Sunday Soul: Decorating Darkness

How might we create an ideal of beauty for this moment?

Ezra Klein and M. Gessen (they/them) had an interesting conversation (gift article) on this week's Ezra Klein Show. The point that interested me most dealt with the aesthetics of fascism. Gessen confesses that even as a child raised in a dissident household, they were still attracted to the uniform of the "scouts" of the regime. They liked the look the scouts embodied, their red handkerchiefs, the order of their marching in formation. Then they cautioned,

"But I think we might be falling into an equivalency trap, and I’d be careful here. It’s not incumbent on us, whatever we want to call this politics — liberal, democratic, left, antifascist — to produce an equal and opposite aesthetic. It’s actually a much more complicated task, which is to assert an entirely different aesthetic direction that is oriented toward difference and variety and things that you haven’t seen before. That is, objectively, much more difficult.

"How do you create an ideal of beauty that includes all sorts of things and all kinds of people and the kind of architecture that no one has seen before? I don’t know."

Gessen is suggesting that creating a visual scheme that is just the opposite or a reaction to the Trump administration would itself be "a trap." Instead, they caution us to create symbols and style that fully represent the vast landscape of American dissent.

I find myself attracted to this challenge: What would a revolutionary aesthetic look like for our times? How might we embody our ideals in our style, in our design, in our look? If President Trump is insisting on making our politics a politics of spectacle, how might we out-spectacle him?

Perhaps because we still have our Christmas tree up, I'm thinking about a brilliant conversation between the podcaster Rob Bell and the psychologist Alexander Shaia. In a discussion on the mystical symbolism of Christmas, Shaia explains that the tradition of decorating a great tree with lights dates to the Celts in Europe. For centuries they adorned a central oak tree in their villages with candles, not to light the night, but to "decorate the darkness."

It is a dark time. One of our fellow citizens was murdered execution style in front of her life partner, in front of our eyes, just a few days ago. She was then vilified by her own President and Vice President.

How might we decorate this darkness? How might we physically embody our hope that our democracy can and will be preserved despite the assault on it? How can we include all those who share that hope in our ideal of beauty?

I don't know the answer, but I suspect it involves a lot of Christmas lights.