Understanding from a New Angle

There is a wonderful Brief but Spectacular (and really, all of these videos are wonderful) video of Betty Reid Soskin, the 101-year-old park ranger that was making the rounds on social media for a while. Betty’s insights on life made me literally pause the video to scribble down her words:

“I could sing things that I couldn’t say. But when I sang them, they were acceptable.”

“The questions are the important things. Each time they get asked, it’s a different meaning, because you’ve grown so much from the last time you asked it. The answers are only temporary.”

The questions that art asks have the ability to transform a subject.

For the last almost 2 years, Lindsay Garfield and I have been working on a project called Salem Unsung, a musical walking tour of Salem, Massachusetts. Sifting through the history of Salem and the witch trials, urban renewal, and the family trees that bind so many of us to tragedy, we began asking questions. What kind of person believes in spectral evidence? What were the motives of pointing fingers? What were the motives of saving one house and not the other? Why did Hawthorne add an ‘w’ to his last name to distance himself from the role his family played in Salem’s history?

With the lens of art, we got to explore the humanity behind these historic happenings. This process was fascinating and disturbing and led to many long conversations between Lindsay and myself about the people documented in the town’s history. We have the advantage of hundreds of years to see that the answers to many of these questions have changed with our collective knowledge and the many social movements, scholars, and artists that have lifted the veil on answers we once believed were permanent and unquestionable. As Betty Reid Soskin says, “the answers are only temporary.”

This week Lindsay and I launched a crowdfunding campaign for our tour, which is set to launch in September. If you’d like to learn more about the tour or contribute to our campaign, click the button below!