to the dance of life
My post, A Fondue Feast, is up today at Art House America’s blog.
A taste:
Artists play communal fugues. We take a theme sounded by one and invert it, reverse it, transpose it. We play with this theme, echoing it and transforming it. We mark it with our unique personalities and cultures, then hand it on to the next artist.
Read the rest here.
My husband and I have been talking a lot about our work lately–he the businessman, I the writer–and how our work serves God’s kingdom. And though I come to our questions sacredly, my pride weaves throughout. Often, I wonder about my significance in God’s kingdom as a writer, especially as an unknown writer.
An interview Image Journal published with Makoto Fujimura about artist Georges Rouault offered some challenge to me about my struggles with working in obscurity.
“Striving toward art wasn’t so much about selection as about rejection.”
- Charles Turner in “Ends of the Earth,” a short story published in Image (No. 68)
Which is why I’m deleting every word I wrote yesterday. I used to think that the creation of art was linear. Every day, you add words. Not that you never delete them, but the additions would over-compensate the subtractions so that by the end of the day you’d always have more words, not fewer. You’d progress along the journey, arrive somewhere new, even if it was a rest stop on the way to the final destination.
Not so much.
Not to say I’m not progressing, but my idea of progression has changed. It’s not so different from practicing piano. I can spend hours perfecting a passage only to come to the same passage the next day as if I’d never seen those notes arranged in that way before in my life.
The direction I wanted to take my story yesterday (so innovative! so symbolic! so ironic and even iconic!) seems vapid today. But this is how we create art. I can’t put my finger on the correct metaphor: it’s not linear, but neither is it cyclical. It’s a journey, but more meandering, less direct. My GPS would not appreciate the deviations I’d take from the route she so efficiently mapped out for me (“turn around when possible,” she’d repeat).
So I reject more ideas than I choose, more words than I keep, more stories than I finish.
***
I write slower these days. Perhaps it is laziness or fear. Those are possibilities. Certainly it has to do with my new “interruption” (and such an adorable interruption he is!). But in some ways, I also write more deliberately. This may be part and parcel of my new life: I write in my head more while walking with Keegan or doing (another) load of laundry (really, how much laundry can one ten-pound baby create?).
Who’s to say if this is a better way to write or not? I still put words to page that will end up in the trash. But I’ve lost the rush to write, the need to produce a certain number of pages each day or each week. Maybe I’m only losing my discipline. Or maybe it’s only for a time. Or maybe it’s a change in how I view writing.
***
Writing has become less important.
Also, writing has become more important.
No longer do I care as much about tallying pages at the end of the day. And while I still research journals and agents, while I still aspire toward publishing my books (don’t you want to meet Marnie and Sarah and Morning?), I no longer feel defined by that. Not to say I’m defined by motherhood now. That’s not it exactly. But infants nurse for but a moment. I spend my time memorizing Keegan’s smiles–that is my art.
Yet the need to create, to form in my part of the world something beautiful, especially through my writing (but also through gardening, through family meals, through music made together, through knitting) drives me to continue typing. I want to teach Keegan what it means to be fully human, and that means to nurture creativity in myself and in my family. Someday he’ll teach me, for his creativity will be something different from mine.
So I still write. And I delete. And I walk away from the computer and dance to Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with babe in arms.
“Most of all the cooking in the world is comfort food. It is food designed to remind us of familiar things, to connect us with our personal histories and our communities and our families.”
- John Lanchester, “Incredible Edibles” in The New Yorker (March 21, 2011)
I came across this passage in an article the other day describing modern food. Of course, the article went on to say how modern food these days deviates from the familiar, but the point stands: we seek the familiar. It reminds us that we belong, that we are loved, that we are known.
Several years ago, my husband asked me why I write. I answered, “So that others won’t feel alone.” A year or so later, I came across the C.S. Lewis quote: “We read to know we are not alone.” Perhaps I’d read the quote before and subconsciously connected it to why I write. Perhaps it’s a common sentiment that many recognize.
As writers, we’re told to find the fresh–a fresh voice, a fresh angle, a fresh take. This is true. The world would be bored by the same old story told over and over again.
But the world also longs to hear the same old story told over and over again. We long for the comfort of the known–to know that the hero wins and how, to know that Elizabeth ends up with Darcy or that it is in Romeo and Juliet’s death that their families reconcile. How many times can I watch When Harry Met Sally? Or read Anne of Green Gables? Yesterday, I read “Childhood Lost,” a poem by blogging friend Eric Swalberg. It broke my heart because I sensed the familiar–an emotion of fleeting time on which I’ve been meditating since Keegan’s birth.
