ON PICASSO AND POLITICS

GIVEN THE CHOICE I would take Picasso over politics.  Every time.  Eleven times out of ten.  But as happens on these pages, the narrative of the day and its events hijack my soul as much as they must.  Until I can’t stand it anymore.  I am but a blogger though my story is seldom told, I carry the reminder . . . Why do we care?

HOW CAN YOU NOT?  We live in historic times about which songs someday will be sung.  Who hasn’t? Events now take place that will change the world forever.  When have they not?  We live in times of the greatest moment.  Who hasn’t?  We live with the consistent illusion that our era exceeds all others for its import.  Cynics resign themselves to all things now as they always have and laugh.  The comic in me may as well.  There is more in life than a blue hue and a hard reality.  What acid the cynic burns the face of the day with will not be the mark of these times. I live ever on the edge of hope, unafraid of the occasional tumble.

AND WHAT ABOUT PICASSO?  The friend I have never met Picasso lives outside the common reality in the nobility of the simple line and the forever true, the essence of the soul found in hue, in the space found in the fracture of a cubist face and cultures.  Blue, Parisian, Cubist, political even when he was not.  Picasso is about politics as all artists and all people are, whether we know it or not.  How and why we apply paint to the canvas of our lives reveals with every stroke who we are and who we are not.  Artists great and less than great live in their own worlds, but we share one as well.

ART MAY BE the refuge of the soul, but that is not the sole power of its forms.  When the artist comes out of his necessary solitude, the like of Guernica comes to life.  I return again to Guernica.   Guernica, specific to a Basque town in a Spanish war of Republican and Loyalist, is not limited to its time.  Some say we live in a Republican time of our own.  Fallujah could be Guernica. Who will paint that? And what Old Guitarist will sing a song?  Who remembers Baghdad is the Babylon of old?  Who can forget the rivers of tears cried by those in search of peace.  Are we captive in the infinite dark prison of ourselves?

By the rivers of Babylon
Where we sat down
And there we wept
When we remembered Zion

But the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa song
In a strange land
Cause the wicked carried us away in captivity
Required from us a song
How can we sing King Alfa song
In a strange land

Sing it out loud
Sing a song of freedom sister
Sing a song of freedom brother
We gotta sing and shout it
We gotta talk and shout it
Shout the song of freedom now

WAR IS LIFE and some say inevitable.  Can we ever be free of war and should we be?  Who wants peace when another holds a sword must be a fool.  But no peace ever lasted when “the victor” holds the sword over the vanquished.  Peace itself is the struggle, the undiscovered country we would all be citizens of if we could forget the arbitrary boundaries of man.  Peace may be the stuff of fools and dreamers, but we are such stuff as dreams are made on.