Tag Archives: art

Selfish Art

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I’ve just got back from a walk in the rain—real rain, not Vancouver’s usual lazy drizzling nonsense. I am damp and happy. I am happy about the wet rivulets which poured off of my umbrella, and I am happy about the squishing sound my boots made in the grassy mud as I crossed the school field. 

I am also two-thirds of the way through a first novel draft. It’s been a push. It feels like work, because it is work. And yet. I’ve been reminded lately that it’s going to be worth it. It’s going to be worth it because when I’m finished, I get to read it. I can talk all day long about writing as communication to others, as taking the pictures and ideas and worlds inside my head and putting them in someone else’s using only the magic of words on a page, and I believe in all that, I do. But ultimately, in the moment, in the midst of the act of creation, I am nearly always writing for myself.

I create to respond to the truth and beauty I see, to call to it across the void, to expand upon it with words, not primarily so that others can understand it, but so that I can. I’ve written here before about how when I reread my own work, I often find that I’m preaching to myself, particularly if I’m coming back to it after some time. I only really know my own process, of course, but  if I had to guess, I’d say most art that is actually worthwhile is made with this self-guided focus, because such singularity of purpose is able to fully serve the art itself, and treat the outside audience as a peripheral, secondary concern. When you are in the midst of making, the fact that others may get to enjoy what you’ve made is just a happy byproduct. In that instant, you need no audience but yourself.

To consult your own instincts and pleasure so centrally as you create seems like a foolishly selfish approach, and I would be tempted to dismiss it as that, except that this is exactly how God created. He made a world and a people diverse, interesting, strange, and beautiful not because this was correct or necessary but because he knew that to do so was good. Really, I suspect he made his creation good partially just so that he could have the joyful experience of calling it so, over and over. In Orthodoxy, Chesterton imagines that every day when the sun rises, God claps his hands and cries, “Do it again! Do it again!” No one takes more delight in his own art than God.

So I will allow myself to be happy about my own words on a page in the same way I am happy about a long-awaited sloppy rain, because I can receive them and because they are good. A couple months after moving to Vancouver I wrote a little note for myself and put it on my wall. I no longer have any idea what it was originally in response to, and I sometimes forget about it for weeks at a time, but every time I do reread it, it feels more necessarily true than the time before. 

It says, You no longer need to be your own maker and taskmaster. Jesus has stepped in. You are free of the tyranny of self. The Lord has an infinitely better plan, and, moreover, he is gracious. Your only call is to wrap his gifts in rejoicing and offer them back.

Art and Justice

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I’ve thought and prayed and grieved and read and talked to friends and written over a thousand words of notes for a blog entry. But now I’ve deleted most of it and I want to say just two things.

The first is that there are many, many resources out there for folks who feel new to this, like me and maybe you. There are lists of practical ideas for offering help and support and solidarity in this continuing moment, and there are lists of resources for our own reading and our children’s, all to educate ourselves. Many people have put thought and care into these, and practical, tangible action is always, always important. But one thing which I think may be helpful for me going forward, which I haven’t seen appearing much on these lists, is art. 

I know art will not change policy and it will not stand between the innocent and the aggressor. But it seems abundantly clear that one of the deepest needs for all of American history has been for black voices to be heard, and for the rest of us to hear them, really hear them deep. And there is no better way for us to hear something deep than through art. Good art can do things, say things, make permanent, searing inroads into the human heart in ways that very little else can. I have always believed this, and so I spent a good deal of time over the past week or so shyly searching out black artists and photographers on instagram and looking up recent novels by black authors that I can buy on Kindle. I want to hear what they have to say about race and what they have to say about everything else. I want to teach myself more fully to see them as brothers and sisters, near and dear, molded fascinating and precious in the image of the same great and mysterious God I serve. I want the light that art can shed.

Really one of the most important roles of art is to bring hope, and that is the other thing I want to say. I think we must commit ourselves to the hard work of justice with all the self-reflection, listening, sitting, standing, walking, and praying that entails. But we must do all of these things with hope, hope that we are, each of us, made by a God who sees pain, who knows pain, and who desires justice for his people even more than any of us can imagine. The whole Bible shudders with the justice of God. He means all those things he says about the woe that will come upon the oppressor and how completely he will lift up and restore the oppressed. He always means what he says. So take heart, because he is the one who can and will bring justice fully, and he always finishes the work he starts in us. We can step out into this gashed-open, festering world with our sleeves rolled up, gashed open and festering ourselves but full of hope.

