Author: Raam Wong
"This is a truly defining historical moment. It will be a part of our collective memory forever."
The spirit of these words, part of a speech delivered by President John McCardell on Sept. 11, is echoed in the sentiments and artistic visions detailed in the articles below.
Though removed geographically from the epicenter of the September terrorist attacks, the Middlebury College artistic community was by no means insulated from the emotional and psychological aftershocks of that day.
In the days immediately following the attacks many internationally recognized artists voiced their despondency at art's inability to capture the enormity of human suffering. Quoting The London Daily Telegraph columnist Norman Lebrecht, a March 3 article in The New York Times reflected these doubts. "Art has lost the facility for rapid reaction or even considered response," Lebrecht lamented in his column.
Eight months later, the artistic community at the College and beyond is gradually tapping the raw emotions borne of the tragedy as an avenue of artistic expression.
The writings and works spawned by the tragedy stand as a testament to art's ability to respond to crisis.
Whether documenting the aftermath or providing solace to the artist, art serves as, in the words of Robert Frost, "a momentary stay against confusion."
But how to identify this variety of responses? Images of that day, and of crisis more generally, often find expression in conventional forms ranging from poetry to visual and performing arts. To this rule Middlebury is no exception.
The writers and artists profiled here, having grappled with crisis, affirmed the power of art to represent and possibly illuminate it.
News Editor Claire Bourne '04 examines the role of poetry as a vehicle of both a therapeutic expression and a response mechanism for societies confronting crisis. Works penned by sophomore slam poet Crytal Belle and D.E. Axinn Professor of Creative Writing Jay Parini in the days, weeks and months after Sept. 11 reveal the power — and sometimes the elusiveness — of the spoken word in encountering and possibly coming to terms with crisis of all forms.
Laura Rockefeller, editor of The Middlebury Campus arts section, speaks with senior playwrights and actors Joe Varca and Nick Olson and Professor of Theater Douglass Sprigg. Theater is, according to Sprigg, one means of "engaging in the problems of life," a sentiment echoed by both Varca and Olson. Mediating between the single traumatic event and its symbolism, the performing arts remind us, is but one of theater's responsibilities in moments of crisis.
These editors share space alongside The Campus' Arts Editor Kate Prouty '02.5, who examines modern dance as a way to assuage the pain of crisis through movement. In its abstraction, movement has the capacity to be understood universally in a way that language, with all its connotations and overtones, cannot.
Elizabeth Logue, former managing editor of the newspaper, contributes to the collection with a dispatch from New York City. After living there for the semester, she questions how the city can recover emotionally and artistically with a gaping hole in lower Manhattan.
Moving their gaze from the New York City arts scene to personal confrontations with crisis, senior Jan Greenfield explores the nuanced implications of art's ability to tackle history's toughest and most complex moments. Among other things, her creative writing piece addresses the fragmentation of the process.
This spread aims not to be definitive, but to scratch the surface in an attempt to stimulate dialogue on the responses of art in periods of personal, national or international crisis. These responses, as Parini indicated in an interview, will no doubt continue in a variety of forms in the months to come.
— Tim McCahill, Managing Editor, Devin Zatorski, Associate Editor and Kate
Prouty, Arts Editor
September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.
Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.
The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
> Show an affirming flame.
Answering the Cry of Crisis How Literature,Theater, Dance and the Visual Arts Respond
Comments
