a practice of care
Image by Alessandro Puccinelli
I saw this on Twitter yesterday:
Daily life under neoliberalism is constant shock and violence: the artistic strategy of the shocking awakening thus no longer functions. - @harrygiles
The author followed it up with a series of thoughts about how we can take more care and have a greater practice of compassion and - well, what when I was training as an actor we used to call "space holding" - for the audience.
This one in particular grabbed my attention:
But here are some other things you could do with your art to combat the violence of the world: Create an oasis of calm. Allow people to cry. - @harrygiles
It was interesting timing: I'd been going back through my work, cataloguing it; re-building my portfolio. And as I was doing this, I began to see a common thread:
While there is a fair weight of violence, trauma, tragedy in the way my interest skews, there is also I think, an effort toward a broad sense of healing. Healing not only for the artists involved in its creation, but also - I hope - for the audience.
And I realised as I put these pieces together - the back catalogue and the tweets - that none of this had been particularly conscious. None of this had been a stated aim at the outset of the process of creating any of these pieces. They were integral to the work. They were necessary in order to make the work whole.
As my husband reminded me, it is this quintessential coupling: the trauma x the healing wherein literary / poetic catharsis dwells:
I've hit a fairly gnarly patch in the editing phase of "Edit" (yeah, that one's going to be weird for a while); I'm putting together the rough cut at the moment, and while there is a huge practical gap in the process (we still have an interstitial scene to shoot), I'm also finding that there is an emotional gap for me in its flow - its form.
That the gap would appear to be the space a natural bridge might sit between the trauma of the story and the inherent consciousness of "healing" required to make the piece whole. And I think now that I am aware of this fundamental requirement of the work (of my work at least), it's probably going to unstick things a little. Inform where I need to shift, shave, twist, massage.
And I'm not talking about a narrative storyline of healing necessarily. In fact, hardly ever. Disney has that market covered - I feel I can leave it alone. I think that the healing resides actually in the unspoken - sometimes the not-even-shown, but simply implied.
Tarkovsky does this miraculously well. He gives us nothing but uncertainty, grief, melancholy, knowningness - and yet somehow within these states of poetic yearning and emptiness provides a wordless salve for our souls. Wong Kar Wai does this. So does Tsai Ming Liang. So does Beckett, T.S. Eliot and Lydia Davis.
Perhaps, when done well, in the spaces between the trauma that comprises the skeletal construction of tragedy, naturally - inherently - lies the soft, delicate, buffering marrow of healing.
