Vulnerable visions

I understand why artists are plagued with emotional difficulties. Expression is an exhausting experience; varying influences and voices merge into a single creation that attempts to communicate one person's understanding of how life intersects within itself. It's an experience that leaves you weak, exposed, and vulnerable in a world where concrete fortresses provide impenetrable barricades between you and those who have power over you. It is to speak truth, and truth inevitably leaves you among the powerless because cloaks of secrecy shroud the actions of our economic and political oligarchy. Fragility and vision are sisters who have been undervalued and repressed amidst the generations of their daughters who were told that an emotional nature made them unreliable in the work place and unable to handle the pressures of public life.

Last Sunday, caught up in the auditory trembling of the Third movement of Dvorak's "English Symphony," in the heat of an under-ventilated gym at the dawn of a Kentucky June, I found myself overwhelmed by the combination of emotional strain, artistic expresssion, and physical proximity that attends playing in an ensemble. I felt as if I would faint because of the physical effect of opening oneself up for an extended period of time in combination with people whose names I am still learning. The easiest culprit to pick out was the heat; however, that was simply one factor in the strain that comes with performance. At the end of the evening, after a program no more physically challenging than a few hours of typing, you fell drained by that same sense of artistic vulnerability that has helped radicalize so many writers, painters, and other cultural revolutionaries.

That same afternoon, I listened as my friend, who has a propensity for tall tales, recounted details of his hometown. Mike described the annual feast when the first calf of the season was slaughtered, when his family would gather around giant mounds of ground beef that they would eat by the handful, celebrating the work that would put home grown meat on their tables through the bitter Pennsylvania winter. He related specifics of the ways that his ancestor’s farm roots were still playing out in his family, including his two bachelor uncles who have parked their trailer on the family property and still use an outhouse a few feet from their home. His stories revealed the way that tradition and modernity intersect in each of our lives. He also spoke with regret about how people refuse to believe him when he talks about his uncle’s outhouse; his reputation as a storyteller has caused those around him to discount what he says as a lie, without listening and delving in to its depths.

I choose to believe Mike’s stories because I know that there is a truth that is greater than fact. I know that storytelling is an art as powerful as symphony, and that like in the case of Rigoberta Menchu, they do not need to be historical to be an honest and open expression about his life. In this act of visioning and believing, we escape our culture’s emphasis on numbers and statistics as the purest way of understanding ourselves. Numbers are cold and easy to hide behind, whereas story is rooted in the human experience. Like music, it leave us open and fragile to our listeners, in that same subversive and fragile action that is inherent within all art.