Monthly Archives: June 2011

June 30, 2011 · 7:35 am

June was for Blogging

Just as an experiment in putting words out into the universe, during June I blogged every day.  That’s 30 straight days, at least 400 words, most often more like 800.  That’s between 12,000 and 24,000 words, the equivalent of a small (very small) book. June was remembering how different we all are, the war that making art will always be, and looking around at a few folks doing the work everyday.   There’s a strangeness in what artists do, and that strangeness can be prophetic and irreverent or priestly and noble.   I ruminated on fatherhood, on the process of knowing how we know, and the conversation that’s happening about racial reconciliation.  There’s a fair amount, as is usual with me, about the spirituality of art making, including a prayer, a Pentecost meditation, and the need for passion and virtue in our making.  And I wrestled with my own project, a play called Lost Cause, all the while hoping to emerge from “the belly of the beast” without the title becoming prophetic.

Some of you came to read (thank  you!) and occasionally something landed in a way that caused a comment or two, which is enormously meaningful.  Some days there’s not much conversation except between myself and these characters of mine, most of whom are fun to talk to–even fascinating.  But truth is, at least for now, they’re mostly angry and combative, and so go my days.   So the notes you readers send my way are helpful and encouraging, just so you know.   I do not take them for granted.

July is going to be for blogging too.  Everyday I’m going to sit down and put words out there, and see if anybody resonates.   Someday I’ll come up with a schedule and a plan (Spiritual Mondays, Theatre Tuesdays, Poetry Wednesdays, Internet Surfing Thursdays…that sort of things) but for the moment, I’m just going to keep the stream of consciousness going.   Who knows what crazy things will come.

If you’ve got something you’d love to have an online conversation about here, pitch it to me, and maybe we’ll throw things back and forth for few days.   And if something strikes you that someone else might find helpful, please feel free to send it on.

A couple of things from yesterday.   Here’s a question:  why in the world is there SO MUCH CREATIVITY in visual art?  I was roaming around high-end artist community websites yesterday.  Check out DEPTHCORE, BEHANCE, CONCEPTART.ORG, MYARTSPACE.  Wow.  I have major artist envy big-time today.    What a fascinating world we live in…

Thank God…

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June 29, 2011 · 5:47 am

How Art Serves

Yesterday, I asked about the service art provides, wondering how to articulate it so that it was somewhat analogous to the practicality of giving drink and food and shelter.

My own reflection begins, as always, with another question.  What sustains human life?  If I mean physical life only, then the answer is food and water, etc.  If I mean spiritual life only, then another answer is in order.  But what I mean neither?  What if by “life” I mean the totality of mind-spirit interaction that makes up what we call a human being?  Some food (and this will differ from person to person, at least to some degree) will nourish both body and spirit, while other food feeds one (say, body) with one quality and the other (say, spirit) with a different quality.   And then there is some food that really nourishes neither very well.

On the non-food, non-water side of things, we can list elements that sustain us by a different kind of ingestion and metabolism, from which our spirits and souls draw life first (although studies are showing more and more the degree to which these non-food, non-water elements impact physiology).   Compassion, kindness, truth, metaphor, words, images, stories, thoughts, dreams, literature, plays, paintings, sculpture, sermon, emotions…these are a few of the nourishing elements that human beings must have is they are to live, and live well.   We all know by experience what it is to “metabolize” these elements, being renewed emotionally and spiritually (during which there is usually a definite uptick in physical feeling and health as well) by a story, a film, a word of kindness, or even a well-crafted defense of an idea.  Art, to my mind, is the shaping of material into meaning form,  usually with metaphor heavily involved, in order to delight, enlighten, challenge, and inform, all of which are opportunities for humans to ingest and metabolize unseen elements that nourish not just the spirit, but the whole of who they are, no less than bread.

In fact, one of the greatest things about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet was the artfulness of the choice.  What better symbol (which is another reason for being for art–symbol making) for the life Christ calls us to?  It’s got dirt, humility, intimacy, shame, grace, resistance, beauty, and love, and my instinct is that all of these should be part of our processes of making.   We serve by not only by feeding, but also by grappling alongside our audiences as all of us face the chaos of things, all of us hoping to clear away a bit of dust and dirt, so that we can better order our minds, our worlds, and our compassion.   By “order” I do not mean to imply rigidity, control, or hyper-editing, but rather the ability to continually frame disparate experiences in order to find meaning and purpose in the constantly pressing ambiguities and overload.

And frankly, much of this work must be shouldered, at least on the front end, alone.  We serve by being willing to go into the lonely place.  The wars of imagination are fought both in isolation and in community, but the “war” metaphor is an apt one.  In both the private sphere of the mind, as well as the public square of our post postmodern culture, there is, and has always been, an ongoing debate for what is “good” for human beings in the areas of love, family, health, and freedom.   Art makers serve by staring into the most difficult places with or without fear, and being willing to do the hard work of thought and metaphor and image in order to attempt to be helpful to those trying to figure things out.

