THE EXCHANGE

"Art is central to all our lives, not just the better-off & educated. i know that from my own story, & from the evidence of every child ever born---they all want to hear & to tell stories, to sing, to make music, to act out little dramas, to make sculptures. this is born in & we breed it out. & then, when we have bred it out, we say that art is elitist, & at the same time we either fetishize art---the high prices, the jargon, the inaccessibility---or we ignore it. the truth is, artist or not, we are all born on the creative continuum, & what is a heritage & a birthright of all of our lives." jeanette winterson

i remember it was not too many years ago, we were still in our 40s, when i asked someone "don't you believe art can make a difference?" & he replied, "no. not at all." i was a little stunned. "you never believed that?," i stammered. "never." i was nonplussed. mainly, i was surprized at myself, that i'd misread this person(someone i'd know for many many years) completely. for me, art existed somewhere between auden's "poetry changes nothing" & williams' "but men die every day for lack of what is found there." thinking it existed outside of those perimeters seemed to render it either meaningless or commodified.

in 1989, jeanette winterson published "sexing the cherry," a novel that's probably in my top 25. it's a challenging book written by a woman whose childhood was w/o books(well, she did have the bible). that she wrote such an incredibly complex novel, one that truly explores some of the "fantastic" aspects of being in the world, she'd claim as her birthright & offer it to us as ours. a gift but one that requires no gratitude(since it was already ours), only openness.

i'm inclined to accept her offer & her sense of art's value in this new millenium. it seems to me that's just accepting being human & that does make a difference.