Sorry, long one with loads of spelling mistakes. If you find any, tell me. If you know what it was that Simon Rattle actually said, also tell me.
And now it stops.
Mocks are over.
School has finished for Christmas.
I don't have to revise.
I am calm.
I thought I'd better update this as I haven't for a while, so here I am. Just got back from seeing Lord of the Rings, and it was pretty good, but I don't remember much of it. I was conscious for most of it, but I just can't remember. Is that saying something about me, or the film?
Anyways, I thought I might mention something I heard Sir Simon Rattle say in an interview. He is a sir, isn't he? He was talking about arts funding in this country, saying that Munich spends more on the arts than the whole of Britain. Then he said about how there were orchestras in the concentration camps, and to roughly quote him, "Does it take something so beautiful as the arts to make us see something so awful?"
I love the arts. I can't sing, I can't dance, I can hardly play my viola, I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag and my drawing wouldn't even qualify as bad graffiti. I don't even try to write poetry because I feel it would be greatly insulting to those who can, and I'm not to be trusted with a camera. Mind you, that's only because I take pictures of people when they're asleep to annoy and bribe them. Fun fun fun! But I do try, and I usually have something vaguely intelligent or educated to say about art, and even when it is crap I like to be able to say why I think that.
Does it take something like art to make us see the horrors in this world? Television can count as involved in the arts, and the most horrifying images of 2001 were broadcast live across the world on the 11th September. But that was breaking news that had to be covered, and was seen by journalists who had flocked there in the wake of the disaster.
A more potent example is First World War poetry. There are two main types: the poems written before the soldiers arrived ('Remember that corner called England' or however it went), which are very patriotic and king-and-country, and the ones written by soldiers in the trenches - Seigfried Sassoon, need I say more? These wonderfully constructed poems tell of the absolute horror and suffering of conscripts in muddy ditches in France. The line that I think has touched me most in all the war poetry I have read was one by Rudyard Kipling. His son wore glasses and of course, failed the eye test. Being a famous writer, he pulled some strings and got him signed up. Not long after, his son was killed. "If they should ask why they died,/ Tell them, because their fathers lied."
I don't know any music that tells of something horrible or terrifying, but it must exist. I know there's an enormous painting in a Paris gallery that depicts a shipwreck, we studied it in year 9. I think it starts with a 'G', and it is basically a painting of a shipwrecked crew floating near-hopelessly on a raft or piece of wood, and the horror and pain in their eyes... you can see the hopelessness of these men as they cling to their dying crewmates, and stare longingly at the meat on the dead ones. It is based on a real wreck, and only about 14 people survived.
Nasty.
I don't know if it is art that makes us see these things when we otherwise wouldn't, or if it's because it is accessible enough for a wider audience to see, but it does bring thing to the world more than numbers and statistics ever could. With many things I doubt we will ever see the true horror in them if we weren't there, but maybe art makes us appreciate it more than we otherwise might.
