“When I use a word,’Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” (Lewis G. Carroll, Through The Looking Glass)

Certain words seem to be evergreen in artworlds: quality, excellence, innovation. We use them so often, it’s natural to assume that we know what they mean. But whenever I hear them, the first thing I want to know is this: who’s talking? Each of these words can only be understood as a comparison: This is an excellent work of art; that isn’t. And comparisons can only be made by a specific judging intelligence: In my opinion, this is an excellent work of art; and that isn’t. Without considering the source of judgment—and the purpose for which it has been made—we can’t have more than a vague idea of what is being said.

I want to look at the word innovation in this artworld context. I will tell you a few stories, show you a few facets, and ask a few questions that I hope you will want to ask too.

I do a lot of speaking at university arts departments. Sometimes I am asked to do critique sessions with individual students; they get to check off a requirement, and the department gets full value from its investment in my fees and expenses. The experience that sticks most firmly in my mind was a sequence of encounters with graduate students in painting and sculpture. All three were young women, and all three greeted me at the doors to their studios with the don’t hit me expression I associate with those who’ve been abused. They showed me work, I asked questions and shared my responses, and at the end of the session, all three volunteered that the experience had been nothing like prior critiques. Two of them cried as they said this.

Naturally, I asked how a typical critique session had gone. What questions were asked? What observations were made? I’m betting you can guess the most popular questions: What are your influences here? With which artists or movements to you feel an affinity? How would you situate your work in art history? One young woman, who made lightly surreal etchings of human-animal hybrids, beautifully executed, told me that her professor said she seemed to be interested in “mere beauty,” and was she truly serious about her art?

You know what the most popular response was? I find your work derivative. Evidently this was said without irony, even when preceded by a raft of questions about the influences from which the work derived.

I thought four things in response: first, I wondered how many arts professors saw their work as an opportunity to enact on their students the cynical discouragement that had been meted out to themselves (perhaps in the name of toughening them up)—and in the case of the last professor, to punish a student for his own inability to draw beautifully. Second, I wondered at the aggregate impact on young artists of this pressure to see one’s work as a dialogue with art history rather than with the world. In any discipline or medium, when artists are encouraged to understand that their primary creative relationship is with other artists, dead or alive, the field of possibility narrows, the discourse becomes cramped, and the whole enterprise shrinks to a game of inside-baseball. Third, I felt the sadness of an arts education in which the most important educational aim—to help a student most fully realize his or her own essence and potential, without comparison with others—had been so entirely forgotten. And fourth, I wondered how and why derivativeness (the opposite of innovation) had become both a virtue and a flaw.

So when the word innovation surfaces I want to know: who’s asking?

Critics often approach work with a grid of influences in their heads, silently ticking off those boxes as they go: that reminds me of X, this of Y, and so on. If a play offers a fresh frisson to someone who has previously seen everything—well, that’s a high recommendation, but not necessarily an ultimate or even general value for those who don’t carry this history of theater in their heads.

Funders constantly search for a knife that will allow them to pare the worthy few away from the great mass of perfectly valid requests they receive. Excellence is always a great tool for that purpose because its subjectivity renders it immune to invalidation. Innovation is almost as good, since it too is in the eye of the beholder.

I have two quarrels with each of these knives: first, they are almost always allowed to stand without interrogation. What do you mean by that? ought to be the first question after a verdict on either excellence or innovation is offered. But some people find it hard to challenge the pronouncements of those who can affect their funding or reputation. Second, the way they are deployed is often so constrained by a conventional framework that the critics and funders wielding these knife-words fail to see how their own prejudices and blind-spots have annealed into judgments.

I am often asked to speak about socially engaged art: projects that emerge from a collaboration between a theater and other community members, for instance; or that aim to awaken empathy and imagination concerning a pressing social issue; or that embody and express voices that aren’t often heard on main-stages, and in that intention, enlarge the very notion of art. Almost always, in the Q&A that follows, someone in the audience says, “I just don’t feel that excellence is the aim, because some of that art isn’t very good.”

Well, yes. Some of that art isn’t very good, and no matter who is judging—audience members, critics, other artists—some of the art displayed in marble halls between red-velvet curtains isn’t very good either. It’s just that the sight of all that velvet tends to suppress judgment. My rough guess is that when work is considered in light of its own aims and criteria, the range of judges would turn up roughly the same proportion of excellent to not regardless of venue and framing.

Just so with innovation. There, two questions are needed: What do you mean by that, and why do you care? If something is creative, powerful, moving, engaging, thought-provoking, activating, or touches our hearts or minds in other ways, what value is added if an authority deems it innovative? Other than its utility as a knife, serving the felt need to pare away some work so as to give attention and resources to a gatekeeper’s manageable number of other works, what independent value does innovation have? I’m not asserting that there’s no answer; but if we sever the concept of innovation from its utility for critics and funders, a convincing answer has yet to be offered.

By now, I imagine most artists interested in this theme are familiar with Jonathan Lethem’s tour-de-force 2007 essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which makes the undeniable point that everything is derivative, even when the artist is unaware of borrowing, and ends with an acknowledgement of all the phrases he “stole, warped, and cobbled together” to make his essay.

Given all that, if we are to accept a pronouncement that’s as ultimately indefensible as a thumbs up or down on innovation, we should at least enlarge the category. Way too often, those deeply aligned with a received idea of innovation fail to see that making theater in new places, or with very different people, or for different purposes entails just as much innovation as making it with new technologies, time-shifts, or other formal experiments. And when something that matters is really riding on the verdict—a grant, access to a venue, a critic’s impact on audiences—a narrow definition of innovation does active harm.

Every field has words that function as knives. I’ve just written two books devoted in large part to deconstructing the edifices of assumption and narrow-mindedness that litter our art worlds: The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave. If you’re in New York on May 23rd or Berkeley on June 2nd, please come to my book launches. I think I’ve got something new to say, but it’s the soundness of my ideas and observations and not their newness that will make them worth considering.

