Art — Cultural Luxury or Necessity?

Elena Pav

Beware the barrenness of a busy life.

~ Socrates

Joy is presence meeting the world with open hands.

Joy also lives in connection — with people, with creative work, with ideas, with the natural world.

When you give yourself fully to something that matters to you, joy rises as a kind of confirmation: yes, this is what you are here for. Yes, this is real. Joy recognizes itself in aliveness.

~ Turbo Goth

We lived in the house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane’s depression and my cancers and Jane’s leukemia.

When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and outrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King’s “The Exequy,” written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife.

~ Donald Hall

I’m always puzzled by people who show no interest in art. My father had an interest in language and stories but zero interest in music or visual art. It’s as if we’re born to see and hear some things and not others. I’ve never been able to decide if it’s nature or nurture that determines what we are attracted to.

I do think we shortchange our children by not introducing them to the arts quite young. I could say the same for foreign languages. It could be that if we don’t awaken a sensitivity early enough it dies on the vine. Or, maybe some people just don’t have the capacity to ever be sensitive to the subtleties of the arts. I guess that’s possible, but it seems unjust, like being born in handcuffs.

There are stories of young people discovering some artistic form by accident, in spite of a deprived environment, and devoting their lives to it. Finding what you’re made for in unlikely circumstances gives you the gift of a life you’ll fight for. That’s far superior to a life of expediency. Something in us is saved by finding something of surpassing meaning that we will sacrifice for.

There is also something in beauty that is balm for the soul. The ever-busy person, too preoccupied to ever consider such things, always rushing about taking care of business, is starved at the level of soul. It’s important to savor your existence and to live slowly enough to actually register sounds and sights and the colors and textures of reality.

When we think of how common it is to miss all that because we’re too busy surviving, we have to ask what we are actually made for. Why do we live? What do we get out of it and what do we contribute?

Anyone who creates art knows that they keep going back to the practice because that’s where they are most alive. Finding where you are most vital, most inspired, most perceptive and joyous is no small thing.

When you think of how many people never find such a life because it was simply never on offer, it’s shocking. But that’s our way of life, that’s our education and our vision of what’s important and what isn’t.

Phillip Wakeham

Our culture is out of step with the human soul. The New World was created by people whose survival was threatened so of course they created a culture that reenacted that threat/response environment, which endures to this day. It’s reinforced by a mindset that can’t imagine another way in spite of living on a continent endowed with incredible riches. Still, they have managed to create scarcity and threat and poverty.

Not trusting life is being passed down from generation to generation, embedded in our thinking and in our way of life. It’s unquestioned, as if it were established by the gods.

We might ask who we become in such a system and do we like it.

Paul Laurenzi

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