We Do Not Apologize, We Do Not Die.
On art, (R)romanticism, sublime madness & realism.
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.” - Nietzsche
There’s a fun 1991 film called Impromptu that stars Judy Davis and Hugh Grant, the former playing the dynamic and brilliant author George Sand (pen name of Aurore Dudevant) and the latter playing the frail and also brilliant Frederic Chopin. Mandy Patinkin also has a supporting role as the poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset that to my mind is the funniest - a lover cast aside by George in her endless pursuit of the perfect love.
Part of the film takes place at a country chateau, home of the Duchess D’Antan who desperately wants to bask in the perceived romance of an artist’s life, of course without giving up any of the fineries of aristocracy. It’s reminiscent of Marie Antionette’s Hamlet, a peasant village built on the grounds of Versailles where she liked to act out a “peasant’s life” before walking back to the palace for dinner.
In the film, Sand and de Musset craft a satirical play to both entertain and make fun of their hostess, a biting commentary that the delicate Chopin interrupts, complaining that it is in very poor taste. It is perhaps the starkest moment in the film where de Musset in his clown makeup angrily shrieks at Chopin “Art does not apologize!”
The rest of the film before and after that scene is basically a romantic comedy. But for a moment, shit gets real. The rage, resentment, power and vulnerability of the artist is revealed, just before some gunpowder goes off in the fireplace, hidden in logs by the children playacting as French revolutionaries. As a parent, I feel like there’s some good commentary there too on the radicalism of youth. But, I digress…
I’ll admit that I’m a romantic, and indeed appreciate much of the Romanticist art movement that rejected the clinical focus on logic and reason, embracing instead emotion, magic, and the imagination. But of course things are never this clean, or indeed romantic. In reality, the love affair between Sand and Chopin was also remarkably toxic and fraught. Artists who drank, fucked, scribbled, painted, and didn’t apologize with reckless abandon also had to be a part of the systems they flouted.
Eugene Delacroix, for instance, was commissioned by the turbulently changing French government on many occasions, and is perhaps best known today for his piece, Liberty Leading the People, a painting that was hidden away for years because the government deemed it too incendiary to show in public. George Sand was a bisexual feminist and socialist who, among many other things, founded a newspaper called The Cause of the People, published by a worker’s cooperative. She was also married to a baron for more than a decade. Chopin was the child of a turbulent nationalist Polish movement, never publicly engaged in anything political, and tried with repetitive diligence to appear as a member of an aristocracy who paid his bills and treated him like a brilliant plaything to adorn their salons.
We expect much of the artists, likewise their art. We expect a contradictory purity, a steadfastness, a niched ideal that few if any can actualize. They must be otherworldly in their talents, all too human in their failings. Even the chaos has to be romantic. It must be the chaos that creates beautiful art, but not the chaos that abuses lovers or children, that self harms in ugly ways, that deteriorates in bitterness. There must be suffering, but it must be suffering that ends, suffering that takes misery and turns it into concertos, poems, novels, epic paintings. It must be proud, it must be dignified, it must be raw, it must be polished, it must comfort and disturb.
We burden these artists with all these impossible contradictions because I think we know, as Nietzsche said, that we need art, we cannot actually live without it. It is the perceivable manifestation of our souls - and therefore it is all of our passionate humanity crushed against a system that is so dispassionately cruel.
We need art to be so many things at once: a shield and a spear, a salve and an inspiration, a caretaker and a lover, something delicate and dangerous, but safe, something indestructible and far too mortal. It must explain our suffering like a frontline reportage, and heal it. As Bertolt Brecht put it, “art is not a mirror held up to the world but a hammer with which to shape it.”
In this sense, the role of the artist is not unlike the role of the organizer, the revolutionary - who with a passion that can only be born from the soul demands and seeks a better world, who must not only see the truth so as to fight it, but must reject it in order to do so. In my Project Censored interview with author and professor Mohammed Bamyeh, he talked about realism as a hindrance to liberation.
