Monthly Archives: September 2011

September 24, 2011 · 8:11 am

Don’t Forget What You’re Doing…

Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art. by Madeleine L'Engle

Sometimes, we forget.

We wake in the morning and hope to find our way to the desk.  We hope to hear from the manuscript in front of us that we are welcome, that our company is longed for, that the stroke of our hands will be healing and full of discovery.  But maybe the sleep cycle got us, leaving us with dull brain, especially in light of the day before, with it’s logey, unproductive hours.   Coffee doesn’t help, Facebook doesn’t help, the stale air in the house doesn’t help, and the fact that its Saturday doesn’t help.   God’s busy, too busy to bother, and something’s wrong with the browser pages so that you have to choose between waiting and killing them.   Sun’s blazing white beauty on the window sill, and all you really want to do is walk.   The desk sits there, waiting, not giving a damn what you feel, which is pretty much true of most things and people.  So you have you feelings, so what?  Will the work get done?  Will the work be served?  Will words land on the page or not?

I pick up an old copy of Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, that powerful little book by Madeleine L’Engle.   Walking on Water was probably the very first book on the slippery interaction between Christian faith and art I encountered, given to me by a friend I eventually lost due to old-fashioned neglect.   Whenever I pick up the book, I’m reminded of that loss, which means I don’t often pick it up.   But this morning, there it is, and I reach for it, and L’Engle, wonderful writer and human that she was, immediately begins to remind me of what I’m doing.

This questioning of the meaning of being, and dying, and being, is behind the telling of stories around tribal fires and night; behind the drawing of animals on the walls of caves;  the singing of melodies of love in spring, and of the death of green in autumn.  It is part of the deepest longing of the human psyche, a recurrent ache in the hearts of all God’s creatures.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water.

L’Engle reminds me, at the very top of the book, to listen to the silence.   “When I am constantly running there is no time for being.   When there is no time for being, there is no time for listening.”  She goes on in that first chapter to give focus to that listening.   “If the work comes to the artist and says, ‘Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artist, great or small, is to serve.”   She then quotes Jean Rhys.   “All of writing is a huge lake.   There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.  And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys.  All that matters is feeding the lake.  I don’t matter.  The lake matters.  You must keep feeding the lake.”

It’s about listening, serving, and giving yourself over to the work.

When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere.  When the work takes over, then the artist listens.   But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work.  Getting out of the way and listening is not something that comes easily, either in art or in prayer.

–Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water 

She also says, quite simply, that bad art is bad religion no matter how pious the subject.

Remembering what I’m doing….

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September 21, 2011 · 6:48 am

Making Sense and Nonsense: A Conversation at Vermillion

Last night I was privileged to hang out with my friend and collage artist extraordinaire Marty Gordon.   We decided to take in a conversation of seeming epic proportion at a Capitol Hill art gallery gathering place called Vermillion, where a man named John Boylan was hosting a artist-dense conversation on the notion of making sense in a world of increasing craziness and “new norms.”    Boylan has been leading these kinds of conversations for well over a decade, and the back room of the Vermillion was packed with folks of all ages, most of whom were artists of some kind.  There were painters and teachers and non-practitioners, the common thread being the conviction that artists had a role to play in helping the world make sense of reality.

It began with politics and a bit of education on the history of art regarding surrealism and dadaism as attempts to forgo making sense in the cultural landscape that was WWI.   The conversation careened around the room with lots of folks willing to pitch in.   Machine noises (refrigeration units?) would kick on occasionally, making hearing difficult, but I supposed we kept trying to hear because we wanted so much to make sense of things.   There was the much-agreed-upon craziness of the right (they’re driving an anti-intellectual mood just now), the ongoing pitch of Eastern mysticism as a means to non-violence (think Ghandi and TM), and the very sane idea that artists should be working in the communities of which they are a part, embedded among the people they serve.    The artist as hero didn’t get much traction, but one articulate painter called into question the whole Modernist notion of the artist as solitary vision meister or revolutionary.  That’s over, he said.   Television is in some sense the Surrealism of today, and the politics we are living in is just “lies, lies, and more lies.”

