Early last month I wrote about the time I’m having in my little art world—the world that reflects and reverberates back to mostly me. I’d been waking up in the dark and writing in the quiet mornings, something I’ve never done, looking out a cracked window at the wide expanse of sky, soft hills and trees. From within my small world I wrote about my attempts to unearth a writing project that has been embedded within me, rightly or wrongly, for too long. I wrote about wanting it out of me, and also liking the process of getting it out: the ebb and flow of inviting and exorcising our own art demons. I wrote about how this process had recently begun to make me feel alive and excited, feelings (about writing) I thought I might never feel again.
Making art, and thinking and writing about art-making, is liberatory in its smallness, in its intimacy between me and me. It arrives me to the realization of individual agency and invention on its smallest scale. It also connects me to the oldest thru-line of every version of myself I’ve ever tried on, or pruned back to: a desire to make something interesting from the raw material of circumstance and resource that comprises life at any given moment. I hit send on this small prayer from the warm front room of our rented house and felt briefly good. Felt momentarily as if I’d synthesized a series of jagged choices—forgoing steady paychecks and health insurance and the social safety of maternity—into a neat little package of thought.
Since then, I haven’t had many neat thoughts at all. When not working I’ve been pacing absently around my cold house, or else dropping half-conscious onto couches and beds, transfixed by some of the worst images I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve watched videos of bombs dropping in real time, men digging babies from grey rubble with their bare hands, teenagers walking through a field of scattered bodies: trying to share what’s happening on social media so the world will see and believe them. I call my senators who send my calls straight to voicemail. Then I go out in the studio and listen to the news feeling angry and sick. I wedge and throw fifty or a hundred pounds of clay into fifty or a hundred objects until my back hurts, or my hands burn from cold.
How do you write poems in a country like this? This is the question with which I began my essay “Art During Wartime,” written five years ago now, during a time when my consideration of wartime could afford metaphorical expansion. The power of choice, of liberatory imagining that the artist wields when sitting down to their work is a small power, and false, at least when confronted with the larger superstructures of power and violence that gird this world. When faced with the reality of this smallness, the reality of the senator’s outgoing message, the reality of having to continue to go to work for low wages to pay the ballooning rents, what is there to make or say? Messages of solidarity to whom? Objects to be displayed where?
Last week Anne Boyer resigned from her position as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine, in protest of their [despicable] coverage of the “war.” She writes: “Because our status quo is self-expression, sometimes the most effective mode of protest for artists is to refuse. I can’t write about poetry amidst the "reasonable" tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”
There is no art for me to make from this. No metaphors, no poems, no stylized representations of something too horrific to look at directly. No variations on a theme. No notes. There are only the small, seemingly meaningless liberatory and political actions of individuals that when added together resemble something like the collective will of humanity, which cannot be found (cannot exist) in the institutions and the superstructures. Which will only be found in the streets and in our soft tissues, in any meaningful vision for a more human world.
Yesterday evening, news circulated that a four-day ceasefire agreement had been tentatively reached. This after more than six straight weeks of bombing, displacement, and indiscriminate civilian death. This after the refusal of the United States government to publicly support de-escalation or place conditions on money and weapons sent to Israel, despite screaming political pressure to act. I can imagine that this temporary pause in grotesque open violence will be all that many people need to consider it over. The feeds can return to their catalog images: news of holiday sales and drops that those who sell objects depend on to keep going. I’m one of those people! But most acutely now, I feel a sense of dread at the way all this death will be papered over, sanitized, swept away under the images again. Just another unfortunate circumstance of the empire’s citizens having to pay their rent.
I’ve included my essay “Art During Wartime” below in full, written by a previous me who reached for something five years ago and didn’t find it. Notes on the crisis of art-making as a citizen of the United States, which often feels like playing with toys on the floor of the weapons warehouse. My hope is that it offers some language to a moment in which there is none, and underscores the insidious thread of militarization that stitches together all aspects of the Western identity—in hopes that you may identify it in your own life, in your own art, and begin to tear it out.
