What survives

Ramesses II

The only thing that ever survives from a culture is its arts. Political power is transient. Political power is nothing. It will vanish.  The most powerful man in the world is nobody. The only way we remember any of the powerful men of the world is the way they were captured by artists, often anonymous artists in ancient Egypt and Rome. The bequest of any civilization and the test of its quality is its arts. I feel that the left and the right, everyone across the political spectrum is guilty of offenses against the arts, and I hope that you will now go forth and be ambassadors for the arts. 

           --Camille Paglia, minus a few okays and may be a so or two

"tremendous beauty and continuous revelation"

"Exploring the Psychology of Creativity" (click for the video.) Below are some quotes from a conversation between Marc Mayer, Director of The National Gallery of Canada, and Dr. Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. March 9, 2017. I liked the video; you might also. Peterson has a Jungian perspective, and he leaves room for the dignity and freedom of human beings.

Professor Peterson, University of Toronto
Photo via BBC News Toronto

The known world inside chaos: "Imagine that the world is basically explored territory inside an unexplored territory.... Every world is like that."

Where artists live: "The artists like to be right out on the edge. That's the edge between chaos and order.  They like to expand the domain of order out into chaos. They do that first by transforming perception."

Artist on the edge: "You can fall into the chaos at any time."

Artist as dream: "Artists have always been on the frontier of human understanding. The artist bears the same relationship to society that the dream bears to mental life."

More artist as dream: "The dream mediates between order and chaos. It starts to make chaos into order, so it's half chaos. That's why it's not comprehensible. And artists play exactly the same role in society."

Old and New Worlds: "The beauty that the Europeans have produced, it's infinitely valuable.... People go from all over the world on pilgrimage to Europe just to look at beautiful things. It nourishes their soul. They're priceless. Paris is priceless. Rome is priceless. And it's all beauty that drives it. It's phenomenally valuable! And Canada is just ugly as sin. Really. Really. We should be ashamed of ourselves."

Ugly as sin: "Hell is a place of drop ceilings and fluorescent lights."

What there is other than worldly success: "One of the things that pays off big for creative people is that they get to be creative. There's great aesthetic joy in that, and depth."

Jung and the arts: "The reason Jungian psychology works is because it works for creative people. It doesn't work at all for non-creative people. It just falls dead and flat for them. It isn't how they think."

Power of art: "It speaks of the ultimate depths...."

The start of a great explanation of how publishing works according to an airport book shelf, and how winner takes all: "Half the money in the publishing business goes to Stephen King."

Openness as a personality trait for artists: "Creativity loads very high on openness."

The artist's gamble: "There's a high probability you will lose."

Teen telling parents about a desire to be an artist: "It's like discussing color with someone who is color blind."

Artists and society: "Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people."

On regimentation in schools: "They're factories. You don't produce creative people in factories. You produce factory workers. That's fine except there aren't any factory workers anymore, so we should probably stop doing it."

The pepper grain in a salt shaker: "Creative people are as rare as the winners of races."

Worldy success for artists: "You have to be more creative than everyone else, and good luck with that."

Stylish, heartfelt Stevenson

Stevenson's tomb on Mount Vaea, Western Samoa

Clip from a gorgeous letter by Robert Louis Stevenson: Lastly we come to those vocations which are at once decisive and precise; to the men who are born with the love of pigments, the passion of drawing, the gift of music, or the impulse to create with words, just as other and perhaps the same men are born with the love of hunting, or the sea, or horses, or the turning-lathe. These are predestined; if a man love the labour of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him. He may have the general vocation too: he may have a taste for all the arts, and I think he often has; but the mark of his calling is this laborious partiality for one, this inextinguishable zest in its technical successes, and (perhaps above all) a certain candour of mind to take his very trifling enterprise with a gravity that would befit the cares of empire, and to think the smallest improvement worth accomplishing at any expense of time and industry. The book, the statue, the sonata, must be gone upon with the unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play. IS IT WORTH DOING?—when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candour of the one and the ardour of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. Read the rest HERE.

