Artistic Clarity

A friend has helped me clarify a bit. (Like what happens when butter heats up and all the solids float to the top, I think.)

Regarding the post immediately previous to this one ...

It seems to me that:

"Art" is a subset of "Expression."

(Not all Expression is Art.)

"Communication" is a subset of "Art."

(Not all Art is Communicaton.)

Perhaps, then, Art is the intersection of Expression and Communication, when the subject at hand is the Unseen and the Un-embodied. (This would not be the same as disembodied.) In other words, when the Artist enters the Land Between, and brings back to the Corporeal Landscape something of that other land, he endeavors (or, I think he should endeavor) to communicate what he has seen (felt, heard, known). I just don't think it counts as Art if it's mere Expression alone. A tantrum is an expression, but it stops its communicating at the point where exasperation is the message. Eloquent, maybe. But not Art. Art is the embodying of that which has no body without expression. Isn't it?

Does ANY of this make sense outside my own head to ANYone else in the world? Comments please.

Don Dahlke and a Life Between

He ne'er is crowned with immortality
Who fears to follow where airy voices lead.
John Keats

Back when I started this blog, I wrote a bit about this painting that speaks so eloquently to me every time I look at it. To see more of Don Dahlke's work, click on this one - called, "Between Green and Orange" - and you'll go to his site. All the paintings are like this. They're all paintings of windows that open into interiors that open onto the sea. It doesn't look on my computer monitor like it looks in person - this is the one I saw the original of, and it is the only painting that ever made me begin to weep so unexpectedly.

I decided at the time that the reason this painting drew me in was because of its sense of being "between." The other paintings follow the same elusively haunting and beckoning format, but the one I loved - "Between Green and Orange" - it has the word between in the name it got from its creator. He thought it was about being "between" too. It wasn't just me. It was the artist's intent.

Keats lived "between" too, if that ethereal and romantic quote above is anything to go by. Poets and artists and musicians of all kinds - fascinating photographers who are able to see more with a camera than we can see with our eyes - I even know a couple such people. One of them is Douglas Bienert. This is what true artists do. They follow where the airy voices lead, and they enter the place between green and orange, where the yellow light is blinding and obscuring until the eyes adjust. The artist is the person whose eyes (eventually) adjust, so that he can bring some bit of what he's seen back to the other people - the ones who had the sense to get dinner on the table while the artist was off being blinded by the light.

But what is it good for? It almost never puts dinner on the table. Not in the "real world" where there is a clear difference between green and orange, and dinner is served at six and is made with groceries someone thought to buy ahead of time (and this highly sensible person also remembered to take money to the store to do this buying - and had that money they remembered to take) - but not too far ahead of time - or else the groceries will have become science experiments while waiting to be turned into dinner. (An aside: I read a great turn of phrase the other day. Healthy eating is to "eat foods that spoil - and eat them before they do.")

Artists with words or paint or film or clay -- they nearly never get food on the table by way of their time in the land between. Such sojourns are not usually good for financial advancement. Sometimes, but not usually.

Today I ask myself the question, "What is it good for?" Is it just self-indulgence? Or - worse - self-deception? The making of an imaginary world as personal as a child's imaginary "friend" world, and as much a reflection of the artist as the child's friend is a reflection of the child? That's nice and all ... but it just seems ... well ... futile. It seems futile and fruitless and therefore kind of pointless. Sad, even.

And so I realize that to my mind, Art is not about expression. It's about communication. It's about taking something from that place Between, and bringing it back to the table with the corporeal food and drink.

This, then, is the question I am trying to answer for myself. I do not know if, when I follow where airy voices lead, when I go to the place Between Green and Orange and then wait for my eyes to adjust, and finally, after a great deal of work (I no longer kid myself about that -- it's really hard work), finally bring something back with me ... am I one of the people - can I be? - who returns with a friend anyone else can see?

A rather shocking amount ...

... of thickly dripping sarcasm can come from a 21 year old when he moves through the living room where his mother is watching TV ...

"Wow. Ballroom dancing and a medley."

(If you know a quicker way to clear the room than ballroom dancing and a medley, you could probably make money with it!)

Jane Austen

What an interesting find! I have been trying to figure out what happened to Jane Austen's mother and sister after her death, and I found a site called pemberly.com and "a prayer written by Jane Austen." It is a thing of beauty, oh, so Anglican in sensibility, and I'm very glad to have found it - especially considering the laughing stocks and silly-face goobers many of her clergy characters are!

Give us grace, Almighty Father, so to pray, as to deserve to be heard, to address thee with our Hearts, as with our lips. Thou art every where present, from Thee no secret can be hid. May the knowledge of this, teach us to fix our Thoughts on Thee, with Reverence and Devotion that we pray not in vain.

Look with Mercy on the Sins we have this day committed, and in Mercy make us feel them deeply, that our Repentance may be sincere, & our resolutions stedfast of endeavouring against the commission of such in future. Teach us to understand the sinfulness of our own Hearts, and bring to our knowledge every fault of Temper and every evil Habit in which we have indulged to the discomfort of our fellow-creatures, and the danger of our own Souls. May we now, and on each return of night, consider how the past day has been spent by us, what have been our prevailing Thoughts, Words, and Actions during it, and how far we can acquit ourselves of Evil. Have we thought irreverently of Thee, have we disobeyed thy commandments, have we neglected any known duty, or willingly given pain to any human being? Incline us to ask our Hearts these questions Oh! God, and save us from deceiving ourselves by Pride or Vanity.

