In May 2012, in his commencement address at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Neil Gaiman said a number of wise and helpful things to his audience of young artists. I will come back to his several ideas in future posts, certainly, but for the moment I want to focus on the part of his speech that has gotten the most play on the internet:
You have the ability to make art. And for me, and for so many of the people I have known, that's been a lifesaver. The ultimate lifesaver. It gets you through good times and it gets you through the other ones.
Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do:
Make good art.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
It’s been a difficult last 24 hours since we learned of Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s passing. I haven’t felt this kind of stress in my stomach or my back since 9/11, this visceral/physical sense of dread, this feeling that the world has lurched off its axis and is spinning toward some unknown but very bad place.
And Gaiman’s words here have been ringing in my ears all day, seeming hollow and false and misleading. Make good art?! That’s the response?! How can that possibly make a difference, make even the slightest dent in the multiple environmental, economic, political, and social crises we are living through and will continue to be living through for the foreseeable future?!
But that’s not what he says. He doesn’t say that making art will right these wrongs or solve these problems. He doesn’t say that making art will bring peace or enlightenment or retribution or victory over our fellow humans or whatever else it is that we might want.
What Gaiman says is that making art is a lifesaver, that making art will get *me* through bad times, will see *me* through when things are hard, when things go wrong, when things get tough.
Back when I was a graduate teaching assistant working on my MA at Colorado State, our program director would regularly and sardonically note that “a dead T.A. is of no use to anyone,” meaning that we needed to take care of ourselves first before we could hope to do anything else, before we could be of any kind of service to others, that self-care was thus fundamental and critical and -- in the long run -- altruistic.
Making my art may not lead directly to any substantive change in the world around me, but it might keep me alive — mentally, emotionally, and spiritually — might keep me from despairing or becoming misanthropic — long enough that I can do such work through other means.