Grief

Art's Consolation

Though I usually focus on visual art, when emotions sink deep to the core, I reach for music. When I first heard that my mother died, I went downstairs to play “Moonlight Sonata”, badly, but I fed off the depth of feeling as a participant. It was consoling. Now I’m learning a hymn she liked, am hearing her sing it in my head right now, just thinking it puts it inside me. When I think of songs she used to sing around the house, I see her in action, a happy person living a satisfying life. Music is so deeply woven with memory, its power can be startling. I once sobbed uncontrollably at a rendition of “You Don’t Know What Love Is” at a funeral for a colleague I hardly knew. As writer Anne Lamott says, “Music is about as physical as it gets. What other art can make you burst into tears? “ Or like it says in the “I Ching”, “Music has the power to loosen the grip of the obscure emotions.” We’ve lost so much in the past year. Normal patterns of living we’d come to take for granted were disrupted or erased and the duration of it is wearing us down. When patterns are out of synch what could make more sense than music for restoring rhythm to our lives. Like some have said about depression, that the system shuts down when the old ordering system isn’t sufficient for the volume and complexity of new content, the brain uses the empty space of melancholy to construct a better system. In ancient Egypt, the Temple Beautiful used all the arts to heal, but music in particular was considered very powerful. Music speaks to the physical body on many levels. Science has shown that high pitches stimulate the frontal lobe, home of imagination and other higher mental functions. Middle tones resonate with emotion and low pitches vibrate in the body. Our body is not just substance but layers of rhythms working together. Art connects to the actions of the body. Getting back to balance involves immersion in beauty. Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.’ – World Economic Forum, Why art has the power to change the world, 2016 I keep this quote on my desktop as affirmation of my conviction that the development of right hemisphere knowledge, the sense of meaning in the whole, is the first step toward positive change. The intuitive feelings that are the messages of this intelligence are most easily schooled by looking at art. As Philosopher Susanne Langer wrote. “Art looks like feelings feel.” To see and recognize is to better understand and people’s confusion about how they feel is part of the problem. Feelings direct thinking and need to be taken seriously. Our world is filled with traumatized people. Having tools to recognize our emotions provides a necessary step in order to move beyond them and the problems they cause by going unrecognized. The arts are the opportunity to heal that self-estrangement.