Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
The measure of any art is to what degree it reveals truth. No matter how controversial or painful, movies, plays, sermons, stand-up comedy, documentaries, symphonies, operas, songs, ballets, dance performances, video games, poems, books, graphic novels, paintings, sculptures, sketches, and even secular and religious ceremonies all have the capacity to spark an epiphany.
For my own part, just to name a few, I remember the Stations of the Cross that showed me in detail how much Christ sacrificed because of His love for me. “Scared Straight” showed me so very many reasons why I would never want to go to prison. I remember Charlton Heston damning us all to Hell for blowing up the world at the end of “Planet of the Apes”. I remember my thrill at Gandalf’s return, my grief at the heartbreaking failure of Frodo, and my shock at the corruption of the Shire in “The Lord of the Rings”. After the terrorist atrocities of 9/11/2001, “Buffy: The Musical”, of all things, helped restore my soul in the resolution that the fight for good and against evil is its own reward.
I remember the first time that my blind-in-one-eye self saw in three dimensions, when I looked into Vincent Van Gough’s “Night Cafe” at the Yale Art Gallery. Even thinking about “Kilkelly Ireland”, an Irish-American folk song, makes me weep at the realization of how fraught by physical and psychological distance my extended family’s relationships have been. George Carlin’s “Seven words you can’t say on TV” awakened me to the dangers of censorship, especially self-censorship. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” showed me the griefs and joys of genuine heroism in old age, as Yeats’ “Second Coming” filled me with existential dread. Even “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” spoke truly about the disastrous policy of appeasing evil in late 1930s Britain, as well as here in the USA
today.
Significant art can awaken us to newly-discovered revelations and long-hidden old truths about our conscious selves in relation to our inner lives as well as within our contexts in the wider world.
If, and only if, art speaks unflinchingly and uncompromisingly about truth can it penetrate beyond our ego’s defenses and our routine self-satisfaction to make an impression on our genuine minds.
This is why our human species should not be called Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but rather Homo Sapiens Aestheticus. Descartes was wrong when he said “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”). As important as is our capacity for reason, our capacity to appreciate beauty is equally essential to our humanity.
As part of our development into adulthood, we each need to experience both beauty and ugliness. We must individually come to terms with each. In doing so, we encounter truth!
Truth is not merely data. Facts are a part of truth, but they can never be truth. Truth expresses the meaning of our thoughts, words, and deeds; the meaning of our lives and that of the whole human condition.
Moral cowardice has destroyed art across the West. The vandals doing this say that, “the modern audience” demands that everything produced today be rooted in a cohesive set of politically-correct, diversity-equity-inclusivity-oriented dogmas.
Without the ability to diverge from this lockstep, creativity dies. Excitement, beauty, joy, and meaning all die. Any ability for the art to inspire dies. Compare any contemporary iteration of a successfully told story from generations past. “Star Wars”, “Star Trek”, “Indiana Jones”, “Doctor Who”, “The Witcher”, “The Lord of the Rings”, “Dune”, and even “The Odyssey”, and the horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft, are merely a few of the wrecked intellectual properties that have been pillaged in this dozen-year Woke Purge. Today, when I hear of a beloved story cycle being rebooted, I feel dread because something intrinsically alive and true is about to be, “remade for the modern audience”.
We need more than this! Free men, women, and children will not remain free if they have been thoroughly starved of truth. Without compelling stories, our spirits never expand. Without hope, there is no bravery. Without dreams, there
is no imagination. Without art that is sometimes sacred and at other times profane, art powerful enough to offend and to inspire, we will be deprived of that which helps us to transcend our birth circumstances and engage in a life that is worth living.
Without the spiritual nutrition of worthwhile art, we might as well be slaves! I do believe that, in some circles, this may be the intention.
Reclaim our art, our high culture and our popular culture in all of its many forms! Demand dangerous truth instead of safe orthodoxy. Restore art to life!