I didn’t say much, save for a comment at the end about our increasing discomfort with the discovery that our romantic notions of peacefully coexisting “senses” (read “conclusions”) will only go so far.   People really do come to different narrative conclusions–they tell the story differently.   And different readings of reality really do matter when it comes to street-level living.   The narratives of human enterprise, human community, human consumption and production, human sexuality…the stories being told by differing groups can sometimes co-exist peacefully together, and sometimes not, depending on which story we’re talking about, and just where power lies.

Ghandi and Buddha both got nods as having good ideas.   No one spoke of the Christ, and the disdain for what seemed to be the only public face of Jesus in this discussion was evident and strong.

Marty and I left the meeting a bit unsure of what to make of it.  Passionate, intelligent conversation that left me more bewildered than inspired.   Artists are sensitive folks with huge hearts, with radars that instinctively lean in a Jesus-like direction: solidarity with the poor and the less privileged.  I kept thinking of Walter Brueggemann’s idea that the prophet has to make two moves: 1) bring the critical voice to the ruling falseness of the day, and 2) energize the community through a renewed vision of the real.   These artists really want to live as prophets.  But to do that, you have to first make sense of what reality is.

And the basic human problem is this, and we’ve been struggling with it since the beginning:  how do you make sense of what is obviously so much more than we can wrap our heads and hearts around?  We used to struggle with just a few narratives.  Now there are thousands.   “Sense” must be made even though our knowledge and understanding has limits, and eventually we must all turn to faith in something we cannot see.   For that is our design.   And since for so many, God is long dead and gone, where does our design for faith turn?

The leap to faith (even if not in God, but in something else) will always seem to be nonsense to many.

This is not an easy world we live in…

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September 20, 2011 · 7:40 am

…Which Held All Possibilities

“Each sentence hung over an abyssal ocean or sky which held all possibilities, as well as the possibility of nothing.”

Writing used to be a sensual joy.  It’s more pounding now, more churning out material, wondering how to not get lost in the sea of sentences now ebbing and flowing in swift currents and tides.   Structures of plays are not as fun as sentences, or at least they don’t come as easily.  I guess flirting is far easier than the long haul of relationship, too.

As an artist, I’m a scavenger.   What I mean is that I like to discover as I go, in brief but compelling bursts of connection.   I am not now in the process of expressing a carefully planned blog post, but am instead responding to a number of things that came across my desk this morning, more in the manner of improvisation.  But there’s a theme for sure, caught in the title.    Possibility.   Possibility is what I’m gripping as I start the work each day, and frankly, the forces of impossibility, false though they may be, are powerful.  Call it resistance, evil, depression, whatever, forces are at work that make creation “feel like a real fight.”

If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will.  But it feels like a real fight.

–William James, quoted in A. Dillard’s A Writing Life

A fight for believing the possible is…well, possible.  Faith is at the heart of the divine design of the human, and faith plus action (how did we ever separate the two) moves the world.   Sentences are actions, the throwing of words onto the membrane of the world’s consciousness.   The vastness makes it seem futile, except that just now, you are reading, and there’s something of a connection going on.  It’s a small gift to both of us, this meeting over possibility.  You being here means it’s possible to be heard.   Me writing the words to tell you that your voice is all possibility as well.   We shake hands, and agree, and draw courage from our meeting here.   And now we turn, and chase possibility again.

Or maybe no one will read, and the “abyssal ocean” will simply swallow my best efforts.   Does Heaven care?   Is God invested in our smallest thought?  Does He need reminding to put His attention here, or there (with you), as we scavenge over a littered beach of a world, collecting the beauties caught up there?   Whose idea was sentences anyway?

I continue to buy into God caring.

