You can't eat a poem but you'll starve without it

A defence of the arts in a culture obsessed with productivity

The ‘C’ in capitalism stands for callous and clinical, words that are apt to describe a societal structure that measures worth in profitability and happiness in neatly stacked sheaves of paper bills. This propagation of a culture that stifles creative thought and individual expression, is something we are all too familiar with in today’s day and age. From a young age we are warned against the impracticality of the arts and humanities, volatile fields that are unable to bring stability and satisfaction into our lives. We are guided and coached towards safer career paths - 

writers with ink flowing through their veins and words blossoming from their fingertips cage themselves to a desk, 

artists with splashes of colour and vibrancy painted onto their souls slide a grayscale filter over their appearance, 

musicians with melodies filling their lungs and notes reverberating through their minds silence their thoughts and put on a suit, 

and just like that, we let art die. 

“You can’t eat a poem”, is a line that refers to the inability of arts to satiate our daily human needs of food, shelter and clothing, but what about our other needs? Money may be what helps you stay alive, but art is what makes you feel alive -  while we may work long hours, earning money to put food on the table, ambitiously climbing the corporate ladder to achieve higher levels of ‘success’, at the end of the day we long to come home and drown out our thoughts in playlists curated by strangers, seek therapy in film scenes, cry to verses written by poets we’ll never meet - consuming the very forms of artistic media whose creators we condemn. The same person demeaning and disrespecting a career in the arts and humanities, will be the one humming tunes as sustenance to get through the day, and in that lies the irony that we cannot consume meaningful art while simultaneously degrading those who create it for us. 

Being a human comes with humanity, and at the very core of humanity comes the need to feel. The difference between a life with art and one devoid of it, is the difference between living and merely surviving -

hospitals use music therapy to soothe young children, 

during wars people write letters and paint walls, 

at funerals we read poetry,

at weddings we quote books. 

These rituals aren’t coincidences. They are evidence that art is sewn into the fabric of our most intimate moments - births, deaths, heartbreaks, reconciliations. In crisis we don’t turn to balance sheets, we turn to bookmarks - it is stories, symbols and melodies that give us comfort, and help us truly reside within the broad spectrum of human emotion, and still, we dare to call it “unnecessary.”

While it is true that art does not come with a 6 figure salary, that doesn’t make it disposable - like notebook pages brushed under the carpet, or paintings thrown away with the trash without a second look - the value of art was never in its ROI. You can study the human heart, map every artery, and memorise its rhythms, but that will never explain the feeling of falling in love - while biology can show you how a heart beats, only art can tell you why.  And while it is true that you cannot eat a poem, there are many other forms of hunger that it’s the only cure for.