Kenny Neal, “That Knife Don’t Cut No More.”

You cut me bad
but oh, I’ve been hurt before
and one thing I know for sure,
that old knife don’t cut no more.

Last night, almost done reading one of my two new books, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, my partner said this: “You’re a feather-ruffler, aren’t you?”

Well, sure. Speaking truth to—and about—power has been one of my lifelong habits. It’s too late to stop now even if I wanted to—which I don’t.

I thought there was a note of concern in my sweetheart’s voice when he dubbed me a “feather-ruffler.” But I reassured him that I’ve survived intact so far and intend to keep on. I’m used to concern being voiced both by people who care about me and those who dislike what I have to say. And I understand why: they are noticing which way the wind blows.

In the decades during which I’ve felt called to raise my voice in defense of liberty, justice, and equity, I’ve seen a quite remarkable expansion of the chilling effect, a mechanism whereby fear instills self-censorship until self-censorship becomes second nature, masquerading as mere prudence, as the expected thing. When I speak on this subject, one quip always gets a laugh (followed by a gulp). “We don’t need much overt censorship in the country,” I say, “by now, censorship is the most decentralized element of public policy. We do it to ourselves without even being asked.” (In The Culture of Possiblity, I write about the series of political inoculations that produced this symptom.)

So when a case of overt censorship comes into view, it’s big news. There’s big news in the latest New Yorker, with Jane Mayer’s account of how PBS, ITVS (the Independent Television Service, a funding and producing organization for independent public television productions), and other public broadcasting entities participated in squelching Carl Deal’s and Tia Lessin’s documentary, Citizen Koch. Brendan Fischer’s piece at the Center for Media and Democracy’s site is the most thorough account I’ve seen.

Since David Koch became the poster-boy for right-wing zillionaires buying public opinion—in the Koch brothers’ case, through massive lobbying for dirty energy and a vast funding campaign masquerading as a grassroots Tea Party movement, among other things—he has come under scrutiny. Mayer’s piece describes the sharp discomfort of public broadcasters and funders at a series of nonfiction films focusing on David Koch, who has also been a generous patron of establishment art and media organizations. Indeed, until recently, Koch sat on the board of WNET and was expected to give a great deal of money to its capital campaign.

By the time Citizen Koch turned up in ITVS’s pipeline, Koch had been deeply offended by the airing on Independent Lens of Alex Gibney’s Park Avenue: Money, Power and The American Dream, focusing on Koch and other the ultra-rich residents of a single Manhattan highrise. Mayer’s article details the pains WNET officials took to warn, inoculate, and placate Koch before that broadcast; but to their credit, they let it go forward despite his protests. Ironically, throwing Citizen Koch under the bus didn’t help: Koch resigned from the WNET board a few days ago, taking his dangled donations with him.

Although I am not currently a denizen of the independent media world, I used to do a great deal of work for media makers and funders, including ITVS. I know something about that culture, which has a built-in chilling effect. U.S. public broadcasting has always been remarkably anemic and underfunded compared to the public television presence of nearly every other nation. Most of the cuts to an already-weak system have come since the Reagan years. They stem from right-wing opposition to any media presence that isn’t funded by commercials: worship the marketplace fervently enough and you get to thinking that even freedom of expression ought to be bought and sold. Today, only 12 percent of PBS’s funding comes from public sources, rendering a system that ought to be entirely free of commercial control into something rather like a commercial TV network that gets a little help from taxpayers.

After a thousand cuts and several decades as the target on which far-right ideologues practice their attack techniques, people in public broadcasting tend to be gunshy. On the one hand, it’s remarkable that under such circumstances, controversial material does get aired. I’ve seen public TV people go to bat for cutting-edge work even though they felt they were risking their own security. But I’ve also seen a lot of work get toned down through a vetting and editorial process that’s supposed to be about making the work good, not tame. Jane Mayer has painted an accurate picture of a system in which too many decisions are constrained by the need to placate the right or the rich, and too many of the officials whose role it is to make and implement those determinations have sunk so far into their own cover-story that they are able to assert without blushing that this isn’t censorship, just realism.

My own reputation for feather-ruffling emerges from precisely such situations, where I am able to utter truths that everyone in the room knows, but many remain silent, having been taught that there are terrible consequences to too much free speech.

Why should I fear? What can they do to me? I’m not wikileaking classified documents or otherwise committing civil disobedience in the name of freedom of information (whatever you think about that). I’m just sharing observations and opinions about issues that seem to me squarely in the public interest. Even though some people seem to have forgotten it, we still have the right to free speech in this country. It was hard-won by our forebears, and periodically in our history, it’s been rescued from the temporary grip of witchhunters.

The terrible thing about the chilling effect is that it is seldom based on a realistic assessment of consequences. Instead, as people like Koch throw their economic power around, they magnify their images and others’ imagination of the consequences of crossing them grows. People scare themselves. I don’t think public TV’s censorship will hurt Citizen Koch too much in the long run: in the digital age, it’s possible to seize a great deal of attention by promoting your work as “the film PBS didn’t want you to see.” But it will hurt PBS, ITVS, WNET and all of those whose duty is to guard free expression and whose behavior has put it in greater jeopardy.

K’naan’s version of Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side.”

What comes to mind when I write that someone has used words as blunt instruments? Insults or arguments maybe, the kind of hate-speech that pushes you away? But today I’m thinking of something slightly different: phrases and concepts that come pre-embedded with coded meanings that are seldom questioned. Recently, I’ve seen a bunch of them deployed in ways that block insight and progress. Let me offer a few examples.

“Artists equate to gentrification.” Like other blunt rhetorical instruments, this one contains a half-truth. There are many examples of artists moving into hard-pressed neighborhoods in search of cheap rent and disused commercial space; fast-forward a few years and galleries and performance spaces have filled out storefront vacancies, bars and restaurants have multiplied, and trendsetters with spending capacity are scouring the vacancies left by local families who can longer afford to live there.

