“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.”    ~Stella Adler, Actress & Acting Teacher

 

 

Left: Hans Memling, Portrait of a Young Man (c. 1480). Private  Collection.

One Degree of Separation

We are all residents of Newtown, Connecticut.

When tragedy struck that community, less than an hour from where ARTES is published, we asked ourselves, “Who do we know there?” The answer soon emerged. Many knew a bereaved family of one or more of the victims directly—or at least knew someone who knew someone. We breathed a sigh of relief as we struggled with the cruel reality of events unfolding on that day and its aftermath, and embrace our loved ones more closely. But the fact is, just as in the wake of 9/11, there is a gut feeling that life has changed permanently for every American from 9:30 a.m. December 14th, onward. artes fine arts magazine.com

A famous study done by an MIT psychologist years ago revealed that everyone in the world is separated from everyone else by just six people. This notion of Six Degrees of Separation meant that, radiating out from your circle of friends and family, and their friends and family, who, in turn, knew others in an ever-widening circle, it was possible to connect directly to anyone else in the world—popes, kings, celebrities, politicians, butchers and bakers—through a chain of just six people. The staggering reality that the social connective tissue that binds us together as a civilization is so tangible and accessible shocked and amazed many at the time. Even a Hollywood movie about the phenomenon, with a star-studded cast, followed.

Today, in an age of social networking, instant messaging and global media coverage, it is possible to imagine that that surprisingly intimate circle of influence is even smaller. Grief and joy, tragedy and victory, natural calamity and daring rescues are now flashed out to the world through media we now carry on our hip, or on screens mounted in virtually every room in the house. We become hardened to sadness and loss, not because we no longer care, but because we hear about and witness so much of it that we shut down in self-protective mode. We find ways to carry on in an increasingly dangerous world where catastrophe has become a normative event.

In an instant, events at Sandy Hook Elementary School changed all of that. Protective emotional barriers fell in an instant, and we sat in collective disbelief. The horror of the scene greeting first responders (some have not been able to work since), the grief of families being told not to expect their 6-year old to exit the school in the hours following the incident, the outpouring of sympathy and support from the world, was reflected by the mood of the president, who described that day as the worst of his presidency and told the people of Newtown, “We all grieve.”

We come together around events like this, and shockingly, they have become commonplace. But, in reflecting on the event and its aftermath, it is important to realize that, these desperate lone gunmen are not merely taking lives in Newtown, or Columbine, Aurora, Oak Creek, Tucson or Fort Hood; they are sapping the life blood of everyone else, as well. As a society, a community, a family and as individuals, we have been forced to live our lives differently—exercising more caution, fearing strangers, seeking solace and solitude when and where unnamed threats seem to loom in otherwise innocuous settings. A culture of violence is perpetrated by only a few, but we all become their victims in one way or another.

We are separated by only one degree from the people of Newtown, our peaceful lives shattered by yet another monster in our midst. We are the families of Newtown and they are us. We are One.

Remembering Newtown, Connecticut in a poem composed in response to the horrors of World War I:

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

        .     .     .

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

      .     .     .

The darkness drops again but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                    ~William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Thank you for being part of the ARTES success story. May it be a happy and peaceful new Year for all!

Blessings,

Richard Friswell, Publisher & Managing Editor

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