Many great presidents, he pointed out, have provided the populace with enduring metaphors (Lincoln’s “A house divided against itself can not stand”) as well as proverbs and turns of phrase (Theodore Roosevelt’s “Speak softly and carry a big stick”). So what are we to make of an artless president, a president with little or no feeling for poetry, language, or art? Metaphors connect ideas — and sometimes people — through language. We find we need poetry at occasions like weddings, where words can create union, funerals, where they ease separation — and politics where they span divides. Instead of calling on language and poetry to connect, Trump instead traffics in power relations. Power is hierarchical, a vertical line that severs other patterns, connections, and meanings. Trump’s linguistic creativity has been limited to insults and name-calling — Pocahontas, Lyin’ Ted, Little Marco, Jeb “Low Energy” Bush.

The language a person uses reflects their worldview, so it should come as no surprise that Trump would propose the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, along with the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, cutting America’s most literate institutions off at the knees. Their elimination would be akin to the destruction of ancient monuments in that it would be difficult if not impossible to ever bring them back. Abolishing them eradicates not only a vast body of knowledge, but also the career-long efforts of smart, caring civil servants who have made the most of the relatively small resources allotted them in honing processes to best support the nation’s arts, heritage, history, and culture.

In addition, our artists have been among America’s greatest ambassadors. Each year since 1982, for instance, nine to thirteen individuals from across the country are chosen to receive onetime National Heritage Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, in recognition of lifetime achievement and artistic excellence. These individuals embody America’s heritage. The NEA has honored all variety of musicians and craftspeople, including blues singer Brownie McGhee, Irish fiddler Liz Carroll, Chinese opera star Qi Shu Fang, blues singer Mavis Staples, and Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet and Chilkat blanket weaver Clarissa Rizal. Cutting these agencies diminishes the significance of these awards and past awardees, including the parallel NEA awards in jazz and creative writing. I can imagine one of the former honorees saying someday, “Ah, yes, I once won an award from a government that cared about its culture and its art, but those agencies no longer exist.”

As Trump so emphatically noted, much of America, particularly in rural areas and small towns, is depressed and wants change. But the arts are part of the solution, not the problem. Shannon Monnat, assistant professor of rural sociology and demographics at Penn State University, explored the election data from districts where Trump did well in November. “I started looking at the data, especially within regions of the country where the opiod epidemic has received a lot of attention. And what I found was that Trump outperformed the previous Republican candidate Mitt Romney the most in counties with the highest drug, alcohol, and suicide mortality rates.” Funded arts programs were never a choice in many of these communities, and the National Endowment for the Arts can help bring a sense of purpose and alleviate some of the hopelessness that plagues these areas of the country, particularly if it were given the necessary resources to reach into them.

“There’s nothing to do in this town but get high,” said a young woman from one of these towns in a recent television show.” A 2017 study published by the Social Impact of the Arts Project at the University of Pennsylvania notes that “cultural opportunities represent an important dimension of social inclusion and community well-being. The arts provide a resource that people can use to make sense of the world as it is and to imagine the future. Communities with a vital cultural life also enjoy a variety of ‘spillover effects,’ including stronger community and civic engagement, improvements in public health and social stability, and economic revitalization.”

A two-year ethnographic study of collaborative informal arts groups in the Chicago metropolitan area underlined the impact of arts on community. The study, led by Alaka Wali, looked at writing groups, painting circles, choirs, and other informal networks in which people congregate around a shared interest. They discovered that the collective pursuit of informal arts enables people to come together across the often-intransigent boundaries of race and ethnicity. The study suggests that these groups create a “metaphorical space of informality” with few barriers to participation, affirmation, and mentoring. The arts can help bring people together across the ethnic and social divides that defined the recent election.

“The only cure for life is art,” read a homemade sign that went up after September 11. A taxi driver in New York echoed this sentiment when I asked what he was listening to on the radio: “Music is only thing in this world that’s pure.” We need to pay attention to the poetry and art of everyday life to restore a sense of meaning and purpose to the mental health and well-being of communities across the American landscape.

