The pain expressed through art helps us as viewers or listeners to be in touch with our own pain, to feel the beauty and sorrow inherent in life.
Music, especially, connects us instantly with all the emotional shades of being human.
I was reminded of this while listening to an NPR interview on All Things Considered last week. Melissa Block was talking with Bill T. Jones, the dancer and choreographer, about his favorite winter music.
Bill picked Franz Shubert’s Winterreise (winter journey) about a solitary traveler who has lost his love and is wandering in a bleak landscape during a savage winter. Bill said this music reminded him of a day in winter when he was a boy sitting in school looking out the window. He saw a man struggling to walk against the wind, and realized it was his father, walking ten miles to a factory job so that Bill could stay in school and have a better life.
Bill’s story about his father was bleak and painful, like the music. Tears were already coming to my eyes.
Since Adrian died, I think of sad music, sad books and sad movies as aids helping me to feel more deeply. I welcome the opportunity to cry.
When I heard Melissa Block trying to soften Bill’s pain with her gentle questions, I got more and more upset.
“Didn’t you want to bring your father into the warm school building?” she asked.
No, he didn’t.
And then when Bill said he didn’t think he had ever told his father he loved him, she said, “I bet you showed him.”
I don’t know if Melissa was worried about losing her audience as we all descended into the depths of Bill’s experience, or if she was just trying to comfort him.
It’s natural to want to soften someone’s pain, to get him to see the bright side, but ignoring the pain doesn’t make it go away.
When I finally couldn’t stand Melissa’s comments any more, I said out loud, “Sometimes there’s just pain.”
And that’s OK.
