So strange are the times, so chaotic is the jumble of feelings — grief, rage, anxiety, terror — that art seems not to have a chance. With every utterance, art risks at worst inappropriateness, at best irrelevance. In those first hours after the attacks on September 11 we were all made to feel irrelevant to our bones — what good were our pitiful daily activities, the return to routine that politicians called for? Last week I wrote about the collected Columbia recordings of Billie Holiday — a body of work I’d put on a par with the greatest. Name your poison: Beethoven’s late quartets, Joyce’s " The Dead, " Chekhov’s " The Lady with the Dog, " War and Peace. Holiday is up there with them all. And yet, talking about Billie — it didn’t seem like the wrong thing, but maybe not exactly the right thing, either.

I’ve always been a staunch art-for-art’s-sake man. If it’s abstract, I’m buying. " What do novels do then? " the Paris Review asked the once-notorious literary onanist Philip Roth. " Novels provide readers with something to read, " Roth replied. " That seems to me the only realistic expectation. " So much for the ennoblement of mankind. Wagner was a miserable anti-Semite, Beethoven was simply miserable, and their music can either ennoble you or send your troops marching off into Poland. Or Afghanistan. Fearful that Webern, Mahler, and Wagner might not be ennobling enough, the Berlin Philharmonic changed its three Carnegie Hall programs last week to include more Beethoven (Beethoven was what had been planned all along for the Berliners’ Symphony Hall stop this past Monday night). Fearing that Schumann’s Scenes from Goethe’s ‘Faust’ was not appropriate enough, Seiji Ozawa switched to the Berlioz Requiem for this weekend’s concerts. This is art programming as comfort food.

Not that we don’t need comfort. But there are other things we expect of art: to give voice and perhaps clarity to that chaos of emotions. When the art experience is profound, we may feel catharsis, or at least a bit of that clarity. At the risk of invoking new-age lingo: we feel centered. Which isn’t bad. When you feel an abyss open beneath your feet and waves of anxiety rushing in to fill the void, you can get a bit light-headed, and maybe that’s why we yearn to be centered — as in, balanced. But 90 percent of our distractions are taken up not with high art but with what more properly belongs to the world of entertainment. And in the undifferentiated electronic buzz collectively referred to as media, it’s sometimes difficult to separate journalism from entertainment. At first we needed to see those crashes over and over — not simply because we’re habitual media-programmed voyeurs (though we are), but because we needed to convince ourselves that it was real. But context is all: put those flaming twin towers on the cover of TV Guide a week later and all of a sudden it’s a TV movie from 1976 (or, more precisely, Irwin Allen’s 1974 Towering Inferno). I think we’re all desperate to slice through the electronic buzz right now, to find some centering emotion we can trust.

Much has been made of David Letterman’s turn from " irony " to " sincerity " in the week following the attacks, but Letterman’s gone even farther than that — in those first two weeks he became the nation’s grief counselor. I think it’s ingrained in the American nature to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and jump directly from grief to action. At a Yom Kippur service I attended in Brookline, Rabbi Donald Pollock reminded us that two days after the Oklahoma City bombings, " Billy Graham held a mass rally devoted to healing. All the missing had not yet been accounted for; all the bodies had not yet been found. " Here was Letterman, in show after show, bringing on one public official (Rudolph Giuliani, Hillary Clinton) or news-media elder (Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite) after another and focusing for much of the time on loss. It didn’t matter that much of what Rather said was nonsense (that the entire explanation for the attacks could be boiled down to the word " hate, " with no informing geopolitical context — doesn’t this guy watch Frontline?); what counted was that the great lizard-faced Texan of prime-time news broke down in tears twice and appeared to be struggling for composure much of the rest of the time. Letterman himself, though defining " courage " as the operative word of human behavior, struck the truest note when he said, almost in tears himself, " It’s very sad here in New York. "

It’s not that we need our entertainers and news anchors to sob us through the current crisis. Letterman was back on the air Monday the 17th. Jon Stewart’s Daily Show returned on Thursday the 20th, and there was Stewart, giving a disclaimer about doing " another entertainment show beginning with another overwrought speech by a shaken host. " Yet sure enough, Stewart was soon in tears also, and connecting his experience of the September 11 attacks with that of being a five-year-old schoolboy when Martin Luther King was assassinated. " This attack happened — it’s not a dream. But this recovery is a dream realized. " It was, he said, MLK’s dream. " Whatever barriers we’ve put up are gone, even if it’s for a moment. " So for now, Stewart pointed out, we were judging people for the content of their character and not the color of their skin. Of course, he didn’t mention the occasional Arab-American gas-station owner who might get shot at.

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Issue Date: October 11 - 18, 2001