Dreaming the revolt of the Muses--

Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1891.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Wikipedia gallery / public domain

The world is a Silk Road--we have been adopting and adapting bits of other people's culture from the start. Culture is no more a static thing than is language. It's a living, growing thing, and we should hope that it is in good health for all our sakes. What many froth over--cultural influence--is the condition of the planet for many thousands of years. Cultural contact meant and still means change and growth and a way of re-imagining one's own arts. At the moment, I don't think the culture is in especially fit health, in large part because we've cheerfully let in the Trojan horse of entertainment (enjoyable and fun and occasionally rising to heights, yes, but not usually the height of human achievement) to defeat the high works of culture and leave only tiny audiences for many of our most important arts. Precious traditions dwindle and die away.

Take poetry as an example. We find ourselves--at least in this country--with a vision of poetry that is extremely small these days. As readers and as writers, we have forgotten our Western classical roots, seldom study the great works of the past in our own language (we oust Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton from the English major in many schools), and have abandoned our knowledge of a range of forms, prosody, syntax, modes, tropes, figures, and auricular pleasures. And that means we have kicked a good deal of variety and surprise and liveliness out of the poetry tent.

A great many writers have come through the Romantic period and into Modernism and Post-Modernism with a conviction that poetry can only begin with our own (sometimes itty-bitty) feelings and end in an epiphany of some sort, and that stance cripples us. We have been devoted to the small lyric for too many years, and we have ignored the other possibilities. When such things happen, we fall into the world of diminishing returns.

I like this (already somewhat old) trumpet call from Mary Kinzie:

...the poet aims to restore to poetry the universality and aboriginally that over time has mistakenly been reassigned to prose. Poetry is the preconditional state of language, not its late and shiftless offspring... Poetry was once the queen of literature, not its poor cousin. At various junctures drama was written in it; so were letters. Once the medium of songs as of satire, of philosophical meditations and allegory, of civic as well as private praise and lament, poetic verse periodically could do anything a thoughtful or unruly bard wished it to do. It was the very expanse of possibility in which literary structure was secured. I subscribe to the notion that, if language can be thought of as a pyramid, its base is poetry, not prose. Poetry is the ground--the ground of resemblance, controlled in time--from which literature of all kinds takes shape.

Isn't it time for a revolt of the Muses? My hope is that we are entering a period of unruly bards who will take new territory and unruly readers, who will look far beyond the limits of entertainment.  We ourselves are, after all, the ones who can change our world. The past and tradition don't just make us look backward but are the nourishment that helps us look forward.

Here are some thoughts about the state of poetry and the arts from writer and poet Jeff Sypeck, drawn from a series of comments on the previous post, "The Fool in his fish skin cloak," that I thought deserved to be in greater light and not tucked away in the comments section.

And it's not just at universities. I spent two years attending major conferences in the museum world, and everyone was fretting about how to meet the demands of young people, with almost nobody willing to claim that their field should be promoting slow-paced contemplation and beauty as an alternative to the culture. I've seen museums use their exhibition spaces as dance clubs, and some symphonies now make a big deal out of programs devoted to movie soundtracks or video-game music.

I don't necessarily object to any of those things, but you can smell the nervous sweat of arts professionals desperate to be liked by the culture at large, even though the culture has overwhelmingly opted to embrace corporate entertainment instead. Museums, art centers, indy publishers, orchestras--they should all be starting with the premise that for at least some people out there, alternatives exist to a $410 million piece of crap like "Batman vs. Superman," and I don't mean "Batman vs. Superman II."

What can we do? I, for one, am trying to promote and spend more money on art and entertainment that's weird, independent, unaffiliated--but I think it would help if we had stronger rebuttals to cries of "elitism!" and "snobbery!," the most common smears against fine-art and high-arts advocates. People who like crap aren't open to hearing someone scold them to like better things--but how to persuade them is something I've been thinking a great deal about lately.

What we need are good arguments—not lofty statements that we ourselves already believe, but claims that persuade. To my mind, one of the best is an honest expansion of the argument used when music and theater programs in schools are threatened: that these things are lifesavers for kids who desperately need outlets. There's no reason that thinking should apply only to kids or only to school programs; I've seen middle-aged people find new purpose in their lives by learning oil painting or becoming mosaicists, and I once saw a 60-year-old student, a construction foreman, discover that he loved opera (to the bemusement of his patient wife). We should greatly expand the thinking behind the cry that sensitive kids need the drama club; all kinds of people need this stuff in all phases of their lives. 

