After about 10 hours, I’ve come to the end of George the Poet’s inspired piece of radio. One couplet particularly struck me and has stuck with me:
When artists become advocates
The audience become activists
I wouldn’t call myself an artist, but this message captures the best of what my writing can achieve. Worth remembering when it feels like pissing in the wind.
George’s line reminds me of how George Orwell explains his motivation in his 1946 essay Why I Write:
My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice. When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art’. I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.
Three years later, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. Art is at its best when it motivates action.