Creatures of the metaphor.

But let's not be naive. My imagery is freely lifted from Eliot's Waste Land, circa 1922. Doomsayers in all civilizations have supplied popular entertainment. Particularly intelligent people fall for the trap, refusing to acknowledge the inevitability of cyclic historical patterns. Like Eliot, they're often admired not just as poets but often as purveyors of religions, cults, and sects; not just because they're being dramatic but because they also do acknowledge truth. As Yeats put it, "Things fall apart; the center cannot hold ." Well, yes!

But the demise of the sun and all life on the planet is more accurately predictable than the disintegration of particular civilizations. The 3,000 years of dynastic Egyptian history reveal many peaks and chasms. That the United States now rides a strong cyclic downstroke of time's pendulum is as obvious as it is lamentable. What in all honesty we cannot presume is whether this is "it" or a necessary precursor of renewal.

Whichever, let's be practical. When you're not dead yet, proceeding with life is the only sensible course. And if you're ill, attempting to continue becomes an imperative - fix what you can and accept the rest. So what is it, precisely, that our culture lacks? What might be healed, and what must be left to inevitability? And who or what is capable of suturing the wounds?

The body politic and our daily lives lack meaning because belief in our metaphor grows frail. The world picture - and, hence, invented purpose - is becoming vague. I say "invented" because metaphors are tools, if you will, that lend drive and purpose to our otherwise insignificant lives. And they often appear silly, especially from the outside looking in. What could seem more ridiculous than the pyramids - devoting the highest percentage of your gross national product to insisting that a pharoah (not you) can be immortal? Or in the case of the United States, to stockpiling a thermo-nuclear arsenal that can obliterate the earth many times over? Disintegration is the result in both cases. Or (in other places and at other times) that 2,000 ripped-out hearts in one afternoon can satisfy the blood-lust of the Aztec god Huitzilopotchli; that crawling on bare knees for miles makes the Virgin of Guadalupe happy; or that being cremated and dumped into the putrid Ganges assures a better life next time? Yet these are all metaphors offering purpose and (not insignificantly) producing the very greatest civilizations.

So long, that is, as a majority of the population believes and has faith in the validity of the metaphors of the civilization. When metaphors weaken or collapse, from sources external or internal - usually both are nearly simultaneous - the civilization ceases. Both Cortez and Alexander the Great were welcomed by the Aztecs and Egyptians they conquered respectively. We are creatures of the metaphor and, after even the barest subsistence is achieved, turn to pictures and images for purpose and meaning - and, most importantly, for political stability, order, and ethics. We even fight for or against invented beliefs, especially of our own uniqueness, the byproduct being coherence and, for a while, the semblance of tribal stability and unity. Exile is not only an ancient punishment; it is a slow and predictable death of body and spirit.

It is my contention that what may pass in some quarters as spiritual or artistic frosting on the cake of human endeavor is, in fact, a practical necessity - not for some otherworldly purpose but as the foundation of tribal identity, purpose, and, above all, cohesion. If we don't cohere, we die; it's as simple as that. A metaphor lost is ruin itself and a metaphor gained (or sustained) is tantamount to survival.

A society is as strong as the belief in its metaphors permits, and it lasts as long as that belief continues. And because metaphors are images, and images are pictures, and pictures can be made of or evoked through words, paint, clay, and sound, then art must be viewed as a fundamental means of sustaining existence and identity. After all, most cultures have assumed the primacy of art from the Cro-Magnons of the Lascaux caves, through fifth century BCE Athens, to the Florence of Michelangelo and da Vinci. When a general such as Sophocles wrote plays and popes knew power to be maintained via images, we'll have to assume those fellows were aware that fighting and praying were dependent on the metaphor and not the other way around, as our present culture would have it.

We erroneously assume that, when we have nothing better to do and are bored to distraction - retired, perhaps, or ill - then we can write or paint; but, above all, don't take crafts seriously! Give children piano lessons but hope they don't get carried away and decide to attend Julliard. Because neither the local politicians nor the clergy nor the army will take art seriously - despite all the historical evidence that in the past pictorial images were precisely what leaders depended upon. The human notion of reality goes something like this: if you can't see it, it ain't. Faith clinches the deal: for the tribe to adhere, it's got to believe its imaginings - even when they're absurd or downright dangerous.

