Don't Take the Bait (Corrected!)

The following is a talk I gave at the Friday Arts Project in Rock Hill, South Carolina, last year. I hope you enjoy it.

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*Note: This post has been edited to include the full talk, since I sent it prematurely. My apologies.

Thank you so much to Friday Arts Project for having me here. I can’t begin to tell you about the web of serendipity that culminated in my being here, but one of my favorite things is when friends of different spheres magically end up in the same room—I had nothing to do with that, but it’s like opening a series of really surprising Christmas gifts. So I’m happy to be with you.

What are we celebrating tonight? We are celebrating being artists. That might cause people who aren’t artists to scratch their heads, give a chuckle. Ok, sure we have these superpowers—we can draw, dance, make music come out of metal tubes—and people like when we make things that are pretty; you know, the nice prints and tea towels in our Etsy shops; a well-crafted mug; a song that gives you all the feels.

But then there’s the part that confuses folks: why are we just a little odd, or a little too passionate? Why don’t we get real jobs? The answer is simple:

Artists live on the margins.

We are border-walkers. We’ve got one foot in the everyday and one foot in outer space. We never feel like we fit. And I’ll tell you what: that’s by design. Because being an artist is not about how you dress or cut your hair or even ultimately about what you create. To be an artist is positional. To be an artist is to be a witness.

But I fear that the artists are in trouble.

I am worried about us. Because we seem to have lifted that one foot out of the outer realm, the border, the margin, and to have planted both feet squarely in the concerns of this world, and like a statue with feet made of bronze we have built an idol that has entrapped us.

There’s a Jewish prayer we used to say in synagogue when I was growing up:

Let the time not be distant, O God, when all shall turn to you in love, when corruption and evil shall give way to integrity and goodness, when superstition shall no longer enslave the mind, nor idolatry blind the eye…

Superstitions are borne of fear: fear that we lack control, that we don’t belong, that we will be alone. We artists have come to believe that if we mouth the right slogans, vote for the approved candidate, donate to the right cause, that the fear and anxiety will finally attach themselves to that idol and we can rest in its shadow.

But when we do that, when we leave the borders and the margins and attach ourselves to the idols of the culture—we lose our witness.

We lose the objectivity that we must have in order to tell the truth about our own time—and that is the calling of the artist: to tell the truth, whether that is in an truthful pas de deux in a dance company, or a truthful flower painted with integrity, or a book of historical fiction that doesn’t alter history to fit ideology.

And so you can see that if our calling as artists is to tell the truth, then fear is the death of art.

The age of social media has pressured us to make things marketable, fashionable, palatable, consumable, mainstream, approved, consensus-driven, safe—what with all our emphasis on safety and kindness and giving no offense.

But what if the offense is the one thing needed? What if the times deman that we recover our sense of truth, our sense of dissent, our sensitivity to the hunch that we’re being lied to by our album covers¹?

What if what we need most is…to go underground?

This is costly. Many have done it. Salman Rushdie finally paid for his truth-telling with the loss of his eye in a stabbing attack last year. Luis Manual Alcàntara languishes in a Cuban prison. Vàclav Havel, sure of his impending arrest, walked the streets of Prague with a prison kit, in case he got picked up off the streets by the secret police—which he eventually did.

But if we’re going to talk about dissent, what is it based in? Our dissent must be based in the desire for human flourishing, not the fight for control or the redistribution of power; not vengeance or deconstruction or the fear of those on “the other side”, whatever that means; our dissent must not be out of a base instinct for suppression or limp-fish conformity to the cause-of-the-moment.

And what do I mean by “human flourishing”? I mean the absolute, immoveable, unshakeable first principle that every single human being—not a faceless “humanity” but every individual with whom our lives intersect—is deliberately created in the image of God, that every single person—no exceptions, no mistakes, whether they share my politics or my beliefs or my skin color or not my skin color—is a walking, living, breathing column of glory, on fire with the presence of God.

So as artists, we must not take the bait.

Art lives in your body. So you must pay attention to what’s happening in your body. Influential voices—politicians, celebrities, pundits, influencers, professors, authors—they will try to bait you, try to dissociate you from your body, from that feeling of discomfort you feel when you know you’re being lied to, or when what they’re telling you produces fear or rage or alienation from whole classes of people.

Or from the feeling you get when you hear a lie coming from your own lips.

That feeling in your stomach, that slight dizziness, that phrase or slogan that rolls around in your mouth like marbles because you know the words aren’t your own. The people in these institutions and corporations and media accounts try to get you to suppress your gag reflex, suppress your compassion, goad you into the “Two Minutes’ Hate”, get that opium-like catharsis by shouting the words they told you to shout, of making the symbol they told you to make, the genuflection they told you to perform.

All of a sudden, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know who could be a friend, you think you should block that person or shun that person or divorce that person. Come on, come on: hate them. Hate them. We demane that you hate them. We denounce them. We demand that you denounce them. Why will you not denounce? Is it because you are just like them? Shall we denounce you, too?

DON’T TAKE THE BAIT.

Fight for the right to create from your own body, your own God-given body, your own God-given glory. To create from your soul; to create from your rational mind; to create from compassion—even compassion for those you find reprehensible. To create from beauty; to create from truth; to create from goodness; to create from the deepest love you can find—from the Love that will not let you go.

You have to fight for that kind of love. Fight like you’ve never fought before. Fight those voices of the soul-sucking idols like your life depends on it. Because at some point…it just might.

But if you take the bait…you shrink yourself into a bottom-feeding conformist. You shrink the people around you to fit into low-resolution categories, barnacle-encrusted caricatures. You shrink neighbors and friends and family members who might otherwise grace your Thanksgiving table, who might otherwise find rest and shelter in your home at Christmas.

Instead, when you take the bait, you cast your fellow man into the outer darkness. And what do you think he will do there? What do you think he will do, this person, or this group, or this category who you have labeled your “enemy”? Will he become better? Will he disappear? Or will we push and push and push at each other until all that is left is to build a wall of separation, constructed of each other’s bones, mortared with each other’s blood?

And will the artists do this? The artists?! The witnesses? Will the border-dwellers and the margin-stalkers take the bait, be lured in and captured in the spirit-quenching net of an idol?

I SAY NO.

I will not take the bait.

I will love people through my art. I will appeal to the glory in my neighbor, not the caricature. I will get smarter, more savvy, like the dissidents in underground movements, so I can see the hook, recognize the bait—and turn away.

Back to my pencils and my paint and my instruments. Back to the greater reality. Back to the borders where I belong. Love does not live in conformity. Love does not live in politics or on social media or in the mouths of pundits or celebrities or “influencers”.

Love lives in my body, in the image-of-God-in-me, and in you. Love—deep, uncompromising, truthful, that lives in the art we make and in the relationships in this room, where we are in each other’s presence and can look each other in the eye and say “neighbor”.

This is the only way forward, artists. Back to the margins. Back to the fire, the love, the world and all its people ablaze with glory.

Thank you.

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1. Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.