Before you dirty your hands with the unrest in my head, here’s Patti Smith:

“…I find I am unable to draw one line. It should be so simple, child’s play to trace their dual silhouette. But I can’t. I’m afraid that I won’t do it right. I’m afraid that art is useless…I think of Picasso and how he reacted to the bombing of Guernica. How he translated his pain and horror into a monumental work that moves and teaches us to this day. I return to my wall.” (Interview, November 2001)

I return to my wall. Beautiful. Finally, in the month since four planes fell upon the eastern seaboard, forever disrupting how we rise in the morning and sleep at night, a piece of truth that fits us all.

We all need our walls. We need our jobs, our classrooms, our canvasses, instruments and typewriters. We need our outlets, our books, our paintbrushes, films and sports. There’s no shame in that. It’s what we need to move on. It’s why we choose to move on.

Much has been said since September – theories on what happened and why have poured forth from every crevice capable of shoving the information towards us. Everyone has an answer, a solution, a formula for fixing things that’s better than the next. Some folks seem to know exactly what to do with a situation the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

I don’t. Politics escape me. I am unable to draw lines between the issues, the facts, the intricacies rooted too deeply for me to see. Afghanistan? The Taliban? Osama bin Laden? Names I know but don’t understand. All issues previously ignored, now simply too big to sit down face-to-face with. Most people have been willing to dive into the enormity of it all, to wash themselves with the news each day and digest every soundbite, article and image that crosses their plate. It’s a position I respect; I’ve just happened to take the opposite spot.

I’ve reacted not to the cries of war, but the voices supplying them. I’ve searched not for the peaceful protests, but for the folks heading into public to support them. I’ve read not into the texts of speeches and public addresses, but the eyes behind them. Do they believe what they say? Are they feeling what they preach? Why?

I’m not ashamed to embrace the emotional side of what has happened. Watching people return to what they love and, even if just for a moment, allowing themselves a sense of genuine pleasure, has taught me more than I’ll be able to comprehend for some time. The little things, the often insignificant, the markers you can point to as what helped one day turn into another.

Benefit concerts. Watching The Who take the stage at Madison Square Garden this weekend. Won’t get fooled again? I hope not. Mick and Keith belting “Miss You” to an arena full of people who have no doubt uttered the phrase countless times in the past few weeks? Powerful. Bowie assigning “Heroes” to the real articles and McCartney giving us back “Yesterday”? Damn near perfect. Eclipsing these stars were the 6,000 or so heroes in attendance, the men and women of the New York Police and Fire departments. By allowing us to watch them sing, dance and laugh for what was perhaps the first time in a month, they again helped a nation stand on its own two feet.

The nationwide telethon a few weeks backs that, like the Concert for New York City, aimed to raise money for family and friends of the Sept. 11 victims, also helped to raise my head out of the spiral it had been in. Neil Young begging us to “Imagine,” Eddie Vedder mapping out the “Long Road” and U2 telling us to pick up and “Walk On” were moments more significant, for me at least, than anything else I’ve seen since.

Call me a pushover. Fair enough. Don’t deny the comfort, however, in seeing familiar faces express our emotions. Some artists have been railed against for taking to the small screen and plying their trade. Why? It’s what they do – don’t expect anymore than that. It won’t change the world, but for a short while, at least, their craft makes what we do have a bearable place to be.

The music – all of art – has helped us to humanize the impossible, to grasp the unimaginable. It’s why we should continue to embrace it, to pursue it, to spread it as far as we can, into the laps of as many people as possible. The news is vital, of course, but it only takes us so far, and there’s only so much we can shoulder at a time. With music, with art, there is something we all understand. We don’t need to be taught the emotions we naturally feel, or educated on how to enjoy the songs we hear and the images we see. In the end, for all of us, it’s as important to the healing process as any other factor. By peeling politics away we’re able to boil it down to the often ignored human element – not race, not religion, not class – but a people as one.

“Perhaps when we humble ourselves as a people, will we communicate again.” (Patti Smith)

Perhaps.