Art is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
Cesar A. Cruz
I can’t recall the first time I encountered that quote. But I do remember feeling intrigued, amused, and slightly uneasy as I read it. I wasn’t sure which category I belonged to. Neither? Both? I viewed myself as too conventional to be an artist, and too idealistic to be comfortable with the status quo.
I wobbled in the middle. Which, I’ve discovered, is often an uncomfortable place to be. The middle ground has many connotations. It can be a noncommittal retreat, or a compromise, or a self-preserving ethos. Or it can be stormy and ambiguous, a vortex of conflicting winds and strange tides for which there are no reliable maps or pathways. Perhaps the middle is a combustible place where the fiercest monsters live, and might be found and wrestled with, but where people tend not to stay for long.
Maybe it all depends on the day.
What I do know is this: I find myself there often. Whenever the world is “too much with me” (to borrow from William Wordsworth), going inside my own head is as reflexive as a child ducking under the covers during a thunderstorm. I don’t go in search of dragons. But I sometimes find them, nevertheless.
My head can be an unruly and unpredictable place. Memories are untidy things. They don’t always remain where I left them. Perceptions, too, can shift around, change color, grow or shrink.
But for all its peculiarities, my mind is also, sometimes, the only place that feels at all familiar. It’s the only place where I can make sense of anything – or at least attempt to. If I can find the words.
Writing is what anchored me during the pandemic. It anchored me through my divorce, job losses, and grief. In the most trying and chaotic periods of my life, writing brought me comfort. The simple act of choosing words, typing them onto a page, became the place where I was most myself.
But sometimes even that failed. In the darkest, darkest times, I didn’t write. I painted. Not because I had a talent for painting, or wanted to become a painter, or thought I should have a new hobby. The truth is simply that selecting words and arranging them in ways that were sensible took too much effort. I picked up a brush and mixed paint. I let the colors say what I couldn’t find the words for.
Sometimes I find myself comforted by others’ art. Sometimes I find myself disturbed. And sometimes, I just need to make my own.
Writing is an escape hatch when the world feels smallest and coldest and at its most cruel. A life of the mind can become a bunker. But a bunker with sunlight. A bunker with infinite pathways, strange gardens, subterranean rivers. A bunker with trapdoors and ghosts.
There is a kind of magic inside. As the external world whirls in chaos, the bunker contains only what its creator permits. What is written, what is painted, what is composed, what is captured or spoken may come into being. The rest does not exist. What better alchemy for coping with trying times? What better proof for seeing that we are not alone?
By peeking into other bunkers, we might see beyond the borders of our experiences, our countries, our ideologies. We might venture into the middle ground. We may encounter dragons and pass them by; we might see monsters and not wish them tamed.