Arlene Goldbard

New circumstances make it easier to see ourselves clearly. I often think of a tale told by an acquaintance of Afro-Caribbean heritage, living in the West Midlands of Britain. In the British Isles, she’d become accustomed to being regarded as other, as category “West Indian,” in it but not of it. Visiting family in Jamaica, she found herself on a hot, crowded bus, bumping along a rocky road. “The woman standing next to me,” she said, “a complete stranger, suddenly turned and handed me her crying baby.” Long pause. “It was then I understood I was British.”

Finding myself in new circumstances, back in California and unsure about what comes next, I recognize that I have lost a sense of spiritual connection that was with me for many years: a sense of belonging, of being held, what people tend to call “faith” or “trust.” My sense of who I am seems strong and clear; but lately I’ve been fresh out of reasons to believe that who I am will matter to the forces that are shaping my future.

These days, I have unlimited opportunities to answer the question “What will you do now?” There are projects in development, good possibilities all. But all of them are affected by the economy, so for the people raising funds, the outcomes are uncertain. The more I talk about future prospects, the more details I pour into my answer, the more I start to scare myself. I know what I have to offer; I know I have always landed on my feet; I know it takes courage to set out on a new path; I know I have friends and resources and gifts. And then some ultimate existential question opens up, and I don’t know.

A wise friend asked me what I now believe about spirit. I said I had come to a place of utter agnosticism, utter ambivalence. At one time, the world had a numinous quality for me: not just that I could see “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” (in Dylan Thomas’s beautiful phrase), but that I could feel that same force moving through me, driving me, too, toward growth and fulfillment of the potential I carried into this life. I can perceive the outward signs of energies that cannot be captured by numbers nor manufactured in laboratories, but just now, they feel apart from me, indifferent to me. The mystical experiences I’ve had, the supernatural explanations that formerly persuaded me, now seem mere possibilities. Perhaps I imagined them, perhaps I have mistaken the artifacts of my own mind for information about the world. Who is to say?

The flow is blocked, my friend said, by ambivalence. “You have to decide what you believe,” he told me, “or you will stay stuck here.”

So I have been revisiting my own beliefs to see what is intact and what has dropped away—and why. Most of it seems so obvious: the anger and resentment I feel when I consider the possibility that some intelligence or force is guiding all this—the summer leaves, the glittering waves, and my grief—my resistance to trusting that force. The brokenness I have experienced with spiritual teachers and leaders, leading me to question whether practices that don’t make you better are worthy of devotion (but then I wonder just how much more broken they might be without such practices). The credulity of the New Age in its many absurd manifestations, my own desire not to betray my mind or my integrity with foolishness.

Yet the avatars of atheism are just as stupid, just as unworthy of ultimate trust. What hubris to claim certainty that this infinitely complex and beautiful universe can be entirely explained by what appears in our science textbooks! I feel somehow embarrassed at how much those militant atheists’ certainty exposes their of own fears: they would rather pretend to know it all than face the overwhelming scale of mystery. Science is converging with spirituality, these days, of course, with theories grounded in quantum mechanics that tell us that “reality” is just a way we decide to freeze and perceive energies that are actually in unceasing flow, so that everything that seems solid has permeable boundaries and is always in interaction with everything else. So today’s rational certainty is likely to fall in the face of new insights, as has almost every prior certainty.

Locked in ambivalence, each of these thought-streams leads me to the next, round and round. All explanations seem equally plausible and inadequate. Yet I understand that for my own well-being now, I have to choose. I decided to ask for a sign. “The Divine Radio is always singing if we could only make ourselves ready to listen to it,” said Gandhi, “but it is impossible to listen without silence.” In silence, I took myself on my favorite walk by the water, scanning for signs.

I saw three, but my resistance to perceiving them is so great, it took me a whole day to recognize them. First, a Western Fence Lizard appeared. It strolled out into the middle of the path just as I approached, and no matter how close I came, it refused to budge. The path had been crowded with people, but they seemed suddenly to disappear. I have a special love for reptiles and amphibians, so seeing a lizard or frog is always a delight. But the encounter is usually much briefer. This time, as the lizard and I communed in the silence, a Western Tiger Butterfly made straight for us, flying in low circles over our heads until I rose and continued down the path. Toward the end of my walk, a garter snake slithered onto the path as I came around the bend, dancing its S-shaped way to the other side while I stood and watched.