The accusation gets thrown at artists and organizations contemplating a move into one of these neighborhoods. The typical response is either slinking off in shame or adopting a kind of willful blindness and forging ahead. But are those the only choices: move in and push others out or move on?

This is yet another manifestation of a familiar tendency in this country’s political discourse, the repeated conversion of public issues to private troubles (to borrow a concept of C. Wright Mills that I love). That way they can more easily be hidden, dismissed, and ignored. The real issues have to do with policy and planning, economic inequality, and a market-driven culture that privileges profit over people.

It’s just not as simple as the equation of artists and gentrification wants to make it. No urban neighborhood is static: go back a generation or three and the complexion, class character, and fabric of just about any block will bring surprises. Some neighborhoods rise, some fall, but they all change. People don’t live in a museum: anything you might do to freeze the fluidity natural to urban life is likely to lead to stagnation. After all, some of the ingredients of what we call gentrification can be positive: more amenities, safer streets, more economic opportunity. The big downside of gentrification is displacement. People get priced out of their own neighborhoods; they feel uncomfortable or unwelcome on streets that once felt familiar. Change was desired, but when it comes, someone else reaps the benefits while those who are displaced pay the price.

Often, I see people accepting the sleight-of-hand that converts this social mess to a question of private choice. Artists or organizations move in, knowing they may be part of the common pattern that ends in forced resettlement (for the artists too, when rents rise far beyond the affordable rates that enticed them in the first place). They don’t talk about it too much. Maybe they try to be friendly, even offering their gifts to the neighborhood in some way. But no one really believes that a sustaining neighborliness will prevail.

Instead it feels like a slow-motion accident: you can see the days coming when a cup of coffee costs $5 and swarms of fit, fashionable young adults line up for the privilege of buying it. After all, when issues are reduced to a toggle-switch—move in and be an evil gentrifier or stay away altogether—there’s not much incentive to deeper scrutiny.

The antidote? Unpack the concept of gentrification, converting a blunt instrument to a sharp tool for understanding. Ask harder questions: what can artists and arts organizations do to resist being used by speculators whose aim is to profit from displacement? How can they engage with their neighbors in understanding the forces at work and devising ways to have an impact on the neighborhood’s future, vitality and prosperity that aren’t driven by displacement? How can they build relationships that invite collaboration rather than defaulting to mistrust? How can the discoveries made in their own neighborhood work their way back up the policy pipeline to affect the actions—the regulations, programs, funding pools—taken in other neighborhoods?

“Ethnicity equates to cultural integration.” I was in a meeting where someone bemoaned the pervasive failure to value culture’s power. People don’t yet get the transformative force of image, music, drama and other art forms, this person said. They don’t yet get what’s to be gained from bringing artists with their gifts of innovation, improvisation, resourcefulness, and imagination to the table when important public issues are at stake.

Someone said, “That’s not true for all communities; our community understands this.” Another rhetorical blunt instrument with a half-truth at its core. In general, the community life of people whose cultural value is under attack—immigrants, racial and sexual minorities and many others—is more lavishly threaded with artistic expressions. Songs and celebrations take on multiple meanings, carrying their traditional messages of commemoration, for instance, but also asserting the right to culture in unmistakeable cadences. Sometimes there are special roles for professional artists, and sometimes the invitation to make culture is open, equal, and universal. But either way, a truth pointed out in a 1996 UN Report continues to be true: The World Commission on Culture and Development wrote that, “people turn to culture as a means of self-definition and mobilization and assert their local cultural values. For the poorest among them, their own values are often the only thing that they can assert.”

The cultivation of traditional customs, festivals, and cultural practices is often more robust and determined in immigrant communities of all races than in comparable urban communities in the home country, where cultural identity and a sense of belonging are not so strongly contested. But that doesn’t translate to each and every person. In any community, regardless of ethnic identity or immigration status, numbers of people feel disconnected from the music, movement, stories, or imagery others associate with their ethnic category. Perhaps they’ve been drawn into the rootlessness fed by commercial culture. Recently a friend posted her astonishment on Facebook when an evidently Latino teenager passing her family in a public park said, “I hate people who speak Spanish.” He’s not the only one cut off from what might be of value in heritage, not the only one missing out on how it might be renewed today for the benefit of the living. Nor are most of the artists that I know in these communities any more likely to be invited by the powers-that-be to take meaningful part in making general social policy (as opposed to, say, providing entertainment at a political event).

It’s possible to make reasonable generalizations based on outward signifiers: I don’t know any white person who’s experienced a direct equivalent to being pulled over for “driving while black,” for instance, but I know many African Americans who have. But the type of disconnection expressed by that boy in the park is too widely distributed for many generalizations to stick to large, blunt ethnic categories such as “Asian,” Native American,” or “white.”

The antidote to any kind of essentialism is particularity. Unpack the blunt categories of race or ethnicity to make room for the truth that individual experiences and perceptions—including perceptions of culture itself—differ just as much within categories as between them. The emergent world holds a wide space for commonality and for huge particularity of difference; our understanding needs to be sharp enough to see that.

“We don’t have the metric for culture and social change.” This one drives me nuts. I’ve written many times (most recently in my new book, The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future) on this challenge, which is something like a locked-room mystery: no exit if you accept the given parameters.

Philanthropy in general is risk-averse (which is kind of ironic for an enterprise which amounts to investing in what has not yet happened). Many funders now want extremely detailed accounts of proposed projects, including the prediction of specific outcomes should funding be received. The fear of looking foolish is pretty pervasive in this society, distorting our notion of success in many ways. But among the risk-averse, the metric-obsessed subgroup of philanthropists really has it bad: above all, they don’t want to be seen as betting on the wrong horse.

