By twilight of one recent evening, I had worked at the newspaper all day and had soaked up the dark content of a variety of news programs after I got home. Boy, did I need to disconnect and seek the uplift to be found in lots of super shiny floors that I didn’t have to wax. Time to go shopping.
I’d no sooner snapped me and my 4-year-old nephew into our seat belts than the classy tones of NPR news filled the air. More gloom, more doom, delivered ever so dulcetly. No way. The purpose of the trip was to disengage, so I sought another station. Being of a certain age, I looked for dinosaur rock, found it, and pretty soon the air filled with the chords of a song I hadn’t heard, or thought of, for ages.
And something happened: My heart did some little flips, my hands started smacking the steering wheel (that’s after I cranked up the volume) and before long my nephew was asking me, begging me, to please stop singing, please.
Surprise: I was happy. Bigger surprise: I had forgotten what it felt like to be happy.
And to think that emotional rescue came from an old rock-’n'-roll song on the radio that reacquainted me with a joy that was undimmed by recent, horrible events.
A bit of an epiphany, really, but I didn’t think I’d been singled out for this lucky realization. I thought there might be more to this, so I called two artists to ask what role the media — as in visual arts, music, poetry, books and the like — can play in drawing people out of what one of the artists so eloquently termed “cycles of dread.”
Locally, I talked with Dan Rhema, who pulled through dengue fever and meningitis several years ago and whose own survival informs his visual art and his generous life view. I found word of Rhema in a Courier-Journal database search using “art” and “healing.”
I also spoke with the poet and author Julius Lester, a University of Massachusetts professor whose children’s books have been honored with both the Caldecott and Newbery awards. Word of Lester found me. Weeks ago, a thoughtful and welcoming Courier-Journal reader sent me copies of Lester’s poems, “Revolutionary Mandate 1″ and “Revolutionary Mandate 2.” Both poems, written decades ago, emphasized the importance of making connections with real things that really mattered. (“These are not the times/ To take your friends for granted,/ To assume that they will always be there./ They may not be,” begins one of the mandates.)
Was there, I asked Rhema and Lester, something to my hearing this old song that liberated me from the anxiety that had me locked down since Sept. 11? And could that same something be there for everyone else, to be unlocked by their own keys?
Yes and yes, they said with great certainty.
Rhema said he, too, had felt the “darkness” settling in his soul. The turning point toward the light came when his young daughter brought him a four-line poem she had written called “Fear.” It dealt with her feelings about Sept. 11, and ended with her fear that “it might happen to me.”
“We decided to go see the funniest movies. Last weekend we went to the theater and saw ‘Shrek,’ and we just laughed and laughed,” Rhema said. “You shouldn’t underestimate the power of silliness to rekindle your inner light.”
For Lester, solace and sanctuary were found in the serious music of Bach.
“His music is very structured and very ordered, and it’s extraordinarily beautiful,” Lester said. “. . . (Bach’s music) has been a companion for decades. I felt like I was back home.”
I asked Lester about his “Revolutionary Mandate” poems and their abiding messages of savoring life and its many connections. Lester said, “I wrote those poems in the late ’60s when I was involved in the radical movement. People I knew were being killed. We were living in proximity to death, which meant we were also living in proximity to life. And that shows you how precious life is, and not to take anything for granted.”
Especially our relationships to what Lester calls “the eternal” — our soul and our spirit.
Rhema said the role of the artist is to bring people back into balance. He points to the great music, movies and literature of the 1940s as an example of how artists respond to great crisis, and how different media make life bearable when so much seems unbearable.
“When someone dies,” Lester said, “you feel guilty the first time you laugh, or the first day you don’t think about them. And that’s what the country is going through.”
The way to make it through that grief?
Lester offers what may be another revolutionary mandate: “To respond with joy,” he said.
Rhema agrees. “We are adaptable,” he said. “Maybe you can’t control events, but you can control your response to events.”
The message of balance is true in life, true in art and true in newspapers. That’s why, even in these very troubling times, we print daily stories about what only a month ago was unimaginable. But we also print what a great writer called “small, good things” — recipes, and movie listings, and TV previews, and book and music reviews.
Before I talked with Julius Lester, I bought and read a copy of his 1999 children’s book, What a Truly Cool World. It tells the story of how Shaniqua, the “angel in charge of everyone’s business,” helped God to create a more wonderful world.
One part of the book dealt with music. With Lester’s permission, I quote: “The music went into the universe. The stars and the planets had never heard anything so beautiful. Tiny pieces started falling off of them. These were their tears. The pieces floated down through space until they reached earth. People looked up at the tiny scraps fluttering around. The yellow ones were the sun’s tears. The blue ones were the tears from the moon. The white ones were star tears, while the red ones were from Mars and the orange ones from Venus. . . .” And in Lester’s book, the tears turned into butterflies.
“Butterflies” roughly describes what I felt that autumn twilight, when music nudged me away from worry and toward something that felt a lot better. The most famous recent use of the tune was for the funeral scene in “The Big Chill.” What a truly cool world, to use Lester’s words, that the same song had moved me toward a big thaw.
My nephews went with me to buy a CD that had this breakthrough song on it. We routinely slip the CD in the player as we tool around Louisville. They don’t ask me to stop singing anymore, because they’re singing, too. By the end of the song, we’re shouting right along with Mick:
You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
You can’t always get what you want,
But if you try sometimes, you just might find,
You’ll get what you need.
