“Life is a mistake that only art can correct.”

Stew, Passing Strange

I discovered this week that I have become a member of a religion I used to reject: the Church of Art. (I’m guessing you clocked this before I did.)

I discovered it during the swooning spiritual experience of watching the DVD of Passing Strange, the uniquely beautiful and rich musical story of the musician Stew’s coming of age, as an artist and a man, a journey that took him from a two-story home with all the mod cons in L.A., through cannabis coffeeshops in Amsterdam, post-punk clubs in Berlin, communes, collectives, love affairs that ended on the border of realness, and back again.

Repeatedly, Stew’s story draws a hard, straight line between the redemptive, clarifying, transcendent capabilities of art and spiritual ecstasy or enlightenment. I’ve drawn a few hundred of those lines myself in talks and essays over the years, I admit. But I have resisted tethering myself with them, because when I contemplated joining the Church of Art, my feelings about some of my prospective coreligionists made me think again.

You see, my nature and inclinations are deeply democratic (despite the disappointments of that faith). And so many of the stalwarts of the Church of Art are anything but egalitarian. At the extreme elitist end of the spectrum, worshippers eschew the mundane, living for sublime aestheticized moments involving the exhibition or performance of classic works requiring vast skill and capital to achieve in the form they crave: La bohème or La traviata, Giselle or Coppélia, the Eroica or The Magic Flute.

I heard my favorite story of high-church aestheticism when working as a consultant with a small theater company in Minneapolis. A feature story in the local paper had included the cost of authentic, handwoven tartans the Guthrie Theater had commissioned for a production of MacBeth. That single expenditure exceeded the annual budget of the excellent small theater.

My response to the grotesque excess of this type of red-carpet display—and after all, its utter irrelevance to the actual art being mounted—can be compared to liberation theologists’ repulsion at the Catholic Church’s willingness to invest in material splendor while countless faithful starve or endure severe hardship and oppression.

The gilded frames in which high art is so often presented serve not so much to enable its full expression as to call attention to its place of pride in the pecking-order. I wrote a few years ago about an experiment in which the superstar violinist Joshua Bell performed incognito in a Washington, DC, Metro station, failing to attract either attention or donations from passers-by. I imagine that even the most fervent devotees of the highest Church of Art close their eyes when a particular passage of music touches their hearts most deeply, blotting out the glare of chandeliers on red velvet and white marble so as not to intrude on the essence of the experience.

In London on Wednesday, an anonymous bidder spent over $100 million for Alberto Giacometti’s bronze “Walking Man I.” (Sotheby’s had expected it to sell for less than $30 million, still a remarkable sum.) This has nothing to do with the intrinsic merit of the piece itself, but with the glorification of its owner. However much an encounter with the work might touch or engage you or I or anyone else who passed time in its company wherever it were to be installed, that experience has little connection with the thrill of ownership at a headline-grabbing price. The transaction comments not on the power of Giacometti’s work, but on the economic power of its buyer, and on this ravenous beast, the high-art market, that—even as the global economy falters—grows in size and appetite, not even troubling to notice the ocean of suffering that could be alleviated by equivalent investment.

Having joined the Church of Art, I place myself among its liberation theologists, interested in the essence of its teachings, in the expansion of their practice, rather than the glory of its institutions.

To be sure, the DVD of Passing Strange represents significant investment: productions at the Public Theater and Berkeley Rep before Broadway, workshops at Sundance, and more. If the artists had been content with a one-off show in some small club, I never would have seen it at all. But Spike Lee’s production is a concert film, the record of a performance, modest as films go, and very right for its subject. I suppose that is one of the church’s tenets for me, a sense of purpose twinned with a sense of proportion.

Late in the play, Stew, as the narrator, recounts a conversation with a friend at a bar, a friend who sells pretzels for a living:

[H]e said, “The Real.” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “The real is not real, my friend. The real is a construct. The real is a creation. The real is artificial. The kid in your play is looking for something in life…that can only be found…in art.”

I keep working that blind spot in our social self-understanding, our inability to see the astounding extent to which our lives are infused, uplifted, and deepened by the experience of art, whether it comes to us via iPod or YouTube, the multiplex, the Met, or the work of our own bodies and spirits. I am hopeful we are going to awaken soon out of the trance that prevents us from seeing, understanding—and therefore pursuing—the public interest in artistic creativity, in beauty and meaning and all they bring. In the meantime, I do my bit to clear out the idols, and I worship.

