Jeremy Begbie AYR Interview
“The Arts as a Resource for Healing and Reintegration” was a promo video by Jeremy Begbie for the 2011 After the Yellow Ribbon conference at Duke University. Interviews by Stephanie Gehring and Logan M. Isaac, videography by Pilar Timpane.
Transcript
If the experience of war always for nearly everybody involved will bring some experience of trauma, fragmentation, things splitting apart, disintegration, so we lose a sense of continuity of form. What the arts are doing, whatever else they're doing, is they're giving form to our experience and to our feelings.
I'm a theologian and I'd see myself as a biblical theologian. So I suppose I always look first to scripture in thinking about how to address any issue, but certainly the issue of, of trauma after war. I'm also a musician and very interested in the arts, and especially in the way that the arts can be vehicles of healing and reintegration in people's lives.
And when it comes to war, of course, and the victims of, uh, of war, and those who have fought in war and return home, very often their experience will be one of bewilderment, certain sense of isolation, emotional isolation, perhaps, and fragmentation, of things falling apart. The arts are a way of reintegrating us, reshaping us.
And then we've gotta also remember, of course, the arts are basically creative. That is, you are making something, you are not leaving wreckage. Indeed, you can make something out of even the wreckage and that's an extraordinary, powerful experience as well. Out of broken things, out of ugly things, you can make something that speaks of your emotion or a beauty or a or or something you feel strongly about. In that connection, I often think of a poet, Wilfred Owen. Wilfred Owen is probably the greatest of the First World War poets, and he, uh, had shell shock, and he had to be taken home and in a convalescent home in Edinburgh, he wrote not all, but most of his famous poetry.
He's not only just telling the world of what's going on out there. Back home in Britain, of course, so many were unaware of the sheer horror of what was actually happening to these young men. So he's not only telling them about that, he's giving form to his experience, giving form to his trauma so that he can be clearer about what he's angry about, about what he's really feeling, and perhaps even what he should be feeling or not feeling, and poetry, I think can do that.
One ever hangs where shelled roads part.
In this war, He too lost a limb,
But his disciples hide apart;
And now the Soldiers bear with him.
Near Golgotha strolls many a priest,
And in their faces there is pride
That they were flesh-marked by the Beast
By whom the gentle Christ's denied.
The scribes on all the people's shove
And bawl allegiance to the state,
But they who love the greater love
Lay down their life; they do not hate.
