At some point all voracious readers and habitual writers get existential about what they do and ask the questions, “who cares?” and “what’s the point?” Inevitably, unable to conjure up a satisfactory answer, we decide once and for all to chuck the written word and opt for something more tangible. It always happens, it never lasts, this foray into attempted wordlessness, and we can’t help ourselves – we come back to the written word like a dog’s nose to the ground.
It seems we must believe this idea that words make us human. I admit it. I think they stretch us, enrich and enlarge our humanness. To me a new word or combination of words encountered is like the unfolding of a crease in my mental space. It feels important, this little event, and not just that learning has taken place, but that new ground for nurturing thought has been cleared. Without that new word or phrase, a whole piece of life would have remained inaccessible.
The three words that make up the title above, fear. art. god., in that combination, lowercase and all, constitute my reasons for writing. (that is not God with the white beard who frowns on dirty dancing, but god: mysterious, biological, universal life force god) Three big motivating factors in life, they are, and of all the motivating factors (money, recognition, hunger, etc.) they remain for me the most omnipresent. I can’t shake them, even for a moment. It’s my belief that as these three forces weave themselves in and out of our lives, for many of us, the strands become inseparable.
fear.
At times the litany of things to fear in this life can lull us into a catatonic state…death, disease, decapitation, being buried alive, resistant staphylococcus, anthrax powder in our mailbox, public humiliation, mental deterioration, just to name a few. But the biggest most powerful fear of our lives probably isn’t attached to any one specific thing at a time. It’s too primordial, too amorphous, too overwhelming for us to let it rest on anything long enough. It’s always there, but we keep it detached, just barely at bay like some monster tenacious mosquito.
In a dream I have, an enormous roaring crowd of people, an ocean of angry people, is chasing me. They are enraged, their hatred pushes them across a vast plain toward me. It’s like that. And the way that I handle that dream is this: I lie there, after I wake up, heart pounding, and envision myself running from the crowd. Then I stop running. I turn around and face them, and stand alone, waiting for them to overcome me. I will not survive and I know it. But I stand alone and wait, and I have one thing to tell them. I shout this one thing at them as hard as I can shout,”There’s nothing to be afraid of!”
Art can be like that. The simplest faith in some kind of god can be like that.
art. god.
By its very nature, art resists fear, turns on it and drives it back. In her book, Art Objects, Jeanette Winterson says,”Art is my rod and staff, my resting place and shield, and not mine only. For art leaves nobody out. Even those from whom art has been stolen away by tyranny, by poverty, begin to make it again. If the arts did not exist, at every moment, someone would begin to create them.” (20)
One of the many places to which I turn for wisdom and inspiration is the Bible. And it has much to say about turning on fear. How many times in our lives, those of us who devour books and absorb paintings and poems, has a piece of art acted as David to some Goliath of fear in our present circumstances?
In the story, before David takes Goliath out, and after he declares boldly that, “I will strike you down and cut off your head,” he explains his strength to the mocking Goliath. He explains that the battle is not David’s at all, ”the battle is the Lord’s.” We can say the same about art.
Take a walk through a gallery or museum, stand before each piece for a moment, the sweat and ingenuity and strokes of each artist, and then on to the next, and the next. Or flip through a volume of modern poetry, stopping to rest with Whitman, then Williams, Moore, Pound, Stevens, and it becomes very clear. We sense that the battle against fear and all things fearful, like complacency and resignation and stagnation, is not our battle, rather it is this Art Force battling through us all.
Also in the Bible, Psalm 56:10 dismisses fear, saying, “This I know: God is on my side.” Here’s Whitman:
Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,/ Now I wash the gum from your eyes,/ You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life./ Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,/ Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,/ To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.
And this, too, I know, Art is on my side.
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September 27, 2007 at 3:44 pm
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