making the choice to keep creating

Intentionality, and the Decision to Keep Going

I have spent the last few days in a studio with a wonderful producer, recording the audio edition of Permission. This is the fourth time I’ve done this, each time for a different book, with a different producer, in a different studio. Each experience has been an excellent one; I suppose it could have gone the other way, but it didn’t, and this time was no different. My producer for Permission, Paul Averginos, had just returned from the West Coast where he received a Grammy for producing Jimmy Carter’s posthumously released audiobook for Last Sundays in Plains: A Centennial Celebration, which features the music of Jon Batiste, Keb’Mo’, LeAnn Rimes, Darius Rucker, and others.

I took this as a good sign; I was a teenager when Jimmy Carter was president, and I remember what he faced, how he looked at the start of his term, and how he looked at the end, after he had been chewed up and spat out into little bits by his political opponents’ brutal attacks. It was only when the term was over that Carter was allowed to fully stretch his arms wide, and take on the work that he was truly meant to do, in which he fulfilled his place on the planet as a devoted public servant, an observant Christian in the truest sense of the word, a man dedicated to peace. I remember, vividly, when he left his lifelong membership in The Southern Baptist Convention for their stance on equal rights for women, which he felt was incongruous with the teachings of his religion. I remember, vividly, when he and Rosalynn put on hard hats and tool belts and began building homes for Habitat for Humanity in the Georgia heat. I remember, vividly, when he helped negotiate peace between two endlessly warring nations in the Middle East, without taking sides or conniving behind either side’s back.

We seem to have fallen so very far, and here we are. I am old enough to remember the Fallout Shelter signs in my childhood apartment building and in every school I went to, and how I was made to do duck-and-cover drills in the event of an attack from our friends east of Poland. Never could I imagine that everything we fought against — all of it: the brutality of fascism, the Russians, the outrighting lying, the doubletalk, the various coups that we children of the 1970s watched unfold, in horror — would happen here. And then I remember the famous Joseph Brodsky quote, as related by poet Marie Howe:

He said, You Americans are so naive. You think that evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots and climb up the stairs—it begins in the language. Look to the language.

So many of us do look to the language, as a rule. And unfortunately, so many of us look to a different language of division and artificial (non)intelligence, of manipulation and the politics of cruelty and hatred and proud idiocy. Last night, after a very long day, I was sitting on the couch in my quiet little suburb, and reading a hair-on-fire post in which the writer writes Your government is busy cutting healthcare funding, jacking up prices on everything, and laughing their asses off while you argue about whether or not it’s patriotic to wash your hands.

The good guys win, right? Eventually — as history shows us — yes. But not until a lot of lives are lost. Not until a lot of devastation. History has also shown us that the quickest way to authoritarianism is through the hearts and minds of the easily swayed who will believe anything, who are willing to sell their souls for a meme, at least until Sunday when they go back to church to listen to sermons about peace and loving the stranger and thy neighbor.

Humans, bombarded daily, relentlessly, with outrageous lies and the physical and psychological damage associated with chronic violence, need to create as a vital part of the promise of resilience, groundedness, and humanity. Otherwise, it all just becomes scrollable madness.

It’s very difficult at this particular moment to continue to make art — to write, draw, make music, whatever it is you do — because it feels frivolous. It’s incredibly hard to concentrate. Where will art get us? Why bother? At 3:23 every morning, when I wake up in a cold sweat, I’m not thinking about making art. I’m thinking about what we will take with us when we have to run. I’m thinking about epigenetics, and how my cells struggle every day to not go down the familiar road of postmemory, and the work of Marianne Hirsch, whose theory revolved around the relationship that the 'generation after' bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before.”

But there is a point, a moment of overload, when the heart and head need beauty like a dying plant needs water and light. They need art. They need words. They need music, ritual, and community. Humans, bombarded daily, relentlessly, with outrageous lies and the physical and psychological damage associated with chronic violence and the covenant of doom, need to create as a vital part of the promise of resilience, of groundedness, and humanity. Otherwise, it all just becomes scrollable madness.

I found myself just today re-reading the words of Margo Jefferson writing in The New York Times shortly after 9/11 and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. In a 2022 article by Jason Farago, The Role of Art in a Time of War, Jefferson, paraphrased by Faraago, explains why we need art during times like this:

The reason you need art in wartime, wrote Jefferson, is because “history cannot exist without the discipline of imagination.” Through art we establish similarities between past and future, near and far, abstract and concrete, that cast received certainties into doubt. We look and listen in a way that lets thinking and feeling run parallel to each other. And in extreme times, this sort of cultural appreciation can rise from an analytical to a moral plane. If we pay close attention — a task made harder with every meme-burst and iPhone rollout — art and literature and music can endow us with improved faculties to see our new present as something more than a stream of words and images. They can “provide ways of seeing and ordering the world,” as Jefferson wrote then: “not just our world, but those worlds elsewhere that we know so little of.”

In Permission, I wrote about making the choice to create. In this chapter, just excerpted by Poets & Writers, I say that if we don’t heed the call to create, and give ourselves permission, our worlds darken and fade. Forget about funding, or grants, or the right to write being ripped out from underneath you. Keep going; you have to.

Whoever we are—published or unpublished writers; painters or musicians or chefs—if we don’t heed the call to create, and give ourselves permission, our worlds darken and fade. Our stories are stillborn; our lives thrum along on a dull, monotonous hum. The healing capacity of storytelling becomes stifled.

History cannot exist without the discipline of imagination.

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Here is a link to the full excerpt for The Choice to Create, in Poets & Writers.