Lately I've been thinking that another viable argument involves a bit of gentle shame aimed at the more liberal-minded: if you so distrust and dislike corporations, why do you give them 100 percent of your art and entertainment budget? Diversify! 

I should note that I write this as someone who used to be a popular-culture junkie. I still like a good superhero movie, danceable music, ambitious comics...but I'm grateful to have had bigger things to grow into. I foolishly assumed that this more high-minded culture would always be there; I never imagined that popular culture would so overwhelm it. 

I'm still thinking about how to promulgate the arguments and use not only the shame but also the hope and the curiosity and even the fear of people who opt for corporate entertainment by default. I don't expect to start a cultural revolution, but every person who takes a little more non-corporate art and entertainment into their lives is a victory as far as I'm concerned. I want to come up with arguments that are as scrupulously honest as they are persuasive, but to be persuasive, those arguments can't be disdainful or insulting. It's an interesting rhetorical challenge. (One of the strongest tactics may be to appeal to an ongoing countercultural impulse. Is there anything more establishment, more pro-corporation, more consumerist than marching off to the latest superhero movie?) 

I also think it has to be a face-to-face process: getting people into artists' studios, art centers, theaters, literary events, and so forth. I'll go so far as to say that even video-game night or sci-fi theme-song night at the orchestra could be good starts, as "pops concerts" once were, if these events were presented not apologetically, but as the first promising glimpse of a much larger creative world.

So what do you think of all that? I expect there are plenty of people who have interesting ideas about how to deal with the conquest of entertainment and the need for unruly bards! If you are one, leave a note. How to care for culture is a issue that sings out to us all.

Update: Lots of views, no comments! Maybe I'd better promise not to put any comments on the front page! I also ought to say that a great deal of what we once regarded as entertainment has lasted, and lasted well--Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Fielding, etc. Evidently the meaning of this word entertainment has changed over time, though, and perhaps I need to figure out what it meant and what it means now.

You asked, no. 1: motherhood and the arts

Art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Maze of Blood

The reflections about more life (motherhood) being helpful to a writer (and an artist) might be good to have out there, too. When I was a new mother, it seemed like my hands might be tied forever. It made me scared. Two more children later, I realized how much more material I had, and how many more things I felt strongly about. Reassurance from seasoned creative mothers could be so helpful to a new creative mothers who might be feeling the panic, or helplessness. I remember looking online at the time for artist mother role models who were pulling this off successfully, and having trouble finding examples. --artist Kim Vanderheiden

I often notice writers or artists talking about how their children are keeping them from work. Just last week I read a piece by a highly successful young writer with a Guggenheim and several books in her bag. But now she has a baby and can't seem to write something she likes. Well, really, is that a huge surprise or a tragedy? I doubt it.

You know, this idea that we have to do our art every day is an idea custom-made for men. Made for men! It does not fit the average mother's life. If a mother cannot manage it, fine. She will do what she can. Mothers are needed by children, while writers and painters and so on are simply not needed by children. Not needed. At all. Oh, children might enjoy spotting a mother's book or painting in a shop or gallery, but it's not important to their lives. A mother is deep down vital to their lives.

Some of us are obsessed. I seem to be one of those. There's no particular virtue in being obsessed, just as there's no particular virtue in not being obsessed. I wrote my first book (my first published book) with my first baby on my lap. My second book was written on the landing of the stairs. We were in a condo for a year, and I could see into the sunken living room through stair railings, and sometimes I encouraged my children to play there when I wanted to write a little. I also used nap time, and I stayed up late to write.

Obviously, I wrote that book in little bits and pieces. No doubt that affected the book. And no doubt having small children affected the book. I've had people tell me that Catherwood made them cry, or made them stop reading for a week because they were grieved. Somebody told me that they were amused to see that an Amazon review of the book said it was almost too heart-wringing! Why? Because I had a son of two and a baby daughter. To love more (and in a new way) is to be bigger than before. I had more to care about, more to lose, more to feed my writing. All my intense mother-love rained down on that book. More life should never be a mistake for an artist of any sort because art craves a sense of life and energy.