Naturally, many grant applicants take these requirements at face-value: what else are they to do? They search for ironclad indicators that will prove to funders that a socially engaged art project justifies investment. This snipe-hunt ignores major obstacles. Cultural change aggregates over time (just like any meaningful change), frustrating the desire for immediate results. What claims can provably be made for a one-year grant? In a complex situation with many coexisting factors, it’s nearly impossible to prove which ones have clear impact: not every correlation is a cause, not by a longshot. The more people try to find the metric, the clearer it becomes that it’s not actual proof being sought, but a sort of gentlemen’s agreement in which funder and grantee/applicant tacitly agree to treat some metric as plausible, even if its logic is holey as Swiss cheese.

The implicit assumption behind this blunt rhetorical instrument is that in other contexts, the metric exists and dependably delivers. Sometimes it does, although there’s always a tautology in measuring what can be measured. Still, if your metric is babies vaccinated or malaria cases reduced, what you measure actually says something about what you get (but not necessarily about the priority, ethics, or depth of your approach). But if your goal is to cultivate community, bridge social barriers, or enable self-expression, it’s not at all clear that the typically proferred metrics capture or convey value in any meaningful sense.

Under these circumstances—and to me, this is now the crux of the matter—the demand to produce the metric is akin to spinning straw into gold: an impossible and impossibly preoccupying task that provides plausible deniability for funders who didn’t really want to fund culture as a path to social change in the first place. The antidote? Unpack the metrics syndrome, bring the debate out into the open, and sharpen this blunt instrument into a tool for understanding a broken system which is now being further damaged by an obsession with the quantification of absolutely everything. Take inspiration from the most forward-looking investors in new ideas in technology, who understand the need to embrace risk and who know that the best investment is in people, not numbers.

I was moved by this subtle dance film, Well Contested Sites, a collaboration between a group of previously incarcerated men, performing artists, choreographer Amie Dowling and filmmaker Austin Forbord. The collaborators say, “several of the artists/performers have been incarcerated and it is by drawing on these men’s physical memories that Well Contested Sites connects audiences to the impact of incarceration. Not a blunt instrument.

John Trudell knows how to unpack blunt instruments. “Crazy Horse” from his album Bone Days.

Both books can be bought for a 20% discount from a special page, a gift to my dear readers: to buy The Wave or The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future, just click the links in this paragraph and enter the discount code 76KPUKT8 when you check out.

The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future is non-fiction. One of its two main parts features 28 short chapters (most no more than a page or two) exploring emergent knowledge from many realms including commerce, anthropology, social science, medicine, spirituality, cognitive science, art, public policy, and others. Each chapter highlights stories, research, and emerging developments that point to a specific public interest in cultivating empathy, imagination, and community through artistic and cultural creativity. The Wave is speculative fiction: not utopian, because everything in it is doable, but a glimpse of this possible world that I hope will spark other social imaginations.

At my site, you’ll find testimonials from readers like Eric Booth, Peter Coyote, Bob Holman, Lucy Lippard, Van Jones, Jerry Michalski, Raymond Tymas-Jones, and Gloria Steinem. I’m thrilled to have the endorsement of these stellar individuals.

If you live near New York or the San Francisco Bay Area, please come to my launches: May 23rd at NYU and June 2 at the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley.

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, you know what I care most about are awareness and choice. I see our vast potential; I see our capacity to actualize it; I see that we are on the cusp of a new paradigm in which creativity, social imagination, and empathy will be given their true value. But I have absolutely no idea whether we will reach the tipping-point. That’s up to you, to me, to all of us.

I wrote these books to share a perspective that I hope will help others see the same potentials, discovering new ways to enact them. If you share that aim, please tell others about both new books. Tweet this blog. Like my Facebook page for the books. Suggest me as a speaker. Introduce me to new networks. If books can make a difference—and goodness knows they’ve made a huge difference in my life—I hope and trust these can help.

And I’m thrilled to be back at blogging. There are so many things I haven’t had time to write about this spring: how eager we were to have a story to fit the bombings in Boston, how almost any story—diehard IRA, white supremacists, Kazakh terrorists—would do, as if these neat tales actually explain anything. How George Bush discovered art….

I’m writing this heading home from Philadelphia, where the lilacs, dogwoods, redbuds, tulips, azaleas and other glorious blooms took my breath away. I didn’t have much time to walk, but at the back of my mind when I did was the awareness of people who have passed away in recent weeks. Bob Edgar, a lifelong fighter for social justice, will be hugely missed. Richie Havens’ passing seems somehow to herald the end of an era. I can’t precisely describe the rough sweetness of his music, but you can hear it in his take on this aptly named Beatles song “In My Life.” I honor the creativity of these great spirits who inspire me to repeat my constant mantra: I don’t want to waste my precious time on this earth. If I succeeded in my intentions, my new books are encoded with that message on every page. I hope you’ll want to see for yourself.

I can’t embed “In My Life” from YouTube, so here’s a wonderful medly of love songs sung by Richie Havens, “Tupelo Honey” and “Just Like A Woman.”

READ ABOUT The Culture of Possibility: Art, Artists & The Future and The Wave.

The youngest jumped up and walked to a spot directly opposite my window. He pointed at something on the ground. From my perspective it resembled a small tangle of straw. Talking and gesticulating, he returned to his companions. One followed him back to the spot, then knelt down for an inspection. After a few seconds, he extended his index finger carefully, the way you urge a parakeet to perch on your hand. The bit of straw jumped onto his finger: an insect! The man tiptoed back to the wagon, extending his hand to his companions. The third man placed his own finger parallel to his coworker’s, and for a short time—gently, gently—they passed the insect back and forth hand-to-hand. Then, moving in slow-motion, the rescuer swept his hand back, keeping it parallel to the ground, then swooped it through the air, top-speed. With the energy of that boost, the insect took flight. The four of us watched until we could see it no longer.

