Collective Trauma: The Fallout 5

Of course, we could do better. We could always do better. I remember a time when art was widely considered to be the ultimate and purest expression of the very best and the highest and most sublime of our humanity. Rather like a distillation of the very essence of the best and the highest to what we really aspired to, as well as capturing a shimmering glimpse of the paradise that we all lost. I think a lot of this changed with Picasso and his contemporaries, who decreed that a painting must be full of razor blades and for whom it wasn't art if it wasn't full of distortion since distortion and displacement and fragmentation were all thematic to the multi-tiered violence that was the twentieth century. So then it could be said that art went from describing our lost and fleeting ideal to showing forth our broken and ugly humanity in its raw and violent form. Or something like that. Aesthetic art came to be distrusted and despised as kitsch or as twee escapism, and some of our most prominent contemporary artists who couldn't paint their way out of a wet paper bag have gone on record as calling aesthetic or beautiful art weak, and therefore unworthy, and ugly, discordant expressions as strong, and therefore worthy. I am an artist, but not an art expert. And I know that I am not the best at what I do and that my work is primarily aesthetic, which could be why the art world isn't particularly interested in me and I can live that one down okay. Still, I would prefer to look at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel or one of Monet's water lily paintings over any of Picassos ugly portraits or Andy Warhol's soup cans. I think that we do ourselves a great disservice when we reject the beautiful, because we are also spitting on the best that we are. Freud famously called art collective neurosis. I think that it's more than that. It distils our essence, yes, and that essence can be very horrific or noble, or both. I imagine that our artistic expression is at its best when we integrate the two contrary realities, because our human history is something that is very ugly, brutal and violent, but we also aspire to something better and to be better and to be reminded by the prophets and sages of old that their is a Deity, more than just a cosmic CEO who commands our attention and our loyalty, and that our whole reason for being in this multigenerational funk that we call human history is because we are so thoroughly divorced from the creator and sustainer of this universe and all that is in it, including us. Atheists, and especially fundamentalist atheists, or born-again atheists as I like to call them are really having a field day with the God is dead or never was nonsense and really bend over backwards to discredit faith and people of faith whom, by the same token, often leave ourselves wide open for ridicule. But why do they discredit us and what we believe, if simply to justify their demand that they are the controllers and masters and not God, and that how dare any deity presume to tell us how to run our lives. except, that was never the idea, and whether we like it or not, the Deity does indeed run our lives because God fills and inhabits everyone and everything in this whole cosmos and beyond, whether we like it or not and the only thing that we have to call our own is our human will and we have only the analogy of Charlton Heston's claim that only from his cold dead fingers will they ever pry out his gun. Well, Gentle Reader, Charlton Heston is dead now, no longer has a gun to pry out of his fingers, warm and living or cold and dead, and one day we will also be dead. We don't even want someone else to be in control of our moment of death. Since it is going to happen anyway it has become in vogue in progressive countries to legalize and legitimize doctor assisted suicide, with all kinds of lovely excuses and reasons, particularly that people want to avoid a particularly painful and humiliating end to their days here on earth. Fair enough. But I wonder if this also says something about our desire to be God instead of God, for us to control everything and for the simple reason that we will not cede the control of our lives to the One who gave us life, sustains us, inhabits us and to whom we owe absolutely everything that we are. But this, I believe, is why our humanity is broken, and why we have deteriorated into this sorry state that we are in, indeed, our state has always been sorry because we keep distancing ourselves from the Love that is at the heart of the universe. No wonder we are miserable, and no wonder we never quite seem to get it right. But sometimes we do, and I believe that those are the instances when the light of Christ actually does make it through the cracks in our foundation, and we see beautiful art that takes our breath away, or listen to such music as must have come from another dimension, or we are suddenly ratifying legislation to protect human rights and end poverty without putting an end to the poor. God always gets in past our resistance. But we give ourselves all the credit. No wonder we're screwed. That's all for now. No comments, please.