Dear good people, dear friends,
I’m sitting in my study on this steamy July afternoon, watching storm clouds cover the sun. Outside, two industrious wrens, undaunted by the weather, are building a nest. They are not obsessing about who will be our next president. Their project is to make a home and breed.
Several years ago, I heard a science journalist talk about the staggering number of species that have disappeared over the last thirty years. He discussed human despair and suggested that carrying our grief as individuals might prove unbearable. Soon we would need to engage in rituals of communal mourning.
I think he may be right.
Do you experience this, too? Waking with a heavy heart? A feeling of bracing against catastrophe? Is your inner mantra What now, what next? Bad dreams, bad mood, exhaustion, lethargy, anger, hopelessness?
More and more, I think about the role of art during cultural shifts. As a writer at work now, what is my role in the larger context of the polis, the republic?
What history teaches is that those who tell the emperor he’s stark raving naked end up in a gulag. Or worse. If art is subjugated to state rule or the dictates of an autocrat, art’s raison d’être becomes another arm of propaganda. Think of the social realism of Soviet art during Stalin’s reign and its Panglossian view of USSR life, those posters of cheery, rosy-cheeked buxom women shouldering hoes, a far cry from the back-breaking reality in the fields.
On the positive side, in the 1930s, during the Great Depression, art and artists flourished. FDR’s New Deal programs funded art as a necessary public good. Artists were offered the money and space to broaden their scope, which led to intense experimentation with new forms and reshaped public interest in the arts. Sadly, I can’t imagine this kind of support for the arts now.
Who, I wonder, will reflect our complicated, nuanced, paradoxical lives, if not artists? I worry about this, mightily. (Discerning truth from fiction, even from science fiction, is already at risk. AI will further test our perceptual and critical thinking skills.)
In her 2014 acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the writer Ursula Le Guin offered a chilling warning:
“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.”
I wasn’t going to write about any of this. I was going to write about the miracle of wrens, creatures no bigger than a child’s fist that fly at great altitudes across continents battling severe weather and all manner of deadly human interferences to return to the birdhouse at my window.
That’s the poet in me, the lyrical celebrant, eager to be enchanted. The novelist, the storyteller, evokes a different tune, and is more engaged with the mysteries of our psyches. (See, for instance, “Celebrating the Mysterious and Why It Matters” or “Fate and Destiny: What Role Do They Play in Your Life?”)
The writers I most admire are always in dialogue with their audience. They lift up and examine the unsaid and unspoken in relationships—families, communities, nations. The disturbances that are palpably present, maybe even breaking our hearts, but too often denied or ignored.
(Some examples of what I mean, two stories that brilliantly accomplish this, are James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues and Ursula Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. A gentle reminder: If you are moved by a book, a poem, an essay, pass it on to friends. And share it with me! Share your concerns but also your pleasure.)
What is it we fear that we cannot name and cannot face? Why do we hurt ourselves or others? What will we do with our grief? Is hope a viable choice? What is it we hope for?
These questions hurt. Forgive me, but please know I am offering them to you with the most gentle and tender regard, and with hope that our conversation continues.
I’ll end on a note of joy and appreciation. Thank you to those who were able to attend the play at Madison’s Overture Center last month which featured some of my poems from M in the marvelous three-part performance of Step Right Up, Ma’am: Women’s Resilience Theater.
Coming in the next months will be my new, updated website which will include writing prompts. I’m also thrilled to announce that the documentary, “Between Two Worlds,” in which I am interviewed, may be available on a streaming platform this fall. I promise to keep you updated.
In closing, here is a wish: May our difficulties spark the energy for a communal dream that envisions a more humane and viable future for ourselves and the planet, reflecting an understanding that our interconnectedness with all living things is part of ancient traditions (Read more about this in “What Ancient Traditions Can Teach about Coping with Change.”).
We are the anima mundi, the world soul.
With care and gratitude for your presence in my life,
Dale
P.S. In the words of my friend, the author Mark Nepo: If so moved, please share this offering, and spread the word. Anyone can subscribe at this link. You can read my previous newsletters here. I invite you to keep up with my offerings by following me on Facebook and Instagram. And, of course, I’m grateful for any comments you’d like to leave about The Conditions of Love or M on Amazon, B&N, Goodreads, or LibraryThing (wherever you talk about or buy books).
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Top image: House wren (Troglodytes aedon), Parc national de Plaisance, Québec Courtesy of Cephas CCA4
