It's Time To "Create Dangerously" Again
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Albert Camus, author of The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957. He traveled to Stockholm that December to accept the prize. During his acceptance speech, he talked about the importance of art and the artist’s essential role in 20th-century society.
Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.
A few days later, Camus gave a lecture at the University of Uppsala also in Sweden. He used the speaking opportunity to say artists must “create dangerously,” if art is to be an “instrument of liberation,” which he believes it can be and must be.
To create today is to create dangerously. Any publication is an act, and that act exposes one to the passions of an age that forgives nothing. Hence the question is not to find out if this is or is not prejudicial to art. The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies (how many churches, what solitude!), the strange liberty of creation is possible.
The strange liberty of creation. I like that he calls it that. Great art is endowed with truth and beauty—two of the life-affirming things that totalitarians want to deprive us of. To keep truth and beauty alive is therefore both heroic and revolutionary.
Camus was saying that the artist’s role in society is far from fanciful. He felt that artists and writers must do the heavy lifting that our gifts are made for. If we can see, then we have a responsibility to convey what we’ve seen. We must feel the pain of oppression, move through it, and use our words and images and music to express a range of feelings that offer inspiring alternatives to whatever “the man’s” selling.
Camus was a badass. A survivor. A humanist.
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Here’s a new poem I wrote last week.
Hate’s Harvest
All the slack has run from the line
Frayed from friction and neglect
It seems certain to snap
Even as we the people hold on
Decency decays and freedom rots
Hate’s harvest casts the villagers aside
False idols and fabricated frontiers
The settler’s dream the Indian’s annihilation
Destiny is now manifest
Forced entry, forced labor, forced birth
No one owns another human being
Hate’s harvest is something we cannot abide
Shared horizons and shared blood
Common law and common sense
You are free to fly at the oppressor’s neck
You are free to defend your life
We lost the plot, but now it’s back
From hate’s harvest you can no longer hide❦
It requires bravery, talent, and immense faith to “create dangerously,” and make art that is an “instrument of liberation.”
In his “Create Dangerously” speech in Sweden, Camus looked back 100 years and pointed to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s faith in creators and the creative act.
“A man’s obedience to his own genius,” Emerson says magnificently, “is faith in its purest form.”
It can be easy to get down and think it’s too hard to make art and make a living at the same time. It is hard. In fact, it’s a constant battle for me and for most artists.
Nevertheless, we are compelled to create and driven to be heard. Some of us find that we must make order of the chaos swirling around us. For others, it feels good to let go, to sing and paint and speak in riddle and rhyme.
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Emerson was a witness to America’s original sins—genocide and slavery. Europe was engulfed in war and the holocaust during Camus’s time.
Here we are again. Greed kills and nothing is greedier than an Emperor. “Give me Greenland.” The imperial mind doesn’t inquire, it acquires.
Now, for some beauty.