The Heart of the Matter

 

The defining characteristic of the human race is its ability and will to create pure abstraction and beauty out of the chaos of existence, in the forms of music, prose, poetry and visual art, despite all odds to the contrary. However low or high the form - a distinction itself devised & imposed by the unimaginative and uncreative - the creative instinct at its heart is the purest expression of what it means to be human: no other earth-bound species thus far has developed an artistic and musical history [that we can understand or begin to codify in our terms] such as ours.

It's deeply unfortunate that creativity has, for the last few centuries at least, been commodified by those un-creators, whose sole talent is the accumulation of wealth, and to whom works of art, music and literature are merely tokens of exchange in an economic mechanism. This deeply entrenched attitude enriches only the moneyed and privileged, whose appreciation of those works is pretty much essentially pecuniary & acquisitive. It leaves behind in its wake, as in society generally, the true wealth creators - the originators and grafters, both in the arts and in society generally - those at the very core of society and who are the bedrock of the economy, without whom there would be no wealth at all, to sequester or suborn.

We need to appreciate who we are as a populace. We need to value who we are and where we fit into the world, and stop guilt-tripping ourselves into the trap of believing that we are somehow of less value than the masters of the universe, whose sole aim is to take what we produce, run off, and make money out of it, with as little input from themselves as is humanly possible. How far would any of them get without our collective effort? Precisely nowhere: unearned privilege by dint of birthright buys them the advantage of private income, and where that income has dwindled through profligacy and mismanagement over the decades, the connections remain, and the club stands firm. These people are still in power: we, for the most part, remain cannon fodder in their economic wars. Please support the Trade Unions and their members - that's us, folks - in their/our efforts to right this very great wrong.

Engage with art, whatever form it takes, it's good for both the soul, and one's perspective on life, it's what we have always done: pictured, some of the beautiful cave art at Lascaux, made 17,000 years ago by our probably rather more egalitarian ancestors.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.

If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of they friends's or of thine own were.

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne (1572 - 1631)