The world and words this morning

After reading student calls for "reporting and tracking microaggression from faculty" and the need for "cultural humility training" for professors, and after reading the morning news of the latest people murdered for their incorrect thinking, incorrect beliefs, or incorrect efforts to help the plight of others in their faraway countries, I felt a little beaten down. The world seemed lacking in beauty and goodness.

Being rather silly at times, I had the urge to eat the last chocolate bunny. Unfortunately, the consumption of chocolate bunnies solves very little. Doesn't help.

Coming across a little passage of Nabokov helped. It had beauty. It had goodness. It was suffused with love, the work of a creative being reaching toward someone he cherished.

Three years have gone--and every trifle relating to father is still as alive as ever inside me. I am so certain, my love, that we will see him again, in an unexpected but completely natural heaven, in a realm where all is radiance and delight. He will come towards us in our shared bright eternity, slightly raising his shoulders as he used to do, and we will kiss the birthmark on his hand without surprise. You must live in expectation of that tender hour, my love, and never give in to the temptation of despair.

Now this praise and image of glory expresses a son's love for his father. It also expresses a Christian belief in a creative, bright realm beyond this life--not a very popular concept among intellectuals when he wrote those words. Although you may be thinking that I'm wandering away from the original topic (the effect of too much chocolate, perhaps), this homage does have something to do with free speech, correct or incorrect thinking, and variety of opinions:

V. D. Nabokov, a lawyer and professor and athlete and editor of a progressive newspaper, was a liberal who was convinced change was overdue in Russia, but he eventually came to abhor and then oppose the bloody revolutionary chaos that arrived. Elected to the first provisional parliament ever formed in Russia, he was a courageous man, a hero to some. When he leaped up to shield a political enemy who was speaking at a rally in Berlin, he was shot to death by a pair of assassins. Their intended victim walked away unharmed    --both passages from a review of The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov by Larry Woiwode in Books and Culture

First, I note again the beauty and goodness and warm love in the passage of a letter written to Vladimir Nabokov's mother. Second, I note that V. D. Nabokov was a liberal and a progressive who lost his life--who gave his life--in defending a political enemy. Third, I note the calls for campus tribunals and training. Fourth, I note the slaughter going on around the world in the service of abolishing incorrect beliefs and thinking.

Letter to a young artist

Interior collage vignette by Clive Hicks-Jenkins for Thaliad

I've been thinking about you and your aspirations as you drift into the world, slipping into a job, finding the time to make your art without someone at your shoulder. You ask for advice, yet always I fear being polonial,* and so needing a good stabbing as I stand behind the arras. And though you must discover your own path and make your own quest, I feel the impulse to warn you against certain beasts along the way. In our age, the barriers to mastery in the arts have become especially powerful and strange. They can lead you in directions that mean the destruction of art--that can cripple your future work at the very start.

I say this in part because you passed through the liberal arts college of the day, and sometimes you have been taught by academics to take angry little hatchets and chop away at the pillars that hold up Western civilization and tradition. (My stance? To teach is a high calling, often fulfilled with grace. But a professor who mocks and throws away the great works of the past is a mere chipmunk digging a hole under the foot of a giant.) Oh, it is good to look with clear eyes at the world and time. But it is wrong to dismantle and trash the glories of a civilization. The truest, strongest art is crafted in the sex-abolishing, race-abolishing spirit, using the tools of the trade.

Take the great works of the past. Make them your own. Know why some matter to you, while others do not, and you will know yourself and your aims better. Know the tradition from which you spring and so be a giant by standing on the shoulders of men and the few women who managed to speak well in spite of the expectations and constraints of their times and culture. Rejoice in the art, rather than dwelling on social critique and conditions as a measure of that art. Conditions and cultural beliefs are not the measure of an art, but part of a complicated soil of time and place from which a work grows and flowers.

Also, sift out and forget any nonsense you were served up in studio or workshop classes--to make art only based on "what you know," "to find your voice," etc. My education taught me that certain words were off limits, that literature was divided into genres and only one was worthwhile, and that I didn't need the ancient tools of my trade inherited from the masters of the past. One of the things I found useful about my education was that it awakened the desire to strive against or test what I had been taught. Question your received ideas, and toss them if they do not serve your art.

Let the art teach you. Know your tools. Remember that the way forward has long been through the tradition and the past. Each time you start a work, you will be starting over. But just make your art. In love. In truth. In grace. You will be making yourself, as well. Each time you begin again, you will be different--bigger on the inside, more emboldened and ready to leap into the unknown with a shout.

Love to you, luck to you--
Marly

* Yes, I made that one up. But it's a made-up word I've used for a long time, as Polonius and his advice always come to mind when I am asked for advice. Perhaps in such situations, we are all Polonius, or we are all the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find," who would have been a good woman--would have spoken only what is true and what matters--if only there had been someone there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Video by Paul Digby.