Part of the job of the artist is to reveal humanity, and this requires creating things in such a way that the audience sees things from a different perspective. But even as we do this, we invoke the familiar so that the audience says, yes, I know this house, this family, that girl. And in knowing our characters, the audience knows that they, too, are known.
In this familiarity is life itself. It is more than Google stats or page counts or number of comments. These may tell us we are popular (or not so popular) for a moment, but they’re ecclesiastical. It is not a belonging that lasts. When we write words to page, paint oils to canvas, strike keys on piano, the timelessness of our creations is not in the masses, in the bestsellers or high bids. It is how we resonate with one another, connect, communicate, commune, if only with an individual. And in this type of familiarity, we find the unique, the fresh–how my mom wields spices for her pumpkin pie recipe, how my neighbor cares for his roses, how my son sleeps with the same expression his father sleeps with. Hollywood’s bland worlds and practiced anti-accents ultimately fail us. Mass marketed fruit paintings may look pretty on our walls, but they don’t touch us. Commercial jingles may move us to consume, but they don’t move us to create.
So today, I write about the rose-tender in my neighborhood, the cloves in my mother’s pumpkin pie, the sleep of my son, offering my familiar that you might find yours. And in this way, art again creates community.
“Modigliani might have done stronger work in painting if he weren’t driven to forge a signature look–to make a name for himself, as his time ran short.”
- Peter Schjeldahl, “Long Faces” in The New Yorker
As I read this bit in a an article about Modigliani a couple of weeks ago, two questions came to mind:
This speaks to the relationship of the artist with his audience and how much the artist is concerned with or writes for a particular audience.
(Side note, just this morning, I read in Amy Inspired by Bethany Pierce a section where the protagonist–also a writer–asks this question.)
I don’t mean to say that we should ignore the good people in the marketing department or fight editors (who, most likely, want to help you write the best story you can). It doesn’t mean becoming obscure for the sake of obscurity and weirdness. After all, if art is the revelation of truth, then on some level, it is a communication; it is communal.
But art is dangerous.
Later in the article, Mr. Schjedahl writes that Modigliani is one of the most forged artists in the world. His style and “stock-in-trade imagery” (or “logo-like motif”) gives us a series of works in which Modigliani “practically faked himself.”
I’ve come across this in artists and authors–one work is exactly like all of their others. At some point, they stop taking risks. They stop delving into humanity. They stop asking questions because they found something that worked. But is it wrong when they’ve found something that resonated with a particular audience? Or has the audience merely become complacent with the artist?
At the heart of this may be the question of pride (at least for the artist–I won’t deal with the possible complacency of the audience here). If I write in order to make a name for myself, if I write for my own glory (or legacy), then that limits my art. Fear of disapproval may keep me from exploring truth in my art. But the other side can step in as well. If, in order to protect ourselves–our pride–we use obscurity and esoterism (it’s okay; I can make up words–I’m a writer) to purposefully distance ourselves from audiences (or a particular audience) so that we reject the audience before the audience can reject us (I broke up with you first!), then that, too, can limit our art.
As we all suspected, no one answer exists to these questions. The relationship of art, the artist, and the audience changes from artist to artist and even within an artist’s own oeuvre. I believe my Christianity informs how I practice this and even frees me to explore more deeply without concern as to my own legacy. After all, it’s about God’s glory, not mine. As I focus on the questions in my art, I can trust God to do with the end product what he will. (I’m not saying I do a good job of this. I’m saying I can trust him with that. The ability to do something and the practice of that ability are two different subjects.)
While many within and without the Christian faith critique how Christianity limits our art, in this area, we can look to how it gives us more freedom.
Recently I’ve become fascinated with the etymological link between communication and community, specifically with how this plays out in the realm of art.
Why do I write? Why do I offer up my writings into the world-at-large?
I explore these questions in my latest Master’s Artist post:
Through art, I respond to God and his movement in his creation at large and in me specifically.
And then I set this response, this discovery, out into the world.
Isn’t this part of the human existence, too? This vulnerability, this desire to be known and to know others through my art. Tertullian said that the essence of personhood is the ability to communicate. The art we create is not a dead artifact upon its completion. It invites the response and engagement of others.
I tell tales--tall ones, short ones, fat ones, skinny ones. Some call it compulsive lying. I call it writing.