The epigram that started this post introduces a remarkable moment in the play. Consumed with regret, the main character (”Youth”) creates an imaginary redemptive encounter with his mother, who has died as he lingered in Europe, refusing her entreaties to come home. His older self, the actual Stew as the narrator, sings that he will never see her again. Youth replies:

That’s it? You know, you’re right: you cannot bring her back. But why lose faith in the only thing that can? I will see her again…. Because life is a mistake…that only art can correct. I will see her again…Every night….

Amen.

In the physical world as in other realms, it takes remarkably less time to destroy something than to rebuild it. A house burns in a matter of hours; perhaps a thousand such intervals are needed to make it habitable again. A single executive order unleashes a war; decades are required to repair what can be fixed.

Even on the individual level, this dynamic prevails. In the past year I’ve had a dozen conversations with deeply unhappy people who will spend months, even years, trying one purportedly quick fix after another—hoping to firebomb their misery into oblivion—because the thought of sitting down to tell their stories to a gifted therapist, an hour at a time over many weeks, is just too daunting. In the aggregate, the time and money invested are the same, but somehow, the investment is more palatable if each installment is conceived as the first and last.

Surely the inherent appeal of quick results is part of what attracts people to the type of nay-saying—burning down the house of democracy—preferred by media personalities like Glenn Beck and the Tea Party leaders. Surely this explains in part why negative campaigns, protesting objectionable policies or public figures, catch fire so much faster, blaze so much larger.

The conundrum I’ve been gnawing on lately is how to engage people in that slow building process, even when they see no reason for short-term hope.

For instance, I was deeply disappointed that President Obama’s new jobs initiative—in the face of terrible, despair-inducing unemployment—amounts to a tax credit for private businesses. Necessary, perhaps, but astoundingly insufficient to address the problem. This country has had two successful experiments in public service employment as a way to advance public goals, build infrastructure, and support job creation, the New Deal programs of the 1930s and CETA and other public service employment initiatives of the 1970s. (You can read brief descriptions here.)

Both took years to build up. Both were ended in no time flat by political fiat, by actions that had almost nothing to do with the programs’ merits and everything to do with a scorched-earth approach to regime change in the U.S., whereby the ascendant party seeks to obliterate any progress made by its predecessor. Both left a wide, deep wake of demoralization among advocates, such that it took years even to rehabilitate the rubric “public service employment.”

For most of my adult life, I’ve been a vocal supporter of public service jobs. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you know that from the first, one of my hopes for the Obama administration was a new WPA, a new public service jobs program to support artists and others in building community and making social institutions more humane and responsive. I’ve been writing for a while about the poetic synchronicity of 2010 being the 75th anniversary of the WPA, about how lovely it would be to pursue the same public aims today in ways that fit our own times and conditions. (To read some of my earlier essays on the subject, scroll down to “The New New Deal” and “A New WPA: Why a Sustainable Future Demands Cultural Recovery” on the Essays & Talks section of my Web site.)

I’m not the only one, not by a long-shot. If you google “WPA” or “New Deal,” you’ll find quite a few pages devoted to similar ideas. Special attention should go to WomenArts, which is devoting its SWAN Day events to honoring women artists of the WPA. I’ll update you soon about events in New York and the Bay Area in which I’ll be taking part.

But even in the first flush of Obama’s victory, when I spoke with inside-the-Beltway people about the idea, I drew a complete blank. It took them about 30 seconds to rifle through their mental databases and conclude that no actually existing member of Congress would support a new WPA right now. For them, that was enough to dismiss the idea for all time.

Markets are powerful mechanisms, an intrinsic part of every society on earth, one that more or less seems hard-wired into the human subject. I support interventions to make them greener, more transparent, more resourceful and innovative. But you have to be absolutely nuts to imagine they can serve all the needs of a vast, diverse and damaged society like ours. Right now, we have a huge public sector, with far too much of it supporting completely unproductive enterprises like wars and prisons. Very different public service jobs—in schools, community organizations, hospitals, public services, and so on—are absolutely necessary to the tasks of healing and building our society. All the arguments against them are purely ideological: “Government shouldn’t….” And that’s where my mind snaps: I get where the right-wing ideologues are coming from, and just how wrong they are. So how can intelligent, caring, liberals and progressives let them prevail? That’s what they do when they reject the slow building that would eventually change ideological nonsense into common sense, just because they can’t see the way to get a bill through Congress today.

