Date: 13 November 2016
Subject: The new crisis, same as the
old crisis
Dear Ray
First off, I can't tell you how glad I
am to find you resurface on the Internet. It had been more than a year since
your last post, and I was getting a little twitchy that the BU administration
might have gotten their mitts on your blog as well. Or worse. But you are back,
and it's a great relief, even though it took Mr Trump to move you to
post.
It's a great relief because you see, in
spite of your many valid criticisms of the Internet, I found you here many
years ago, and without hyperbole, it changed my life forever. I forgive the
Internet everything else because of this. Even Facebook. I was an undergraduate
student of English those days, stuck in a University where great written works
of art were dissected politically, economically, sociologically,
deconstruction-ally and then discarded as if they changed nothing. But they
change everything. The first time I read Lawrence, my soul soared with
possibility. The first time I watched Cassavetes, it was an assault on my
senses and I was left bewildered. But if one is in touch with some truth within
themselves, one claws back and one fights with the author, the poet, the
filmmaker and then one lets themselves change. Gandhi is said to have said that
first they ignore you, then they fight you, and then you win. But this can only
be true in politics. In art, first you try to ignore it, then you fight it, and
then you lose, resoundingly. And how glorious it is to lose, to shed your skin
and to arrive at the ledge, excited to take another leap into the unknown. The
only time criticism has managed to do this for me is when I have read you.
Often your best teachers are those you don't meet.
And that's why Donald Trump doesn't
matter. Yes, he will probably roll back freedoms that have long been taken for
granted. Yes, he will make hate a valid form of public expression again. Yes,
we may look back in a hundred years and think this was the point where we
pushed the planet to finally kill us off. But none of these impressions will be
true. Trump is merely a symptom of a greater but more subtle crisis in our
globalised world. As Michael McClure said, the function of art itself is to
maintain a state of crisis, and true artists don't need a political crisis.
They are in touch with the crisis within all of us. The crisis of how to live
and how to love, crises as old as human beings themselves. And they will keep
working, because creating is a joy, the attempt to understand is a joy and
being gregarious with the history of art is a joy.
Even for those people who do not live
in war torn countries, such as me and you (yet), a crisis is always around the
corner. This year I am going to be leaving my job in the environmental sector
(not innocent by any stretch) and go headlong back into art, to write. to
create and to acknowledge the crisis within me.
My email may be a little scattered and
merely a rehash of what you say, but I have been meaning to write to you for
years. I want to tell you that no matter how futile politicians and
administrators may make you feel, you have already fulfilled some function for
being on earth, and that is to awaken in others an appreciation of how delicate
and ever eluding truth is, but how maddening and joyful and worthwhile it is to
pursue it nevertheless.
With love and admiration (and a little
regret that I could never attend your class),
Vinay
India.
Prof. Carney’s response
to Vinay Nair is printed on the next blog page.
