Tomorrow is a Highway
An art critic, poet, and theologian share blueprints for a shared future
Friends,
Peter Blume’s surreal landscape above is in the wake of violence. We don’t know exactly what happened, but we get the sense everyone is starting to pick up the pieces. On the right side, a man shovels debris from a fallen house into a smoldering fire. On the left side, people are rebuilding a massive wall. In the middle? A strange egg-like stone, irreparably broken, sits above the workers on an earthbound altar, with bleached bones on one side and strange flowering plants on the other—life and death in equal measure.
I’m drawn to Blume’s image, in part because I’m such a fan of weird surreal imagery like this, but also because I think it’s a profoundly hopeful image, even in the midst of so much destruction. Things fall apart, and yet: people work together—man and woman, black, white—to sift through the rubble and make something new. Whatever differences they have among them won’t distract them from their shared work of repairing the world.
It’s in that same spirit I wanted to share some quotes with you this week. The three people below come from vastly different backgrounds (a queer feminist art critic, a Latina Christian theologian, a Buddhist poet and environmentalist), and yet taken together, they all point to where spirituality and the arts become a singular moral vision. They can help us move forward. Or, in the lyrics of Pete Seeger:
Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair
And we are the many who'll travel there
Tomorrow is a highway broad and fair
And we are the workers who'll build it there
And we will build it there
Take care,
Michael
Helen Molesworth in Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing About Art
Art helps me understand, think through, and enact love and freedom. These two big ideas are my intellectual and affective lodestars. Art doesn't merely represent those things for me, it enacts them. It is them. Art is not a picture of love—it is love. The acts of making, preserving it, displaying it, writing about it—all of these are events in which one makes oneself permeable to the other...
When I say that I think some of the art of our time will exist in the future, to have an encounter with a radically unknown other, and that possibility some infintitesimal part of that future encounter might carry with it some of the interpretative framework I offer in these various essays—when I say all that, I am suggesting, tacitly, that I believe in the future and have faith in the ongoing potential of the communicative, knowledge-based enterprise I am involved in...While I am not a religious person, I recognize that my belief structure in art is completely analogous to the deep structure of religious belief if for no other reason than that I believe in things I cannot prove….
I want to make a passionate plea for retaining one's curiosity, because to be curious is also to be vulnerable. To be curious is to not know and to want to know. And when it comes to art, the more you know, the more you'll see. The more you know, the more complex it becomes. The more complex it is, the more you realize how much you don't know. A life lived with art is neither linear nor progressive. It is meandering and recursive, forever folding back on itself. Art is perpetually tidal, receding and coming forth.
Cecilia González-Andrieu in Bridge to Wonder: Art as a Gospel of Beauty
In a Christian understanding, seeing what is wrong and then imagining something better that includes truth, goodness, and beauty is what can return life, what can save as it activates ethical action. Yet the vexing question is that seeing, and the awakening of the imagination that aids in unveiling truth, goodness, and beauty into consciousness, cannot be conjured up at will, nor can that which energizes and celebrates be expediently manufactured. Something quite elusive is needed to activate such loving wakefulness. Toward the goal of creating the conditions that will bring asombro with a flowering seeing and imagining, religion and art can be understood as tilling same prophetic soil.
Art, like religious faith, can foster a different kind of consciousness, and the religious life must also tap into the potential brought by wonder that can lead to transformation—or, in religious terms, conversion. In experiencing art that causes asombro/wonder, we most past certainty into humility, where we are surprised by what we see and presented with the opportunity to reflect on our choices. The quality of wonderment caused by encountering mystery is the catalyst for the awakening of seeing, which in turn produces the fruit of transformation through imagining....
The very nature of a consumerist society colludes to blind us, and religious fundamentalism also thrives in this blindness. The fate of our beautiful blue planet and its many lively inhabitants may depend on our capacity to see the good, the true, and the beautiful.
Gary Snyder in A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds
The world is constantly in flux and totally mixed and compounded. Nothing is really new. Creativity itself is a matter of seeing afresh what is already there and reading its implications and omens...There are poems, novels, and paintings that roll onward through history, perennially redefining our places in the cosmos, that were initiated by such seeing. But creativity is not a unique, singular, godlike act of “making something.” It is born of being deeply immersed in what is—and then seeing the overlooked connections, tensions, resonances, shadows, reversals, retellings. What comes forth is “new….”
The twelfth-century Zen Buddhist philosopher Dogen put it this way: “To advance your own experience onto the world of phenomena is delusion. When the world of phenomena comes forth and experiences itself, it is enlightenment.” To see a wren in a bush, call it “wren,” and go on walking is to have (self-importantly) seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel “wren”—that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world.
In the same way, when we are in the act of playful writing, the mind's eye is roaming, seeing sights and scenes, reliving events, hearing and dreaming at the same time. The mind may be reliving a past moment entirely in this moment, so that it is hard to say if the mind is in the past or in some other present. We move mentally as in a great landscape, and return from it with a few bones, nuts, or drupes, which we keep as language. We write to deeply heard but distant rhythms, out of a fruitful darkness, out of a moment without judgment or object. Language is a part of our body and woven into the seeing, feeling, touching, and dreaming of the whole mind…
“Remember” by Joy Harjo
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star's stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun's birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother's, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.The Vatican displays art in a women's prison at the Venice Art Biennale
How Peter Blume painted his personal reality of hope
Good Lord, that image! Thank you for sharing it. I want to see the real life version someday. So much to ponder.