Let justice roll down like waters,

    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

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In Praise of (Good) Fiction

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I’ve been thinking. (Dangerous.) I’ve been thinking about fiction because I’ve been trying to read a little more of it lately and soon I plan to be writing quite a bit of it. And in doing so, it’s become apparent to me that I have strong opinions about what is and what isn’t really good story-telling–perhaps to an extent that catches people around me off-guard. Sometimes, in the midst of conversation, I back myself into a corner and find myself having to explain why it is that I have just announced my disdain for much of the fiction of Wendell Berry or Marilynne Robinson, but that I do love The Mennyms and Decline and Fall and Invisible Man and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and True Grit.

There are very few things that will make me drop all pretense of being an agreeable person and begin saying foolhardy things than just getting me started on literature, most particularly getting me started on whether a story is a good one. Though the particulars of things are my bread and butter and I fully believe that only through particulars are we able to touch upon the universal, etc., etc., it might do me good to take a bit of a step back and look at the whole forest of the fiction that I love and try to understand its commonalities. What makes stories commonly good?

 

Well, I know that every really transcendent piece of fiction I’ve ever read is somehow completely unselfconscious. It is open to being read, but it does not need a reader. One gets the sense at times with a particularly strong story that even the action of the writer was incidental to its existence. It is an organic thing with beating heart and restless limbs which has always been existing at its own frenetic pace in its own universe and history with its own people and noise. 

Because of this, really good fiction is focused on its own story-ness and does not secretly wish it were a sermon or a poem. It knows that we do not live our lives in the form of philosophical treatises or expositional texts, but that life, in its rawest most incomprehensible form, is story, with beginning, middle, rising actions, characters, complications, and denouements, most of which are not recognizable when we are in their midst. Life does not pander to us and offer us reassuring explanations for its eccentricities, so good fiction reflects this in the way it drags us full steam ahead into the bright and blinding wilderness of its characters and happenings. Flannery O’Connor said that good fiction writers get dusty while doing their work. Well, I think the rest of us also get dusty while reading it.

We know we have loved a book and, perhaps more to the point, been loved by it, when we walk away from the last page changed, feeling as if our organs have been rearranged, as we’ve fallen in love, moved away from home and back again, jumped off a cliff only to be caught by the wind. But though we just spent all those hours with words, and they are the tools which have communicated the torture and salvation to us, they will somehow not suffice to explain the wonder of what we’ve experienced. Perhaps such a wonder is not possible to explain at all.

In reading, we have been allowed a glimpse at something–a world, a people, a home, a pain–which may be even real-er than we are. And this is a great mystery to me: the best stories I have read feel like secrets. I know that Jane Eyre is a classic and has been read and loved and dissected and devoured and regurgitated by millions. I’ve had my share of conversations about it and even used it as a discussion example when I taught history to teenagers, and yet I am sure no one has entered it like I have, loved it like I have. The ageless, hungry little reader inside me will never actually believe that it is not her own private treasure in the same way that she will never quite believe that Holden Caulfield of Catcher in the Rye is not her personal friend. It is that unaccountably real to me. So not only is good fiction’s realness to us inexplicable (after all, we know that it’s fiction), but its real-ness and frequent intimate proximity to our own hearts and deepest concerns make the best fiction literally inexplicable. Our favorite stories are beyond explanation: they heroically resist it, even (Lord preserve us) in high school English classes.

Good fiction matters because when we read it and then set the book down at the end and attempt to walk away from it, we find that we cannot. The story will follow. We have walked into another world and lived there, and now we stumble back into our world to live here, with the extra appendage we have gained dragging along behind us, making us weightier, older, more.

 

So those are my justifications for my occasional outbursts about story, for the moments when I say indefensible things like, “I just don’t think that’s the way to write fiction.” I am so aware of fiction’s wondrous and frightening power to change everything about us. Some books seem to change the density of our bones and course of the blood in our veins. But ultimately, I can’t tell you or myself or anyone what makes good fiction what it is. It’s ineffable. Good fiction, like beauty, is its own answer. 

Soon (now this makes me shiver a bit to write) I will be writing fiction for my final project, hopefully good fiction, but for now I’m writing this. And I have not been happy with the last few entries I’ve written here, which has gotten under my skin. What I’ve had to say has been fine, but I know I have not hung back long enough before publishing to play with the words, to take joy. It is all kinds of writing that we need to get dusty. And even as I write these short blog entries, I must be willing not only to stop and play in the dust, but to simply wait in it, in the grubby, glinting caves of my own little life, in deflated vowels and unwieldy consonants. I must wait unselfconsciously, with no particular agenda in mind but the offering of praise.

Last Wednesday after dinner we went for a walk across a field in ankle-deep snow under a multichrome sky. I toyed with the idea of writing to tell you about it, but, like I said, beauty is its own reward. Not all poems have to be written if they have been lived.