The human being needs beauty, truth, debate, education, faith, prophecy, inspiration, informed critique and vision casting, and sometimes, something pretty, soothing, or charming to adorn a wall.  All of these fall within the purview of art, and in providing pieces of art to fill these functions, artists serve.

A life without food and water is unimaginable.  Can you imagine a world with no design, where no materials are shaped into meaning form?  No color, no beauty, nothing according to the golden mean?

Art-making serves by sustaining and creating life, much as its cousins food and water do.

It is often said that food keeps us alive, and the arts give meaning to our being alive.  Christians might knee-jerk and call that idolatry, but I would suggest that as we follow the Christ, we take all manner of material and shape experience into meaning form, and that is the artful life of incarnation.

What will you make today, and who will it serve?

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June 28, 2011 · 5:26 am

What is the Service Art Provides?

In what sense is art-making service?

If you give a person a drink of water, when they ingest it, there are immediate, real-world results.  If you offer a hungry person bread, when they eat it, their bodies replenish and become better able to negotiate their day’s tasks and responsibilities.  If you offer a coat to someone who is cold, and they take it and put it on, this new protective layer allows a change of body-state that is palpable, beneficial, and easily identified as something that looks like Christian charity.   Each of these acts of kindness address a physical state of being, providing a temporary remedy to a threat.   Food and drink and shelter and clothing are needs everyone acknowledges as being vital to life in no metaphoric sense, but in actuality.

If you offer a person a painting, when they engage it, what happens?  If you offer a person a song, when they hear it, then…what?  If you offer them a play, and they experience it, is there an analogous benefit that would approach the worth of offering them water or food or shelter?

A teaching friend of mine told me a couple of years ago that he thought the days of having to create an apologetic for art-making were over.   Maybe so, but my sense is that we still have many questions to answer about how art-making actually serves.  Ask yourself this question: if the picture of service is that of Jesus getting up from the table, wrapping a towel around his waist, and washing the feet of his disciples, what is the “foot-washing” art accomplishes?

Some answer the question by connecting their art-making with service organizations, donating whatever profits might come from their art to the supported organization.  In this way, it is easy to make the leap from art-making to real-world meaning and worth in that it literally creates energy for feeding the hungry, fighting injustice, supplying clean water, and so on.   But what if your art and its distribution is not related to social justice issues?  What if you’re really just hoping someone will buy a painting to hang on their bathroom wall so that you can afford supplies to create yet another painting?  And one more thing about the painting sold on behalf of the service organization: once the painting is sold and the profit donated to the service organization, is that the end of its purpose?  Or does it still have service to perform?

Others answer the foot-washing question by granting art the power to engender values such as compassion, understanding, generosity…even love.  And while I will grant that art may indeed have the capacity to do all that, it also has the capacity to create hardness of heart, confusion, miserliness…even hate.   So perhaps art’s service depends entirely on the specific work of art as well as the heart of the artist doing the work.

Even so, I wonder how to articulate what art’s service might be, especially if you try to think of it as an appropriate incarnation of Christ washing the disciples feet.

Tomorrow, I’ll come back and give you my take on this, but I’d love to hear how you answer the question.

Art serves by…? 

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June 27, 2011 · 7:49 am

An Artist’s Prayer

Dear God,

You make, I make.  You make me to make.  What am I to make today?  What are You making today, and what is the plan for how our making?   In every small corner of every large nation, human beings are setting out to take disparate materials and fashion them into a piece of work that has beauty, meaning, aesthetic unity, and the power to impact and change those who encounter that piece of work. (Though the specifics of the impact and the change hoped for vary wildly.)   Here I sit in my small corner of my large nation, setting out to do the same.

I assume You are intimately aware of the nuance of my thought-life and my feeling-life, of my history and proclivities, of my talents and hang-ups, and You have a perspective on who and what I am that is beyond anything I can grasp.  Yet I am stuck in my perspective; my neural circuitry is what it is, my capacities not unlimited, and it simply isn’t true that I can do anything I set my mind to.   The clock is ticking on this earth-side life of mine, and the sun is hurrying over my head even as I type.  I glance over my art-making, and decisions sit there, staring back at me, demanding (with a certain ferocity) to be made, and made now.  Writing is different than planning to write.   Acting is different that exploring acting.   Dancing is different than vowing to dance.

Lord, I control nothing.   ”The wind blows where it wills…”  My making today will not be enough to combat the enormity of things.   The streams of information, experience, and aspiration that feed a human’s creative work (and by “a human” I mean me) are overwhelming and vast, and to wrestle the elements into a form that contains coherence, beauty, and inspiration may not be as back-breaking as digging in coal mines, but it sure seems that way.   When I ask You to guide me, it seems I am asking You to help me find just what illusions I can live with, because the truth of the human condition seems more than any of us can bear.