When I arrived home, I talked to a friend about my ambivalence, my desire to resolve it, my difficulty in finding the way. “Why don’t you pick a side,” she asked, “and commit to it for a while? If you want, you can always switch sides later.” How smart is that? If you can’t go through it, just leap over!

Regardless of my present doubts about the provability of a force that guides us, a force to which we can align ourselves and in which we can trust, the other side of the debate seems to me so egregiously narrow, flat and blind, the side that says yes is the only one I can pick.

Readers of philosophy (who know there is nothing new under the sun) will recognize that my life has come to precisely the same crossroads as described in Pascal’s Wager, Blaise Pascal’s 17th century conjecture that since the existence of God cannot be proven by reason, there must be another basis for our decision to believe or not—and since our life is conditioned on our choice, we cannot escape the necessity to decide. Since we can never know the truth of our choice, the only relevant question is which decision offers the most to gain. Pascal points that out with utmost clarity in Pensee 233:

You would like to attain faith, and do not know the way; you would like to cure yourself of unbelief, and ask the remedy for it. Learn of those who have been bound like you, and who now stake all their possessions. These are people who know the way which you would follow, and who are cured of an ill of which you would be cured. Follow the way by which they began; by acting as if they believed, bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you—will quiet your proudly critical intellect…

Now, what harm will befall you in taking this side? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, generous, a sincere friend, truthful. Certainly you will not have those poisonous pleasures, glory and luxury; but will you not have others? I will tell you that you will thereby gain in this life, and that, at each step you take on this road, you will see so great certainty of gain, so much nothingness in what you risk, that you will at last recognize that you have wagered for something certain and infinite, for which you have given nothing.

I have made the same walk hundreds of times. Usually my companions are birds and ground squirrels, although I’ve seen the odd lizard, the occasional skunk. But I have never before seen all three species on the same day. It wasn’t until I woke up this morning that I recognized the obvious truth, that the essence of all three is transformation, the snake shedding its skin, the butterfly emerging from its cocoon, that lizard joining its appearance to its environment. And me.

The radio is blasting Michael Jackson features. All of them end with the same note, that he was planning a “comeback tour.” It appears he had to leave to come back, as befits a figure whose early dive into the oceanic adoration of celebrity turned his life inside out.

I find myself thinking this morning of the concept of “transcending race,” a strange and knotty idea. To begin with, race doesn’t inhere in the person: there aren’t any objective tests to scientifically assign us to races, because race is a social category, not a biological one. As more people undergo genetic analysis, they find their heritages far more mixed than the application of our current categories would suggest. I’ve had an evidently WASP friend write to say, “Apparently, I’m Jewish,” an apparently African American friend report the presence of more European than African ancestors. Geneticists tell us that there is far more variation among members of these racial categories than between groups. So “transcending race” really means confounding the social categories that exist in our minds, such that they no longer overdetermine others’ response to ourselves.

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This is the first section of a talk I gave on 19 June 2009 at the National Summit of Ensemble Theaters, meeting at the University of San Francisco. Click here to download the full text.

I’ve just moved back to California, part of a big life-change for me. Whenever I come here, I touch down with three friends in Mendocino County, where I used to live. We have been meeting regularly—monthly when I’m in the state, less often otherwise—for fifteen years. One is a theater-maker like yourselves, another a healer, the third an environmental activist and steward of the land. We are very different, but taken together, our worldview is pretty wide: from the tiniest details of these amazing human bodies with their interlocking complex systems; to our imaginations, both personal and social; to this beautiful blue-green planet, home to an astounding variety of life-forms, including our own infinitely surprising species.

When I arrived on Sunday, the healer was getting ready to leave for a meeting to plan a memorial service for her dear friend, who had died in an accident. As she told me the story, her eyes filled in that way that evokes an ocean of sorrow, all the tears that have flowed through human history. Shaking her head, she posed a question, “How can they still have war?”

It took me a few seconds to leap across the conceptual gap between the highly personal and particular conversation we’d been having and this eternal conundrum.

“They couldn’t,” I told her, “if they felt the loss of each life the way you are feeling this one.”