All proceeds from paid subscriptions to Field Notes (thank you) will go to Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) for the foreseeable future. As a pre-emptive thank you to those paid subscribers, I’ve included a recording of me reading the essay at the end as well.
Solidarity to all. Permanent ceasefire now. Another World is Possible.
Love,
Kelly
Art During Wartime
How do you write poems in a country like this? I asked my friend, a poet. We were at a sunny brunch spot in a gentrifying part of the city. It was one morning of a typical bad-feeling summer—record-breaking temperatures and teenagers dying in police custody. Out the window, people in bright clothes walked back and forth on the sidewalk. I couldn’t bear my own identity anymore, which was a person who noticed things and sometimes wrote them down.
I had been under the impression that art should be visionary and instructive—that its most holy function was to transform the soul of the person experiencing it, and that this transformation would lead, eventually, to the improvement of our collective experience on earth. This impression had led me to pursue a life governed by creativity. But say an artist lived, ate, slept, and worked in a country defined by violence and competition—how could they create a vision that reproduced anything else?
In other words, it was a serious question—one I’d asked myself, in recent years, nearly every single day. I imagined my friend would know what I meant—at least about the country. That it was all so brutal and garish and cruel, and that to be complicit in the cruelty, by virtue of your citizenship, was too much to bear. I thought she would agree that the impulse to be an artist could no longer be totally trusted, at least without examining what it was you were making, and with whose resources, and why.
My friend had no idea what I was talking about. She frowned and gently touched my wrist. Art has never been more important, she said, over our just-arriving breakfasts. What the world needed from me, now more than ever, was to continue doing my work. My friend nodded, sure of herself, and began to eat. I stirred my coffee feeling scolded—a woman who thought naively that art emerged when it wanted to, from the body and its energies, like flowers from dirt.
I knew my friend didn’t really mean me or my work—she meant all poets, and whatever work it was they did. She meant anyone who could look upon some half-lit garbage, or a series of weird photographs, and say, with some confidence: this is a poem. I knew that what she wanted was to pretend, momentarily, that we lived in a world in which the validity of art and art-making was never questioned. I wanted the same world, I guess, but no longer knew if we could afford it.
I had no idea who would understand this. My friend wore an expensive blouse and she smelled like rosewater and behind her the sky was hazed with smoke from the wildfires, portentous and beautiful. She was telling me her belief system, which was that artists should continue working even though the world had ceased to. This was a seductive idea, as it eliminated all other options—I had to. But how?
How is not why, though I could have asked that question, too. Why write at all, if afterward I still felt helpless to escape my debts, or fell asleep thinking of our nuclear oceans? Why write if it was not softening me to the imperfections of others, or purifying my soul through intentional action? And what if, by writing from a place of fear and despair and cynicism, I made others feel afraid, or desperate, or cynical?
I didn’t ask this. My friend and I ate smoked trout in a window booth, and the conversation moved toward the things in our lives that we could see: our work and partners and exercise habits. We did not return to my question, which wasn’t a question at all, really: just one of thousands of slivering fears, resisting analysis or burial, but nonetheless always there.
*
How do you make art in a country that’s always at war? Maybe this was my real question. Picasso painted such beautiful doves, and still we send human beings into the desert to blow up buildings. All my life I’ve been told that art is revolutionary, but I still don’t know what this means. I can see how it comforts; how generously it distracts. But no novel has convinced a billionaire to pay their taxes. No poem has persuaded our president to end a war.
When I was sixteen, I watched a famous Vietnam movie at a friend’s house: half a dozen young soldiers floating a muddy river, smoking joints and reading letters from back home. One by one they die from enemy fire, set to a soundtrack of rock n’ roll. Critics refer to it as one of the most powerful anti-war films ever made, despite the fact that the director set hundreds of acres of forest on fire to make it. My film is not about Vietnam—he later claimed—it is Vietnam. The movie made $150 million at the box office.
