Wise Words on Art from Alan Alda

ALAN ALDA—Love your art, poor as it may be

Recently I was surprised from an eloquent source, an accomplished actor of note, Alan Alda. He surprised me with the eloquence of his very relevant statements in his works, only surprising in the fact I had known of his extensive work in this area. His words strike a particular cord with me as art and writing have dominated my activity for some time seventy-six years now and I find particular resonance with this passage. Please reflect on these words, they are very important to our humanity:

    Pay attention to our language so that, in a string of sounds, the order of those sounds had meaning. This will let us communicate the huge difference between “My foot is on the rock” and “The rock is on my foot.” At that point, I would think, we could start parsing not just our words, but the world itself. We could go from the statement of “I’m here to questions like “Where is here, what is here?”—“what is over there?”—and the big one: Who am I who is asking all these questions?” And that, I think, was the birth of the humanities.

We have all traveled different paths in search of an answer to the question that is named us for thousands of years. What does it mean to be human? Together with her colleagues in the sciences research ceaselessly endlessly for an answer to that question: what does it mean to be human? It may be the most crucial critical question we’ve ever asked in the life of our species, especially now—when our ability to destroy ourselves is much greater than our ability to understand ourselves.

This is what it’s like when you decide to be an artist: first of all you must decide to do it. You are kidnapped by it. You never know if you have what it takes. After years of doing it, you you are always back where you started a beginner. Because every time you head for the horizon it’s not there.

An artist looked at life in the chaos of nature, then takes a brush, a violin, a camera, or his or her own body and plays a plaintive song of desire on it. A desire for understanding. Who are we? Why are we the way we are? Can we ever become what we wish we could be?

All artists, I think, are poets—whether they arrange words on a page, make steel and stone into buildings, or leap into the air, transforming their bodies into visual music.

The poet puts the right words in the right order so that the colliding of their sounds and meaning makes your neurons flash like a pinball machine. And like the pro poet, artists of all kinds take the viewers nervous system and snap it like a whip. They refresh it they refresh our vision. They press our reset button. They make the colors of the world as vivid as they were when we were children and saw them for the first time.

Artists try to say things that can’t be said. In a fragile net of words, gestures, or colors, we hope to capture a feeling; a taste; a painful longing. But the net is always too porous, in the end we’re left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

We ride this rhythm—and it rides us. Like a wind sock in a heartless gale, the artist whips back-and-forth to the beat of nature free of care and sometimes, just as free of safety. I love my fellow artist for the dangerous life they lead; for the exhaustion of their birth pains; and how they bet their lives on the slim hope they can make something worth looking at or listening to.

We may amuse in the light, but, like Shakespeare’s clowns, we always ask the most important questions about who we think we are. Where would we be without Artists? We would be gray automatons in a gray landscape picking gray flowers for Gray lovers. Life would be grim.

Where would we be without the humanities? Life, I think, would seem far more meaningless. The search for wisdom—and for a deeper understanding of who we are—is the daunting challenge for the humanities. They are that part of our common brain that reflects on our actions, questions or desires, and forces us to deliver what we value. In some ways, we’re all Artists—practicing our skills, but also reaching into the dark for an answer.

In the dark of the cave, we hope to find light—not from the torch, but from the sparks that fly as we decode the handprint on the wall.

I wish us luck—Alan Alda