arts harder than any other industry save maybe travel, restaurant services, event planners / rentals. Art would survive, but many careers in the arts might not . . . Would we? Could we? . . . Limping on into the third month of this mess, the virus calling the shots, there was that one thing gurgling up as painfully clear: as with the application of craft in professional sport, we could not do without the application of skill in music, theatre, art. Harry Hopkins, the director of the WPA (and by extension executive director of Federal One) said it true: “artists have to eat too.”

The Actors Fund had picked up its megaphone and was reminding us all not to forget the performing arts. The rallying cry went up from the National Association of Independent Venues, asking: would we “Save Our Stages”? Would the heightened sense of a stricken moment, one having already come wrapped inside a fraught fractured real, the nation toying absent-mindedly with autocratic solutions to democratic problems, could we see through all of the quaking and clack-clacketing-along to reframe what seemed, now, to be for all times obvious: That we cannot let art die. That we are soul dead without art. That letting the livelihoods of project managers and cabinetmakers and distillers and civil engineers and warehouse workers and all the thousands on thousands of other ways to work evaporate for lack of logistical and organizational focus, that demanding the work of politics does something beyond the sugar rush of its performative power mirage trappings (and how about starting with giving their all towards containing the fucking virus, let’s never lose sight of that fact) . . . that for all of these thousands and thousands of ways to work, we could, we should, add creative artists to that immense varied list and pledge to do what we must as individuals—as a nation, a culture—to save as many jobs in the creative arts as was humanly possible? We cannot know the all of what makes fellow citizens tick. But we can support their efforts to add to the world in pursuing their craft. That was where we were by mid-May. And creative artists were in the process of losing their careers, if not their shirts, as well.

I had no immediate logistical, political, or economic solutions. Few did. But I was every day mourning for those things of the immense varied national soul that we might lose along with all the actual souls we were losing every day. Here was the raw nerve reveal that ran through that day’s entry. All I had was the ability to push myself—a long-aspiring, occasionally financially successful creative artist—to work harder than before: to get to it. What did I have to lose? Why would I stick to a more conservative predictable path? This thing, staggering into month three, having recognized the trembling totality of this instant, why—how—could I hold back?

Go big. Create. Think beyond what I might have thought possible, what “normal times” had consumed in money-making, bill paying, the drone-on routine busy-ness of our unrelenting modern schedules. Go for it now. Now. Every morning, document this bizarre alternate world we had found ourselves in. Just get it down, capture the emotional now. I could come back to it later, pull out the central drift, try to make sense of it. In light of art withering all around us, here was my answer: See to your art. Document this moment. Do it with a creative slant. Rip quotes from headlines, dig out the themes hiding within. Be opinionated. “Stick to your guns,” I thought. But do so while making sure it was all lit from beneath by compassionate common sense . . . Don’t forget to be nice. . . . There was more than one way to interpret common sense in the moment, but there could be no mistaking the ultimate inevitable need to go about self-preservation with compassion and selfless respect, to go about both until it hurt, to look out for others as we all made our way through.

So immense. So much unknown. Beyond platitudes and prognostication and the sudden abundance of small frail egos. I would have to check mine at the door . . . Could I? I could push something meaningful into the world . . . Would I? I could and would attempt to do so through art. Every day: create art. Every day: work at compassion. And given the heightened sense of all things right then, the totality of it all, I felt not just released to do so in a way that the busy-ness of before times had invariably interrupted, I felt compelled to do so. All things that once stood in the way had fallen away. There was no time to lose. Reshape and remake my own existence around a driven creative pace stoked by the warmth of compassion, of caring, of giving a shit. It was a way to live. And in the midst of all the terrible tragic weirdness, that thought, that goal, settled my concussed mind. Art will never die. Make sure that this was so. Attend to your art.

Movie theatres are largely shut down. Concerts are on hiatus. Broadway has gone dark. The pandemic has turned the world of culture on its head. At the same time, the capacities of art—to soothe, to diagnose, to help make sense of these times—have never been more apparent. — The Atlantic Daily e-newsletter