Give us a thankful sense of the Blessings in which we live, of the many comforts of our lot; that we may not deserve to lose them by Discontent or Indifference.

Be gracious to our Necessities, and guard us, and all we love, from Evil this night. May the sick and afflicted, be now, and ever thy care); and heartily do we pray for the safety of all that travel by Land or by Sea, for the comfort & protection of the Orphan and Widow and that thy pity may be shewn upon all Captives and Prisoners.

Above all other blessings Oh! God, for ourselves, and our fellow-creatures, we implore Thee to quicken our sense of thy Mercy in the redemption of the World, of the Value of that Holy Religion in which we have been brought up, that we may not, by our own neglect, throw away the salvation thou hast given us, nor be Christians only in name. Hear us Almighty God, for His sake who has redeemed us, and taught us thus to pray.

Our Father which art in Heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever.
Amen.

Pause ... Rewind ... Fast Forward ... and other things I'm not really allowed to do

There are few things to which I am allergic as strongly as anything smacking of "good old days" mentality. There was no such time. It's a fond mythology, but it's just a silly longing for escape from present perceptions we'd rather not have. "Back when I was a kid," I was indeed unaware of some really nasty stuff existing in the world - but it was my unawareness that shocks me now. The stuff was there all along - I was just a child, that's all. I didn't know.

However, there is one thing increasingly a part of our modern world which I do happen to find tempting me over and over and over (and over and over and over) into a mentality that would insist on controlling the passage and direction of TIME!!! Now, THAT's hutzpah for you! That's some kind of nerve! Imagining that I ought to be able to carry around some kind of mystic remote control - a TiVo for my interaction with people ... ahhhh.... just think about it for a minute, would you?

Wouldn't it be great? I could do like Samantha in Bewitched. Some horrid words or fit of temper or sad, sad little petty gripe escapes my mouth, and then I could run my finger anti-clockwise, and poof! All better! I never said it after all. All fixed. No disaster caused by me at all.

Nice, huh?

Or, how about the ability to re-wind something that just went past and, and there I was, not paying attention? It would be great! Just point my mystic remote control at the car radio, or the person across the table, or the guy in the pulpit, and start that part over again.

This ever-present temptation to wish and wish that I could manipulate time first came to me on an airplane, on the way home from college, decades ago. I just HATE the part of anything that's the last 5 to 15% of the thing. I hate it. Hate hate hate hate it. After about 4 hours on a plane, it came into my head, as we flew across the state line into Oregon at last, that I'd been on that damned plane for long enough, and I just wanted to fast-forward the tape. I knew the ending already. There was no need whatsoever to do this last part. Just fast-forward to the end. Press the button on the tape recorder. Skip this bit. Read the last page of the book I've read before. I just want the last part now, thank you very much. This part before the last part? It gets me into a nearly screaming frenzy.

Now, I do agree with C. S. Lewis. I do think that our sense of frustration with "time" - just the whole thing - linear time's inexorable march - is a bit of Eternity we have within us. We know we are actually immortal. Time and death seem "wrong" to us somehow. We just know it's not supposed to be like this.

But nothing so lofty as a longing for Eternity motivates my irritation with the last bit of a thing or my desire to rewind after I've just said something unforgivably insensitive or embarrassingly idiotic. No, it's not a holy desire for Eternity at all. It's an absurdity of hubris and the false humility of shame driving this itch for a mystic remote control. I'd just rather not think of myself as needing to take anything back - and I'd also rather not adjust my opinion of myself so far as to include "godliness with contentment is great gain" when it's only 20 minutes to landing. This is a matter for repentance - not an acknowledgment of inner Awareness.

And to top it off, once considered, it seems a most perverse thing for me to wish for the power to control time. Look what I'd do with it! I'd be a nightmare of a Bill Murray, Groundhog Day-ing over and over. To my mind, there is indeed a modern temptation which, if it existed in days gone by, did not exist in this form. We are now able to leave our houses without looking for directions or a map - instead, we have GPS, or a cell phone. (My husband heard someone say that cell phones have turned us into a nation of birds - calling out merely to say over and over, "I'm here. Where are you? I'm here. Where are you?") We can always call, right? Bother whoever is at the other end, and get them to give us a turn by turn. We don't have to get a grocery list together either - just stand in the aisle while the person at the fridge tells you what's missing. And if you missed that snippet on the TV or DVD? Just rewind. Have commercials? Fast forward.

All this control on a daily basis is nearly too much for me. It's a temptation nearly - not quite, but nearly - overwhelming to me. It makes me long to be like God, knowing yesterday from tomorrow, and good from evil. Seems to me the last guy - no - I mean, the first guy who did that ended up being very sorry for it.

It is time again for me to find a place of silence. I need to reorient myself in the universe and remember that "to dust I shall return" - at a pace of 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year, and only in one direction in time for as long as God grants me breath. And I have to do it without a mystic remote.