How could that happen? How could those who make and profit from war be given the opportunity to experience the fullness of loss created by their enterprise? … Read the rest of this post»

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote briefly about the May 12th White House Briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery I had helped to organize. Now, a detailed report on the briefing has been released. You can download it from the Cultural Recovery page of my Web site. The report is the next best thing to having been there, summarizing all we heard from administration representatives and all we said afterwards about how to act on what we had learned.

On May 12th, we heard from 7 officials: Mike Strautmanis, Chief of Staff for the Office of Public Engagement; Buffy Wicks, Deputy Director, Office of Public Engagement; Joseph Reinstein, Deputy Social Secretary, Trooper Sanders, Deputy Director of Policy and Projects, Office of the First Lady; Mario Garcia Durham, Director of Presenting at the National Endowment for the Arts; Tina Tchen, Director of Public Engagement; and Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President, who serves as liaison for both disability and arts.

It was an extremely interesting event. As I wrote immediately after, most of us were buoyed up just by being there. Having been dissed for so long by the Bush administration (and many of its predecessors), being invited to enter what those who briefed us called “The People’s House” seemed a remarkable indication of the potential for change. As the report explains,

Overall, we came away feeling that there would be room at the table for artists and creative organizers to take part in conversations about relevant policies and programs; and that we were being challenged to come up with promising and attractive ideas about how artists can work for the administration’s agenda and how artists’ work can be integral to national recovery.

I don’t underestimate the challenge. People who understand community cultural development work firsthand know the remarkable power of well-prepared and skilled community artists to contribute to any public initiative that needs to engage people deeply and help them see themselves as part of positive change. We were hoping this knowledge would precede us to the White House, that we would be met there by key policy people in community development, green jobs, rural and urban affairs, and so on. But the prevailing definition of art was far narrower: as it turned out, the longest presentation (and the most sophisticated in terms of understanding culture as a crucible for change) came from the White House Social Secretary’s office, the people who create parties, ceremonies and celebrations.

This is not negligible. The White House figures large in the symbolism of our cultural life. The air of Camelot that gathered around the Kennedy administration nearly fifty years ago was due in no small part to the appearance of stellar high arts figures such as cellist and conductor Pablo Casals at state dinners. The evening after our briefing, the White House hosted its first-ever poetry jam, with spoken-word and musical performances unlike anything those hallowed halls had previously experienced. During the briefing, some participants suggested that such events could resonate with allied local activities explicitly linked to the White House (e.g., a national poetry jam timed for the same night), creating a symbolic cascade. I’m even planning to write to the Social Secretary to suggest an event!

But in comparison with what we know we can do, even in the Obama administration, the dominant idea of the public interest in culture is underdeveloped, and now is our opportunity to enlarge it. There’s always a fine line between ambition and grandiosity (I keep driving over it myself, feeling the bump as I cross the white line). But whichever side of the line you place the current mood among activist artists, we are feeling the moment. Here are the final lines of a poem Carlton Turner read to bring our day to a close:

In the womb of the mother spirit of creation we gestate

On this occasion of engagement she gives birth to us
the evolution of possibility

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for
Movers in the spirit
Lovers of justice

We, the soul stirrers
The magic makers
The pulse takers of an ailing nation

This is our charge

I took part in a “think-tank” at the Center on Age and Community, a structured brainstorm involving artists and people who work with elders and their families in long-term care facilities, advocacy organizations and other roles and settings. Our brief was to look at “transforming activities in long-term care,” “activities” being all the things that people in such circumstances are offered to do: from sorting poker chips to telling stories to making art.

That started out sounding like a fairly narrow charge, but like almost any question you stare at long enough, it expanded to fill all the available conceptual space. It become evident that addressing the conditions that induce caregivers—whether at home or in facilities—to end up parking elders like abandoned cars, interventions are needed at every level: relieving the burden on families who must care for aging relatives with diminished capacity, bringing about “culture change” in services for older adults, from indifference and warehousing to “choice, dignity, respect, self-determination and purposeful living.” The chain of need extends all the way up to a transformation in our collective awareness, reframing aging as a universal human process rather than a medical problem.

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I have some advice for Rocco Landesman, the newly appointed Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, but first I have to convince myself it is worth offering.

In case he reads this, I’ll summarize my advice up front: Rocco Landesman, the intelligence, risk-taking and independence for which you are admired on Broadway will be of little use to this country unless you recognize how much you have to learn about the public interest in culture and democracy, committing to educate yourself, pronto. I sincerely hope you accept this challenge.

