Interlude for James Fishkin by Virginia Moscetti

As James Fishkin points out, today’s democratic institutions are in a precarious state – and it’s no secret. Since the late 2010s, we’ve been flooded with studies and reports warning us about a global crisis of faith in liberal democracy. As that crisis went unaddressed, we’ve watched it jump right off the page and into our backyards, fueling insurrections, waves of populist fervor, and the rise of a new technocracy. Now we’re like T.S. Eliot at the end of the first World War, “fishing for solutions with the arid plains” of a dying democracy behind us. Or like John Adams after the tumult of the French Revolution, quietly conceding that “There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide.” 

Religious imagery, like The Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck or Ciseri's Ecce Homo, tells us that the aesthetic object is transcendent, infused with a Divine presence that not only goes beyond the object’s material components – its colors, textures, use of chiaroscuro, et cetera – but claims to view (and judge) us in return. Other, non-religious images have a similar effect. Take the Mona Lisa, or Fantin-Latour’s Homage to Delacroix. In both cases, the image claims seeing power over its viewers, blurring the divide between the observed and the observer and transforming the aesthetic experience into a space of confrontation. Put differently, we see and are seen by the image. And, confronting it, we are compelled to return a gaze whose origins we can’t trace. What’s looking back at us through Mona Lisa’s eyes – Da Vinci? History? The Divine?

Before writing, poetry was the oral tradition. The poet, historian, held the knowledge of where the people came from. Was second only to the king. The poet makes or breaks one by recounting exploits or failures. Who are William Dawes and Samuel Prescott? They strode alongside Paul Revere on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s famous midnight ride yet went unmentioned in the poem. Sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington rode twice as far that night doing the same, but her name is less illustrious because no one wrote a poem about her. In 1821’s “The Defence of Poetry" Shelley claimed "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world".