I admit jobs are a pet issue for me, so pick your own issue: the situation is likely to be the same. Many more people are active on healthcare, peace, or environmental issues than on the cultural questions that obsess me. But each of those issues also suffers from the tyranny of the immediately doable, where the most intense public enthusiasm can be mustered for quick action (mostly to tear something down or stop something from happening), and the long, slow process of building seems so daunting that people find it hard to resist giving up.

What has happened to our perseverance and fortitude? Do you think it’s something in the water supply? Consider that Plessy v. Ferguson, establishing the “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimated racial segregation, was decided in 1896. Do you know how many court cases, hours of legal research and strategizing, years of activism, decades of fundraising it took to reach the end of that doctrine? Brown v. Board of Education was decided in 1954, 58 years later. It took just as long for the idea of social insurance, introduced by progressives and unionists, to become law as Social Security in 1935. It took 70 years after the mid-19th century Seneca Falls Convention for women’s suffrage to be ratified in this country by the 19th amendment. The struggle for gay legal rights has persevered for decades. And in all these ways, changing laws has been a small part of working for full equality.

I wonder: if these struggles had to emerge from today’s conditions, would desire and persistence trump discouragement, or would too many people have been daunted because the road looked too long and difficult?

In some realms, people understand and accept the long time that building takes. There are good parents and good teachers who would find it absurd to resent the painstaking investment required to nurture a young and promising life; good farmers and foresters who understand permaculture and sustainable harvest; good healers prepared for the long haul of preventive care; good organizers who understand the cultivation democracy requires.

But much of the political picture looks different. The more daunted people are by current resistance to a needed policy, the longer they wait to start pursuing it in earnest, the more the timeline stretches out. What has me most worried now is the possibility that we are so addicted to burning down the house, we will postpone building for too long to recover.

Even writing that sentence goes against everything I care about. Mostly, my attention is on a simple truth: we have the numbers, the capacity and creativity to build, and we have proof that when people see a way their efforts can make a difference, they will act. But every day, a mountain of spin and drivel is deployed to obscure those truths from view. If creative thinkers and activists lack the will and perseverance to see through it, to overcome the tyranny of the immediately doable, to overcome the pervasive preference for burning down the house, the truth won’t matter much. People of vision will go on pursuing it, because that is who they are, but that won’t be enough to tip the balance.

It keeps coming down to the same thing, over and over again: the choice is yours, and mine, and each person’s to make. Dorothy Day, the founder of Catholic Worker, said it best, I think: “The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?”

Today’s sound track: “When Your Mind’s Made Up” by Glenn Hansard and Marketa Irglova, a lovely song that doesn’t quite mean what it says.

Under such circumstances, confusion is an intelligent response. What is going on!?!?

Well, a lot, obviously. Start from your own center and work out. We all know the personal version of the reactivity now sweeping our political culture: something pushes a button, unleashing a swirl of memories, images, emotions. Flooded with brain chemicals, our thinking minds come unglued. A small setback turns into a hopeless failure; a major challenge triggers the kind of fight-or-flight response our brains were built for back on the savannah, being chased by sabertooth tigers. It happens to every being with a body. I’m guessing that even the Dalai Lama goes reactive now and then, and obviously, most of us warrant no comparison with the Dalai Lama’s mastery of automatic emotional responses.

But what’s front and center for me today is this: the reactivity swamping our culture of politics, and how little we have done to stanch it. Our poor political culture has been neglected for so long, it is like field depleted by the perpetual cultivation of a single crop. We have sown fear, and now harvest the panic and the paralysis they generate. We need to feed democracy, nourishing the culture of politics with social imagination, inspiriting people to think before they act, and to act for the greatest good.

We know by now that stories shape political understanding. Compelling stories of democratic resilience and common purpose can still help to neutralize the ubiquitous message that “every man for himself” is the only political truth. But they have to be told, and told with imagination, vigor, vibrancy. My concern is that so many of the people who could help to nurture to a political culture of democratic possibility are themselves in the grip of the addiction to fear, able only to rouse themselves to administer another fix. I want to understand the funnel-cloud of resentment, scapegoating and vitriol rising on the right. But most of all, I want the rest of us to understand and manage our own reactivity, to keep things from spiraling into a full-scale war between the states of mind. It may be too much of a stretch to empathize with the people who are stirring up hate, but perhaps compassion for ourselves and empathy with our confused friends and allies will help calm us down.

