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.
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.
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,
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 other’s works of art. A
Jay Griffiths is the author of Wild: An
Elemental Journey.