But if a woman simply can't do her work with small children for an extended period, that's okay, too. She's getting bigger on the inside all the time (and I'm not talking pregnancy, though that sometimes happens as well.) Motherhood stretches us. It's joyful and wild and full of work and difficulties and exhaustion. Children sometimes turn out to have syndromes or deficits a mother never expected. And even without those difficulties, children and parents learn that the song is right: growing up is hard to do. Always. Challenges can be good for us as artists, if we don't insist on having our own way. Because children aren't about letting a mother have her own way. But they are about growing, and they will make a mother grow too. And that's good for the work.

Sometimes even the obsessed can't manage. I have to confess that it was harder for me to write something sustained when we moved back South when my children were small, and it wasn't just because I wanted to go outside and play. Some passages in life are simply more difficult than others and impossible to plan for. My children needed me in new and different ways as they grew, and they slept less. I kept writing, but I think of the years between the second and third book as years when I wrote a lot of work that I threw away later or stockpiled. Lots of poems, lots of sketches. My husband was doing some intense training that meant I didn't always have a lot of help. My father became quite ill with the disease that would kill him ten years later. And I was very sick during my third pregnancy and afterward. We also moved three times in the space of five years. I sold two houses as a result, while my husband left for new work a thousand miles away, well before the children and I moved. That was a whole lot of upheaval and change to manage.

Extreme measures can occasionally feel possible for short bursts of time. When we moved to Cooperstown, I unpacked the whole house, all but my writing room. I put my computer on my writing table and wrote a novel, The Wolf Pit. I wrote it after my three children were in bed, after I had finished the laundry, after everything else that needed to be done was done. My husband was already a grand cook, and he really took over when we moved. So I didn't have that job to do any more. Managing was still hard. I sometimes finished a night's work at 4 a.m. Then I erupted out of bed (seemingly about five minutes later) to wake my children at 7:00, in order to see the older two off to school. When I was done with my draft, I caught up on sleep, unpacked my writing room, and started tinkering and revising in little bits of time during the day. The book came out from FSG right after the tragic day we call 9-11. It got a nice national award and some great attention, but the timing was terrible, of course. I've never quite recovered from the bad timing because publishing and book-selling are governed by numbers (so thank you for supporting my in-print books.)

Now when I am not writing, I don't worry. I think of myself as fallow. I am like a field that will produce in a great explosion of spring. But perhaps it is not spring yet. Perhaps in a month I will be writing a novel, wishing to be with it all the time. Perhaps I will be having a crazy sluice of new poems. I am old enough that I have faith that what has drifted away will return again because I know my own patterns, and how I work best.

A good parallel example of how to keep going and manage to work daily shines through Luisa Igloria's post about daily writing on The House of Words series: it's here. Luisa has four daughters and a busy professional life, and she has managed at least a half hour per day for her writing for years. I don't know if she could have managed it when her children were younger. I expect if painting had been her thing, she might be doing a tiny oil painting or a sketch or a small woodcut in her bits of time, as she likes to complete something each day. And she would be, as a result, able to do better and better work on that scale, and be more ready for any bigger work as well.

