The Healing Arts?

A colleague of mine was recently asked to sit on a panel about the healing power of performance. In preparation, she and I bashed around a few ideas and came to a quick conclusion that, for me at least, was a little surprising.

We were both almost atavistically repelled by the use of the word healing in that context. I mean really. There were involuntary facial expressions. Of the eeww variety.

I’ll release my colleague and her own issues with this issue to the ether, at this point, with thanks for setting my mind spinning. When did I develop some sort of antipathy about healing? Who is anti-healing?

See, I thought I believed in healing. In hospice, we use that word a lot. We like to say that, while there is no cure, there still can be healing. Which sounds good, right? Sounds hopeful. Sounds like closure, and comfort and, really, I do still believe that’s true. I think there can be closure, and comfort, even in the absence of a cure.

But that closure and comfort no longer looks like healing, to me. Somewhere, in some dark corner of my mind, when I was busy not noticing, that closure and comfort started to look, instead, like change.

Transformation. That’s what I now think is truer. Healing is an ideal, a beautiful fantasy. When wounds heal, they close up. Preferably without scarring. When bones heal, they return to their original form and structural integrity. When charred mountainsides heal, the trees grow back. The more things return to their original form, the more completely healed we believe them to be.

But when my form is disturbed, is return to the original state really what I want? Maybe it’s because I’m sort of an alchemist at heart, but I’m all about solve et coagula. Dissolve and reform. REform. In my world, that’s growth. When form breaks down, under stress… whether that form is physical or habitual or prejudicial or reactionary… when form breaks down under stress, by all means, I need a new form! I don’t want to be healed. I don’t want to return to the integrity of a form that failed. I want to grow into a new form altogether.

And art? Well, I’m an artist, I suppose. It’s a hard word to apply to oneself. Never doesn’t sound presumptuous. But I am a performance artist. And a writer. And a photographer. I constantly, sort of helplessly make art out of the things I think and see and experience. If you agree that “making art” is a useful descriptor of the process I actually engage in, which is all about selecting and highlighting, polishing and manipulating, presenting a filtered facet of reality, and that I think of more as shaping.

But. BUT. There are a few things that have happened to me that catastrophically disturbed my form. Blew it apart. Avatars of dissolution. In both cases, when the whirlwind stopped blowing, there was no ME left. Nothing I recognized. I will never make art about either of those experiences. I won’t dignify them in that way. I will never allow myself or someone else to point at them and say “at least X came out of that”. Sometimes there is no excuse of the awful.

And I won’t try to heal myself in that way. I don’t want to be healed. I want to be changed. Scarred. Marked. Visibly different. I want a new form, not the illusion of an old form that failed. I want to honor and acknowledge the wake of the wounding… Turns out I’m not really anti-wound. Even though I have yet to learn to appreciate the pain involved.

We wound the seed to sprout it. We wound the soil to plant it. The forest fire that chars the ground makes space for new trees to grow. Death, perhaps the ultimate wound, is what makes room for new life.

I think what art does best is wound us. Breaks something open so that we notice, maybe change, at least aerate something… a belief, a value, maybe even just a momentary sense of awe. A response to beauty. An understanding about what is beautiful, and what is not, and why.

Is this healing? For the artist or the audience? I suppose you could make an argument that, in the long-term, it is… but it’s the healing of the bonesetter, not the balm. I don’t think artists have any obligation to be healers. I actually don’t think they even have any obligation to be good. I’m pretty sure the only obligation of the artist is to be honest. In the creation of their art.

In their lives… in any of our lives… I think we have more obligations than that. But honesty isn’t a bad one to prioritize.

So, to be honest, I no longer believe in healing. I believe in changing. Which actually feels more powerful and hopeful, to me. And I think I’d like to be an advocate of… even occasionally an agent of change, in myself, in my life, and in my art.