Let’s start with a brief tour of the situation.

From the left, two types of material keep circulating, proliferating, and recirculating. First, there’s a tremendous amount of inside baseball-type political commentary, offering unlimited free strategic advice to the President, who seems to be responding by attempting to reanimate his campaign apparatus, spectacularly missing the point. I don’t entirely know what to make of this pervasive tendency of pundits and activists to address their concerns to top-level strategists. I’ve done it myself, and I’m guessing the impulses that seized me also have a grip on others: the desire to believe that in high places, there is a listening ear for sweet reason, that if our leaders only understood, they would see the error of their ways. There is an exhausted quality to much of this advice that makes me want to lie down for a nice long nap when I’ve plowed through the morning papers and email.

What does it mean that thus far, remarkably little of this energy is directed toward the electorate, toward the rest of us who have no role in crafting strategy, but whose opinions and feelings ultimately determine whether any inside-baseball strategy will succeed? The ship of state lurches on violent seas, and instead of hauling out the lifeboats, liberals and progressives respond by convening in the captain’s cabin.

Second, the left is also circulating voluminous accounts of official malfeasance and self-dealing, analyses of historic errors, official lies and policies driven by entrenched interests. It’s not that any of it is untrue: from the colonial legacy in Haiti to the imperial precedency in Washington, I stipulate to the myriad emails choking my in-box. Callous, self-enriching policies and their venal operators have indeed set the stage for our current crises. But as the indictments pile up, the reactions they generate tend to 37 varieties of impotence: despairing rage, overwhelming depression, retreat from the public arena to the little world where we feel less powerless, and so on. They tend to generate a deep hopelessness, the feeling that history’s weight stands like a boot on the future’s neck, and resistance is futile. Surely that feeling does more to reinforce the power of the perpetrators than empower others to act for change.

From the right, no one can say with anything like certainty how big the “Tea Party” movement is, only that it has canny media advisors, extreme visibility, and a pissed-off simplicity that is the favorite drug of TV news producers. Saturday’s New York Times included a helpful little chart of the Tea Partyers’ unifying principles, all of which are points of opposition (i.e., if all the things they’re against were abolished, what would they be for?):

Climate change		Skeptical about human role
Health care		Deeply suspicious of government involvement
Taxes			Opposed to income taxes, favor I.R.S. abolition
Illegal immigration	A hard line against illegal immigration
10th Amendment		Federal government takes too much power
2nd Amendment		Opposed to gun control

The latest New Yorker has a piece by Ben McGrath that doesn’t add a huge amount to what’s already been written, but is a little less condescending than much of the other coverage in liberal journals. What interested me most was a description of a Tea Party politics-style video game, in which the President, Democrats having been defeated in midterm elections, takes action to

dissolve the Constitution and implement an emergency North American People’s Union, with help from Mexico’s Felipe Calderón, Canada’s Stephen Harper, and various civilian defense troops with names like the Black Tigers, the International Service Union Empire, and CORNY, or the Congress of Rejected and Neglected Youth. Lou Dobbs has gone missing, Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh turn up dead at a FEMA concentration camp, and you, a lone militiaman in a police state where private gun ownership has been outlawed, are charged with defeating the enemies of patriotism, one county at a time.

Of course, this vision is the exact mirror-image of scenarios widely circulated on the left in the latter part of the Bush administration, with elections canceled, mass arrests, detention camps, the whole nine yards.

McGrath’s piece ends with the following anthem, which seems key, because it asserts a sense of ownership and entitlement that I don’t think is shared by many on the other end of the political spectrum. Mostly, progressive history and mission reflect a common aim, not to consolidate advantage, but to finally achieve an egalitarian body politic, with a fair distribution of social goods and social opportunity. Consider this:

Take it back,
Take our country back.
Our way of life is now under attack.
Draw a line in the sand, so they all understand
And our values stay intact.
Take it back.

