Last week, I wrote about the stance of disassociation that many of us have with the body politic, the bureaucratic engines that continue apart from any one candidate or elected official, appointed agency head or school board slate. These systems feel too arcane to be understood, or too large to really matter in our lives. The dissociative state in regards to the broader state makes a lot of sense.
But there is actually no such thing as living separate from these systems, from the effects of them and the affects as well.
It may not ever occur to us, for example, that a group of people gather around a table (or log into Zoom) and decide what the regional water policies will be, much less that these policies will intersect with our every day lives intimately. But virtually every region in the country has a similar body.
These are just people, the occupiers of these seats. People not unlike us, or others we know.
How the table is formed is much more important than the identities of any one occupant. Are the people appointed? Are they representative or discretionary? Are affected communities represented? What interests are holding that position in place?
How the table makes decisions and relays information, gathers and integrates feedback and necessary adaptation -all more important than whether Board Member #7 can manage the email or if District 28 maintain a neighborhood newspaper. The former is about how the system is built and the latter an issue of tools.
But at the end of the day, it’s all just made up of people.
My family has long been involved in education and the arts, the things that make us better human beings by the endeavor itself. My ancestors are generations of teachers and learners, painters and players. My sister is a dancer and a choreographer and my brother runs a professional symphony.
I suppose I am the outlier as a clergy person. But I am a lifelong learner with a career in training and development (That is, I have a lot of degrees and I love to walk with others on paths new to them) and I too identify as an artist. I write and paint, sing and sculpt. These things make me a better person. They make me more fully human, and help me bridge the gaps.
The thing about both education and the arts is that they are equally wholly relational and very personal in their worth and value, in the experience itself and who and what is changed.
No art exists in a vacuum. Art is the tree, the forest, and the sound the felling makes. A painter may intend a message with her image. Most do. But not only is beauty in the eye of the beholder, all the things are. Beauty, repulsion, apathy, interest… all valid responses and become themselves wrapped up in the art.
Entangled. Entwined. Inseparable.
During the first year of Covid, a European symphony performed for plants. Like many other school children before me and surely yet to come, I did a grade school science fair experiment showing the effects of different musics on plant growth.
There is one.
But this proved to be unsatisfactory, the playing to plants or focusing only on rehearsal and recording, the Zoom-box table read plays or dancers overlaid and live streamed into ensemble performance. I get it. Zoom church for us at Living Waters Night Church has been tough, and it’s been much better to meet in person.
I think most folks understand the import of an audience when talking about stand-up and sketch comedy, or improv. The performer is continually adapting to the audience reactions, and the ‘fourth wall’ -that zone of mutual consent not to notice that exists between actors and audiences- isn’t even a factor.
But all of the arts, all performance, all offerings of creation and imagination, require audience. They all need to be seen, heard, read, tasted to be whole, to be real in a way. Certainly, the unpeopled audience is a nightmare for performers but it is also an incomplete picture.
No art exists in a vacuum, and our responses matter.
All of the systems that undergird our society can be viewed similarly with a commitment to engagement and involvement. The orchestras playing the shape of our lives need not only an audience to function, people actively receiving what is offered and responding in kind, but require a deeper and fuller participation from their communities.
Those who sit in the dark and watch a play unfold before them are players in the story itself. It cannot really be told without them. It is hoped that everyone will make her own art, will take the revelations or insights gained and use them, will deepen our own humanity by joining the great work.
Somewhere in the landscape of the policy boards and public commissions and advisory bodies is a group that needs your witness, and perhaps your involvement, to function. Perhaps part of what I am saying is that we must engage some of those bodies not only for our best functioning as citizens and residents, but also for those systems to work at all.
Not only is it true that none of us is meant to do this alone, it is equally true that we cannot build the Commons alone. No one interest can, not for the benefit of all.