The great David Bowie once said living within cooee of international conflict, when he lived near the Berlin Wall in East Germany, increased his music-writing creativity.
It no doubt made his material sharper.
Peter Brook said of the Polish Professor of Shakespearean literature Jan Kott: Professor Kott assumed readers had been woken in the middle of the night by the Nazis in World War 2 or the military police in Poland, after the war.
This was the pressure under which Professor Kott worked. It made him very creative. I can remember his review about The Tempest, which I read many years ago.
In The Tempest, in act 5, scene 1, Prospero spoke to fairies who made midnight mushrooms at night, when he said "You whose pastime is to make midnight mushrooms..."
Professor Kott, however, annoyed Shakespeare traditionalists, when he said Prospero used the midnight mushrooms as a metaphor for a nuclear explosion!!
Bombs going off and military police of one kind or another knocking on the door in the middle of the night drove Professor Kott to this staggering conclusion, even though nuclear weapons did not exist in Shakespeare's day!!
It, however, showed a wildly sharp mind, and amazing use of creativity.
These things talk about people who work in creative professions, but the world around them is that of military dominance.
Suzanne Marchand, in her 1996 book Down from Olympus, stated the masters of the enlightenment wanted to recreate the ten truths and beauties of ancient Hellas.
Ronald Taylor, in his 1997 book Berlin and Culture, stated that in Enlightenment Germany they preferred the Greek sublime, for example von Knobelsdorff’s work on the Berlin Opera House, including statues of Apollo and the “muses of comedy and tragedy” and statues of Sophocles, Euripides, Menander and Aristophanes.
Prior to the enlightenment, however, Germans lined the avenues with statues of Roman
officials. Professor Taylor said that at that time some of their statues portrayed aristocratic individuals such as Schleuter’s monument to the Great Elector of Brandenburg.
The generational change that saw them replace the 'Great Elector of Brandenburg' with the 'muses of comedy and tragedy' must have caused sharp division among Germans.
Times change and people change with the times. In his historical novel about the former US Vice President Aaron Burr, the author Gore Vidal quoted a Mrs Townsend in 1833. She described the scene in New York in the year 1803 (approximately). She said "...30 years ago, when all the world was young..." Here she described one of the greatest changes of all time. It was still the dawning of a new political age in America.
Times such as the Enlightenment and more recent war-times compromised people in their beliefs and this made them stronger and more critical thinkers, creatives and idealists.
I thought about how my own beliefs may have been compromised in my own life-time and how it shaped me. In this moment of reflection, I was drawn to an article in The Atlantic. It featured the Political Science Professor Jeffrey Lyons from Boise State University, among other people. I am not sure I agree completely with his stats which stated that roughly three-quarters of kids who have two parents of the same political party will fall on the same end of the political spectrum as their parents.
You see, if I can link all of this in together now, I grew up in one of the most conservative political electorates. Most people in my family were conservative voters and my entire neighbourhood was a very right-wing politically. I lived in this conservative suburb for the first 17 years of my life, in the same home.
My conservative surroundings didn't always sit well with me. I was very against war. The local neighbourhood consisted of a lot rather rich business people. They were not lefties!
Here in Australia, the Federal Labor Party began an 13 year rule, when I was aged 15 and so I understood politics based on the mechanisms of a Labor government. Some of their policies, such as much better respect for average working people and their universal health system Medicare won me over. I still sit a bit more on the left side today, but I always feel wracked with guilt for deserting my conservative roots - a guilt which sometimes makes me something else - not left or right, but somewhere in the center - a kind of libertarian perhaps - but probably an idealist - someone who would like to fix the world and not rely on either side of politics.
We do need to ask the questions about whether we need to 'recreate the ten truths and beauties of ancient Hellas' and feature more of the statues of Apollo and the “muses of comedy and tragedy” and statues of Sophocles, Euripides, Menander and Aristophanes.
The alternative might just be the military police waking us up in the middle of the night ― Joseph Walz