Fight well, fight long…

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September 19, 2011 · 5:58 am

The Unmerited Grace of the Work

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace.  It is handed to you, but only if you look for it.  You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then–and only then–it is handed to you.”  –Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Odd isn’t it, that there is work in receiving grace?  It was Dallas Willard who said that grace is opposed to earning, not effort.  How strange it is that grace and effort are symbiotically linked in a relationship designed to throw the lazy off the track.  Couple the word “grace” with “free” and spend a few hundred years railing against meritorious work and life lived knocking on the Christian door can get pretty out of kilter.   The conundrum of the loving Jesus offering grace set against the Jesus of Revelation 2 and 3 who says unless you turn around and change what you’re doing I’m going to take your lampstand away, spit you out of my mouth, and (perhaps, if you’re Thyatira’s Jezebel), kill your children…well, this is hard stuff.

It seems strange to have to work at receiving a gift.  But there is work to be done in receiving a thing, especially if you think you’re above the gift…or the giver.   Perhaps this is why pride is the worst of sins–it keeps you from receiving the grace being poured out.

Dillard writes about this so eloquently in the fifth chapter of The Writing Life.   She describes that sensation follows the hard work of probing, researching, hunting, structuring, and alligator-wrestling sentences.   When the work actually appears, even as you stand there with sweat dripping off your nose, you know that the arrival of the solution, the form, the final expression of what you had in mind all along has very little, if anything, to do with you.    The chapter, the novel, the play, the poem…they arrive by grace, as you are faithful.

Grace grows crops, but only if we seed, plow, and harvest.

God embeds his ways in ours, inviting us to join in shouldering the world even as He carries the whole thing.

Be faithful, show up, apply muscle, and open your hands and arms as wide as you can.   And grab some friends.  There is way more grace pouring out than we can handle by ourselves.

Grace works…

 

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September 16, 2011 · 7:52 am

The Feral Work in the Next Room

Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life.  I should have read it back in February, when I first began approaching my current project.   Funny thing is, the image she describes in the following paragraph is one I have kept in the back of my mind for years.

A work in progress quickly becomes feral.  It reverts to a wild state overnight.  It is barely domesticated, a mustang on which you one day fastened a halter, but which now you cannot catch.   It is a lion you cage in your study.   As the work grows, it gets harder to control; it is a lion growing in strength.  You must visit it every day and reassert your mastery over it.  If you skip a day, you are, quite rightly, afraid to open the door to its room.   You enter its room with bravura, holding a chair at the thing and shouting, “Simba!”

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Chapter Three, the chapter for my morning, is all about how you rev up to get the work going for the day.   It fits nicely with Pressfield’s idea (The War of Art) of warring to get the work done.   Dillard’s more visceral metaphors–tea kettle’s whistling, heavy-bodied moths panting furiously toward lift-off, dreams delivering pragmatic advice about splitting wood–strike me as truth, as in true to my experience.  She recounts telling a neighbor that she hates writing, and mostly fools around all day and calls it work.  (Oh, man…how I get that.)  And in answer to someone who asks her “Who will teach me to write?”, Dillard’s answer strikes me as pure and true as any I’ve ever read.  It’s why I sit in front of the blank page, or screen, as the case may be.

If you are a creative, here’s your encouragement to take on the lion in the next room.

The page, the page, that eternal blankness, the blankness of eternity which you cover slowly, affirming time’s scrawl as a right and your daring as necessity; the page, which you cover woodenly, ruining it, but asserting your freedom and power to act, acknowledging that you ruin everything you touch but touching it nonetheless, because acting is better that being here in mere opacity; the page, which you cover slowly with the crabbed thread of your gut; the page in the purity of its possibilities; the page of your death, against which you pit such flawed excellences as you can muster with all your life’s strength: that page will teach you to write.

–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

I can hear the roaring, but I’m going in, chair in hand…

SIMBA!  

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