Certainly, we can come up with our own colorful, metaphorical language to describe Trump in the Oval Office. We know that “there’s a bull in the china shop,” and that “the fox is in the henhouse now.” Trump’s words also often bring to mind a Hasidic proverb: “Not only is what he says not true, but the opposite of what he says isn’t true either.”

Yet asking Trump to use more proverbs would certainly not solve the problem of arts funding or the value we place on arts as a nation; preserving the National Endowment for the Arts, on the other hand, is crucial to our civilization. It costs each American only the price of a postage stamp each year, but consider how much good its programs do in alleviating the despair and lack of opportunity that afflict so many communities across the nation — perhaps even in how many lives they save. It is said that when Winston Churchill, who always supported funding for arts and culture, was asked why he didn’t cut the national arts budget during World War II, he offered this fabled reply: “If we cut the arts, then what are we fighting for?”

~Steve Zeitlin is the Founding Director of City Lore. His new book is The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell, 2016)

March 24, 2017

A story. Once upon a time in the old country, there was a tiny town in a wine-producing region of Eastern Europe. The villagers in this region heard that a revered and renowned rabbi was planning to visit their town on a grand tour. So they called a meeting and said, “We must host a great celebration in the rabbi’s honor.”

Then one of the villagers suggested, “Since we all make wine, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a wine festival where the rabbi could taste the very best of our wine?”

And then someone countered, “But each family only makes a little wine each year. A big celebration would use up a family’s entire supply of wine for a year.”

So they devised a plan. They put a big oak barrel in the center of town, and every week, just after sundown on Shabbat, every household was to bring a small pitcher of red wine and pour it into the cask. Then, by time of the rabbi’s arrival, they would have a full cask.

In one of the village families, Mendel went home and said to his wife Rebecca, “Listen, you know that everyone is going to be bringing wine, and we’re not a rich family. There’s going to be so much wine in that one cask, ours certainly will make no difference. Why don’t we just fill our pitcher up with water? When I take it to the barrel — I’ll pour it right at the lip — I guarantee you that no one will notice.” And that’s what he did, every week.

Six months later, the big day arrived. The villagers set up a stand in the center of town and put the cask on top of it. Right on schedule, the famous rabbi appeared. The townspeople were all very proud of their village and their wine, and they were anxious to impress the rabbi. They presented him with a beautiful, ceremonial kaddish cup to taste the wine and inaugurate the celebration. He put the lovely cup underneath the spigot, filled it up, and lifted it high.

Suddenly there was a gasp from the crowd: his cup was filled to the brim with water.

This story, told to me years ago by Rabbi David Holtz and published in my book Because God Loves Stories, popped into my head as I sat on the bus on the way to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. If everyone thought the way that Mendel and Rebecca did, what would that mean for the protests? Perhaps, as my friend Barbara Dyer pointed out, that’s why the election turned out the way it did — so many stayed home and didn’t vote. It’s precisely that so many didn’t decide to “pour water and not wine” that we saw the numbers we did at the Women’s March and continue to see at other protests, such as those for immigrant and transgender rights. Though many through history have sacrificed more, their bodies and their blood, we all gave a measure of our time.

At the march in D.C. following Trump’s inauguration, I was struck too by the astonishing creativity we contributed collectively to the protests — from the puppets to the slogans and the imaginative signs: “We’re the witches you forgot to burn.” And the chants, this one heard from middle school children marching near the Capital building, “We want a leader, we want a leader, not a creepy tweeter.”

On my way home, my phoned binged and it was from photographer Martha Cooper who had been at the march. “Why don’t we do something with the signs?” She told me about the installation of signs created at the Washington Memorial

We talked on the phone about how the magnitude and widespread dispersion of the signs and protests across the U.S. and beyond seemed as powerful an outcry as the memorials that cropped up nationwide after September 11th. At that time in 2001, we worked with Martha Cooper to document the memorials and to produce both an online exhibit and an exhibition at the New York Historical Society; 15 years later, we had the opportunity to work with her again. We began to plan an exhibit in the City Lore gallery on the Art of Protest, and we are inviting the public (i.e.: you) to send us images of the signs and your stories to my email (steve@citylore.org). Let us know, too, if you saved your signs.

