Most of the time things are cloudy, uncertain, hard to make out. The windshield that we all look through to see meaning and truth is coated with the dirt and dead bugs of a thousand-mile roadtrip. We’ve grown accustomed to this grime-vision. It’s thrilling, and frustrating too. We could be anywhere, really. What looks mundane could be magical after all. Fabulous and unusual things probably lurk there behind the bug guts, we just can’t quite make them out. That we’re missing something is a given, but the possiblity of that something, it’s comforting.
And then there are those times, rare, very very rare, when clarity shows up. We try at seeing just like we always have. We squint, we prepare ourselves for the effort, and suddenly no effort is needed. Suddenly, the windshield is clean and clear and nothing separates us any more from what is there on the other side. Then it turns out that what’s there on the other side is just that. It’s there, just sort of looking back at us while we’re looking at it. Nothing happens.
Pema Chodron puts it differently. She writes: “The truth, said an ancient Chinese master, is neither like this nor like that. It is like a dog leaning over a bowl of burning oil. He can’t leave it, becuase it is too desirable, and he can’t lick it, because it is too hot.” It’s a sort of stunning nothingness as I see it.
Clarity and confusion. Two different states of being, coming and going like weather or seasons, or something else very natural and yet slightly bullyish. It’s not that one state is hopeful and the other is devoid of hope. It’s that one state is, well hopeful yes, and desperate but familiar, while the other is completely free of desperation but at the same time terrifying and disturbing in its foreign transparency.
Given the choice, which state would we really choose, the clarity or the confusion? I don’t think we know. Maybe it’s best that we don’t really get to choose (the weather thing).
Then along comes the artist.
I have stood in front of a painting on a wall inside the Art Institute of Chicago for what seemed at the time like hours. The painting was Ice by Gerhardt Richter. It’s a layered thing, peeling and worn in some places, sparkling like crystal in others, and monstrously beautiful like life. What you might see when you look at it is the windshield, the bug guts, the dust, the grease, the grime, and the clear parts where things stare back at you. All of it. All at once.
Ultimately, of course, we see ourselves in art. We see art struggle and miss and stumble into some frightening clarity that doesn’t do what it was supposed to do. We see art run back into comfortable confusion. We see ourselves in that stumbling and running. Ourselves, but from a tender and compassionate place where we look beautiful and dignified and tattered and majestic all at once.
Because art tries, we see that we try. And we see that trying and missing can be astounding. For a moment, an hour even, we are astounded by us all.