The anthem hints at what is really stewing around in the primitive parts of our brains, thanks to a combination of unlimited, well-funded media manipulation and official secrecy. On one side, we see the swirling fears of an overwhelmingly white, middle- and working-class cohort who feel their ownership of this country is under threat from people of color, immigrants, “others” whose needs they will be compelled to serve. On the other side, we see the disappointment and fear of those still struggling for equality, for access and opportunity, that the firestorm of backlash to even the smallest gains will now overwhelm all possibility. Though the realities differ greatly, both camps feel a powerlessness that makes people frightened, immobile, and easily manipulated. Both camps have trouble defusing reactivity and connecting with the quality of thought that might open options other than the frantic refusal surfacing through both the Tea Party movement and the left’s escalating alarm.

The designated territory for the current contest is the role of government, although I think it stands in for something much larger. Populists on both the right and left feel that public resources that should go to more important things have been wasted bailing out fat cats and failed industries. But then they diverge.

The Tea Partyers are pushing an idea some progressives have labeled “producerist.” (There’s a compendium of these analyses at the Web site of Political Research Associates, which has been tracking the right for a long time.) It means they believe that the hard-working, productive middle class is being forced to subsidize freeloaders, and their definition of “freeloader” runs more to the people who need help coping with the housing bubble-burst than the bankers who pushed untenable home mortgages. I am angry at many things about our actually existing government too, but they’re not the same things. I’m appalled at the role of profit in the public sector, in what should be a quest for the common good rather than private enrichment; the fact that we continue to support militarization at home and abroad in a distorted pursuit of national interest with little regard for the human life it wastes; our rush to become Incarceration Nation, with the planet’s largest prison population, heedless of the personal and social cost; our official neglect of the things that make life worth living at ground-level: culture, connection, equity, opportunity. And so on.

But that doesn’t make me see government as the enemy, any more than abuse and neglect in actually existing families makes me think the remedy is to abolish families. Human beings form families, communities, and governments, and our challenge—especially as our numbers and impact grow—is to bring our big brains (not just our primitive brain chemicals) to these necessary elements of the human project.

It is interesting to pull back from the daily tumult to consider that “government,” after all, is just a name for the arrangements human beings make to safeguard their commonwealth, provide essential infrastructure and generally make it possible for groups of people too large to sit down together and work things out to arrive at a modus vivendi, a way of living together.

I haven’t been able to find any definitive figures on the public sector’s role in the economy. But of a workforce of 135 million, about 10 million are outright government employees. That doesn’t include a couple of million social service providers, eight or so million educators (many of whom work in publicly funded schools and universities), some substantial proportion of the 10 or so million employed in healthcare (who serve in publicly subsidized facilities, or take care of people receiving Medicare and other public health aid), nor the three million police, wardens and other protective service workers, nor the 1.5 million members of the U.S. armed services—etcetera. It’s a safe bet that, as in most industrialized nations, at least one of every five workers owes that job, either directly or through subventions, to government. (I just learned from my friends who spent some time in Bhutan that about half that happy nation’s jobs are in the public sector.)

Government may be the battlefield, but the conflict goes far beyond it, subsuming the entire culture and the ideas and values that form our collective identity. I’m not a believer in anything like Rapture, but in one way, it seems likely that we are in the end-times, not of the world, but of a way of understanding and valuing it that has led us badly wrong. Either the valorization of accumulation, profit, and the subjection of human beings to mechanistic systems will wind down into the sort of dystopia so widely and lavishly depicted to scare us witless; or we will awaken from our trance, take a deep breath to dispel the catecholamines, use our big neocortices to recognize that we still possess the resources, intelligence and skill to enact a redemptive vision—and then do it. Our capacity to think rather than react will determine whether we can put our shoulders on the side of awakening, turning the tide.

Here are some things that may help:

Paying attention to our feelings. Notice the effect something has on your own physical and mental sensations, then extend your empathy to others. Computers come with a “delete” button. If reading something has upset your stomach, set off a tingling in your extremities, triggered a sensation of panic and desperation, consider not forwarding it to all your friends, and not opening the next email from the same source. Spend that energy instead on something that feels constructive, even in a very small way. I am not arguing against the need to know relevant history, to surface hidden realities. I am saying that if the main impact of a particular piece is to stimulate impotent rage, terror, or despair, circulating it is not a way of changing things.

