Life as Art

C.S. Lewis said, "No art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist." (English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, p. 124)

By Art I take a category far wider than painting and music. It includes any human expression that puts meaning into the physical world, for our senses on display.

This is a constructionist view, that art does not exist apart from man and his creativity. Also, even when it does exist, the meaning, the key must be maintained. Maybe there is a universal affinity from expression to receiver, so that any viewer of art, at any time in history will "get it". Maybe there is a cultural affinity. Maybe it's even idiosyncratic, so that anyone of the same temperament will "get it".

While all we share the same passions, we don't express them in the same way. Some even have passions that defy transmission because of the uniqueness of the experience. But we all have language to pass along the key.

Now, can our lives be art? G.K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday commented on an artsy, Bohemian neighborhood that if those who lived there were no artists, at least they were works of art. But are we our own artists? To what extent do we exercise the freedom and creativity built in us by God almighty to cultivate meaning through our physical existence? Do we recognize it when we do? What message do we send? Doing your makeup, dreaming up and planning events, shaving or not, relational diplomacy, correspondence, finance -- giving -- it's all Art.

Does it stand opposed to the Potter's work in our lives?

Is it more important to make meaning, or to yield obedience in faith, to be made meaningful?

It's so small -- maybe the art we make of our lives will end up like the molecule of oxygen that receives the spent electron at the end of cellular respiration. A leftover, minuscule leftover, but so good at taking out the trash in a grander scheme. For without it the chain reaction that makes energy usable to our cells would stop. But in every respect, all the oxygen molecule does is receive and move out.

Back to the nature or foundationalist versus constructivist argument: all nature sings, but what do we hear? When we hear it is good, we praise a good God -- and when we hear it's not quite right, arrhythmic or out of tune... deatheningly bad, we mourn our sin that brought nature to such a state with us. Such is the message of nature for those who listen. Need we add more with our art?

And what might we add? Art or order? There's no room here to write about how order is both found and imposed, both in dominion before the Fall and in survival after the Fall. But order is at last a gradient of Art, aligning meaning like points on a snowflake, in the physical world on display before our senses... order differs from art in which passions it seeks to express and satisfy.

For life as art, by receiving, giving, enjoying, and expecting the impossible from the Potter who can do all things, return with me to reading Soren Kierkegaard's meditation on Abraham's faith in Fear and Trembling.

Zora Neale Hurston - Their Eyes Were Watching God

Here's a snip-review I wrote for Facebook's Visual Bookshelf. I have three more chapters to go before I'm through, and I'm growing more sick of it than I was at first. Still, there is a high power of human description.

Review of Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

A blend of perceptive author-speak with vivid negro-speak. She tells of awful lifechoices and lingering dreams, pioneering from hopeless setting to tragic setting but with a gentle imagination. Is the boss-man's wife really proud or is she stifled? Is the low-life really that low? Should death have to come bef...ore empathy? Of stereotypes made and dissolved, the one debunked is the black victim as a stooping, scraping monolith. Choice and passion make it so individual. Which is why Zora was too radically conservative for the New Deal.

"She often spoke to falling seeds and said, 'Ah hope you fall on soft ground,' because she had heard seeds saying that to each other as they passed."

Book collecting

Went to Goodwill with part of my family tonight to look for Halloween costumes. It's the first Halloween we're hitting the streets, ever, and the reason for the change is "Tract-and-Treating". We're going out tomorrow night with armloads of Bible-laced candy to reach neighbors in their houses. Only I never settled on a costume. Instead, I made off with some new books:

The NY Public Library Science Desk Reference (1995)
Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling
Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy
Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls

I could have got the new verse translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but I thought I might already have it in my Norton Anthology. I'll have to check. For Whom the Bell Tolls is copyright 1940, but it's a reprint by Blakiston, not the first edition by Scribners. Oh well... I hope it's good, anyway. Andrew Pudewa once said it's a clever title for a dull book. Lesson: the value of a book is in its content, not in its covers.

Digression: how far can I go in writing like Tristram, and how far should I?