A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates
I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.
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At the present moment in our culture this yearning for meaning and consciousness, this yearning to give and serve something higher than ourselves, is breaking through the hard crust of our widespread cultural materialism and pseudo-scientific underestimation of what a human being is meant to be together with an equally tragic overestimation of what we human beings are capable of in our present everyday state of being. The intensity of the present confusion about the nature and existence of God is a symptom of this yearning within the whole of our modern culture.
[People] might have a different word for the yearning of the heart and the yearning of the spirit that is looking for what I call "God," it still is the same thing. It is the heart's yearning to know the origin of its mystery. It's a heart's yearning to know the power of the divine in each of our lives. It's a heart's yearning to be connected to that.
We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was progress in it? Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.
People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture.
The best antidote I have found is to yearn for something. As long as you yearn, you can't congeal: There is a forward motion to yearning.
Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.
Poetry, song, stories, art, our reverence for nature, are key to our survival as a species, and to the survival of all species, I believe. You can't always extract such emphatic hunches and activist stances from a scientific maxim or mathematical axiom.
As for myself, I do not believe in loggers, I believe in trees. I do not believe in fishermen, I believe in fish. I do not believe in miners, I believe in the rocks beneath my feet. I do not believe in pie in the sky spirituality, I believe in rainbows, rivers, mountains, and moss. I do not believe in environmentalists, I believe in the environment. I am a proud traitor to my species in alliance with my mother the Earth in opposition to those who would destroy her, those parasites who believe the Earth is here to serve human interests.
The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.
I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal.
There are few qualities more vital than a strong yearning. That desire to reach a little farther, to be a little more, yearning...for a piece of something greater, can often make all the difference.
The human species is no more unsuited to give birth than any other of the 5,000 or so species of mammals on the planet. We are merely the most confused.
I personally believe the role of poets as poets (which is something different from our obligations as citizens, community members, humans) is to write poems. I believe this because I am quite sure poetry can do something no other form or writing, or human activity, can, at least not in such a powerful and distilled and undeniable way. And that we need this type of thinking for our survival as individuals and as a species.
The soul is kissed by God in its innermost regions. With interior yearning, grace and blessing are bestowed. It is a yearning to take on God's gentle yoke, It is a yearning to give one's self to God's Way.
I think we're yearning for something beyond the every day. And I will tell you that I don't believe in the supernatural, I believe in the supernormal. To me there is nothing that goes against nature. If it seems incomprehensible, it's because we haven't been able to understand it yet.
Human beings are not inevitable, and our brief existence is not preordained to be extended into the distant future. If Homo sapiens is to have a continued presence on earth, humankind will reevaluate its sense of place in the world and modify its strong species-centric stewardship of the planet. Our collective concepts of morality and ethics have a direct impact on our species' ultimate fate.
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