It’s funny about the NEA: this teeny-weeny federal agency, which invests well under a dollar in the arts per capita, packs a powerful symbolic punch.

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I’m on the road with time for just a quick note to tell you that on May 12th, more than sixty activist artists, community artists, creative organizers and uncategorizable fellow travelers took part in a White House briefing I helped to organize. Actually, it was two meetings in one: I’d proposed a meeting of community arts people focused on cultural recovery, and some colleagues had proposed a meeting of artists and organizers focusing on moving the administration’s agenda by creative means, and with the White House’s encouragement, the two events were combined into one major extravaganza.

For the first time in decades, the meeting opens a conversation between the administration in Washington and artists who are committed to cultural recovery and cultural sustainability. After eight years of Bush, we had to keep pinching ourselves to believe we had entered a moment in which dialogue is actually possible. There’s a lot to learn all around, and won’t that be fun?

You can read a short article in the Washington Post and a more personal account on Facebook from Michael Nolan, who took part. More from me later. For now, here we all are on the steps of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. That’s me slightly right of center in a red jacket, sharing a laugh with my friend Dudley Cocke.

Coming up next: Why is culture the only arena in which total lack of policy expertise is no impediment to being appointed head of a major government agency: Rocco Landesman is named NEA Chair?

I’ve been waiting a week for the obituary on Augusto Boal that appeared in Saturday’s New York Times. He passed away last Saturday at the age of 78.

Boal was a giant figure and a defining influence on the practice of art that is simultaneously the practice of politics (and though some Boal disciples might disagree with me, the practice of spirituality), which is the intersection that feels most like home to me too. I was waiting for the obituary because I wanted to see if even the departure from this life of a person of tremendous importance to those of my ilk would be noticed by mainstream media that often seem complacently willing to skip over everything that lacks official imprimatur. (And if you question the challenge in my tone, go the Times site and search for “Augusto Boal.” Despite the fact that there are many theaters and even international organizations devoted to Boal’s ideas, in the archives of the New York Times, there’s barely a reference newer than the 70s.)

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It’s been an astoundingly busy time: I’ve inhaled a giant lungful of the air of possibility concerning cultural recovery, exhaling endless pro bono projects, days speeding by like spring petals on the wind. (Nagging thoughts of livelihood float like rain clouds overhead, but never mind for now.)

Busy on the inside too. Something persuaded me that it was time to take stock, so in the interstices of my tasks (it seems I get all my thinking done in airports lately), I wrote a kind of spiritual autobiography, scrutinizing my journey thus far in the hope of discovering what I have learned. So there it is again: every moment has been instructive, of course, the delights as well as the despair, but hands down, the most important lessons have emerged from difficulty.

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The most-forwarded article award for this week goes to “The Creativity Stimulus” by my friend Jeff Chang, which appears in the May 4, 2009 edition of The Nation. It’s a concise and compelling argument for the vital role that artists and artists-activists can play in democratic renewal and national recovery:

Every moment of major social change requires a collective leap of imagination. Political transformation must be accompanied not just by spontaneous and organized expressions of unrest and risk but by an explosion of mass creativity. Little wonder that two of the most maligned jobs during the forty years after Richard Nixon’s 1968 election sealed the backlash of the “silent majority” were community organizer and artist.

Obama was both. So why haven’t community organizers and artists been offered a greater role in the national recovery?

You’ll find the article imminently forwardable because, in a mere 1500 words, Jeff succeeds in invoking artists’ role in creating the conditions for an Obama victory, the matrix of community-based cultural groups that nurtures creative activism, the need for public funding, the need for reform in the cultural industries’ “privatization of imagination,” and the example of Gilberto Gil, Brazil’s former culture minister, braiding them all together into an inspiring call for a new “creativity stimulus policy.”

Isn’t it funny how some ideas seem to bud forever, then suddenly burst into flower, shattering petals everywhere? One thing that especially tickles me is that “The Creativity Stimulus” headlines this issue’s cover. The Nation, that venerable journal of progressive politics, has long been known for relegating culture to the back of the book. Making this the cover-story underscores one of the article’s points, that the work of artists captures attention and imagination, helping to move minds (whether toward social change or the purchase of a magazine). I can only hope this marks a reversal of that longtime editorial trend, a U-turn into treating cultural activism with the seriousness it deserves.

Now forward the article, please!