Abandoning belief in the mobilizing power of fear. We have absolutely no evidence that fear mobilizes; to the contrary, all the research that has been done on what motivates social action suggests that having something concrete to do, something that feels like your own efforts can make a difference, is what works best. The Tea Partyers got around this by channeling energy into the purchase of millions of tea bags and the creation of public events that seized airtime; now they’re holding a convention at Opryland in Nashville, with Sarah Palin as the keynote speaker, and it’s predicted that candidates and platform will follow. It’s very hard for progressives to find a positive basis for mobilization at the moment: disappointment with the administration makes it hard to say yes to what is being proposed; and there’s the truth that as an organizing agenda, saying no is always much easier than proposing. But that doesn’t justify continuing to lean on the fear factor, which just can’t work for us.

Actually tackling the challenge of reframing government. One of the traps of polarized politics has been that progressives get stuck defending things that aren’t worth defending: the bailout, the war in Afghanistan, etc. The defense is half-hearted, it fails to convince, while the other side consolidates its media advantage by steadfastly repeating the talking points its members do believe, whether you and I buy them or not. What would it be like to hold an honest critique of the errors of the Obama and previous administrations, while pulling back from the details for a long-shot of public interest, responsibility and accountability as they could and should be? If we can’t even conjure a compelling vision of equity, pluralism and democracy in action, how can we expect them to materialize?

I understand how hard this is. Believe me, I really do. But the most important thing we can do right now is calm down enough to observe, analyze and choose instead of react. I’m going to start with a nice, hot cup of tea.

Right now, the political buffet is piled high. There’s a heaping portion of cynical gloating: See, the gloaters say, I didn’t get my hopes up, I didn’t fall for all that magical thinking about Obama as messiah, and guess what? I was right! There are full platters of bitter disappointment: He had us on his side from the get-go, the bitter ones say, and instead of standing tall for progressive values, he’s compromised everything away. And there is a veritable smorgasbord of Measured Response: Better on Haiti than Bush on New Orleans, better on health than nothing, too bad about Afghanistan but look at the pressure, and let’s be realistic, I mean, it’s the system, so what can you expect?

The cynics are pre-disappointed, having decided at some point to insulate themselves against further pain by never allowing their hopes to rise. The cynics’ remedy doesn’t work, of course: the result is a constant, dull ache, an addictive pain that makes up in duration whatever it might lack in intensity. The bitter ones have hit their pain threshold, deciding that opening to their hopes has gone far enough. But there’s a cost to pay too: the cocktail you get by stirring regret into disappointment delivers a hangover likely to endure for the rest of the President’s term.

The measured responders never really perceive how disappointment came to be their medium; they just live in it, like fish in the ocean. By allowing themselves less imagination, they feel less pain, of course. But unfortunately, also less of everything that transcends the limitations of the moment: as it has been, so it shall be.

I have been working lately with my own personal Disappointment System. I’ve had a lifetime of training in shrinking not only my expectations, not only my hopes, but shrinking even my sense of the possible to fit my disappointments. It’s not so easy to face one’s own limitations, but this one has become pretty undeniable: I have a strongly engrained habit—in psychological terms, a defense—of crafting a mental picture of the possible that corroborates my wish to avoid further disappointment.

You know how this goes. Once initialized, it permeates experience. Hell, it permeates every series on TV. Your parents make light of your problems at school, they fail to perceive who you really are, or if they see you, they don’t like what they see; you learn not to show yourself. Your friend is busy or distracted, every encounter is cut short; you learn not to ask for much and to impersonate satisfaction with what you get. Social scientists say the pattern is epidemic in private life these days: through fatigue, anxiety or outright terror, couples reach a point where intimacy ends, accommodating to a companionate grayness rather than risking desire.

I’ve been living a single life for the first time in decades. One of its most remarkable features is how little human touch my life now entails. I kvetched about it to a few of my oldest, closest friends, and each one said, “I’ll hold you.” I thought it was sweet, but I never took them up on it. Why not? My mind crafted reasons: So-and-so doesn’t really mean that, it would be awkward, if I seem needy, people won’t love me, So-and-so is busy with others’ needs, what entitles me to want this, much better to suck it up…. It’s got to be the Disappointment System, right? I’ve been hurt in a deep, old place, and it’s been more bearable for me to accommodate to a kind of isolation than to risk showing the love and need I feel. (Whew! That example was really personal, wasn’t it? I feel like deleting it, but I’m going to try to practice what I preach and resist the impulse.)

During the presidential campaign, I was excited by Obama’s candidacy. My excitement turned on the personal qualities I perceived through cracks in the persona-machine that engulfs—perhaps creates—candidates in our cash-driven electoral system. I was excited by his intelligence, his ability to translate complex issues into comprehensible stories, his ability to convey understanding and compassion. I thought that the complexities of his own identity and personal story fit the times, foreshadowing new possibilities.

