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Art and Medicine
In Karl Paulnack's welcome address to freshmen at the Boston Conservatory, at one point he draws the following comparison:
If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.
You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.
Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of teaching Keats to my sophomores, and it's always seemed to me that Keats took a similar view about his role as a poet. Before turning to poetry, Keats studied medicine in a time when our modern, aggressive medicine has its roots. It was a time of amputations, incisions, and painfully gory surgical work, and ultimately Keats left medicine to write and study poetry, which he viewed as a means to heal the human spirit.
In attempting this, Keats was not simply a disciple of beauty. He was not, in other words, only offering opium. A hard look at the hard truths of life was essential to Keats' project, and the answers weren't always comforting. Though surrounded by death (father at age 9, grandfather at 10, mother--whom he himself nursed through her last days--at 15, younger brother--whom he also nursed--at 23, and Keats himself would be dead a little over two years later), Keats could not bring himself to believe in--or at least to put his trust in--an afterlife. Is there a harder truth than this? Despite his inability to find comfort in thoughts of heaven and a merciful God overseeing it--or perhaps because of this--he found great beauty, joy, and meaning in this life. Keats looked squarely upon the miseries present in life and did not despair, but instead looked to art to help us survive even in the face of overwhelming difficulty.