I have always been touched by evidence of delicacy, of gentleness, in men whose work entails physical skill and force. I think the sweetness of that contrast for me has something to do with having lost my father in childhood, with my faded memories of ladders and brushes, clanging metal, the chemical smells and soiled rags of his work as a housepainter, with the image of him kneeling down to meet my small self face-to-face. Now it seems to me a parable: the omnipresent possibility of grace even in the hardest places, of beauty surrounded by dust.

Something is happening to me. I can scarcely bear to read the news, that compendium of availability cascades in which the compulsion to repeat whatever bit of fatuous received wisdom occupies the top of the hour takes precedence over considered thought, a felt sense of reality, a healthy respect for the depth of our own ignorance. I am each day more interested in justice, kindness, and transparency; and each day less willing to believe that politics as it is practiced in the realm of money and media will advance any of those conditions.

When I’ve shared this with friends, a surprisingly large number of them have reported the same gathering sense of transformation.

Before you lob accusations of escapism, allow me to say that I am thoroughly familar with the argument that we have a duty to consume the headlines, that it is a form of citizenship all of us must exercise. I absolutely agree that an uninformed democracy is unlikely to be a democracy at all. I read, I listen, I study the world and think about what it means. I just don’t focus my study on information as commodity, the fast-food kind that addicts with an excess of faux suspense and urgent emptiness. What interests me now is the considered opinion that has taken time to produce and deserves time to integrate, and the habits of mind that are learned through what might be called slow media.

For a long time, I have been counseling controlled consumption of mass media, especially sounds and images beamed by commercial enterprises from the center to the margins, animated chiefly by the need to fill time between commercials. I have seen too much of the consequences of media poisoning. I think of the young people who ask for advice when I speak at universities: What can I do, they ask me, to avoid becoming cynical and depressed? Before I answer, I ask how much news they are consuming, whether via TV or online alternatives. Their lists astonish me. I tell them to go on a media diet—cold turkey if they can, or a severely limited dosage if they can’t live without it—and see if that helps. So far, the answer is always yes. At any age, mainlining media-driven fear paralyzes and demoralizes us. I haven’t mainlined for a very long time. My challenge now is to get myself to consume even a tiny dose, and I feel on the verge of abandoning that.

Instead, I value my refusal to collude in the colonization of my own mind by a system dedicated to the commercialization of absolutely everything and to distracting the populace from noticing what is being done in our name. Awareness is fragile. That tangle of straw that owed its flight to the unearned grace of three burly men who took the time to notice: that is my mind, and yours too. The parable of the baggage-handlers has a moral. I like the way William Carlos Williams expressed it in his poem, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

When we are awake, our true condition is radical amazement as described by Abraham Joshua Heschel: “The greatest hindrance to knowledge is our adjustment to conventional notions, to mental cliches. Wonder or radical amazement, the state of maladjustment to words and notions, is, therefore, a prerequisite for authentic awareness…” Whatever nourishes this feeling, that’s what I want to attend to now. I have no intention of abandoning my drive to act on behalf of justice, kindness, and transparency; I know that it matters most when radical amazement fuels it.

Consider this beautiful version of “Whispering Pines” by Lucinda Williams, from the new Levon Helm tribute album, Love for Levon.”

I see his point, of course. If the course of events on a global scale were actually determined by the blind-spots and shortsightedness of individuals who—like those running my friend’s workplace—had been promoted to their level of incompetence, I doubt a single train would run on time.

Luckily for us, saving grace abounds. Most systems, even those as localized as a workplace, are equipped with wiggle room and other resilience factors that prevent any individual’s ineptitude from carrying the day. When you scale up to whole societies and transnational systems, the insulation tends to scale proportionately. Certain principles seem to be woven into the fabric of reality: things that have stood the test of time are likely to last, for instance. And all of this works to the advantage of life on earth despite the massive disregard, disability, and disingenous self-dealing that marks our public and private systems of order.

I told my friend that when I thought about all that could go wrong in the big world, I usually found myself in the opposite position: awestruck at how little of it actually comes to pass. I’m not minimizing a single one of our many social and environmental problems: a lot goes wrong—way too much of it due to human misdeeds—and the suffering it produces is deeply consequential. But enough goes right so that the deep desires of human beings can continue to be enacted: parents cherish their children; lovers revel in love; food is raised, cooked, and eaten; communities form, worship what they value most, and renew the legacy inherited from the past for the benefit of the future.

It’s been a super-busy time for me, getting two books out, traveling for work and much else. What do you let go of when it’s crunch time? For me it’s the news. You can read my reasons in the lines I wrote above. Collectively, the news as actually configured puts us in the state my wary friend described. A digest of any day’s headlines can be boiled down to two words: Watch out!

Are you scared yet?

I still get a glimpse of the news secondhand from my friends, of course. One friend has been following the selection of a new Pope with rapt attention. Yesterday news from the Vatican came in a puff of white smoke announcing the election of the Argentinian Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (the first non-European in 1200 years, although his parents were Italian, so the claim is perhaps a semi-technicality). He is said to be an austere individual who has spoken out for those suffering in poverty. He’s also an intense conservative, strongly supporting church policies on abortion, same-sex marriage and adoption, and the ordination of women, and often advocating for them in secular contexts. He rejects the liberation theology that embraces not just compassion for the poor but change in the conditions that produce poverty. There is talk that he was complicit (at least by remaining silent) along with others in the church hierarchy in the face of the Argentine dictatorship’s abuses.

The French have a saying, Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (or in English, The more things change, the more they stay the same).