I still think all these things, but now I also perceive that he is a man of many pains and therefore many defenses, which is too bad for the rest of us. The Disappointment System has just as much of a grip on him as on me or so many others. It’s all clothed in the language of the measured responders. He speaks of compromise and bipartisanship even when his putative partners behave more like schoolyard bullies. But it’s the Disappointment System at work: President Obama keeps choosing the safety of asking for less over the risk of trying for what we really need.

Sometimes all the headlines tell the same story. The five members who voted for today’s Supreme Court decision allowing corporate spending to dominate political campaigns acted on a common fantasy about freedom of expression (that corporations are persons whose access to advertising should be equated with individuals’ access to free speech). After a lifetime in the corporate “marketplace of ideas,” in which the high-volume drone of dollar-driven speech drowns out much of what really matters, the Disappointment System leads us to accommodate to the surreal notion of corporate personhood. We even start inventing reasons why it’s fair that way.

When I come to a still point and let myself feel the world spinning, the remarkable quality of this moment emerges. Some students of technology and time have observed something that seems very true to me: the pace of events is accelerating, which can’t go on forever. Something’s gotta give. On the mundane plane, it is remarkable how much busier and more productive people are. These days, thinking, typing, formatting and pressing a few buttons publishes my work. But if I compare my current output today with forty years ago, it’s not just the difference in technology that accounts for the exponential leap. It’s true that it took much more time to make notes on a yellow pad and type them up, dealing with whiteout and carbon paper, mailing them off by post and waiting for all the components of offset printing to accomplish their jobs. But there’s also a vast difference in my own expectations, in what I wish to express, in how I choose to spend my time, in how much output satisfies me. While those considerations are influenced by technology, they are not overdetermined by it. There’s an urgency to our activity that hints at the intensity of need being masked by the Disappointment System.

The exponential progression of technology that scientists like Ray Kurzweil talk about suggests some point of transition (or more gloomy, some end-point) to come (here’s an interesting video from two years ago in which Kurzweil explains his theory about what is to come). But even considering just human events, separate from our own creations, it seems so clear that we are on the coastline between worlds. Everyone knows the outlines of the dystopia that occupies one side of this liminal space: we can see it in the movies, in video games, in other fictions, in TV footage of Haiti. If we linger here, we crash and burn. On the other side of our social imaginations, the opposite possibility unfolds. We use our big brains to break with self-limiting ideas of how things are accomplished, to release what no longer serves, to value deep truths about human possibility that cannot be contained by the institutions as they are now conceived, and to encompass reconceived social institutions.

Whether we can cross over from dystopia to renewal depends on our self-liberation from the Disappointment System. If we are too imprinted—too trapped by defenses conditioned on our past disappointments—to risk the ridicule, rejection, or injury with which the colonized mind responds to real freedom of thought, we won’t try. And if we don’t try, the story’s end is already written.

Sometimes when I grasp the limitations I have placed on myself through the Disappointment System, I want to grab myself by the shoulders and give myself a good, hard shake. Sometimes I want to do the same thing to the body politic, or maybe just the President. My cynical friends think he’s bought and paid for, an artifact of the corporate politics that will now accelerate more rapidly, thanks to the Supreme Court’s participation in the Disappointment System. My bitter friends think he’s a fake. My friends the measured responders think a companionate presidency is as inevitable as a marriage drained of erotic life. And what I think is this: that our potential to exit from the Disappointment System, singly and collectively, is absolutely real. And if we don’t actualize it, it’s no one’s fault but our own.

As I’m writing, I’ve got the 1971 Funkadelic version of “Maggot Brain” on repeat on my iPod. Funkadelic did not partake of the Disappointment System. It stood right up in the Disappointment System’s face and said “Deal with me.” May life imitate art.

The drive, a little over an hour through rolling hills and vast flat stretches, was a little surreal, a scene from a personal sci-fi picture in which time folds back on itself, with uncanny echoes. I haven’t made that journey for many years: no reason. But long ago, I lived in Sacramento for a year or so, running a cultural project in the now quaintly kooky days of the Jerry Brown administration.

