Yesterday, I recorded the next episode of A Culture of Possibility with Arlene Goldbard. I’d stepped back from the podcast last year, when I got sick, so this was our first recording for four or five months and I was anxious about how it would go. We’d actually planned to do it last week, but I wasn’t well enough, and I didn’t feel much better last night.
But there was another reason for my apprehension. We’d agreed, as the podcast begins its fifth year, to talk about what we had hoped to do when we began and what those intentions might mean today. I had to recognise that the world has become steadily darker and more dangerous since 2020.
When we began the podcast the Covid-19 pandemic was far from over. Since then wars have begun in Ukraine, Israel Palestine and elsewhere, the climate crisis has produced wildfires, floods and heatwaves, the far right is gaining power and attacking both its enemies and democracy. The political and economic consequences of the past 45 years are culminating in ever greater inequality and injustice as the poorest are made to bear the cost of national debt through public spending cuts. At the same time, bereavement and illness have made these years a hard road for me.
What could we talk about? I feared that any conversation about community art, activism and co-creation would be bleak and have little to offer a listener. The working conditions of people committed to these values have always been tough, but never more so than today. I want my work to be encouraging for them, to offer useful ideas and a sense of solidarity with the millions who work selflessly to improve the lives and circumstances of others in community action across the world.
In the last couple of years, as you may have seen if you read this blog regularly, I began to doubt whether I still had anything useful or encouraging to say. I’ve turned down invitations to speak at conferences for just that reason. I have never questioned the value of the work, but I felt overwhelmed by the times, and I feared the conversation Arlene and I had planned would be trapped in a similarly pessimistic discourse.
And then I read an old poem by Bertolt Brecht, a short poem written in 1939 when he was living in Denmark to escape the Nazi government in Germany, a poem I’d read before and liked but thought no more of than that. It’s called ‘Motto’, and it comes from a book called Svendborg Poems. Here it is in English translation:
In the dark times,
will there also be singing?
There will also be singing.
About the dark times.
When I read these lines before, I think I took them for granted – the kind of cheering thing that people on the margins, like community artists, say to themselves to keep their spirits up. Now, in truly dark times, they spoke to me both as a profound truth and as a commitment.
If we can’t sing about the dark times what is the good of our work?
It’s now we need the values of solidarity, equality and humanism that give life to community art. It’s now we need the lived practice of working together, of sharing hardship and joy, of resistance and mutual aid, of trusting ourselves and one another, of renewing, building and healing. It’s now we need new stories, new imagination, new possibilities. Solutions were never going to come from elsewhere – and if they did, they would be traps, poisoned gifts that disable rather than empower.
It always depends on us, on the people who are willing to work together in the face of indifference or hostility for a better world than the one they have been given.
I don’t know if it’s because I had Brecht’s poem in my thoughts but my fears about what Arlene and I could discuss proved groundless. It’s always a pleasure talking with her, but never more than yesterday when I began to feel myself sing in the darkness. I’m not sure what the song is yet, and my voice is still hesitant and quiet, but I know what I can do about the darkness.
The photograph above shows Brecht’s house in Svendborg, by Alter Fritz through Wikimedia Commons.
François Matarasso 
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