My friend’s interest is rooted in the fact that he was compelled to endure many years of Catholic-school education (although he is not Catholic). For me, his stories of beatings, humiliations, penalties and punishments seem more revealing than the inside-baseball reportage of hermetically sealed brocaded rooms, the baroque trappings of a system that designates a group of men who have eschewed the pleasures and challenges of ordinary life on earth to dictate key conditions shaping others’ lives. In exactly the same way, I choose stories of individual lives on the journey to freedom over the inside-baseball stories of—say— the sequester staged in DC. I defend both political and religious liberty without reservation: your worship is your choice, absolutely, as is your vote. But I feel no more obligation to genuflect to the backroom political dealings of religious power than to the secular trade in money and influence that has shaped this nation’s political realities nor to any other star-chamber system.

Instead, I want to keep my eyes and ears focused on the human-scale stories that sustain us, that provide an antidote to the fear that is the media’s stock in trade. This past weekend, I visited Bloomsburg, PA, to take part in the opening weekend of the Bloomsburg Theater Ensemble’s Flood Stories, Too, a play by former BTE member Jerry Stropnicky based on local people’s stories of the flood of 2011, which inundated a large number of homes (and thereby, lives). In the talk I gave after the Saturday matinee, I quoted my friend Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theater in Appalachia, one project of Appalshop, the umbrella organization for a bunch of cultural projects centered in Whitesburg, Kentucky. I interviewed Dudley a few years ago for a long essay I wrote about the Thousand Kites Project, “a community-based performance, web, video and radio project centered on the United States prison system.” He talked about the importance of telling our own stories:

I always make the proposition that we are the storytelling animal and that language and story has been our selective advantage, and that’s why we’re still sitting here having espresso in the afternoon.

There have always been these contested narratives. If story is how we understand ourselves and understand the world, then there’s always going to be these contests of stories. If one just goes to a neutral mode and isn’t active in telling and trying to search for one’s own story individually and then in group, then somebody else will be there with a story and be there ready to tell your story within their story. It’s like a guy in Choteau, Montana—a dry land farmer—told me: “We got so much incoming. We want to send something out.”

In every community—in every nation, every faith community, every family, perhaps in every human heart—there is a contested narrative. The world being as full of possibility as it is, one side says, “Watch out! Be very afraid!” and encourages us to defer to those who want to shape our stories to serve their own interests. The other side says, “Tell your story. I’m listening and I know your story matters most when it is told in your own voice and words.” To me, this is the meta-question of our moment. If we stop cooperating with the fearmongers’ directives, then change in structures of consolidated power—religious or secular—become much more possible to imagine, and once imagined, to enact.

I spoke to (or eavesdropped on) quite a few audience members in Bloomsburg after the two performances of Flood Stories, Too that I witnessed. Every comment supported the deep truth that enables me to take a break from the canned news that broadcasts from the center to the margins of our society, addicting us to the precise wave-length of anxiety that serves its operators. Those comments confirmed my impression that BTE members, like so many dedicated community-based artists I know, fit the description I shared in my talk at Bloomsburg University: they embody “the sacred trust of returning a community’s own stories to its members in a form they can use.” Not a form that will scare them into buying products or waiting for authoritative orders. Not a form that will reinforce the might and right to rule of the powerful. But a form that says that our stories matter, that the way we shape our stories shapes our lives, and that we possess the power to write those stories for ourselves.

Spring is peaking here. I walked by the Bay today listening to a great cut from The Audience With Betty Carter, a medley of “Can’t We Talk It Over” and “Either It’s Love Or It Isn’t,” which fit my subject to a T. But YouTube disappointed me. Still, how can you go wrong with “Spring Can Really Hang You Up The Most”?

I have been thinking hard about this lately, as friends share with me the work of artists whose approach is embedded with this knowledge as beads are laid into the wax and wood base of a Huichol mask. And even more as I observe political work that is simultaneously spiritual work and simultaneously art work and the three are braided so closely that it is impossible to pass a hair’s-breadth between them. For instance:

The wonderful media artist Mona Smith (her heritage is Sisseton–Wahpeton Dakota Oyate; check out the Bdote MemoryMap for an interactive embodiment of Dakota people’s relationship to Minnesota) sent me a link to Gyasi Ross’s “A Guide to Idle No More for Dummies,” published last month. It’s a concise and straightforward explication of a movement that is anchored in centuries of resistance to exploitation and expansive in its vision: “this movement belongs to anybody who wants to stand up for the Earth and women and also make a positive change in the community,” Ross writes.

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Hawaii’s Poet Laureate and founder of HawaiiSlam, Kealoha, whose work embodies a rejection of corporate values in favor of the continuity and vitality of indigenous, earth-centered values. I was especially taken with his performance of his poem “Chances,” which captures my own truth too (and probably yours) with its refrain, “What are the chances?”:

I come from a long line of impossibilities
A circumstance that happened to manifest because random chance allowed it to.

Which reminded me of my friend Bob Holman, a wonderful poet who founded The Endangered Languages Poetry Project (and with linguists Daniel Kaufman and Juliette Blevins cofounded the Endangered Language Alliance). Bob has been working on a series of documentaries about endangered languages. The first few videos are available at one of his sites, with a full PBS series to come.

To see a whole range of work that asserts the inseparability of art, spirit, and positive social change, visit the website of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation and click on the link for 2013 Artist Fellowships. You will find writers, media makers, visual artists, dancers, musicians, and others whose work foreshadows the world being born.

I feel very strongly that soon, enough people will perceive this to reach a tipping-point. I can almost see the old divisions start to fall away, crumbling under the weight of their own arbitrariness, freeing our common culture from their grip. But I am impatient for it to happen. I find myself sitting like a mother bird waiting for that first peck to crack the shell and release new life into the world. I think it will help to crack the shell if we name things as they are: to begin saying that a project or organization or event falls into the category of wholeness; rather than choosing between art, politics, and spirit, refusing the distinction and choosing them all.

