Concealing Anguish

I broke out the ole Kierkegaard yesterday (sometimes you need a little Kierkegaard to get your day going). In Either/Or, A Fragment of Life, Kierkegaard portrays two philosophers, a brash, witty, but disenchanted youth and his older, wiser mentor. The witty-but-disenchanted youth writes:

What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.

He goes on to talk about the people who hear only the beauty without recognizing the deeper anguish. They clap their hands and say, "More! More! Entertain me!"

In the older man’s reply, he has much to correct in the youth’s shortsightedness and romanticism, but he affirms the youth’s ideas about the poet. The poet is working through despair, the older man says. He lives in between the finite and the infinite. 

The poet sees the ideals, but he must run away from the world in order to delight in them . . . [he] cannot calmly go his way unmoved by the caricature that appears around him . . . For this reason the poet’s life is often the object of a shabby pity on the part of people who think they have their own lives safe and sound because they have remained in the finite.

Our art works out the struggles of the "already/not yet." Thus, it is a spiritual work. I mentioned in my post on Monday about some stresses in the Goodman house. One of them is my WIP. This novel toys with my worst fears. It dances on would-be regrets. It pulls like taffy my ideas of family, community, and individuality. I suppose this explains my penchant for procrastination. Thank God for spring and all its planting demands! (On the plus side, our house has never been so clean.)

I purse my lips, forming an embouchure in hopes that what whistles through is beautiful music, but the impetus is the doubt and despair I daily work through, clinging to the hope of the resurrection but with an eye toward the suffering of the world.

Barbara Nicolosi once talked about the eyes of the artist. The average man thinks the artist crazy. After all, the artist is gesturing wildly, eyes wide, in warning to the average man. But the average man doesn’t see the snake wrapped around him. The artist does.

I do not presume to believe the artist is any greater or better than the average man. If art is a spiritual task, I’m not sure I can say that it is any better than any other spiritual task, or working out of the "already/not yet" of God’s kingdom. Perhaps this says more about the artist’s disposition, his position of constant observer, his willingness to turn these observations in every angle Picasso-like, to anguish over the pain and suffering of the world as Jesus anguished over it, and his bravery to purse his lips and bring forth somethig beautiful.