Art for Life's Sake

'' April is the cruellest month, breeding 
Lilacs out of the dead land''
                              T.S Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

   In view of the global headlines, dominating the media over the first seven days of the month, one couldn't agree more with the most influential poetic text of the last century: April 2017 indeed has turned out to be the cruellest month in the chronicle of global violence in recent times. The underground train explosion in Moscow left us sick in the stomach, and hot on its heels came the early morning horror of the deadly gas attack in Syria.
Numbed to the centre of our consciousness, we saw children choked stiff to death, like twisted wax dolls, foaming in their mouths. A young father, holding his dead twins in both his arms, delicately, as if they were fragile toys, was seen posing in front of a cell phone camera, with the cold composure of the temporarily insane, giving his cousin purposeful instructions, '' film it, film it! We need to show it to the world''.
  Eliot wrote The Wasteland  as his response to the dystopic reality of inter- war Europe. The pervasive political trauma and anxiety, compounded with the young poet's personal neurosis, gave birth to the most terrifyingly accurate prophecy of the imminent inferno that included everything from the blitzkrieg to Hiroshima, with the fall of Paris, Vienna and the apparently unending siege of  the major urban centres of Europe in between. Those are the cherished symbols of Western history and heritage since the Middle Ages--carrying the scars of the Crusades, the living monuments of the Humanism of the Renaissance and Enlightenment-- that were ransacked by the modern-day Vandals of Nazi affiliation:

  ''Falling towers
  Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria
  Vienna, London
   Unreal''

That is two millennia of knowledge, civilization and human achievement razed to nothingness by Fascist aggression. Like a terrified Aeneas on the run, Eliot flees the burning shores of Europe to seek  reparation to the damages, caused by Western imperialist violence, in the ancient spirituality of the Upanishadas, in its enduring message of peace, compassion and generosity. The coda of The Wasteland is a random series of neurotic visions of a disintegrating reality that is finally salvaged by the incantatory chanting of 'Shantih'.

The cultural history of Inter-war  Europe is filled with such powerful and influential interpretations of a reality that defeats the human capacity to imagine evil. Take Picasso's Guernica  for instance. In June 1937, Picasso finished painting the Modernist classic in response to another April tragedy: the bombing of the Spanish city of Guernica during the civil war. It was his anguished creativity reacting to George Steer's eyewitness account of the incident. So instead of sipping his morning coffee with a heavy heart and feeling paralysed by helpless rage, he chose to make it the subject of his next painting: a composition in monochrome that arrests the moment of the collapse of  a city to immortalize it in the collective consciousness of the twentieth century, as a metaphor for the crumbling of the values of civilization and humanity itself.

Guernica: The civilization in the throes of death


Art is important in times of savage destruction because it stands for what is uniquely and indestructibly human; it affirms the values of civilization against the brute force of animal aggression; it is an antithesis of barbarism that evinces the highest standards of beauty and order that humanity is capable of. It is a statement of resistance against chaos.

So whether it is Yeates' personal vision of apocalypse, in a world rapidly descending down the spiral of anarchy and the advent of the monstrous Anti- Christ ('The Second Coming',1919) or the collective resistance of Dada to the bourgeois ideals of conventional rationality, nationalism and capitalist wealth-creation, through their revolutionary aesthetics of cultivated irrationality, nonsense and a radically revised perception of reality as an anti-war/ anti-bourgeois protest, or even Chaplin's ironic critique of political dictatorship and celebration of universal brotherhood and people's power in The Great Dictator, (1940),  the first four decades of the last century has been devoted to a radical, intense and  deeply anguished understanding of the absurd reality around,as if, 'Twenty centuries of stony sleep' that was 'vexed to a nightmare' had woken up the best minds of the time to the pain of a fatal cramp and their art was their desperate, anguished cry.

This is no longer true. Unlike the artistic visionaries of inter- war Europe, who interpreted the last breath of a dying world-order through their brazen art, we see no such aesthetic effort today when the world is teetering on the brink of another geopolitical crisis of equal gravitas, when there is every indication of a tectonic shift in the post-Cold war balance of power.

Carnage, genocide, hijacks, refugees, terror-attacks, ethnic conflicts are so normal these days that it would take another Bertolt Brecht, with his new age Alienation Effect to sensitize the world to the true depths of its evil. These are forms of violence inconceivable even for the most daring of the Modernist avant garde minds. Today we see art standing powerless  and mute in the face of the gruesomeness of experience.

Perhaps no art is capable of capturing the true horrors of the technologically enabled disasters of Hiroshima, 9/11 or Syria. Just as no poetry was possible after Auschwitz, no Wilfred Owen, or Isaac Rosenberg could have captured the sheer horror of concentration camps-- after all, how to romanticize the dismembered bodies of the victims in a post-Holocaust wasteland?--the absolute dehumanization of techno-warfare has exhausted all romantic possibilities of war where there are no more honour- codes, no more rules of engagement.
Where is the poetry in the poison mushroom above Hiroshima where human flesh simply evaporated under the heat of nuclear fission? In the toxic, radioactive air infusing death in the bones of the unborn generations ? In the bodies hurling themselves out of the eightieth floor windows to escape the inferno of a melting World Trade Center, in the undying hope to live? In the bodies of children, stiff with rigor mortis, who never woke up from their fateful sleep in an obscure town in Syria? Children of a lesser god, were they?

And yet, it is to art that we turn to, when we have survived the worst of disasters, even after a part of our soul is dead and torn away. When life gives up hope to make sense of  the bottomless pit of suffering around us, it is art that offers meaning; sounds sentimental, doesn't it?
Zohra band, an all girl ensemble from the war-torn Afghanistan performed in front of world leaders in Davos, Switzerland, on 20 January, 2017. A group of 30 something musicians--girls aged between 13 and 30--performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony, an invincible anthem of universal solidarity and peace. It wasn't easy, doing it in Afghanistan, where the radical Islamic sects denounce performing music in public, especially by women. Under the Taliban regime, music was banned altogether. Even the band members had to defy social censure and death threats to continue rehearsals in Kabul.

Negin Khapalwak, the quiet figure of resistance and triumph

  Demurely dressed, her face covered in a veil, Negin Khapalwak, the first woman conductor of Afghanistan, with her baton, becomes a figure of protest and things beyond: she and her girls show us a way to survive the worst, to resist death through art, making it a statement of human idealism against the irredeemable reality of catastrophe which too, is man-made. Art, in this context, transcends its aesthetic function and becomes  a moral act. An act coterminous with life itself in its race against death.
We are waiting for our deliverance. Still.