Beyond all the other ways my heart lifts at this emergent reality is the spirit of generosity than infuses it. None of this work conceals or minimizes the damage done, genocides, colonial powers’ indifference to the cultures they trampled, injuries to Mother Earth and life itself. But neither does it sink to revenge, neither does it become the thing it opposes. When I think about the sheer weight of generosity required to desire the enlightenment of those who have injured you, I understand moral grandeur and the healing it can bring. I breathe in hope grounded in reality.

So much music tells this story but I can’t help myself, readers, I have to offer another Roy Buchanan: art, spirit, politics, “Five String Blues”:

Oh, Jesus, this is my final plea
Yes, Jesus, this is my final plea
You know I’m still beggin’ you
Don’t let the Devil get the best of me

No matter what the field—regardless of whether the seeker is an artist, activist, or falls into another category altogether—I always offer the same response. “Do what gives you pleasure,” I say. “When do you feel most aligned? When do you feel that your gifts are being used most fully? Imagine yourself as a musical instrument: when do you know you are playing the music you were created to make?”

If I had captured them with a camera, I could make a really cool little art piece out of the microexpressions this elicits: delight, puzzlement, renewed delight, skepticism, thrill, anxiety, a perpetually renewing cascade of conflicting feelings. Here’s how I read them: Really? I can be happy? Wait! That sounds selfish! But it would feel so great…just imagine! But why should my feelings matter: don’t I have to listen to those who know best? Can I really have this? I hope so! And so on.

It’s a mini-treatise on our common culture, isn’t it? We’re forever being exhorted to seek happiness through consumption, each proffered purchase promising the beginning of bliss. And we’re forever being told to condition our life-choices on some calculation in which presumed necessity, conventionally accepted odds of success, and expert predictions figure much more prominently than the pleasure of living fully into our natures and capacities.

I recognize that not everyone is granted the opportunity to pursue a vocation that feels more like delight than drudgery. (Believe me, hacking a path through several decades as a self-employed artist and public intellectual has had its longueurs, and still I don’t mistake it for mining coal, sewing piecework, or standing at a cash-register). But even a hard livelihood has moments of grace (if you didn’t read about Trash Dance back in the spring, for instance, check it out now). And it isn’t just a question of livelihood, but also of avocation, passion, and pastime.

Why is my advice to seekers unfailingly the same? For four reasons:

(1) Despite a plethora of expert opinions, computer projections, and authoritative pronouncements, no one really knows a best way to bring about positive social change. In part, that’s because we human beings are so different in character and habit: what reaches me may turn you off and vice versa. As my old friend Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank used to say (riffing from a passage in Isaiah), “Holy, holy, holy is the Mother of Multiplicity.”

(2) Expert opinion gushes and morphs constantly, but pause the flow anywhere for a moment: if you correlate past predictions with actual outcomes, experts tend to fall flat. I greatly admire Philip Tetlock’s work on this, which has shown an inverse correlation between expertise and correct predictions: the more honors, titles, and endowed chairs you have, the more likely you are to ignore your own biases and misread the signs. So why be guided by an expert’s fondness for his or her own opinions? Your guess may be just as good.

(3) The only law I have seen to be observed more often than violated is the law of unintended consequences. So many of the things that afflict us today are rooted in good intentions: our constipated bureaucracies result from the accumulation of checks and balances; our mushrooming prison-industrial complex was justified in the name of public safety; our soul-crushing “teach to the tests” educational system was conditioned on a sincere (if wildly misconceived) desire to improve education; and so on. Think twice about taking actions because they promise fantastic results; the fantasy may play out more as a horror-story than a fairytale. We can never know the longterm consequences of our actions, but we can judge whether they feel deeply aligned, deeply satisfying, as we take them and be guided by that.

(4) You, as one human being in this glorious garden of multiplicity, will have the most energy, capability, and skill if you are aligned with your essence and pleasure. You will have more staying-power instead of getting discouraged when dramatic results fail to show up instantly. What you do will be infused with love, beauty, and meaning, rather than the grudging sense of duty that makes some activism grim and counterproductive. In experiencing the pleasure of being alive and using your gifts fully, you will afford others a glimpse of that possibility, inspiring them to do the same, adding to your positive impact.

I like this Janiva Magness version of “Things Left Undone.”

When your life is over, and you’re reaching in the end,
River of Jordan is around the bend,
Will you be counting all the trophies that you won?
Or will you look back on the things left undone?

My blog philosophy is to wait till I have something to say rather than adhering to a preset schedule. Usually I have something to say once a week or so, but I couldn’t rouse myself to add to the tidal wave of words engulfing the blogosphere this month. Mostly my reasons have been personal. I’ve been at that familiar stage for a writer: the writing is done. I think it’s good (and response from early readers suggests that I could be right). But that doesn’t mean everyone else will think so. Once again, I find myself putting forward ideas that are sure to gore someone’s sacred ox. Once again, I have granted myself the freedom to mix categories, cross boundaries, suggest possibilities that not everyone may welcome. I took some heart from Nassim Taleb’s point in Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder that writers can be antifragile to criticism: “[I]f you really want people to read a book, tell them it is ‘overrated,’” he writes, “with a sense of outrage.” Of course, I hope everyone loves my new work, but whatever may come, I’m almost ready to say, “Bring it on.”

All this hope, anticipation, and effort is a little decentering, though. As always, my antidote is music. The last few weeks I’ve been listening obsessively to Roy Buchanan, infusing my system with Vitamin G (that’s for guitar), drinking in music’s magical powers to activate body, mind, heart, and soul. So if you’re a little glad to see me back in the blogosphere, thank Roy. I do.

If you don’t know Roy Buchanan’s music, you are in for a rare treat. He was a remarkable guitarist who played music of many genres with the utter conviction and commitment of a consummate artist. Listen to “Wayfaring Pilgrim” as you read a bit about his life. His playing on this song winds itself around my heart, opening it like a gate.