Bus Prelude and Fugue

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I had intended to come home today and write a blog entry about what it’s like to be on the receiving end of things rather than the giving end, but that will wait. I want to tell you about the bus instead.

There is a boy who often rides the 25 home the same time as me, mid-afternoon. Really, there are lots of kids on around that time, but there’s one in particular. He’s maybe thirteen or fourteen, and the moment you see him you somehow know you’ve seen him before. He’s some version of who you once were and maybe who you still are inside sometimes. He walks stiff-legged and barrel-chested in his shorts and tennis shoes, and he can’t help but swing his bag against other passengers’ knees as he lowers it. When more teenagers get on at each school we pass, they look at him narrowly, loath to take the empty seat next to him. Once a group of kids tried to load themselves on at the back door of the bus instead of the front, and he rushed from his seat and lectured them back off to the correct entrance in a voice like a foghorn. But between these occasional polemics and his frequent moves from one seat to another, he stacks two thick volumes of Bach on his lap, flips one open, and then leans forward onto his arms and reads the sheet music. He reads the notes like he’s starved for them. Always. I don’t think he’ll ever get his fill. Sometimes he hums.

This afternoon he was in fine form, switching seats several times within the space of a few stops, the precious Bach cradled in one arm. One moment he sat directly next to me, and then turned and deafeningly informed me that he was going to move to the other side of the bus. I said okay.

A stop or two later a woman and a little blonde boy got on and sat on either side of me. They began having a conversation about how the bus worked: when the bus driver stopped and when he didn’t, when passengers got on and when they didn’t. He spoke in English: young, pointed questions, and she answered them entirely in fast, unself-conscious Spanish. They went gently back and forth and up and down, in complete harmony with one another, as we passed through the dappled sunlight. The bus was quiet except for their conversation, and I was enchanted. I thought that I could write a poem about the music they were making.

I reached into my bag for my journal to make a note and then a loud voice said, “Are you speaking Spanish?” My friend with the Bach had made one more move, to the other side of the woman. She said that she was. “I’m learning Spanish.” He held up his book. “Vientiquatro Preludios y Fugas. It’s my favorite.”

He announced his birthday in Spanish, and then repeated it more slowly and translated to English as if she might not have understood. She nodded patiently. He clearly cared enormously about his pronunciation.

He asked the little boy how old he was, and when he said five, the older boy repeated back, “Cinco!” loud and staccato. The little guy tucked his chin into his neck and giggled with delight: this stranger on the bus knew their secret language.

The boy with the Bach asked the woman where she was from. She told him Mexico. “Oh, I’ve heard Mexicans speak excellent Spanish.” She smiled and pulled the cord for the next stop.

As the bus sung to a halt and she and her little charge stood and moved towards the back door, the three of them called out to each other, more than once, “Adios!” The small voice, the gentle voice, and the rough one all overlapped and found friendly resonances.

When bus doors had closed and the sound had faded and everything had gone back to its hum of regularity, I sat very still but a little bit dizzy and warm, still clutching my journal in one hand.

May Joys

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May is not a month I have ever associated with peace. It is a month of chaos and sugar and absences and red ink up to our eyeballs and holding on for dear life. And this May at school has included some mysterious deathly malady which has occasionally affected not only most of the copiers, but the AC system as well. We’re on our last rope, our last thread.

And yet.

Yesterday I went to Raleigh with some friends. We went to the NC Art Museum and then to dinner at some very cool place called Brewery Bhavana. I knew it was cool because I felt too old and too young for it at the same time, but I still enjoyed myself anyway.

The reason we went to the art museum in the first place was to see a special exhibit called “You Are Here.” The pieces were all supposed to be interactive, and in some way associated with light, color, and sound. (Again–too old and too young at the same time.)

My favorite was a big white room with forty speakers set up in a circle, playing a fifteen minute piece of sacred choral music on loop. And that was it. If you sat on one of the benches in the middle of the room, you could close your eyes and be lifted, as you heard the voices blending and building and melding into one another.

Or you could get up and walk slowly around the room from speaker to speaker, each of which was playing a different individual voice. Once, as I was doing this, the entire piece took a two beat rest, and then the three deep voices which were closest to my head at that moment swung solidly back in. I almost jumped with joy. I felt surrounded, unaccountably loved, known, as if my dear friends were leading the way. My friend Lauren whispered to me, It’s like heaven!

I wish May were that room, that I could walk up to each voice in the peace of a big white space, and listen to its separate resonance and contribution, over and over, that I could take my soft time with each word, each need, each demand for attention. I wish I could parse the million colors and faces swirling in my vision all day long, give each one its due in care, at long last.

But I can’t. I’ll have all the time and more for that in eternity.

But just for now, in these last two weeks as a teacher, I must sit in the middle of it all, close my eyes and be lifted.