By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
“Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.” ― John Berger
‘Just do something,’ our bewildered minds keep uttering in these exhausting and heartbreaking times. In our desperation, all we need, it seems, is action, and for someone, to please, just do something!
Perhaps we are clinging on to ways of seeing and understanding the world that no longer make sense. Asking nicely won’t get us results. This time is over. We need to go somewhere else, not fix the cracks, but as Bayo Akomolafe would say, we need to go into the cracks.
Our instinct is to turn away from failures and from pain, to close ourselves off, but we were made for these times. What we need is to break open. For that, we need new stories, we need counter narratives. We have to refuse to accept that violence and domination are inevitable. This is difficult because in our noise-making busyness, we make no space for reflection, for creative thinking, for imagination, for open hearts.
Mythographer Martin Shaw says that people are utterly consumed by the seemingly horrific narrative of our times, and many, he points out, are suffering from burnout as a result. The problem, he says, is that many of us have no shield to reflect, we have no art to reflect the immensity of what’s in front of us. Referencing Medusa, he warns “if all you do is stare into hell, you will become ashes.”
This is why we need art, stories, myths, because their articulation enables beauty to work itself out into the world. Through those, we can be in touch with our senses, Shaw says, we can be woken up, be in what James Joyce called ‘aesthetic arrest,’ where our analytical brain quietens so that our mind and senses are in harmony, suspended in contemplation. This helps us see what truly matters to us. “You’ve got to know what you stand for, you’ve got to know what you’re gonna defend, you’ve got to know what music you like, what colours speak to you,” he says.
The point is not to use art as a distraction, a cover, a decoration. Neither is it about creating art yourself, but rather to understand that true freedom finds expression in the creative process. It shows us there is another way. And this is why artists are so often the first people to be targeted by authoritarian figures, those intent on keeping a tight lid on ideas, on different opinions, on language. Artistic expression is the practice of freedom.
John Berger said that works of art can increase our awareness of other potentialities, not so much the subject of the artwork itself, rather the artist’s view of the subject; Goya’s way of looking at a massacre, for example, might ask how the human condition got us there.
This is why art is feared by the powerful, Berger wrote, “art sometimes runs like a rumor and a legend because it makes sense of what life’s brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honour.”
This is the place we need to find, to dwell in, but it requires a certain kind of letting go, of surrendering. It cannot be forced or managed. It’s not a quick fix. It’s not escapism, it’s emergence. We cannot schedule it but we can create the conditions for it to occur.
Until that happens, the catastrophes around us will keep eating away at our souls, with the same old tired narratives. So find your aesthetic arrest, let yourself be struck by beauty, let yourself be broken open, make yourself available to what the world is asking of you.
In the words of Dorris Lessing: “whatever you’re meant to do, do it now, the conditions are always impossible.”
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
References
Hold Everything Dear: Dispatches on Survival and Resistance, John Berger.
Ways of Seeing, John Berger.
‘How to be available now: Sidenotes from the para-pragmatic,’ Bayo Akomolafe, 15 June 2025. Read here.
‘Mud and Antler Bone: An Interview with Martin Shaw,’ Emergence Magazine Podcast, 4 June 2018. Listen here.
‘The Avenging Heroes Among Us: John Berger on the Courage to Create.’ Maria Popova, the Marginalian. Read here.
Further Resources
‘John Berger reads Ghassan Kanafani's 'Letter from Gaza', written in 1956, at the Palestine Festival of Literature in 2008. Listen here.
‘Peril,’ Essay in The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison.
When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Pema Chödrön.
Undefeated Despair, John Berger, Critical Inquiry, Chicago Journals. Read here.
“I've learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision.”― Maya Angelou
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” — Albert Einstein
“Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.” — Lao Tzu
“Finally, at twelve-and-a-half, I went under the house and tried to speak poetry. I found out I did, indeed, have a voice. It was so important to me that it gave me a sense, always, of what it was to be an artist. As a young person, I knew then that to be an artist meant taking responsibility for the time one takes up and the space one occupies. That is being an artist. And that doesn’t mean one has to write down poetry or compose the piece of music or paint the important painting which lifts the soul of the human being or dance that dance or design that building. It means really being an artist in the heart.”— Maya Angelou
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” — Groucho Marx
