Below is a review I wrote of an arts and music festival, which I helped create and organize, in Smithfield, RI. See the original here.
This year’s Vernal Arts and Music Festival made me feel like a traveler in a strange land. Passing through forests, fields, and rivers, I happened upon painters painting, sculptors sculpting, and singer-songwriters singing their song-writings. They all seemed wonderfully at home with their crafts, and it was fun meeting and learning from so many.
I felt like Alice, in Wonderland. Oh, there was a poet sitting on a toadstool, a honeycomb of glittering hexagons, and a seed-slinging landlocked pirate ship. I expected, at any moment, to see the Mad Hatter adjusting his top hat or a bunny rudely checking his cell phone while waiting for his tea.
It was amazing and inspiring. I was surprised, however, by a feeling of distance. In planning, it had been important to me (and all the organizers) that the festival be welcoming–an unrestricting place of self-expression. We had worked for months encouraging people to showcase their talents and had extolled the value of creation, carte blanche.
Now feeling out-of-place, I really felt like Alice: uncomfortable and down the rabbit hole.
I’m negative. I find dirt in a snowstorm and study it until I forget the snow, so having felt it, I had to understand this lone negative feeling. It had a few facets, and upon writing out my concerns, I found they were the common concerns regarding art in general. Moreover, they fell apart easily.
Concern: Did we accomplish enough?
Could we have had more of an impact? Let’s face it, poets aren’t known for their practicality, nor musicians for their financial aptitude. The festival could have been bigger. With more artists, more financial benefactors, and more attendees, we could have reached more and done more.
But this will always be the case. We were a small committee, and the turnout was the better than we had hoped: we had over three hundred attendees and dozens of artists. This was a networking forum with chance meetings that led to new collaborations, such as at the PVD Fringe Fest. In addition, we brought new patrons to Revive the Roots and raised thousands for Alzheimer’s at the preliminary fundraiser.
Best of all, there was art, imagination and comradeship in spades, and as it says in the “Jabberwocky,” a poem by Lewis Carroll, “`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe.”
Pacifying Thought: We did a ton, and, regardless, there was nonsense enough.
Concern: Was I too lousy an artist and in over my head?
In an environment of free creation, were my contributions just embarrassing? I work with numbers, not paint; computers, not seashells.
There is some urge, I think, for us to find a nook and then to convince ourselves that leaving is imposturous. I’m no artist; I’m a mailman, someone might say. Leave painting to the painters, I’m an executive! Did you know Lewis Carroll (actually, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) was a nine-to-five mathematician? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a lark and only published under encouragement. Like most of us, he had an unglamorous adult job, but now his pseudonym is an avatar for imagination.
In one myth, the irony is too fun to be real. A decade after Alice’s release, Queen Victoria supposedly requested Dodgson dedicate his next book to her. He acquiesced, of course, and a few months later sent the queen a large mathematical tomb entitled, An Elementary Treatise on Determinants, with an eloquent inscription to her.
While we may never achieve Dodgson’s financial success or notoriety, we should realize we are capable of similar and surprising expressions of art, regardless of how inartistic we think our lives are. At the festival, I saw a four-year-old playing drums with a Berklee graduate and then help a nationally-displayed action-painter throw dirt on his work. I saw an EMT trying to pedal a spinning wheel and a personal trainer picking out notes on guitar. I saw an office worker overjoyed to run her first group art installation and even my own mother watching (and enjoying!) hip-hop dancers. So much for nooks.
Pacifying Thought: Art comes from expression, not already famous artists.
Concern: How do we know that we did right?
Having faced two sides of my feeling, I still questioned. How do we know that the festival was worthwhile? Moments turn into memories almost before they exist; did we make the momentary meaningful?
What finally made my negative feeling go away was an image of the “Poetry Tree” by the Frequency Writers of Providence. They ran string between trees like a wild cat’s cradle, and on it, people hung hand-written poems and hand-woven string.
And there it was, shaken sometimes by the wind.
Somehow, this image makes any anxiety fall away and me realize my worry was and is nothing. Everybody’s work was there. Mine was there. Some well-practiced poets hung poems; some highly-skilled weavers hung string; some neophytes hung poems and string. Some hangings were funny; some were sad; some were quirky. It didn’t matter if it was good or bad, if there was too much or too little. Altogether it was, shaken sometimes by the wind.
There is no Wonderland without Alice, and there would have been no Vernal Arts Festival without artists and “non-artists” alike. It was an adventure distant from our nooks and so very close to enough. And as Carroll writes of the end of Wonderland:
Thus grew the tale of Wonderland:
Thus slowly, one by one,
Its quaint events were hammered out –
And now the tale is done,
And home we steer, a merry crew,
Beneath the setting sun.
Pacifying Thought: I saw Alice in Wonderland, and she was beautiful.