When I drove away from my rented house in Sacramento for the last time, it was exactly half my life ago. Today is my birthday, so I am able to make this calculation with some precision. Back then, the trip was a drive in the country. At night, when I usually made it, there were long passages with no illumination but the stars and moon. Now most of it is a repeating tableau of discount malls and tract houses, spotlights on billboards tinting the night sky pink.

In between trips to Sacramento, the politics of culture have morphed through several incarnations, including a very long time in which my ideas about culture and democracy (and others like them) have been in official disfavor. But as I am discovering, if you stick around for half your life (so far), you may see the wheel start to turn. Right now, many mainstream arts people—by which I mean leaders of institutions and agencies, mostly—are concluding that the old support strategies are no longer valid, whether on account of their intrinsic flaws or the poor state of the economy, or both. So there’s demoralization, leading to a certain amount of desperation. People keep saying maybe we should abandon the word “art” because it has so many toxic associations, and tremendous energy is being poured into finding a new rubric, as if it were a matter of magic words: creative sector, expressive life, arts ripple effect. But beneath the magical thinking about “branding,” and slogans, there’s an emerging receptivity to new or different ways of understanding the public interest in artistic creativity.

The response to my talk was gratifyingly positive. I pointed out that those who steer our lives along the path of art have almost always been set on that path by an experience of the ineffable enabled and activated by human creativity in the service of beauty and meaning, of “something that can never be adequately expressed, but which ignites in our hearts the desire to keep trying.”

To characterize the state of congruity we seek, I quoted Walter Pater’s inspired assertion that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression.” But along the path of art, there is a wide gap between aspiration and actuality. In the decades marked by the half-life since I lived in Sacramento, our impact has been constrained by dominant social values that make many people tone-deaf to this truth:

Arts advocates have been trying to pour the vast personal and social importance of this experience into containers—into language, slogans, arguments, strategies—far too small to hold it. The result has been almost unbearable frustration at being unable to put our point across. After long exposure to the framework of understanding that insists on privileging material value and things that can be counted, weighed and measured over all other forms of value, we have been reduced to making weak, even desperate arguments that do not do justice to the powerful truths contained in those experiences of the ineffable that set us on our paths in the first place.

As an antidote to this frustration, I shared what I have learned, inviting listeners to experiment for themselves:

Our power to persuade is at its height when there is absolute congruence between what we know and what we say. Many of you are visiting legislators this afternoon. Imagine how it would feel to make even a subtle shift away from repeating the same old and weak arguments, toward representing the much larger and deeper truths that animate your work.

People are hungry for such moments now. It will be a long time before anyone knows what was really happening in this hectic time, when the natural world slammed into the cracks in our human creations, shattering lives as in Haiti, when countless people awakened from the long, fitful slumber of modernity’s superstitions while others kept trying to put their questions to sleep. But I have a growing sense of certainty: the largest movement I discern in this swirling storm is toward a renewal of awareness, such that the things that have been treated as marginal—beauty, meaning, reflection, creativity, facing loss and finding resilience—may be moved toward their true value, toward the center of our collective understanding. I am putting my shoulder behind that movement.

Yesterday, I took a walk with a new friend who told me she had wanted to contact me for several years, since she heard a talk I gave at another meeting, on community arts as spiritual practice. My words had helped her recognize her need to bring her own work into congruence with her deepest truths. She had risked doing what she most desired, and by all measures, she had succeeded.

I thanked her, but I don’t know if I adequately conveyed what an important birthday present she had given me. I understand that the power to spark self-recognition and possibility is not inherent in a particular offering. I’m sure that no matter how much a particular talk resonates with some of the people present, at the back of every room, someone is texting baseball scores, someone is making a grocery list, someone is waiting for it all to be over. Transformative moments emerge from a kind of relationship: my readiness to speak a particular truth, your openness to it (or vice versa). But to know I have been instrumental to some such moments means more to me than I can express.

Half a life ago, when this understanding began to dawn for me, it was primitive and inchoate. All I could really do was imagine some sort of ideal world, and chip away at the orthodoxies that impeded others’ imaginations. Now I have very little interest in the ideal, but I still believe in the power of our capacity for social imagination. They say that blessings can direct energies from hidden realms into this world. If you want to offer one for me on this birthday—and of course, I hope you will—let it be for long, wide-awake life, as filled with the opportunity to catalyze transformative moments as a jumbo box of matches is filled with the potential of fire. (Love and livelihood welcomed too.)