Outside In jay griffiths

The exile of The ArTs

Thirsting for metaphor in an age of literalism

lato declared he would ban po ets from his ideal Republic. Placing a garland on their heads, he would send them into exile. Storytellers too with few exceptions would be barred from his state, and flutes would be illegal. What does it mean to exile the arts? Plato knew, and so does the current Brit ish government, ordering the most savage cuts to arts funding in more than a genera tion. At universities, the arts and humani ties will bear the brunt of budget cuts. Public libraries, a priceless commons of knowledge and metaphor, are being closed across the country. With phlegmatic cynicism, Plato based his Republic on the premise that an ideal state will seek expansion, encroaching on neighboring lands and resources, result ing in permanent war. His Republic de scribes the ideal education for the states rulers and warriors to help them pursue these aims. Hierarchical, militaristic, and consumerist, it is a state founded on class divisions, obsessive measurement, and control. (Any likeness to any nation today is, of course, purely coincidental.) State funding for the arts is not neces sary, claim governments on both sides of the Atlantic. Why? Because art is superflu ous. I couldnt agree more: art is surplus to base needs and bare necessities, and its very superfluity is its significance. The arts are not necessary: they are absolutely essential to the human spirit which finds
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transcendence through exceeding limits, overflowing borders, and ba<ing meas ure. The traditional art of the Shipibo peo ple, of the Peruvian Amazon, consists of abstract designs without borders; the pat terns pour like liquid over the edges of space and time into what is infinite and eternal, measureless to man. Disregarding arts transcendent value, modern states ask the arts to justify themselves in commercial terms, money the only measure to calculate a simile, to price the melody of a violin, and to

across the liquid river of night, like a child with a toy boat on a string. Poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up, Plato spat, detesting the liquid way that poetry (and flute music) sways emotions. His mindset was literalist: reason should always over rule and control emotion. In parallel, his politics comprised a class system of rul ers controlling the common people. The spirit of art works against Platos politics of control: the arts are part of the politics of kindness. Art elicits sympathy, conjures

Art elicits sympathy, conjures empathy, and these emotions are requisites for a kind, kinned sense of society.
calibrate the value of transformation. A phoenix must write its own costbenefit analysis. But while art tells multiple sto ries, knows the plural values of beauty, dream, and meaning, money tells a monostory. Money should never be the judge of art, but its servant: funding it, supporting it, aiding it. Perhaps one of the reasons for the hos tility against the arts today is precisely that they are implacable witnesses against this terrible lie of our times: that money is the measure of all. Art refutes this lie, disen tangles money from values, and ar gues with its deepest authority that there is another sky, intimate and boundless, open to all, where the poet can tow a star empathy, and these emotions are requi sites for a kind, kinned sense of society. Metaphor and mimesis were unwel come in Platos citystate because they evade the control which literalism imposes. He used metaphor himself, of course, but only in service to logic never to animate or evoke the world. His citystate represented the Apollonian mind in its strict hyper rationalism, while nature represented the Dionysian mind: emotional, instinctive, and intercommunicative. Knowing that its music is wild, Dionysian, and green, Plato banished the flute to the countryside he de spised and would not grant it access to his citystate. (Two thousand five hundred years later, Im learning the flute, in the garden,
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vincent van gogh

in protest.) A reverse Walt Whitman, he banned the poet from imitating smiths, ar tificers, oarsmen, or boatswains; nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bel lowing of bulls, the murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean. But the expression of the natural world the unfaded world of sa=ron and lapis lazuli is one of the su preme achievements of humanity. We are the tongue on the body of the land, says a Yolngu woman. Humanity, part troubadour and part nightingale, translates the world in artistic recreation, and from Shakespeare to the Aboriginal Australian songlines to the Sami yoik songs, art evokes nature and enchants the land. Van Gogh, the arche typal unfunded artist, painted his sunflowers as if his fingers were touched with fire. Now, his sun flowers are turning brown before our eyes as the pig ment mix reacts to sunlight. But the fading sunflowers also bear a metaphoric reproach against a dingy age that extinguishes the colors of art and the vitality of nature alike, an age that would blindfold a robin and a painter, and wing bind a bird of paradise and a dancer. If the arts enjoin us to nature, corporate con sumerism exiles us into a cold exchequer. Yet consumerism and the arts are both answers to the same yearning. The human spirit thirsts for the superfluous, for over flow and abundance. Literalism wants that abundance made material, though, whereas metaphorical abundance resists any need for literal overconsumption. Metaphors of extravagant liveliness reduce

a hunger for extravagant lifestyles. Stuck in literal abundance, however, a society is credulous to the monostory of money. While metaphor and the arts o=er plural ities and di=erent voices, literalism, from Plato onward, speaks in a political mono tone, the one state ruling, topdown. Essential to our selfexpression as indi viduals and as a species, art suggests some thing of the divine: humanitys purpose is to participate in the worldcreators play of creation, said Indian poet Rabindranath

from the Greek word angellos, meaning messenger. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote: The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read. They taught me I had a language in heaven and another language on earth. Art is a messenger carrying to its audience what Arthur Miller called news of the in ner world, and, he con tinued, if people went too long without such news, they would go mad with the chaos of their lives. A writer touches the page to her lips before she sends the message on. A sculptor fires the clay with love and meaning. Using the sense of sight, a painter turns an ordinary gaze into the extraordinary regard of honoring. Using the sense of hearing, a musician turns ordinary listening into extraordinary acknowl edgment. And when some one says that a work of art touched him, or that a book changed her life, a subtle transformation of mind is revealed. For the greatest artists do not make their best works of art in clay or paint or sound or words: they make them right inside us, within the heart of the reader or audience. By art, humanity is sculpted more tender and more true: we are altered and touched and made magnifi cent. We are each others works of art. a Jay Griffiths is the author of Wild: An Elemental Journey.

Tagore. For the Kogi people of Colombia, it is only through the human heart and imagi nation that the Great Mother can be made manifest. Imagination is connected to the word magic, and there is mindmagic in art where artists are messengers from the invisible world angels, in other words,

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