We all need to have threads running to others who love what we love, and those threads can steady us and give us someone who has sympathy with our situation. People like Luisa have been important to me. I want to make beauty, do the occasional teaching gig, and be a mother, and Luisa's life is a kind of parallel to mine, except that I quit teaching full-time long ago, and so she juggles even more than I do. Luisa and I chat frequently, and we share woes and joys that come with motherhood and being writers. We're happy or sad for each other, depending on the event, and that's wonderfully helpful. I live in a place with few writers, so it's especially sweet for me. Similarly, my local friendship with painter Ashley Norwood Cooper is one where we get together to talk about a life in the arts, leaping about from children (three each) to work to goals. We live in a fairly obscure place, so it's lovely to know someone living a somewhat parallel life. I have many other friends in the arts, but knowing a good number who are trying to be mothers and also make their art feels helpful to me.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for both men and women in the arts is the fact that most of them are to varying degrees invisible as artists, so that their work is little known, or less well known than it should be. We live in a winner-takes-all time where few are pushed and promoted. Artists look around and often see that lesser work is puffed and promoted and feel that it is hard to go on. Plenty of women feel that the game is tilted toward men, but plenty of men are left out of the inner circle of marketed and promoted artists, too. A woman who feels that way and also has a few children may feel her path is just too difficult, that she is too alone in what she longs to achieve. That's another reason why constructing a circle is so important--to spend time with other people who want to bring art into the world. Because the danger with a degree of invisibility is disappearing. To know and be known by others the artist respects is a way of having the work become bright and visible, and that is always encouraging. After all, no art is quite finished without its right audience.

Just a skosh--

art by Clive Hicks-Jenkins

The only thing worth doing in the realm of the arts is to run to the very edge of everything you have made until now and then throw yourself off, trusting that your feet will find new ground. And this is true no matter whether you are Isaac Bashevis Singer or Jane Austen or Joe or Jolene Nobody who wants to make something beautiful.

Okay, that's it. All I have to say. My jot and morsel. My iota. All the advice I have to give. Done.

Borges, Blake, Christ, and art

Public domain image; see Wikipedia citation.
Best reproduction is here. www.blakearchive.org

Here's a post for a Sunday, a post for Lent... Reading a Borges interview made me think of that singular visionary, William Blake, sitting with his wife in the garden at Felpham, or glimpsing angels among haymakers, and or spying them up in a tree, the bright wings spangling the branches like stars.

Borges on Christ as artist

Jorge Luis Borges to Denis Dutton:

 ...I don’t know who said that, was it Bernard Shaw? — he said, arguments convince nobody. No, Emerson. He said, arguments convince nobody. And I suppose he was right, even if you think of proofs for the existence of God, for example — no? In that case, if arguments convince nobody, a man may be convinced by parables or fables or what? Or fictions. Those are far more convincing than the syllogism — and they are, I suppose. Well, of course, when I think of something in terms of Jesus Christ. As far as I remember, he never used arguments; he used style, he used certain metaphors. It’s very strange — yes, and he always used very striking sentences. He would not say, I don’t come to bring peace but war — “I do not come to bring peace but a sword.” The Christ, he thought in parables. Well, according to — I think that it was Blake who said that a man should be — I mean, if he is a Christian — should be not only just but he should be intelligent ... he should also be an artist, since Christ had been teaching art through his own way of preaching, because every one of the sentences of Christ, if not every single utterance of Christ, has a literary value, and may be thought of as a metaphor or as a parable.

Christ the Word and art

Borges called himself an agnostic. His description of Christ as working through style, metaphor, and parable seems highly appropriate for a savior called the Word. (In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the word was God. John 1:1.) That comment about every sentence of Christ being of literary value certainly sounds like Blake. In fact, "every sentence" being of literary value fulfills Blake's ideas about unceasing praise, which is art.

Blake, the Laocoön, and art as the Tree of Life

Borges's reference reminds me of the inscriptions circling Blake's depiction (etched and engraved in intaglio) of the famous Laocoön and his sons group (circa 200 B. C. - 70 A. D.), which he perceives as portraying God with Adam and Satan. Blake's copy-work dates from around 1815, but the winding, colorful inscriptions were added more than a decade later. These lines are fascinating, and many of them pronounce on the intersection of Christ and art.

A selection of William Blake's art-related inscriptions around the Laocoön, Copy B (Essick collection):*

Prayer is the Study of Art. 

Praise is the Practise of Art. 

The Eternal Body of Man is Imagination, that is God himself. 

