But the great triumph of Ninevite politicians was their success in getting the artists to work against themselves. So imbued was Nineveh with the idea that wealth was the city’s goal and that art, since it was not an immediate producer of wealth, was an undeserving pursuit, that the artists themselves came to believe that they should pay their own way in the world, producing cost-efficient art, frowning on failure and lack of recognition, and above all, trying to gratify those who, being wealthy, were also in positions of power. So visual artists were asked to make their work more pleasing, composers to write music with a hummable tune, writers to imagine not-so-depressing scenarios.
In times long gone by, in short periods during which the bureaucrats slumbered, certain funds had been granted to artistic causes by soft-hearted or soft-headed Ninevite kings. Since those times, more conscientious officials had been redressing this financial oversight and vigorously pruning down the allotted sums. No official would, of course, recognize any such change in the government’s support of the arts, and yet the Ninevite secretary of finance was able to cut the actual funds allotted to the arts down to almost nothing, while at the same time advertising a committed increase of those same funds in the official records. This was done by the use of certain devices borrowed from the Ninevite poets (whose tools the politicians happily pilfered, while despising the poets who invented them). Metonymy, for instance, the device by which a poet uses a part or an attribute of something to stand in its place (crown for king, for example), allowed the secretary of provisions to cut down on the funds spent on subsidizing artists’ work materials. All any artist now received from the city, whatever his needs, was a number 4 rat-hair paintbrush, since in the secretary’s official vocabulary brush was made to stand for “the ensemble of an artist’s equipment.” Metaphors, the most common of poetic tools, were employed to great effect by these financial wizards. In one celebrated case, a sum of ten thousand gold dinars had been set aside long ago for the lodging of senior artists. By simply redefining camels, used in public transport, as “temporary lodgings,” the secretary of finance was able to count the cost of the camels’ upkeep (for which the city of Nineveh was responsible) as part of the sum allotted to artists’ lodgings, since the senior artists did indeed use subsidized public camels to get from place to place.
“The real artists,” said the Ninevites, “have no cause to complain. If they are really good at what they do, they will make a buck no matter what the social conditions. It’s the others, the so-called experimenters, the self-indulgers, the prophets, who don’t make a cent and whine about their condition. A banker who doesn’t know how to turn a profit would be equally lost. A bureaucrat who didn’t recognize the need to clog things down would be out of a job. This is the law of survival. Nineveh is a society that looks to the future.”
True: in Nineveh, a handful of artists (and many con artists) made a good living. Ninevite society liked to reward a few of the makers of the products it consumed. What it would not recognize, of course, was the vast majority of the artists whose attempts and glitterings and failures allowed the successes of others to be born. Ninevite society didn’t have to support anything it didn’t instantly like or understand. The truth was that this vast majority of artists would carry on, of course, no matter what, simply because they couldn’t help it, the Lord or the Holy Spirit urging them on night after night. They carried on writing and painting and composing and dancing by whatever means they could find. “Like every other worker in society,” the Ninevites said.
It is told that the first time Jonah heard this particular point of Ninevite wisdom, he drummed up his prophetic courage and stood in the public square of Nineveh to address the crowds. “The artist,” Jonah attempted to explain, “is not like every other worker in society. The artist deals with reality: inner and outer reality transformed into meaningful symbols. Those who deal in money deal in symbols behind which stands nothing. It is wonderful to think of the thousands and thousands of Ninevite stockbrokers for whom reality, the real world, is the arbitrary rising and falling of figures transformed in their imagination into wealth—a wealth that exists only in their imagination. No fantasy writer, no virtual-reality artist could ever aspire to create in an audience such an all-pervading trust in fiction as that which takes place in an assembly of stockbrokers. Grownup men and women who will not for a minute consider the reality of the unicorn, even as a symbol, will accept as rock-hard fact that they possess a share in the nation’s camel bellies, and in that belief they consider themselves happy and secure.” By the time Jonah had reached the end of this paragraph, the public square of Nineveh was deserted.
For all these reasons, Jonah decided to escape both Nineveh and the Lord, and jumped on a ship headed for Tarshish. Now, the sailors in the ship that carried Jonah were all men from Joppa, a port not far from Nineveh, an outpost of the Ninevite empire. Nineveh was, as you have no doubt surmised, a society besotted by greed. Not ambition, which is a creative impulse, something all artists possess, but the sterile impulse to accumulate for the sake of accumulation. Joppa, however, had for many decades been a place where prophets had been allowed a tolerable amount of freedom. The people of Joppa accepted the yearly influx of bearded, ragged men and disheveled, wild-eyed women with a certain degree of sympathy, since their presence procured Joppa free publicity when the prophets traveled abroad to other cities, where they often mentioned the name of Joppa in not unkind terms. Also, the recurrent prophesying season brought curious and illustrious visitors to Joppa, and neither the innkeepers nor the owners of the caravanserais complained of the demands made on their bed and board.
But when times were hard in Nineveh and the economic hardships of the city rippled out all the way to the little town of Joppa, when business profits were down and the wealthy Joppites were constrained to sell one of their ornamented six-horse chariots or close down a couple of their upland sweatshops, then the presence in Joppa of the prophesying artists was openly frowned upon. The tolerance and whimsical generosity of wealthier days seemed now sinfully wasteful to the citizens of Joppa, and many of them felt that the artists who came to their quaint little haven should make no demands at all and feel grateful for whatever they got: grateful when they were lodged in the frumpiest buildings of Joppa, grateful when they were denied appropriate working tools, grateful when they were allowed to finance themselves their new projects. When they were forced to move out of their rooms to accommodate paying guests from Babylon, the artists were told to remember that they, as artists, should know that it was an honorable thing to lie under the stars wrapped in smelly goat hides just like the illustrious prophets and poets of the days before the Flood.