the point of poetry?
Why bother with art? In the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, and when millions have no food and water, Scott Christian wonders on Salon.com: Who gives a shit about Picasso? What's the point of poetry?
My mother has lung cancer even though she never smoked. A visual artist, she wonders if she's ill from years of inhaling poisonous paint fumes and fixants.
My daughter clicks to private design school websites. They cost $21,000 a year, $28,000 a year, $42,000 a year.
Is art a privilege?
Is it a necessity, like food and water?
Is it poison?
I wrote a book on happiness, but now that it's out there's a recession on and the journalists call for their interviews and complain: Americans can't afford happiness anymore.
But I was poor for long enough to know that happiness is one of the free things--like love, like creativity.
In the rubble, a woman is singing.
posted by Contact at 9:37 AM
6 Comments:
Thank you for writing this. It made me overwhelmingly emotional for so many reasons. Because I write poetry. Because I work at a day job that doesn't make me happy, but pays my bills and feeds me.
And because of that woman singing in the rubble.
Once again you have said something for the rest of us, Ariel. If you can choose to sing in the rubble... and choose to make art... then you can pretty much choose to do or endure anything.
And with that last line a laser went through my heart. Thank you.
Life in the worst of times would be unbearable without art. Life in the best of times would too.
I am poor as I've ever been and facing foreclosure. But tonight I am going to a 10 cent art opening. To be HAPPY.
My response to the journalists: Americans can't afford to NOT have happiness. As you so clearly describe, it is one thing that is free and is available to, probably, everyone.
We need to create - be it writing or painting or dancing. We need to find our creativity and create our own happiness - like the woman singing in the rubble. Like the choirs in the concentration camps. Like the artist who paints with a brush in his mouth or the one who uses his feet.
There is enough suffering. Enough getting by. Enough trouble and scarcity and disappearing resources spread too thin.
We can smile.
We can dream.
We can smile even in the midst of the storm and still be present in this life.
Living with happiness does not erase the fact of suffering in the world. But it sure makes it easier to deal with - and it just may help someone else find their way through the hard times, too.
aaah, in the rubble a woman is singing!
thank you for this book & for all that you do!! ~polly
ah, the woman singing in the rubble.
thank you for this book & too for all that you do!!
& please continue to sing....
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