Oct. 4: Listen to the whispers of the artists

By Amy Richard

I had every intention that this column would be about Hawaiian art -shirts, outrigger canoes, hula dances, slack key guitar or something else I'd find there - but we cancelled our trip to Hawaii.

Our flight never left on the 14th, and we weren't in the mood for a festive vacation in Hawaii. We weren't even sure we wanted to go anywhere, but we'd taken the vacation time, so instead we packed the car and headed to southern California.

Thursday night we were so saddened and distracted by the tragedy that we couldn't even pack. We turned on the stereo, made a list and sat. Ate dinner and sat. Gathered a few things together and sat.

And then we bathed ourselves in music. We pulled out songs of love, of loss, of hope, of joy, of struggle. We played CDs, tapes, even the old LPs. We wept, we danced, we laughed. We played John Lennon's "Imagine," The Beatles' "Across the Universe," Van Morrison's "Into the Mystic." We heard from the Grateful Dead, Bruce Springsteen, Willy Nelson, Aaron Neville, Fiona Apple, Elton John, Gillian Welsh, and on and on we went in a healing rush of rhythm, harmony and lyrics.

We weren't cleansed of the grief, but it helped immeasurably. These artists had given voice to our feelings of grief and uncertainty, and our need for hope.

When we made it down to Manhattan Beach, I read in the LA Times that the program directors of the nation's 1,200 Clear Channel-owned pop and rock radio stations had issued to station managers a list of 150 "lyrically questionable" recordings that shouldn't be played after the terrorist attacks. These included "Imagine," Paul Simon's "Bridge Over Troubled Waters," Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World," Dylan's "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," and James Taylor's "Fire and Rain."

Sadly, the Clear Channel program managers, despite their probable good intentions, suffered from a clear lack of judgment, denying listeners what they needed to hear. But the arts and entertainment world did have to make difficult decisions about how to proceed after the attacks. Many had to determine whether to proceed, and most did - if the artists were able to get to the venue. It's well that they did, because art, whether it's a painting, a play, a dance, a poem, a novel, a film, a symphony, or a tune plucked on the family guitar, has always spoken eloquently and deeply to grief, to hope, to community, and to continuity.

The need for art may even be felt more profoundly in times of crisis. Haris Pasovic chose to run the first wartime film festival in Sarajevo. Residents of the city, throughout the siege, risked their lives to get to movies, running through streets torn by warfare. "You see them," Pasovic explained to a writer, "because you want to connect, to communicate from your position on the other side of the moon, to check whether you still have the same reality as the rest of the world. The favorite question of the journalists during my festival was `Why a film festival during the war?' My response was, `Why the war during a film festival?' It was the siege that was unusual, not the festival. It was like we didn't have a life before, like our natural state of mind and body was war.'"

As we seek to find ourselves and to connect with others throughout the world in the midst of this unusual, horrifying tragedy, we must listen to the whispers and shouts of artists. As Saul Bellow once said, artists, even at the risk of our displeasure, tell us the secrets of our own hearts.

Amy Richard has lived in Ashland since 1990, was Revels editor at The Tidings for three years, and since June of 1998 has been media relations director for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.