The role of arts & humanities during tough times
By SCOTT SAALMAN
Scaramouch
How do the humanities help us all cultivate hope and community in times of crisis? Indiana Poet Laureate Matthew Graham bravely posed this question to me for publication in his Indiana Humanities blog. Indiana Humanities is a statewide nonprofit that infuses the humanities into our daily lives. Indiana Humanities ran an abridged version – as you read through this original version, see if you can guess what was not included. Ha.
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During the very surreal early weeks of the Great Global Pause while social distancing from my long-distance new wife, I found free time to reread Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, a thick paperback purchased from a Florence bookstore.
Once again, I became blessedly lost in this biographical novel, and although it was set during the tempestuous Renaissance and read at a very hysterical time in the present, there came from its passages a sense of solace, a salve for the soul, as I bobbed for paragraphs from the past to escape the now, to briefly forget that just outside the closed and deadbolted front door of my hermetically sealed house, something invisibly wicked our way had indeed come.
Poor suffering Michelangelo, his spirit shattered whenever Pope Julius II, upon seeing the great Renaissance painter’s completed commissioned work, angrily shouted, “You fool! This is the wrong chapel.”
There came then an awkward pause between the red-faced pontiff and the teary-eyed painter.
Their standoff of silence finally ended when a mortified Michelangelo responded, “Your Holiness, I dedicated the past five years of my life to this project, and ONLY NOW am I informed that I painted THE. WRONG. FREAKING. CHAPEL!!! Damn Google Maps! Oh, my poor, pathetic neck, how it hurts from all that ceiling work! My carpal tunnel has carpal tunnel!”
“Spare me your body pains,” hissed Pope Julius II. “How do you think I feel, Michelangelo? I will be dead from syphilis a year from now! Now shut up and do the work I commissioned – only paint in the right place this time! Oh, and I need it done next week.”
I’m just a silly humor newspaper columnist. It’s questionable that my work even qualifies as fitting within the arts and humanities realm, as if I’m destined to always be on the outside looking in at the great ones. Still, I take the crafting of each column’s paragraph as seriously as Michelangelo likely took each brush stroke applied to the Sistine Chapel.
Granted, his frescoes completed near the end of the Middle Ages illustrated the “pre-history of salvation” whereas my columns illustrate such unweighty subjects as the scourges associated with my own middle age in the form of “nose hairs gone wild” or the etiquette one learns the hard way while required to poop in a Walmart bag when accidentally locked in a buddy’s backyard shed. Let’s just say those two-handled plastic bags can be a godsend (sorry, sea turtles).
During the first months of the pandemic, I used my alleged humor to serve as some sort of social distancing companion – just as Irving Stone did for me. In our remoteness, togetherness can come.
That my mother was dying of stage four colon cancer during this time provided me with a double whammy of seemingly inescapable reality and horror. At a time when everyone struggled to mentally process the pandemic, I wrote: “Mom first acted as if she were invincible in the face of COVID-19. ‘I survived having a portion of my colon removed, 60% of my liver removed and countless rounds of chemo and radiation. This virus is nothing. All people really need to do is eat Campbell’s chicken noodle soup if they feel bad.’ Campbell’s chicken noodle soup has always been her go-to solution for family ailments. I think she’s convinced that it also played a role in the polio vaccine. If Dad ever, God forbid, accidentally cut off his hand down in his machine shop, she would likely bypass 911 and simply heat up a can of soup for him. The empty can, itself, could then double as an artificial hand. I envisioned a great wall made of stacked Campbell’s soup cans positioned around the perimeter of their property. Their anti-COVID wall.”
Andy Warhol would be proud.
Readers appreciated my small doses of levity during our most dangerous of times. Even Dad reported tears of joy, this from a man watching his wife of more than 50 years slowly whittle away.
I embraced my part in helping a small, unseen, community of readers briefly forget about their worries, and, in essence, collectively whistle past the graveyard. The work applied took my mind off the terrible times, too.
Getting lost in a poem, a painting, a song, a serious story, a silly story, demonstrates how the arts and the humanities provide comfort, coherence, healing, and hope while the world burns and churns. Historically, the humanities have provided humankind a chance to escape the hard times. I find the act of escape to be a virtue, for escaping something implies that one possesses the will to both hope and strive for better days ahead.
To all poets and writers and painters and musicians and dancers and actors and comedians and photographers – and yes, fellow humor columnists – please keep adding your unique threadwork to the cultural fabric of society. The talent – and for some, the genius – with which you have been gifted can forge togetherness, create community, and foster hope for humanity.
True, the world is a grand %&$# show now, and yes, we torch bearers of the arts and humanities are likely to be no better off than the doomed players of the dance band on the Titanic, but still we must play on, especially now we must play on. Nearer, my God, to Thee.
Email Scott at scottsaalman@gmail.com or follow him on Twitter @SaalmanScott.