Our tribe's present obsessive, absurd, and dangerous metaphor is the belief that money buys meaning. Money is pictures stamped on paper we agree to value, just as the Aztecs agreed to feed their war god Huitzilopotchli human blood. As Calvin Coolidge put it, "The chief business of the American people is business." When we cease to have faith in pictures of national heroes on green paper, dollars will become meaningless. Our metaphor will have collapsed. (atomic, drought, viral) - and even if - what will slouch again toward the new Bethlehem is the rough beast of fresh metaphor: a picture to present the new image for the new nation of old tribes so they may once again adhere to meaning, purpose, and identity. And it's to the imaginative creators of these metaphors we must pay homage, even to the often absurd and ridiculous content of their pictorial message. just like shamans, no artists worth their salt (and who remain sane) believe their own images are real. That's for the leaders to pretend and the populace to believe.

There is always historical change but, other than in the geomorphology of the planet, never anything that's particularly new. Nothing can be more "already known" than art and the creation of it. From cave-dwelling on, probably earlier, humans have been symbol-makers. Not for themselves as individuals, however, but to identify the tribe imagistically. "We belong; you don't" has always been the battle cry.

Until the late eighteenth century, art was essentially a group or service activity producing pyramids and cathedrals. Self-expression was discouraged or nonexistent. And though there are major exceptions to this collective preoccupation (Shakespearean sonnets, for instance), the idea of individual production, the concept of genius itself (Michelangelo accepted the dictates of church sponsor, ship; Bach, the same) had to wait for Blake, van Gogh, Tchaikovsky, and their exploration - even explosion - of the self.

With our late twentieth century's collapse of collective belief in general and the cynicism directed toward all authority, the burden and luxury of expression becomes the individual's. I would like to speculate that the process of producing art - any art - is the sleeping giant waiting to awake, the good we need to nourish our starving psyches.

It is not the imagistic product that is important in the long run. What is significant is the process which goes into the making of the artistic product, because the process itself does not disintegrate or, regardless of time or place, even change very much.

As we are unable to attempt any understanding of the world or ourselves except through images, and because the marketplace caters - as it must - to the lowest common denominator (typically spectacle, the lowest form of drama, according to Aristotle), we are left to ourselves to contemplate our sicknesses, fears, loves, defeats, and expectations. Popular culture won't do it: bestsellers and blockbuster movies lie (and we love to be lied to). Yet influenced by these lies, our confusion grows, and our inability to cope with the vicissitudes of ordinary living increases.

I suggest that inherent in the process itself of producing any art are the keys that open a person to enjoying or accepting what heretofore might be considered debilitating problems and confusions. All art has a structure, for instance, that persuades its creators to explore, to confront further whatever difficulties their anxieties have tempted them to express. Once known, once seen, our dragons are not as lethal; these nightmare beasts may even be corralled into becoming friends. And if that means I'm suggesting that, in this century, the personal production of any art is superior in the achievement of tolerance, coherence, comprehension, devotion, and relief for the ordinary person than any religion or psychiatric device, then so be it.

Among Aristotle's many brilliant investigations, the Greek philosopher examined the workings of drama. Recall that, for the Greeks, plays were movies, television (especially of the soap variety), and religion combined. Therefore, to contemplate a drama's under-pinnings was a crucial, even political, act. What makes the drama arouse terror and pity, awe and inspiration? Aristotle asked. He came up with six determinants: plot, character, diction, thought, spectacle, and song. Not much has changed, has it? And why does this combination excite and convince us? Because the essential trait of being human is to be imitative. Art is an imitation of an action, and through imitation we learn. Like ourselves, what a fictional character chooses or avoids in "life" determines its existence, and if we see these choices mirrored in the actions of persons greater (or lesser) than ourselves, the lesson becomes magnified. Since we an have a "fatal flaw," and since Aristotle conceived of reality as a process of becoming or developing, we can see that, by facing our flaws, we can reach at least an acceptance of them; we can experience a catharsis, a relief, through recognition.

