Things I still believe in, Part 1. People of society, and especially American society, and people of the still-UK who are sick of Scotland posts, and people still awake at this time of night the world over: Allow me to go broad-strokes-rhetorical for a moment (you love it, America, dont lie). Sometimes (read: regularly) I hear arguments about Literary Studies/Arts being superfluous to the General Human Effort (which involves staying alive, breeding, building and destroying things, consuming, hanging out, perpetual proxy warfare and whatnot) and for obvious reasons, I have not-very-much sympathy for these arguments. For one thing, there are very few civilizations that have flourished without the arts, and particularly without verbal arts (no bias). In fact losing or sustaining the arts = the first sign of a civilizations decline or health. Look at Europe. Where do the artists/writers go? Berlin. And whos bossing the EU right now? Germany. I mean theyre really bossing it. Look at them. Look at them boss the EU like big bad bosses. Where are most of the artists in the US? NY and Cal, and Ohio for some reason. Maybe forget about Ohio for a second. Whos producing the economic value? I mean what has North Korea produced lately, artistically speaking, aside from Kim Jong-Il looking at things? Do you prefer the art of the Renaissance or the Dark Ages? Exactly. In general, unless were talking about Plato, maybe, and lets be honest he was sort of a sociopath too, retrograde civilizations repress the finer or more flowery gradations of conversation and representation, or get rid of them when they start to lose their national souls, or ironize and demonize those who dont slavishly surrender themselves to some Capitalist Moloch, which always happens before dying a terrible, bloody, soulless death. Maybe not causally proven yet but I stand by the correlation. And OK I know George Bush paints now, but lets leave him out of this too, because frankly his paintings leave something to be desired. Also, everything we do as humans involves storytelling. Science is a story (an empirically helpful story). Politics is a social story. Religion is a spiritual story. Economics is a pretty dastardly story now told by robots. The evening news is a story. History is a story (its in the word, and its his already, etc). Facebook is a book-of-Face. Twitter is a story told by over-caffeinated birds, I think, though I wouldnt know because I dont use it. If we dont know how to think critically about stories and to tell better ones -- more complex ones, more complete ones -- if we dont know how to re-evaluate our values and languages creatively, I mean what, really, is the point of it all? I ask you. Same goes for philosophy. And lets throw poetry in, why not, even though a lot of it is still just a circle you-know-what. Andddd graffiti. And the rest of the economically haphazard but not-soul-crushing things we allow ourselves to do. And furthermore, Ive decided Im just going to keep doing and-or promoting them until I cant, or run out of money, or else somebody I really respect tells me to stop. So there.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 23:48:10 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015