Embracing the Necessary Work
Comments for Maryland Arts Day
February 2, 2005
Michael S. Glaser
I am pleased to be a part of Maryland Arts Day and this important work to encourage our elected representatives to serve the citizens of Maryland by supporting the arts for the arts, as we know, are not some extraneous or luxurious frill for our lives. Rather they are a fundamental component of our democracy and a necessary tool of freedom. They provide, as Kenneth Burke has suggested, equipment for living meaningful lives.
The arts invite us to listen to the inward voice, the soul's metaphors, our own inner lights; they open windows out of which we might see with new eyes, and offer mirrors in which we can reflect freshly upon our choices and our actions.
Listen to how the Spanish poet Roque Dalton expresses the centrality of the arts for our lives in his wonderful poem, "Como Tu":
Like You
Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.
And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the source of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful,
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone
And that my veins don't end in me
but in the universal blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.
As much as science, the arts open doors toward new knowledge, encourage the mutual exchange of ideas, point us toward the places where new understandings can be found and the knowledge of old truths challenged as well as remembered.
I want to stress my own particular advocacy of programs that nurture the arts in our schools for it is through the arts that a child's natural desire to be expressive finds its voice. And the arts not only play an essential role in the development of creative thinking skills, they also, as John Ruskin reminds us, represent a social necessity that no nation can neglect without endangering its intellectual existence.
Promoting such programs in schools helps insure that our young people will have a place where they can feel safe enough to take the risks that becoming productive and contributing citizens requires. Listen, for example, to this short poem written by Megan Merkle when she was a student at Mechanicsville Elementary School.
Last Week At School
Last week at school
was like an opera
because we had to talk
solo
by ourselves
to the whole class.
As Martin Luther King Jr. has suggested, the arts balance the tough mind with a tender heart, and serve us in public life by valuing our uniquenesses and our differences. They help us develop our capacity for genuine compassion; they link us to our humanity.
Additionally, the arts offer us vehicles with which to express feelings and ideas that ordinary words cannot convey Ð and thus they offer to our lives an essential grace Ð those sweet melodies of the spirit that distinguish us as human beings. I tried to point toward this when I wrote the poem I happened to call poetry, but which is, truthfully, about all the arts.
Poetry
Wanting more than hope
I turn to poetry for revelation,
instruction for my spirit,
courage for my re-awakening soul.
Call it what you will Ð
truth or rapture
or love's embrace,
call it what it is--
the consistently
unexpected surprise
of Beauty's human face.
Robert Coles has put it so well, arguing that the arts offer us not only renderings of life, but also serve us as essential companions, sometimes pointing us in new directions, sometimes admonishing us, sometimes giving us the courage to stay a given course. They offer us other eyes through which we might see and other ears with which we might make soundings.
The arts, in short, offer us a way to find and offer to others the affection and love that help give purpose to our time spend here.
By exploring the complexities of human experience with the powers of the imagination and the intellect, artists invite our engagement in those essential discourses that rouse the human heart to life.
Mary Oliver speaks to this exquisitely in her poem, "When Death Comes." The following excerpt from that poem serves, I think, as both a fitting summary and as a powerful reminder of why it is so important that we are here today.
Wanting not to end up "simply having visited this world," Oliver writes:
ThereforeÉI think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy; and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth
When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement
I was the bridegroom, taking the world in my arms.
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