Art in the Time of COVID
Good things will come from the horrific experience that is the global COVID-19 crisis. Don’t get me wrong; usually, I’m not a glass-half-full kind of person. But I do see the light at the end of this tunnel. I always love a good story centered around the light within the darkness, and I know when we look back at this experience, that is how it will go down in history.
For one, I think our western-centric consumeristic society will learn that we can survive, and indeed thrive, with much less than we think we need. The planet, too, will get much-needed respite from a lower demand of resources. This is all not to negate the very real struggles many are facing during this time.
The struggles of COVID are real. The impact on the economy is real. Joblessness as businesses shut down temporarily or permanently is real. I don’t mean to belittle that struggle, but I do want to focus on the other side of that coin rather than fall into despair.
I worry about mental health, especially of anyone in the arts. Artists tend to lean toward the heavily empathetic, and I know we feel the pain of the world more deeply than others. It is the superpower that fuels our art and the kryptonite that cripples us if we let it.
We have to be resilient.
So let’s focus on the good as much as we can to balance the pain we internalize.
For my part, I turned to art. I picked up books, television, music, and movies that fed my brain, my soul, and my heart. I am not discriminating of the content and consume anything from high art all the way to mind-numbing surface entertainment and everything in between.
The first months of COVID self-isolation, I spent reading romantic comedies. The likes of Acting on Impulse by Mia Sosa and You Had Me at Hola by Alexis Daria shifted my defeatist mood when it all began. We need books like these to lift our spirits when we most need it.
I also Turned to old favorites like Gilmore Girls (The Jess Mariano seasons, of course), which led me down the rabbit hole that is Jess’s reading list. Through this exercise, I discovered Allen Ginsberg, my first exposure of whom initiated me with his poem Howl. The poem fits our current struggle more than I think we’d care to admit from a poem written in the fifties. Reading the poem itself is a Howl, and it almost hurt to be out of breath reading it.
Please Kill Me by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain was also a discovery I made through Jess. I delved into the creation of punk rock and was transported to another world and another time—no less chaotic—but explosive with the possibilities of art and the boundaries it could push. This book also reminded me of my almost-forgotten love for Lou Reed. I played the Velvet Underground with Nico as I read or wrote. I wonder if, or how, it may have affected my work? All art is, after all, a response to someone else’s work, whether we like to admit it or not.
After realizing I’d forgotten old favorites, I revisited M Train by Patti Smith and A House of My Own by Sandra Cisneros. The two women pillars who prop so many of us on their shoulders. Sandra gave me permission to write even when so few writers look or sound like me or have names like mine. And Patti, well, she taught me to be true to my art and not give a *#%$ about what anyone else thinks.
Self-isolation paralyzed me for a moment there at the start. All I could do was to find refuge in the arts I loved. Eventually, the works I consumed lifted me and charged my own desire to create.
The best thing to happen from this experience was the fire I accidentally lit under myself. Reading about punk rock and the Beat generation, Bob Dylan, and post-modernism filled me with an industrious urge to create.
In the span of three months, I wrote two books. For comparison’s sake, I wrote my first book in seven years. It’s still not done, and I don’t think it will ever be. That first pancake taught me lessons, but no one needs to read that. I took on a pen name, built a website, and hired editors for the start of 2021 for the two books I am writing now.
Perhaps I’ve taken on too much, and a rest would have been welcome, but my projects have saved me. I won’t put that responsibility on art. Sometimes we ask too much of it, but I do know that staying busy has saved me.
So, stay busy.
Create.
[Notice of non-affiliation]
Neither Ofelia Martinez nor Reading Cactus Press are affiliated or sponsored by any of the links included in this entry.