It manifests itself in his Works of Art (in Eternity All is Vision) 

The Old and New Testaments are the Great Code of Man

Art is the Tree of Life   God is Jesus 

The Whole Business of Man is the Arts 

Jesus His Apostles and Disciples were all Artists 

Christianity is Art and not Money    Money is its Curse 

Israel delivered from Egypt is Art delivered from Nature and Imitation 

You must leave Fathers and Mothers and Houses and Lands
if they stand in the way of Art

Without Unceasing Practise, nothing can be done   Practise is Art

*Ampersands signified by "and"

It's interesting how these interrelate. Evidently unceasing "practise" means unceasing praise, since praise is the "practise" of art. All of life, then, becomes praise that expresses itself as art. And art is visonary, flourishing, and apparent in lives that might not, on the surface, appear to be devoted to art as we now think of it.

Triptych with artisans, art, and music

Hand of St. Valentin. Paul Koudounaris

If a common thread runs through this three-stranded post, it is that each of these things I find interesting this morning made me see something new and anew--the past and church history, a Frost poem so familiar that I couldn't imagine it being unfamiliar again, and the state of culture. In each case, I saw or heard through another, and enjoyed what I found for that reason.

1. Catacomb Saints

Photographs like this one by Paul Koudounaris are suddenly popping up around the web. I find them fascinating too, though they seem to be an excuse for many people to flog various dead horses of the past and church history, at least in comments on various sites. Go here for a reasonably respectful treatment of the "catacomb saints."

Koudounaris's new book is Heavenly Bodies. He claims "spectacular" as a descriptor in the subtitle, and that seems to be true from the many samples of photographs online. It's too bad that the book does not appear to have much apparatus to tell us about the photographs which, detached from their historical context and meaning, may well be seen as fabulous but freakish. Many artisans spent years laboring to decorate these bones, seeking to make them an image of the saints in glory . . .

"In 1578 the remains of thousands of individuals assumed to be early Christian martyrs were discovered in Rome. The remains were given fictitious names and sent to Catholic churches and religious institutions in German-speaking Europe as relics of saints to replace holy relics that had been destroyed during the Protestant Reformation. Reassembled by skilled artisans, encrusted with gold and jewels and richly dressed in fantastic costumes, the skeletons were displayed in elaborate public shrines as reminders of the spiritual treasures that awaited the faithful after death."

Last night I saw one of the images on Nathan Ballingrud's facebook page and had a sudden memory of an anecdote. A friend (who shall remain unnamed) was visiting an eastern European castle and allowed to take a peep into stone coffins down in the basement, including one of a recently-deceased aunt. I still remember an odd detail of her fine, detailed clothing. It would make a wonderful story...

2. Eric Whitacre making the over-exposed new

Here's the original version of Sleep from Whitacre's blog. The text was Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I love the way it estranges the text and makes it uncanny again. The Frost estate did not give permission for the use of the text, and so there is really only one version of the piece available, so far as I can tell. The Concordia Choir.

3. Gioia x 2

If you are interested in arts, music, culture-building, education, business-and-the-arts, or religion, take a look at the double interview with Ted and Dana Gioia:  The Arts: Agents of Change and Source of Enchantment. Here are a few clips to entice:

Ted Gioia: I am convinced that, if you have a vocation in life, you don’t choose it. It chooses you. The religious phrase we use to describe this process is the right one. You receive a calling, and the only proper thing you can do is respond to the calling.

Dana: The modern assumption that writers and artists are dreamy, impractical people is both odd and quite insulting to creative people. Sophocles was a general, Goethe a scientist and statesman. Shakespeare was the most successful entertainment entrepreneur of Renaissance England. 

Ted: . . . people are just as hungry for serious culture as they ever were, but are stymied by entertainment-driven media that refuse to give a platform to anything deep, challenging, or sophisticated. But let me make a prediction. Popular entertainment of the current sort will not satisfy this hunger.

Dana: Both jazz and poetry became too academic and intellectual. This is not unique to these two arts. It reflected the general isolation of the arts in our society. They have been relegated to small subcultures and cut off from the general audience that once supported them. That separation has hurt both the arts and the general culture. . . . We need to take responsibility for creating the culture we want to live in. That means to express our values—aesthetic as well as ethical—in our daily lives.

And a late addition--

Thanks to Stephen Roth for reviewing A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage at his blog and at Amazon! For more review clips, see the page tabs above. Evidently Stephen's first book will be out next year--congratulations to him!