Buchanan came up in a hardscrabble world, the child of agricultural workers who migrated from Arkansas to a small town at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley. He left home young to chase opportunity in music—played with Johnny Otis’s band at 15—and managed to father seven children with his wife, Judy Owens, despite gigging and touring almost constantly for the better part of three decades.

There are obstacles and advantages to coming up without a normative sense of social status or all that much grasp of the rules. Our early lives were very different—city/country, immigrant/American, Jew/Pentacostal—but that marginality to the American dream is something we shared. Sometimes it makes for a steep climb toward a sense of belonging; but it can also grant a power of self-authorization to borrow anything, to braid any form of beauty into the tapestry you weave of your life. When Buchanan heard Hendrix, he integrated that jagged, polemical sound into his playing and made it his own. Listen to his Hendrix-inspired version of “Hey Joe.” Or a beautifully clean straight-up jazz version of “Misty” that makes your cheeks ache with pleasure. Or this amazing live version of Roy’s original composition, his spiritual manifesto, “The Messiah Will Come Again.” The sheer unbounded beauty and creativity of this music grants me permission: whatever you need, it says, use that.

Buchanan struggled with life and often lost the battle. He got addicted, got clean, got drunk, got clean, and died in a Fairfax, Virginia, jail cell a month before his 49th birthday in 1988, locked up on a charge of public intoxication. (The official ruling was suicide, but some people close to Buchanan dispute that.) The most detailed account of his life—which reads like a “Where’s Waldo?” of popular music, with Buchanan playing the Waldo part—can be found at the Vinyl Records site. It gives a lasting impression of a man of great talent who kept being “discovered” (he taught Robbie Robertson to play well, was offered Brian Jones’ spot in the Rolling Stones in 1969, opened for The Band during his last year on the road) without exactly emerging into recognition.

There is a powerful integrity to Roy’s diverse music—something that transcends genre—which emerges so clearly on what might be called standards. “These Arms of Mine” is associated with the inimitable Otis Redding, but Buchanan’s version with Kanika Kress, a Chicago blues musician whose life was cut even shorter than his, surrounds and cradles you so you don’t want it to stop. Buchanan’s take on Don Gibson’s 1956 anthem “Sweet Dreams” is unparalleled. Listening to these songs reminds me that every generation—every artist—is authorized to renew the legacy inherited from the past, and each renewal propels the work toward the next.

You can find an account of Buchanan’s early life and music in a 1971 PBS special entitled Introducing Roy Buchanan!, hosted by Bill Graham. It’s on YouTube in three parts (scroll down under “About” for links to parts 2 and 3). “I think the lonely thing is kind of born inside of a person,” Roy says in part 1. “That’s what makes him play. Your soul seems to be completely someplace else from other people’s, a lonesome feeling. My dad used to call it the blues.”

I’m feeling much better now, and still listening daily to my Roy Buchanan playlist. If you need one more for the road—there can never be too much of Roy’s music—here’s an epic version of “Soul Dressing,” originally released by Booker T. and The MGs in 1965. Still not enough? Buchanan’s original composition, “Pete’s Blues.”

I find this insistence on one form of activism fatiguing. It reminds me of the old alchemical idea: that if you perform the same action over and over again, it will eventually yield a transformative result. At this point, I think most old-style forms of organizing have about as much chance of succeeding in addressing our crises as ancient alchemical experiments had of finding the philosopher’s stone and transmuting base metal into gold. But you can’t make anyone see what he or she is not ready to perceive, no matter how plainly it is inscribed in reality.

When it comes to actualizing a paradigm shift—replacing an old reality-map that can’t hold newly emerging information with a new framework that can—the biggest challenge is human perception. A paradigm shift has been compared to an optical illusion: when an optical illusion flips between a duck and a rabbit or a vase and two facing profiles, it isn’t that the printed image has altered in the slightest. The entire change is in how the identical information is seen: if a perceiver is willing to let go of commitment to one image, the exact same information can be read in a second markedly different way.

For several years, I’ve been writing and speaking about a paradigm shift in which culture—and specifically art, the purest expression of culture through movement, image, music, story, and so on—is finally being given its true value as the container for all social organization and action, the place where we discover identity, explore values, learn about each other, and imagine a future. Every day I see more evidence, but this week has been remarkably emblematic of the whole shift. Just a very few examples:

A group of 600 guitarists gathered in Darjeeling, India, last week played John Lennon’s song “Imagine” in tribute to the young woman whose rape by a gang has been a flashpoint for protests around the globe. These images have been widely circulated.

The indigenous peoples’ movement Idle No More, which began in Canada and has spread rapidly, “calls on all people to join in a revolution which honors and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water. Colonization continues through attacks to Indigenous rights and damage to the land and water. We must repair these violations, live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship, work towards justice in action, and protect Mother Earth.”

Idle No More has called upon people to come together for Round Dances in which movement, song, and drumming express the unity of activism, art, and spiritual practice. Here’s some footage of a Round Dance flash mob in Oakland, California, yesterday.

The growing initiative called “One Billion Rising,” begun by Vagina Monologues author and V-Day founder Eve Ensler, centers on a huge number of public dance events in which women and their supporters stand up to demand an end to violence against women.

I could spend days at the keyboard listing music, drama, dance, video, visual art, interactive media, literature and other artistic expressions of the vast, decentralized movement for social justice. YouTube videos (which is to say short films) have become our most popular form of political speech. Groups like 100 Thousand Poets for Change organize many simultaneous events around the world asserting the defense of freedom through art. Pick any genre or artform: hip-hop , graphic art , murals—and you will find countless examples to draw on, with more emerging every day.

I’m a little sad that some people are still so committed to the old paradigm of social change that they can’t yet allow these powerful, multidimensional alternatives to come into focus. But not too sad: what is emergent will not be stopped; and it’s just a matter of time before it can’t be ignored.

Here’s the Playing for Change version of “Imagine,” featuring well over a hundred musicians from around the world.