Letter from the Editors: The Necessity of Expression

Since we're attempting to do something new this week--replacing the light-hearted fare that typically lines our pages with a more serious-minded evaluation of how art grapples with, mirrors and occassionally influences some of America's most pressing issues--we feel as if we owe an explanation as to why we chose to take this path.

It started with a simple Saturday afternoon discussion of a recent Steven Spielberg flick among the staff.

Released in the summer of 2001, Artificial Intelligence: AI was deemed a bloated mess by those paid to write about movies, and we largely agreed. However, in deciding how to piece together this week's Recess, we were offered instant inspiration by one of the film's scenes:

Single-minded in his effort to find the mythical "Blue Fairy," whom he believes will transfer him back into the past and into the loving arms of his estranged mother, Haley Joel Osment's character David travels to New York City. Rendered completely inhabitable after the polar ice caps melted years earlier, the city is a mere shell--icy, lonely, dead. As he is transported in a flying car above the waterlogged buildings that used to litter the city's old skyline, David whizzes by the top of the World Trade Center, and, at that moment, you freeze. In your mind the movie stops completely, and you realize that this scene, which was nothing more than an image of a fallen metropolis when it was first released, is now inescapable and shattering.

Once this vision had been imprinted, other staff members started to chime in. The season finale of this TV show, the opening track of that album, the way a particular painting looked on that Sunday afternoon--all of these experiences had taken on an entirely new meaning.

Some had argued right after the attacks that the world of A&E would become entirely trivial. Now that Americans had experienced true horror, they said, movies, records and exhibits would no longer carry the same sense of import. But as we recounted more and more examples of how art had helped us grieve or how it had given our terror a face, as in AI, we realized how hollow those arguments were.

Art, to us, is essential.

And, apparently it is to you too. For this issue we solicited members of the Duke community to riff on how they felt about some of the most important matters facing our nation through their own prose, poetry and photography, and we were flooded by words and images people had created in an effort to make sense of the last year. Instead of becoming trivial, this response proved that artistic creation has instead burst with an urgent, new resonance.