Avoidance, then or now, gets you nowhere. But rather than merely seeing a play, a movie, a painting, or a ballet; reading a story or a poem; or hearing music, we should create these arts for ourselves. Process is more important than product. The rise of the proletariat as a viable social, political, and economic class permits the concept of everymen and everywomen producing a kind of everyart to proclaim their own very personal understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit. Like the heartbreak of psoriasis, the unfortunate habit of observing rather than personally doing results in a scaly, even unsightly, inflammation of the emotions and comprehensions. We should study former and present "greatness" in order to emulate it. Not because we will all produce a product that will equal the great artists of any age, because we probably won't - but that's not the point. Through the process of artistic creation, we can all confront ourselves, others, and our culture with more wisdom and respect.

Many people are going to complain that they are peculiarly devoid of talent, skill, and knowledge - or that couching potatoes is all their free time will allow them. And yet these same people doodle when bored (ever glance at a student's notebook during a lecture?), tell stories of a friend's misdemeanors with dramatic enthusiasm, and sing in the shower. Remember before the age of 12 and pubescent self-consciousness, when you spent hours coloring, making sand castles, and stuffing your pockets with shiny stones? Nothing is cheaper than talent and artistic interest because everyone has some; it is a genetic inevitability.

Symbol and image producers we were born to be, and so symbol and image producers we must allow ourselves to become. That our particular culture gives short shrift to the obvious bodes not well for us. At present, the relatively new field of art therapy is one of the few acknowledgements that art is not merely decoration for the rich or the academic elite or the preserve of the obsessively talented. Art therapy's one error is that it views the production of art to be primarily therapeutic for the demonstrably ill and disturbed. The production of art should be viewed as a necessity for everyone - rich or poor, smart or dumb, disturbed or not. The contemporary tendency to diminish the importance of what used to be referred to as a "liberal arts education," and the down, sizing of art and music classes in our grade schools, underscores the society's miscomprehension of our basic need to know ourselves and the best means to exercise that knowledge.

Besides, aren't we all - to a greater or lesser extent - emotionally disturbed, socially confused, and fatally flawed? The most satisfied and adjusted persons are those who, through some capacity for personal diminishment, nestle their lives quite comfortably into the latest health fad, political soundbite, religious preoccupation, or whatever popular war or monetary value the world of advertising and the media suggests. Most of us, however, flunk adjustment somewhere along the line - at least in dreams and hidden desires.

So, as Aristotle saw all art as an imitation of life, and with wondrous success ferreted out the mechanisms through which the imitation could seem real, let's reverse the process and attempt viewing the laws and rules that permit even modern art to succeed as the mechanisms that promote an examined and more serene life - not for the viewer so much as for the creator. In other words, let's investigate the possibility that life imitates art rather than the other way around - or that it should and will, if only we citizens can home in on art's innate ability to reveal, relieve, explore, and redeem.

The mechanisms that make a painting or a story convincing are what make a life all it can be. Is your life a strong statement? Is your existence devoted to what can be viewed as significant and universal? Do you mix metaphors? Are you aware of repetitions with variations, of opposing needs for security and adventure? Do you explore and confront what bothers you or attempt to escape? Is your life replete with values that serve more than just yourself.7 Do you see the whole or merely its parts? Is your life structured or chaotic? Do you sing or whine?

Though the process of creating anything may well relieve emotional anxiety and set in motion the possibility of understanding, perfecting the process to produce a viable product is what rubs one's nose, as it were, into the realizations we all need, always have needed, and avoid only at our peril. Jung said that the twentieth century's prime problem was the death of Christianity and the inability to find a metaphor to replace k. Joseph Campbell speculated that art and its creation were the only religion left. De Tocqueville's Democracy in America suggests that art embodies the individual's power to combat the tyranny of the majority.

So let's give art a try. It's not that everyone can't do it, because we already do do it. All humans everywhere - from every tribe, from all countries, and of all ages - always have. All that's lacking is the personal motivation to take the final step to refine our scribbles, doodles, and hums into a solid product. Because art isn't just what somebody else does but can be ourselves in action. If we accept that the proper study of humankind is ourselves - to paraphrase Pope and Socrates - comprehending our lives as the metaphors they are via metaphors themselves might bring us closer to being a work of art. Yes, I'm actually suggesting that we look at ourselves as a work of art ... in progress.

Robert Burdette Sweet was a professor of English and creative writing at San Jose State University for over 40 years. He is the author of numerous books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Dame America, Akbar the Great, and Writing Towards Wisdom: The Writer As Shaman. He is also a painter, sculptor, and musical composer.