And immediately from Your end of the conversation comes a simple, “Stop it.”  By that, I take it you mean the whining.   I can see in Your eyes that decisions must be made, action must be taken, and writing and dancing is to commence now, not later.   The word that seems to be hovering in the air between us is “trust.”    Just trust and move into action, do the work, obey.

It is a given that I will not grasp it all.  You remind me that that is the very nature of the finite.  Maybe I didn’t exactly sign up for it, but it’s the game, and I’ve got no real choice but to play.   So even as I sweat these words out here, I’m telling you again that I am indeed getting on with it, knowing that I’ve asked You a thousand thousand times to guide me already, and I can tell by the look you’re giving me that You agreed (read “promised”)  a long time ago to do just that.   It’s not that You’re tired of this conversation, but I can tell there are some other things You’d sort of like us to discuss.

Like the actual work You’re hoping I get around to.

Today.

Okay, I’m listening.

Oh…You’ll talk to me while I work?

Got it.

What’s that?  Don’t bother with the amen business?   Okay, I’d just as soon keep the conversation open myself.

Hey, sorry about all that over-intellectualizing at the front end of the prayer.  I was just–what?  You’re used to it.  Just how you made me?   Good to know.

Oh, yeah, sorry…the work.

Let me get my notes…

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June 26, 2011 · 8:56 am

The Crisis of Knowing How We Know: Postscript

There’s knowledge, and there’s faith.

A final salvo in my rumination about epistemology, or the study of knowledge, and knowing how we know.

Those things that require faith cannot, by definition, be proven to be true in the sense that epistemology demands if a thing is to be counted as “knowledge.”  Faith, by definition, is all about our relationship to things unseen and unmeasured.   We still use the word “know” if reference to things of faith.   By faith we say, “I know I can do it.”  (By which we mean, the outcome we want will occur, which we frankly do not “know” at all.)   By faith we say, “I know Christ.”  (Again, this is not “knowledge” in the sense we’ve been exploring.  And to say that should not cause us alarm, though I can hear people thinking, “I do TOO know that I know it.”  It’s simply acknowledging that the “knowledge” faith brings is a different sort of “knowledge” than that created by empirical data.)  By faith we say, “I know Heaven exists.”  (We have stories and clues, but like Ellie in “Cosmos”, we have no video or voice recordings from the other side.)

And then there’s the knowledge that comes from stories.   It’s a knowledge that’s delivered by one of the basic cognitive moves, that of comparison, more commonly referred as metaphor.  We constantly reference our life experience to find what this moment “is like.”   What is life “like?”  Life is “like” a “man of a social class or race that we don’t like (read Samaritan) on a road accosted by thieves.”  Life is “like” a world called Middle Earth, in which “the smallest of persons” can change the world, even if the only way to do it is to destroy the greatest of evils.   And life is “like” a Southern Civil War reenactor (my play) whose dreams are threatened by a past he’d just as soon forget.

But after we experience a good, brain-altering story telling, what do we “know.”  There is a little “explosion” inside in which a new piece of understanding (that love transcends social class and race, that evil can be overcome, that moral cowardice can have devastating consequences) enters our consciousness.   This new “knowledge” informs our choices of behavior, though of course we do not “know” the truth of the story until we live it into our experience (intentionally overcoming social class and racial prejudices with love, battling evil ourselves, and demonstrating the kind of moral courage that life demands).  And between our “knowing the lesson from the story” and our “knowing the lesson because we’ve lived it” is a bridge that must be walked in faith.

How about this little formula:  Wisdom (or understanding) is knowledge lived out (applied) by faith.

Christ valued the knowledge that comes from stories.   He valued it enough to make it his primary mode of teaching and persuasion.  He was not a Socratic method guy (or was he…someone feel free to instruct me here) nor was the scientific method the knowledge-seeking grammar of his day, nor had he been recently preceded by the Age of Enlightenment, so he did not trust the mind to solve all the riddles of things.   But without doubt, Christ believed that he knew things that no other human knew.  And if, by faith, we believe that the stories concerning the Christ are true, not the least of which is the Resurrection, then he knew something special indeed.

Paul did not say “Whatever does not proceed from knowledge is sin,” but “whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.”

There is not enough time or intelligence or information to gain the knowledge that I need to make complete sense of the complex conundrums that haunt our personal and societal lives.   But somehow, the faith available to us by the gift of God must be enough to allow us to grapple responsibly and vigorously with that truth and knowledge we are able, with our limited resources, to gather.

Bottom line:  complexity and the onslaught of information coupled with the various ways in which our “knowing” anything can be called into question is no excuse for living head-0n into the dilemmas of our day.   We simply must acknowledge that knowledge is incomplete, fallible, and passing away.   But by faith, the pursuit of knowledge–and it’s failures–can be not only survived, but lived out with energy, strength, insight, and service.

This I know…

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