Classic tales tell of the old ones, and how they lived and died. We identify, live and die with them, then reflect on our own lives, richer for the learning. Closer to home, we create our own theatre, improvised. The skits play out in comedy our most brutish characters, spiteful and murderous.
How can we possibly laugh? My mother used to say, tragedy plus time equals comedy. I might amend that to say, history plus art equals moral limbo.
Is the desired release from history’s grieving enough to move on, to accept, to forget? Are we to take abiding comfort from the distance that art allows, lounging now in our bourgeois gallery, sipping wine and cheese and debating reviews? Or are we also or instead awakened to, reminded of, moved to embrace the enduring outrage deserved by history’s grim facts?
Art elicits both responses: distance and engagement. In this sense it is a spiritual practice ground. It evokes the stillness of distance, of apprehension, of awareness—the essence of the spiritual path. We become the witness. At the same time, art draws us in: it engages our emotions, by creating or recreating scenes of life, full of tension and beauty, or simply the realism of things as they are. And we feel the same response as evoked in life: laughter, even, in the face of tragedy, if that is the immediate eruption that works to release that energy of intense engagement.
Art allows us, invites us, requires us to both experience and witness the essence of life, with all its extremes of quality: good and bad, beautiful and ugly, magnificent and banal, pleasurable and painful. We are moved to apprehend whatever it is, to feel the appropriate response and even to express it (laughter, tears); then to reflect as a witness, buffered in the comfort zone of a time out of history, a viewing room apart from the living room of action. At every moment, we have both opportunities—to engage or reflect—each mode enriched by the other… until in a final synthesis inspired by art itself, we fuse action and awareness, integrating form and spirit.
