I was reading the magazine Planet the other day and came across an article in it by the Welsh poet and playwright Damian Gorman which made an impression on me. It sought to explain why cultivation of the arts, especially in divided societies, matter very much.
I read the article carefully and more than once and made the following adaptation. I will let the Welsh poet know I have shared his thoughts.
The arts are useful because they lift people out of themselves. They can help people get out of their own ways and their feelings about the frustrations and conflicts they’re living through. This involves a kind of letting go, an unbuckling and laying down of armour. It can lead to a situation where people arrive to meet ‘the other’ with more than their opinions. Opinions are important, but we are not our opinions. If, in places and times of conflict, we engage each other only with our opinions, or with our ethnic or religious or political narratives, there is a danger of these being ranged against each other, like weapons, to destroy the narrative of the other.
If, on the other hand, we bring the whole of ourselves to the engagement ‒ our imaginations, second thoughts, frustrations, yearning dreams, our drift from certainty, our uncategorised bits of passion and thought ‒ then the chances of connecting with the other are much, much better. And the arts are all about bringing the whole of ourselves to bear.
And there is this: that you can create the thing that is missing. If there seems very little beautiful or right or true in your society, you can make something which is beautiful, right or true. If there seems little good on the horizon, you can put something of value there. If the people have nothing to smile or be proud about, you can give them something to smile and be proud about. And you can do all these things through the creative arts.
You can create spaces where there appear to be none. You can be creative with some feelings such as fear, frustration, despair or grief which, of themselves, might not be taking you anywhere. The arts can afford this kind of redress. Even ‒ and maybe especially ‒ to people in despair. Despair is natural, but it is not a plan, and, where things need to change, people are needed to imagine pathways out of despair. This, too, is a job for creative arts and thinking.
And many conflicts are asymmetrical ‒ one side clearly more powerful than the other – and when at least part of any dialogue is through the arts, participants tend to engage with ‘the other’ in themselves and this helps level the ground. It helps ensure that people don’t meet on the head of the pin of their conflict, but on a broader platform which they themselves have created imaginatively.
This is looking at the value of the arts in places of difference, suspicion, tension, even violence, as perhaps their sternest test, but of course there is another fundamental point. It has to do with what you might call ‘music’. Somewhere in the life of everyone there needs to be freedom; there needs to be that little bit that no one else owns. It is that part of us which acts as the heart’s raft. It is, in a word, morale. And this morale needs nutrients; our hearts need music. And this is why the arts do matter ‒ to provide this heart-music. This is why they amount to a health issue. It is another good reason why they’re worth fighting for.
And the phrase “worth fighting for” is a reminder of what Winston Churchill said as Prime Minister of Great Britain in the Second World War when he was asked to authorize cutting arts funding because of the demands of the war effort. “And then what are we fighting for?” he replied.