Live-Drawing from 2nd Av & 46th St, NYC Women’s March, January 21, ‘1 © Flash Rosenberg 2017

To read the full story go to:

http://citylore.org/2017/02/the-poetry-of-everyday-life-blogpost-2/

Then one of the villagers suggested, “Since we all make wine, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had a wine festival where the rabbi could taste the very best of our wine?”

And then someone countered, “But each family only makes a little wine each year. A big celebration would use up a family’s entire supply of wine for a year.”

So they devised a plan. They put a big oak barrel in the center of town, and every week, just after sundown on Shabbat, every household was to bring a small pitcher of red wine and pour it into the cask. Then, by the end of the months, they would have a full cask.

In one of the village families, Mendel went home and said to his wife Rebecca, “Listen, you know that everyone is going to be bringing wine, and we’re not a rich family. There’s going to be so much wine in that one cask, ours certainly will make no difference. Why don’t we just fill our pitcher up with water? When I take it to the barrel — I’ll pour it right at the lip — I guarantee you that no one will notice.” And that’s what he did, every week.

Six months later, the big day arrived. The villagers set up a stand in the center of town and put the cask on top of it. Right on schedule, the famous rabbi appeared. The townspeople were all very proud of their village and their wine, and they were anxious to impress the rabbi. They presented him with a beautiful, ceremonial kaddish cup to taste the wine and inaugurate the celebration. He put the lovely cup underneath the spigot, filled it up, and lifted it high.

Suddenly there was a gasp from the crowd: his cup was filled to the brim with water.

This story, told to me years ago by Rabbi David Holtz and published in my book Because God Loves Stories, popped into my head as I sat on the bus on the way to the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. If everyone thought the way that Mendel and Rebecca did, what would that mean for the protests? Perhaps, as my friend Barbara Dyer pointed out, that’s why the election turned out the way it did — so many people stayed home. It’s precisely that so many decided to “pour wine and not water” that we saw the numbers we did at the Women’s March and continue to see at other protests, such as those for immigrant and transgender rights. Though many through history have sacrificed more, their bodies and their blood, we all gave a measure of our time.

Live-Drawing from 2nd Av & 46th St, NYC Women’s March, January 21, 2017 © Flash Rosenberg 2017

To read Steve’s Zeitlin full Art and Protest blogpost click here. Or go to:

http://citylore.org/2017/02/the-poetry-of-everyday-life-blogpost-2

Six months later, he found himself facing precisely that “thing.” A retired forester who planted over two million trees in his lifetime, he had split wood every morning until two years before.

Tonight, he lay in a hospital bed at the McCleod hospital in Florence, South Carolina, unable to properly swallow or get out of bed unassisted. Family members took turns staying overnight with him, and this night was my turn. At one point, I thought he was sleeping. I was working on my computer, when I heard lines from a poem coming from the other side of the room:

I am dying, Egypt, dying!

Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast,

And the dark Plutonian shadows

Gather on the evening blast

“I think it’s from Shakespeare,” he told me, so I brought my laptop over to his bedside and looked up the lines. Born in 1917, Lucas was always amazed at the magic of the Internet to access any tidbit of knowledge. The verse turned out to be from a poem by William Haines Lytle inspired by Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The first line, “I am dying, Egypt, dying,” is from the play itself. We then looked up the drama online and found Marc Antony’s soliloquy that begins with that line. Then I read to him from Shakespeare’s play.

When I finished, he said, “Steve, when I close my eyes I think of the billions of people who have done this before me.”

“Well, you know you’ll be remembered,” I said.

“That’s true,” he said, “not as good as heaven — but a lot better than hell.”

To read the full story, http://citylore.org/2017/01/poetry-of-everyday-life-feed/

by Steve Zeitlin, Founding Director, City Lore, www.citylore.org, author of The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness (Cornell University Press, 2016)