Everyone will recognize it, the feeling of helplessness that creeps up on you when you take in current events. Whether it is national politics, international politics, wars and other violence, or environmental issues. It seems as if, more than before, it is rumbling everywhere and on all sides, as if there are no more certainties and everything is shifting. Certainties we thought we had no longer seem to exist. And in the Netherlands we still live in a good corner of the world. Powerlessness, a feeling that creeps up on me daily.
It seems to be rumbling everywhere and on all sides
What do we do with feelings of powerlessness? Some close themselves off, disappearing into hedonism by focusing only on the pleasures life has to offer; others, on the contrary, shoot into the act, sacrificing themselves while organizing actions to be able to help victims of war and violence or to create awareness of the global climate problem.
Most do what they can or handle
Most are somewhere in between, doing what they can or can handle. Many people respond in small circles, in personal ways, such as by talking about issues that concern them, transferring money to charity, explaining other people's views, demonstrating or sharing information on social media. Another responds by thinking, reading essays and books and yet another reads novel after novel, goes to the movies and visits exhibitions, in the quiet hope that powerlessness gives way to beauty.
Yet another reads one novel after another, goes to the movies and visits exhibitions
Artists are fortunate to make something. By making something that has never existed before, an artist can transform a feeling of powerlessness into something positive and into a reality that can be grasped and conveyed to "the public," who then hopefully experience the same thing. It is not about a way of looking away. Rather, art can provide a new way of seeing, better perhaps, or from a different perspective. Art can touch us and thereby make us lose our powerlessness for a moment, make us feel for a moment that the world is not so bad, that we can do something with it, that we really can change something. And then maybe we will try.
To interpret the world by symbolizing it
In this sense, one of the many enrichments of art, in all its manifestations, is that it keeps us going in a world that is difficult to interpret in any other way than by symbolizing it.
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