Art cannot exist to decorate an intrinsically violent society—I wrote this in a different poem, years ago. At the time I lived in a city where long-time residents were being aggressively displaced, and where muralists were being hired to paint uplifting phrases on the sides of expensive new grocery stores. Keep your head up! they encouraged. Tourists took photos in front of them, holding gourmet ice cream cones and flashing the symbol for peace.
I do admire the impulse to add beauty to the world, or to offer some respite to others as they navigate the specific difficulty of being alive. When I feel helpless or stuck, words and songs are what move me forward. But I wonder at the function of art in an age of empire, when it might be more useful to hold the gaze of our reflection a little longer. What would it look like to confront the reality and pain of the aggressive displacement, for example, instead of escaping into the momentary distraction of paint?
Escapism is necessary, of course, if we want to survive the present, or hold out hope for a little change. The line is so thin, though, between optimism and complacency. After the election, one of the ways we consoled ourselves was by insisting that art would be great under fascism; like punk music in the 80s, or all those films about World War II. The quality of art would increase, we argued, even as the quality of life for humans every declined. The consumer product held up (here) as justification for human suffering (there). How else do we explain capitalism, if not that?
It’s true that art has never been more available—that in an effort to make meaning of our ongoing political disasters we continue to produce more and more. The streams are saturated now with photos and fragments—news of developing products, reminders of older products for sale. The production is undertaken with a sense of urgency, like in any wartime economy. All of it together creates a more beautiful tunnel through which massive streams of corporate capital flow.
And so producing art is a challenge if you want to make a different world. There is no way to trust that the famous magazines, the ones we all want to be published in, are not using our feelings to humanize their war. Even a revolutionary poem, when painted on the side of a tank, can be usurped for empire. Even still, we have to eat—and more than that, we want to feel we exist. We put our poem on the tank and watch the tank roll through the streets. We hope, somehow, that something good will come of it.
Despite all this, I get the sense that the artists of this country believe their creative endeavors—by their very nature—are in intrinsic opposition to the network of violence and profit and political corruption that our country represents. I don’t think they are. In fact, I think it’s entirely possible that the art we are producing—consumer objects, entertainment, interior decoration—is perfectly compliant with empire. That most of what we are making isn’t revolutionary at all.
Earlier this spring, I watched a video clip of fifty-eight missiles being launched at a Syrian Air Force base. The network news anchor narrating the live footage was so moved by the sight of weaponry, by the possibilities these weapons presented for him, that he quoted the late poet Leonard Cohen on the air. I am guided by the beauty of our weapons, he breathed. His eyes lit up like a child’s. On the screen behind him, a massive military arsenal sailed through the air in the dark, en route to inevitable deployment in a country already devastated by bombs.
Art can be enlisted, I thought, and I noticed that this was happening all the time. Painters are hired to design sweatshop sneakers, and writers are paid to humanize political speeches, and all of us daily visit the translucent digital hubs where we publish content for free, all in the service of state surveillance and corporate revenue. Art, regrettably, is just one way to soften the horrors of war without ever having to change the system that perpetuates them. I watch the artists of our country fit themselves to the supply chain, preoccupied with the desire to be told, at last, that they have worth.
*
The sky is a hot bright blue. I’m in another city, eating another breakfast, and listening to a different friend tell me about a woman who works at a fulfillment center for a massive online retailer. This woman is one worker on an assembly line comprised of hundreds of people. Her job is to fill boxes with retail products, seal them, and send them further down the line to be shipped. Her human labor, unending and unbroken, is what makes the products go down the line as quickly as possible. Her speed and focus results in more profits for the company—regardless of this, of course, her wages do not change.
