Art can help in times of grief.
All good-hearted people have cause to grieve.
We are seven months past the fateful day when Orlando gained notoriety as home to the largest mass shooting in America’s modern history. Forty-nine were slaughtered at the Pulse nightclub.
Last week, shots rang out at the Fort Lauderdale airport, with five deaths, mayhem, bloodshed, horror and panic. Afterward came the shock, intense feelings of sorrow; a growing outrage for some; a sense of loss for relatives and others close to the victims.
Now, our law-enforcement community is shrouded in mourning in the wake of the handgun killing of an Orlando police officer and the motorcycle death of a deputy sheriff during efforts to apprehend a suspect in the death of his pregnant girlfriend.
In the course of becoming civilized, people appear to have developed and kept empathy as a necessary element of our social tool kit. The ability to bear one another’s burdens and share each other’s pain seems natural and universal to most of us, showing itself to varying degree in wideranging circumstances of time and place.
Many religionists believe that we have been taught to care in imitation of one or another divine entity whose imperative commands us to have love for all our “sisters and brothers” and show love to the “neighbor.”
Anthropologists suggest that concern for a group member lost to sickness, injury or death merely documents our nature as evolved pack animals who herd together and must keep our numbers high for the sake of survival.
Sociologists say the sentiments that lead us to rescue those in peril, tend to wounded fellow sojourners and retrieve the bodies of comrades killed on battlefields are reflections of our fundamental allegiance to ourselves — that we preserve others mostly because it helps reassure us of our personal goodness and the worthiness of our own kind. Whatever its source, experiencing grief in the wake of human suffering and travail is a denominator that levels barriers and crosses boundaries between individuals and societies. It is known to all. Moreover, it
Using this couplet and a bit more text, the musician G.F. Handel composed a small aria for a single voice and used the tune as both a dirge for mourning and a note of solace at a tragic moment in his opera “Rondelina.”
The musician was doing what artists always do — reacting to tragedy, responding to grief. For artists, responding to grief takes forms both traditional and spontaneous: statuary and stele, monuments and mausoleums, door wreaths and casket sprays, epitaphs and elegies, poems and paeans, orations and lectures, films and funeraria, cenotaphs and cemeteries, coffins and corteges, roadside crosses, gospel hymns, minted coins, fiery biers floated downstream, ice floes pushed out to sea, urns for ashes, T-shirts, the mournful wail of bagpipes, vigil lights, portraits in hallways, murals on walls, reflecting pools, expanses of marble, granite columns, earth mounds, catacombs. You name it — an artist has wielded it to fashion a response to grief.
In Central Florida, in an effort spearheaded by the Orlando Mayor’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commission, we have embarked on a round of public events commemorating the life of an American icon martyred as a victim of gun violence. I would urge you to ask around and plan to attend at least one program being organized and presented as part of the community’s events for the national Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (The foundation I run will sponsor one of these presentations on Friday from the historic sanctuary of Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Institutional Church on West Washington Street in downtown Orlando at 7 p.m.)
This is a fitting time for us to grasp every element of performance art at our disposal to proclaim that, though aggrieved, we are not so weakened by sorrow as to be turned away from the struggle for justice, equality and righteousness.
Let the beauty and joy of dignified remembrances, celebration and reflection be our answer to tragedy. Let the arts lead our response to grief.