I just had a keek at Banksy’s latest work, “Dismaland“. It’s a dark parody of a theme park, and to me it underscores a mindset that I feel I’m finally crawling out from under, largely thanks to working closely with Strategic Coach’s Dan Sullivan on the books we’ve been creating.
The fake park features police vans, boatloads of immigrant-statues trying to dock, rotting carousel horses, and so on.
Sure, these images underscore real problems in the world, but what I take issue with is this appropriation of suffering, like nobody’s allowed to be happy as long as somebody out there is unhappy.
This struck me as Craig read out descriptions of theatre festival shows last week: All of them sounded like petulant actings-out against wrongs the creators went looking for.
(Plus most of them involved audience participation, or an unformed, experimental format, and I’m too tired from work these days to spend my evening completing somebody’s unfinished tantrum of a production. A lot of them sounded like things I would have enjoyed being part of when I was in theatre school, but now I think about the audience. “That’s nice for you, but what about me?”)
I’m not saying we shouldn’t make conscious choices and try to make the world a better place, but it strikes me as a massive blind-spot to be condescendingly upset by other people’s happiness, or to presume to use other people’s troubles to validate our art. And the whole effort seems fueled by a need to validate an unquestioned premise: “The world is bad”.
Maybe, just maybe, joy and pain don’t cancel each other out.
Maybe it’d be better to make little pockets of what we want to see in the world.
Going to Walt Disney World when I was very young felt like being transfigured into heaven. Years later, I went back for a work conference and found the whole thing fake and distasteful; so, yeah, I’m not the target audience anymore. But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t exist, or that I’m superior for not wanting it.
That’s a shift. I did feel that way for a long time.
(And if they do create a life-sized Star Wars world to visit, I may just have to revise this whole position.)
As I cast about for what I want to create, I want it to come from the place of abundance and appreciation that Dan’s shown me, not the spiteful, scornful position that happiness is stupid. Anybody who’s figured out how to happy in this life has got a good thing going.