“…the realists, meaning the diplomats, those who think within the parameters of the states actually have become useless people…And we see actually that people who are trying to think of a realistic way to solve that problem are themselves unable to do anything about it.”
“Now, so that means that we have to actually look beyond reality, and we have to look at historical examples where we have all kinds of revolutions, the Bolsheviks, Khomeini, etc, the Palestinian resistance movement itself, all of which were kind of undertaken by unrealistic people… that is an opportunity, I think, to think beyond the limits of what exists because what exists is unhelpful, basically, and not only unhelpful, but it’s also genocidal and criminal…”
Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about this as “sublime madness,” an idea that Chris Hedges also takes up in his powerful book, The Wages of Rebellion.
In other words, we gotta be a little romantic and Romantic - we must imagine the best and fight for it, we must reject the logic that we cannot win against these forces, and fight anyway. We must be absurd in our dreams and our demands because realism is very really killing us. We have to know the truth and reject it.
At the same time, we have to live in this reality while trying desperately to create a new one, one that can also survive outside of songs, paintings, plays, and organizing spaces. We have to count on the capitalists so that we can count our money each month, feed our families and pay our bills. We have to keep going to work during a genocide, make small talk with the people at our daycare while feeling all the rage, resentment and vulnerability. We have to leverage our power as the people while always looking over our shoulder and engaging in community safety so that something like “Free Palestine” doesn’t land us in jail.
We have to be these impossible contradictions, and the chaos. To once again quote my beloved and contradictory Nietzsche, “One must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” And in that romantic line, I recognize yet another contradiction - that the horror that is reality can and should be the grist for our work, as we struggle not to romanticize, not to normalize it into a Hollywood film where Hugh Grant makes tuberculosis look remarkably sexy. This chaos within us is both an acceptance of reality and its rejection, and this dancing star is the explosion of power and vulnerability, rage and resentment, hope, despair and of course, love. Like a star, it is unapologetic in its chaotic burning. And it does not die, not in any human timespan anyway.
I like to say that art won’t topple empires, but it’ll inspire those who do. Of course art cannot stop a genocide. Of course art cannot stop climate chaos (not sure what can at this point). Of course art cannot stop them from clear-cutting a forest or taking away life-saving medication. It cannot actually keep us from dying of the truth. But it is the last piece of us, our souls, that cannot be occupied, and therefore it is dangerous, it is delicate. It is a very real threat to the powers that be, and a power imagined when not realized.
In his book, Perfect Victims, Mohammed el-Kurd writes:
“Irreverence builds an alternative reality where the occupation is not impenetrable and the occupier is not indelible..irreverence is not just a rhetorical strategy but a form of self-preservation and defiance, a stubborn rejection of psychological subjugation.”
“I know that the price of a joke is volatile. Sometimes it is libel, censure, harassment, even handcuffs…laughter is akin to faith in its ability to make wounds hurt a little less…laughter brings that better place to earth.”
In a 1969 speech, Black Panther Party organizer Fred Hampton said “You can murder a liberator but you can’t murder liberation.” You can force an artist to apologize, you can arrest them, kill them even, but you cannot kill the art that drew the sword. And it will never apologize. For it is there, as Finley Peter Dunne wrote, to “comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.”
The truth may still kill us, but before we die, how should we live?
With our mirrors, our hammers, our pens, our paintbrushes, our clipboards and banners - how shall we embrace the contradictions, be apart from and a part of the systems that kill us, walk the line of a romantic romanticized, not to be normalized - a creed that’s fluid but deep - to create for the sake of our unoccupied souls, to be mad with the chaos, to not be ok, and it’s ok if we never see fame - or fortune. It is a radical act to be here, in this liminal space, to be an active witness to the truth as we imagine worlds to overtake it, as we reject realism and are crushed by it, where art and the artists that create it can be everything and nothing because all we ask of it all is to be, all.
Here, we do not apologize, and we do not die.
“Hope is not killed except by the death of the soul, and art is my soul that will not die.”
– Durgham Qreiqea
See more of Durgham’s story via the Palestinian Art Preservation Alliance’s tribute.