From JeanetteWinterson.com - http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=486 The Times : Books | Human Need?

This week I have been exercising my awful French by trying to read Andre Gide, Prometheus Mis-bound. At one moment Prometheus says, ‘Il faut avoir un aigle’. Why might it be necessary to have an eagle? In the original myth, Prometheus is punished for stealing fire from Zeus by being chained to a rock and having his liver torn out by an eagle. As he is immortal, his liver grows back, and the same torment happens every day. As a myth it works on many levels and can accommodate all kinds of readings, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Gide’s comment, especially when I put down the book and picked up the Financial Times, to read that around 53million people in the West are on Prozac, and millions more on SSRIs that inhibit serotonin re-uptake. This figure doesn’t count the kids and teenagers who take prescription drugs to stop them burning down the school, or those adults who are use illegal drugs, recreationally or through addiction. And what if we look further, to the huge increase in drink related problems? The affluent world is in a mess, no question, and quite a different kind of mess to the poorer parts of the world. I am wondering if we need our eagle back? For Prometheus, the daily return of the eagle continues the punishment, but the punishment is a confirmation of success. Prometheus is suffering, but he did not fail. Aeschylus’s version, Prometheus Bound, sees the hero reflecting on what he has made possible for humankind. The daily wound is a reminder of what is valuable – above all, to be of service to others, by acting from personal conviction, even at a great personal cost. This is old-fashioned thinking. Service, sacrifice, suffering, do not feature in the modern lifestyle culture of the West. We read about such things, sometimes, in charity work, or as a defence of the armed forces, but that each of us, privately and collectively, might do better in the train of such idealism, probably sounds absurd. And yet, the way we live now is not exactly a success. Scientific and material advancement have not made us happier people or better people, and wasn’t that meant to be the deal? Religion, of course, is where you still hear the S words, but Christianity should not be a Sunday version of Capitalism, as anyone who reads the Gospels could understand. If Jesus stood in front of the White House, with his friend the prostitute, Mary Magdalene, and they each held placards that said Love Your Enemies. Turn The Other Cheek, what do you think would happen to them? Idealism is not ideology, and I, like you, don’t want religious fanatics of either Islamic or Christian beliefs blowing us into the After-Life. But neither can I see Materialism getting us any further than where we are now; restless and unhappy. Those people I know who have been prescribed Prozac seem to me to be ultra-sensitive mechanisms; finding what is happening to them and around them, intolerable. They are right; what we are doing to the world, to each other, and to ourselves is intolerable. Their reading is the correct one. Should it be medicated? I pulled Marx off the shelf. He talks a lot of sense until he doesn’t, but his simple statement that socialism is there to solve the animal needs of Man, so that he is free to understand his human needs, is profound. Capitalism may have delivered the goods, but unfortunately for us, it just goes on delivering the goods. Half of us are suffocated with stuff, and the other half is living on a dollar a day. Our human needs are much more interesting than our animal needs, and it is from our human needs that we have invented books and music, philosophy and scientific enquiry, broad streets and beautiful buildings, and yes, for all its problems, religion, which at its best turns us away from the purely mundane, into a recognition of a spiritual purpose for humanity, which is hard to talk about these days, except through art. Anyone who takes a stand against the dark insanity we call real life can find themselves, like Prometheus, isolated and alienated, feeling as though they are being eaten alive. That is why I never lose faith in the power of story telling, poetry, and language, because it is through these mediums that I can connect to a much larger understanding of what it is to be human. However painful, it is necessary to have an eagle.

From "Fiber" by Rick Bass, published in "Off the Beaten Path: Stories of Place", a collection of short stories sponsored by the Nature Conservancy.

'Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful as other things in the world today are terrible. If such stories and paintings are out there, I'm not seeing them.

I do not fault our artists for failing to keep up with, or hold in check, the world's terrors. These terrors are only a phase, like a fire sweeping across the land. Rampant beauty will return.

In the meantime, activists blink on and off like fireflies made drowsy over pesticide meadows. Activism is becoming the shell, the husk, of where art once was. You may see one of them chained to a gate, protesting yet another Senate-spawned clear-cut, an think the activist is against something, but the activist is for something, as artists used to be. The activist is for a real and physical thing, as the artist was once for the metaphorical; the activist, or brittle husk-of-artist, is for life, for sensations, for sense deeply touched: not in the imagination, but in reality.

The activist is the emergency-room doctor trying to perform critical surgery on the artist. The activist is the artist's ashes.

And what awaits the activist's ashes: peace?'