💬 Weekly Question: How should we talk about our art during the apocalypse?
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On February 1, 2021, Burmese fitness instructor Khing Hnin Wai got on camera to film her aerobics routine in Naypyidaw (in central Myanmar). As she danced to fun, upbeat music that might get your own head bouncing, a convoy of armored vehicles arrived behind her to overthrow the government.
This, StoryTalkers, is how it often feels trying to discuss my own art and essays with you as the United States transforms into a fascist state. “Hey, look at me, look at me. Pay no attention to the dictator opening a chain of concentration camps!”
I try to bear in mind that some half of you are located in countries other than America — the U.K., Australia, Canada, and Brazil, I see and appreciate you! — but the broader world’s stability is at stake here, too. Then, of course, there are the crises elsewhere, from wars to genocide and more. Yes, art is a vital, a necessary part of confronting what’s happening everywhere, but…still. It’s a dissonance that is impossible to ignore even if the best way to survive the apocalypse is to remember the world you’re fighting for. Without art, what do we become? Besides, art is a survival mechanism for me. Maybe it is for you, too.
Which brings me to this week’s question: How should we talk about our own art during the apocalypse?
What is appropriate? What’s too far? What’s cringe in your mind?
The world is always multiple things at once. Billions of people are trying to do billions of things and history is the unclear consequences of that confusion of actions, often a comingling of narratives that themselves are disagreed upon instead of a determined sequence of facts. Indeed, history is just the history of how historians choose to interpret history, and what they choose to interpret versus ignore.
This means, among other things, that the seeds of the future are planted imperfectly in the miasma of the present, and the things that happen tomorrow may result from those things. So if we want an open world where citizens are free from the fear of extrajudicial execution and migrants have their natural (and in fact basic animal behavior) right to freedom of movement against the corrupted cowards whose pain of broken souls and retardation of mental facilities leads them only to express themselves in terms of violence against the vulnerable, in fact that world cannot exist if we only act exclusively under the terms of those oppressors. For there to be peace in the future, the foundations of it must be set now.
Art is, fundamentally, part of the architecture of piece. Artists must make their work survive all attempts to destroy peace.
So, that's how you can keep talking about it. A human mind is capable of holding two thoughts at once: that there is urgent issues to confront now, and meaningful investments in future peace.
Big question, right? This has always been for the lack of a better word the purpose or role? of art. I can only answer for myself that after banging my head against the wall as an activist and trying to build a 3rd party (Green Party) I pivoted to making a documentary on activists but focusing on the nature of empathy and what drives some people to move beyond themselves and their surroundings and try to help others. I feel this is the best thing I can be doing right now.