They say no one reads any more, so this email is probably a bad idea.

On the night of the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, I walked into the darkness of my daughters’ bedroom and stood, silently, for a long time.

I remember moving my eyes aimlessly through the shadows of the room. I listened to the small, whispering breaths of the two girls I’d tucked in to bed earlier that night. One was five. The other, not quite three. Eventually, I left the room, and lay down in my own bed, heavy and numb. Fumbling with my phone, I pecked out a brief email to my company. I wrote that I was not sure if I would come to work in the morning. I said I’d see how I felt. I said: Take care. Work can wait.

In the days that followed, I went through the motions of work, but I wondered if it mattered. I remember thinking that almost everyone I spent time with expressed some version of the same question: “Is what I’m doing important? Does it matter?” Artists I knew despaired at making art. I despaired at running a small software company. Stay-at-home parents despaired at household work. It seemed like so many people I knew simply despaired. “I am not doing something important. I am not helping. Something has gone terribly wrong, and this thing I do each day is not helping.”

I remember clutching at a thought experiment. I imagined any job that was clearly more helpful than mine, and then I imagined every person on the planet doing just that job. A world full of nothing but nurses. A world full of nothing but farmers. The absurdity of the image helped. It didn’t convince me I was doing something that mattered, but it did convince me that not everything which matters will look the same.

On the day of the U.S. Presidential inauguration — a Friday — I did not watch television. Instead, our office went to lunch. We went to a pizza place. I remember realizing we had walked in with one President, and at some point during the meal, the President had changed. I remember thinking: There is nothing that makes this fact real except that we all happen to agree that it is true. Somehow, billions of human brains synchronized a state transition in which one human was President when we walked in to lunch, and a different one was President when we came back out. Nothing required this, beyond the fact that we each knew this change was going to happen in every other brain at approximately the same time.

Believing it, together, made it true.

Artists often refer to art as “work”. As in: “making work”. I dislike the word “work” as a synonym for “art”. I suspect it comes from a place of discomfort about the value of art. Instead of focusing on the thing, it focuses on the work we do to make the thing. To me it reads as a sort of defensive play to signal worth — in our culture, hard work is almost always, in and of itself, worth something. Focusing on the work it takes to make art reflects, I suspect, some sense of shame about the value of the art itself. People who make intangible things, like social progress, will talk about the work because it’s sometimes hard to point to the results. But people who make tangible things don’t usually do this. Mechanics and bakers and programmers don’t talk about “the work”, they just do the work, and maybe talk about the truck, or the bread, or the code. Artists make tangible things, but we’re often found talking about making work instead of making a dance, or a painting, or a play.

The other thing about work is that it’s useful. And whatever art may be, surely one of its defining graces is a freedom from any requirement to be utilized.

I love the improbable telegraph line that a poem constructs between minds. “I would like to tell you how this feels” says one mind. Another mind, often far away in time or space, responds: “Oh! I know exactly how that feels!”

I love the little cave of dreams a theater constructs for an audience. “Let us make a time and place to be playful, together.”

I love the emotional radiation a musician can conjure and discharge from the literal air, like a physicist whose instruments unfold hidden forces.

I love the artistic bones of rhythm, contrast, surprise, synchronicity, repetition, focus, distraction, subtraction, promises kept, promises broken, distortion, intimacy, exaggeration, and mystery. I love that creative techniques remove judgment and encourage curiosity. I love that art-making is fundamentally an act of creation, and therefore inherently non-cynical.

I love that art can be simultaneously useless and dangerous to authority: A playful mind is free.

This time, I was not shocked. This time, I came in to work the next day.

I started, on Wednesday, by cleaning. I emptied the trash cans and vacuumed the carpets. I swept the stage and painted over the graffiti on the poster bay.

I noticed that I was calm. I noticed that I was digesting my grief in small, intense doses. I noticed, in the days that followed, how my body ached for no obvious physical reason, like it was doing work that it would not (could not?) tell my brain about directly.

I thought about the day, during the pandemic, when I had stood in a dark and silent theater; alone and unsure and missing other people.

I thought about the day, a few weeks ago, when I had danced in the same theater; after a drag show, in a room full of joy, and sweat, and embodiment, and music.

I do not know what will happen next. But I know that this little theater can be a space where people can, like bell hooks wrote, “invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

Therefore I say: Gather together. Jostle the brain state of the world. When you are ready, open space for laughter. When you are safe, unfold the hidden forces in your heart. Build a cave of dreams. Share with a distant neighbor. Like Wendell Berry: “Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.” I don’t know exactly which parts will matter, how, or to whom. Allow skepticism and reject cynicism. Make trouble, make meals, make art, make it all. Call each thing what it is. And then go to bed, and get some sleep. You’ll need it for tomorrow.

The Voxel is a theater laboratory in the heart of Baltimore city. We are an incubator, research lab, teaching center, and resource for local and national performing artists. It will be nice to see you, the next time you’re here.

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Baltimore, MD 21218

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