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My husband Larry and I are fortunate to have friends, family, and colleagues all over the world. Many of them have spent the past year in the midst of war or creeping authoritarianism. In this past year, I have had many conversations about what it means to lead, to teach, to make art, to imagine when the very spirit of our times bends towards nihilism, cynicism, and violence. “During dark times,” they ask, “how do we sustain our creative work?” This is a deep question, and they are not the first to wonder about it.
Aside from psychic exhaustion of living in dark times, creativity may even seem like a path of denial—a way of running from rather than facing reality. The critical theorist Theodor Adorno famously said that writing poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. He meant, I think, that the very tools of the creative mind—abstraction, metaphor, rhythm, metonymy, hope—seem designed to deny the deep reality of bare suffering. In this view, dark times call for silence, active resistance, and unadorned witnessing.
And yet, so many incredible works of art have emerged from the darkest times and from encounters with deep, culture-wide, suffering: Eichah (the Book of Lamentations), Picasso’s Guernica, Anselm Kiefer’s haunting large-scale paintings, the poetry of Paul Celan and Wislawa Szymborska. These artworks are proof that Adorno was wrong—and he apparently did change his mind after reading Celan’s poetry. Far from disrespect, it is only when we meet the call of dark times with creativity that we fully respect what has been lost, honor the dignity of victims, and direct ourselves towards the work of repair. If we silence ourselves, we give up what is most humane, and we leave no trace of it for others to find in our time or in a more open future.
We don’t know how these great artists found the courage and inspiration they needed. But we do know some of the things that we can do to use our own gifts to shine a light in the darkness. To do so we need to invigorate our bodies, our minds, and our spirits.
Consider beginning with your body. On a basic physiological level, fear and dread take over our muscles causing us to fight, flee, or freeze. In dark times, fighting can be dangerous, fleeing can seem impossible, and so we mostly find ourselves frozen. Unable to act or to release our negative affects, we hide in place. We may go through the motions of our work but there is no aliveness in it.
A first solution is to soften the body and restore breath and easy movement. Dr. Peter Levine (Waking the Tiger: Healing Trauma) encourages us to do what other mammals do after a scare—they literally shake it off. You can induce your own shivering and trembling by taking a cold shower, by lying on your back with your knees bent and touching, or even by just drinking a big glass of cold water and talking some full breaths. Anyone who has ever cried after an intense yoga class knows that freeing the body’s natural movements also liberates our emotional states and the flow of our authentic energy.
As the body emerges from its frozen state, we find our minds also move with more agility. Dark times tend to dampen good thinking because we want to stay away from painful or dangerous thoughts. In its place we are offered platitudes, distraction, clickbait, and even outright lies. Whatever we craft from those raw materials will be of low quality. It might seem like insight or creation on the surface, but it will lack depth and dimension. Kitsch, propaganda, and sentimentality flourish in dark times because they mimic creative output without touching on, or responding to, what is really afoot.
We can guard against producing these pseudo-forms of creative activity by committing to think deeply and speak truly. Eschewing false comfort, we can refuse to limit ourselves to a side or a pre-given ideology. We can hew close to our lived reality. I’ve always been moved by the way that the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, introduces her masterpiece, Requiem:
During the frightening years of the Yezhov terror, I
spent seventeen months waiting in prison queues in
Leningrad. One day…. there was a woman standing behind me,
her lips blue with cold….Jolted out of the torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there)- ‘Could one ever describe
this?’ And I answered—‘I can.” It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had previously been just a face.
Our need for being seen, understood, and valued never leaves us. The need for meaning is, as Viktor Frankl showed, our deepest and most human one. Artists and creative thinkers of all kinds use their minds to make meaning. This is not only the best of comforts in dark times, it is the pathway beyond them.
And what of our spirit? What is the source of vitality in dark times? I know of only one: awe. As cognitive scientist Dacher Keltner has shown (Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life), awe is the distinctively human experience of being in the presence of something vast that transcends ordinary comprehension. By bringing us out of our dailiness and our own ego concerns, awe inspires us and makes us feel more alive. Cross-cultural study has revealed certain patterns of experience that bring about states of awe: mystical encounters, close observation of birth or death, epiphanies, collective movement such as singing or dancing or drumming together, immersion in nature or good design, and exposure to moral beauty (i.e., seeing other people behaving with great courage or integrity).
Not only are all of these available to us in dark times, responding to dark times offers us multiple ways to pay attention to the awe-inspiring aspects of our world. Keltner emphasizes that each of them is connected to a form of vastness—taking the larger or longer or deeper view. With bodies that have moved beyond the paralysis of fright and minds committed to presence and truth, we have ample opportunities to notice and experience the life-giving energy of awe.
We never know how much the dark will strangle the light or how long it will last. As individuals or small communities, we can rarely control the global and historical factors that bring dark times upon us. But we can remain committed to our creativity. We can build and lead and imagine. We can act on behalf of the love of the world and the miracle of its existence. My hope for each of us is that we offer up our bodies, our minds, and our spirits in the service of this holy effort.
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