Art and Dignity

This past weekend, World Youth Alliance partnered with an organization with whom we are good friends, International Arts Movement, so that we could have a table at their event. The folks at IAM and I have discussed over various cups of coffee and breakfast rolls the importance of uplifting art, and of the need for artists to engage culture through their work. There was also an element of social justice discussed at the event, and the work of World Youth Alliance, promoting human rights through human dignity, and how vital art is to this process, and how vital this process is to building good cultures.

I met many artists, writers, actors, dancers, musicians at the weekend. It was a little difficult to wade back into that world again, to disentangle my mind from politics, economics and policy, and to engage with the world of the aesthetic, of expression and movement and grace. But it did not take me too very long.

I also had the chance to listen to one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins, the poet laureate of the United States. His poetry is an absolute revelation. It is stark, sharp, and hilariously funny. But then there are moments, when his understanding of the world, his subtlety and humor are like a sword, cutting deep, to a place we did not know was vulnerable. Such, I guess is the place of good art. It brings us bare and raw to places we did not know were there. It makes us stand before something larger, truer. Here is one of his poems that has stuck with me since he read it.

Sweet Talk

You are not the Mona Lisa
with that relentless look.
Or Venus borne over the froth
of waves on a pink half shell.
Or an odalisque by Delacroix,
veils lapping at your nakedness.
You are more like the sunlight
of Edward Hopper,
especially when it slants
against the eastern side
of a white clapboard house
in the early hours of the morning,
with no figure standing
at a window in a violet bathrobe,
just the sunlight,
the columns of the front porch,
and the long shadows
they throw down
upon the dark green lawn, baby.

A little bit of humor, mixed with beauty and awe. I suppose love is a lot like that.

I am still so very young.