Artists have the ability to set alight our most treasured joys. Be it through a song or a book, via a poem, painting, or a photograph, this offering can bring to mind the things we have proudly carried with us our entire lives. And it's here, in the process of accepting this offering, where a procession of warm memories greets you: teenage nostalgia wrapped in a ribbon of summer sky, that one fall day when a new crush messaged a series of smiling emoji, the cushion of your sister’s voice over the phone as she tells you about her week. Our most important artists summon these sentiments through their work. A song like “Real Friends,” for example, transports me to 2004 and then to 2012, periods of my life when core friendships were built and tested. The song prompts me to consider the personal bounty I’ve been blessed with, one I could never quantify in capital.

ADVERTISEMENT

In addition to this, there are certain artists who possess, beyond the boundaries of our admiration for their creative mastery, an uncanny power to awaken our deepest and most sacred sentiments. Author and essayist Ralph Ellison wrote a version of that line in 1958 regarding Mahalia Jackson, the black gospel singer whose mighty contralto was once described by Martin Luther King Jr. as a “voice [that] comes not once in a century, but once in a millennium.” I use it here because Ellison’s observation of Jackson captures the essence of what artistry can accomplish when wielded properly: the ability to light something within us, to reach those of us in desperate need of some semblance of salvation.

Sometimes this lighting kindles feelings we cannot easily name. It is not so much that we have forgotten how to name them, but rather it is the proximity with which these feelings live in relation to experiences or memories we have entombed somewhere dark within ourselves. And for this reason we have vowed to never return, to never name them again. Part of this decision is survival. Choosing to not name past impressions becomes a conscious act of self-preservation that manifests outward: ignoring a phone call from an ex, foregoing a night out with friends again for the solitude of your apartment, deciding to return home after years away to people and places that no longer welcome you with the kind of love you once knew. These are moments that can trigger feelings of regret, loneliness, apprehension.

ADVERTISEMENT

But it is the genius artist who, over a sustained period of time, is able to continually produce work that gives name to sentiments hidden, shared, and long forgotten. It's in this space—in the hard, messy work of genius—where the artist, as Ellison witnessed, is able to reduce “the violence and chaos of American life to artistic order.” Black artistic genius—that is, singular brilliance that was nurtured in and speaks to the pulse of black life—is a statement or body of work that exists so absolutely (in verse, on a canvas, on the page, etc.) it bestows a transformative power: to light, to name, and to order all that is within us and around us.

This ordering, however, does not happen without sacrifice. Sometimes this sacrifice is the body. Sometimes this sacrifice is pride. Sometimes it is a complete sacrifice of the mind. James Baldwin, the Harlem expatriate author who knew something of sacrifice and a great deal about genius, is helpful here. Writing in 1963, he described what sacrifice meant and why it was necessary for the artist to give oneself fully to their work.

“[M]illions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which—if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define—you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in a way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope—because only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it. What it is like to die, or to have somebody die; what it is like to be glad… The trouble is that although the artist can do it, the price that he has to pay himself and that you, the audience, must also pay, is a willingness to give up everything, to realize that… none of it belongs to you. You can only have it by letting go.”