The woman on the assembly line begins to feel bad one day. She tells those on the line next to her that she thinks she is having a heart attack. In fact, she collapses shortly after she says this. The assembly line managers, who know that the entire purpose of the line and its quickness are to increase the company’s profits, do not stop the line to help this woman. Instead the line continues, and her co-workers are urged to keep going, despite the terror of working alongside someone who may be dying, or dead.
The thing about endurance is that we can only endure so much. Most days I walk in circles around my house, or perform monologues to empty rooms, or drag thoughts around on paper in an effort to recreate the ways in which my mind once bent. All around me as rents rise and more people give birth, other artists insist that I, an artist, need not be deterred—that despite these things or in performed defiance of them, what they and the world need most from me, now more than ever, is my continued creative production.
But I am often sad about the world, and tired from living in it. Those who would ask me to produce beauty do not live in my body, do not feel its efforts and limitations and desire for rest. I fear that, like my country, they care less about the exhaustion of a body than about the body’s capacity to be productive. What could any body offer that would be of value, stooped over on the line like this, churning out half-reactions to thoughts that don’t even originate from inside it?
I will tell you this: we all know when art has value, real value, and we all know when it was made out of the belief that an artist must constantly produce. One of these reminds us that war exists, but is separate from humanity, and can be transcended through collective action. The other is an extension of the threat that war presents—that we are nothing beyond our capacity to keep the line moving. That we have no other choice.
The line does not stop, and because of this the body collapses. The line cannot stop and because of its not-stopping the products continue down the line quickly, and the bodies are swept away, and the profit stream is undeterred—the whole thing makes money. The collapsing on the line occurs frequently, and the not-stopping of the line for the collapsed body signifies to the other bodies on the line that the line and its movement are more important than the bodies—that it keeps on going without them, despite them. That there are more bodies available, right behind you, if yours should fail.
The line undeterred and not-stopping is not at all like life, though it is tempting for those on the line to draw the conclusion that it must be. Actual life is not anything—not a program or a ladder or a series of rules. It is an experience that is stopped often, interrupted and redirected constantly. It is during these moments of interruption, when the cool air rushes in, when we are most susceptible to art’s arrival—to allowing ourselves to be transformed. The line is separate from us, and its continuation is not our own. We owe it nothing.
We could rest.
*
Before the world became what it is now, a scatter of narratives funneling (corralled) toward the One Story, my mind was a house with infinite rooms. Then the world became an emergency, and the sirens were so loud, and our crises were projected onto the tallest buildings, beneath which people gathered daily to exchange notes and re-enact their fears. The implication was that everyone should fixate their entire attention upon the One Story, in all its entropy, which resulted in every artist leaving their post to watch and describe the spectacle of war.
I wanted to participate, having no other ideas. I was angry, like the others, and so I practiced being attentive. I made my body porous and sharp like lava rock, meant for scraping skin. I abandoned beauty, seeing so little of it, and I let the world and the Story and all kinds of things pass through and into me. I wrote down what I noticed, which was, I believed, the main responsibility of a poet.
I noticed weather patterns, severe dreams, cruel and stupid men, the rampant abuse of language, the arbitrary games of money, embedded messages (flags and pop songs), our accumulated waste, our campaigns for nostalgia, the sudden popularity of astrology, another new shop for curated art objects, class warfare, what would calm me down, how gun conversations went, how the eclipse moved us, briefly, and then how there were just three channels left—how all the parks had been dug up in the middle of the night.
I did not feel victorious, noticing this. I cried and slept and wore blood-colored clothing and walked alone and with others and talked around these things, little jagged curios in the street, whose awful shapes trailed behind me, existing as proof that I was alive, and myself, and paying attention.
This is what I want to say: that I walked and collapsed and threw things and felt ashamed, that still I could only be who I was, and so I wrote it all down selfishly, hoping that one day we could talk.
How do you make art during wartime? You make it for everyone living, everyone hoping that it will change. You stop often, and are so careful, that your mind not be a gun or an assembly line. That it be anything but a vision of a world that isn’t here yet—one you have to believe will be here soon.
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