Third Monday Musing: Art and oblivion

By Eric Meub

Sister Susan finds these Musings difficult. She claims the fault is hers. That’s just her way of being gracious. I know my failings far too well to imagine that a turbo-charged conversationalist like Susan should find a properly constructed Musing difficult. So let us build a better Musing. Here are some suggestions:

1. Brevity is not a dirty word.
2. Maybe limit the number of literary cameos to, say, three.
3. Start with something concrete.

So far so good: I’ve only mentioned Susan, briefly, and she’s concrete. In fact, she is far more concrete than many of my acquaintances. Why is that? Because she creates. Every day. Important things.

Susan and Mike’s apartment, as I’ve told them before, is one of my favorite places. This is due mainly to the fact that they are often in it, but also to the fact of Susan’s art. It’s smack dab in front of you as you enter the room: work in progress to the left, framed culminations on the right. I, for one, cannot sit down before I’ve had a tour. The recent adventures of a practicing artist are at least as informative as who-one-has-seen or where-one-has-eaten over the last month.

Heart of the City, July 2013

   The tour is not a monologue. Paintings push back. Susan doesn’t always win. Some well-meaning critic will note that a piece “works better” turned ninety degrees. Susan gives it a try. What was a chair, or a cityscape, or a nude, is now an abstract. Sometimes the painting goes off in this new direction, and, at the end of the day, there is only archeological evidence— a bit of foot here, a fragment of a tower turned sideways— to inform the viewer how it all began. Sometimes Susan turns it right-side up again.
    The suspension of willpower over one’s creative progeny is not an easy achievement. It may be the hardest lesson. It comes with two enormous perks. First of all, once mastered, it allows one to truly see. I imagine about ninety-nine percent of our fellow humans see a very narrow slice of the world. We tend to see what we want to see, or what we expect to see. The rest of the time we see nothing at all other than some interior drama playing out in our heads. An artist who is literally humbled before his or her creation is a human without blinders. There’s a reason Ezra Pound called artists “the antennae of the race” (cameo one).
    The second perk of suspended will is empathy. When you can recognize that a painting may have “a life of its own,” you may be willing to extend that same potential to people. If there’s a consistent trait to Susan’s conversation, advice and friendship, it is this miraculous empathy.

So what is it that compels people to paint or sing or write? Beyond the easy answers of “having something to say” or “expressing oneself,” there are two primary motives I can identify personally. I wonder if they motivate others.
    First there is the indelible joy that comes from creation. In a world of high school shootings and congressional well-poisoning, the making of order, and even a little beauty, is no small consolation. Creation is god-like: we imitate (we presume) the creation (we presume) of our own selves. Seeing the flaws in our work as creators helps us to be more forgiving of our flaws as creatures.

    But I would argue that creation is more than just a compensation for a yucky world. Sometimes, in the face of struggle, despair, or great physical pain, creation is the only possible response. The poet Eric Ormsby (cameo two), in Dicie Fletcher, writes about a nineteenth-century classics teacher having a rotten tooth pulled. She refuses on moral grounds to take ether and thus suffers agonies. Almost involuntarily, her mind drowns in a cocktail of dental pain and Greek lessons:

Homer was the true Evangelist
—that’s what she taught her boys.
Homer did not assuage, met doom
head-on. Uncoddled by all gospels he
only held out hard pebble-phrases for
the agonized to suck. Yes, peiren: drove
(aorist, boys? Who can tell me about this verb?
“Patroclus drove the spear between the teeth
—odonton—of Thestor, son of Enops. He
gaffed the charioteer out of his chariot
like a bullfrog on a pole.”) The doctor
whooped. “We’ve got it now!”

And, once the tooth is out, she observes:

Didn’t our Lord cry out on Golgotha?
Only language stood against
the unimaginable savagery
of gods unable to imagine pain.

It’s not just pain, not just despair, but the fundamental disparity between the human and the divine that evokes eloquence, art, creation. Religion tries to bridge the gap. The Iliad and The Book of Job note the injustice; Buddhism tries to overcome suffering and make man God; Christianity posits a God who actually suffers. But only in art are joy and suffering so exquisitely twined about an activity. The work, no matter how good, is never good enough.

The other motivation, of course, is fear of mortality. Unlike children, artworks can speak in your defense long after you are gone. That is, they can if they survive. Art, song, literature: these are also mortal things. They do not endure forever.

    The poet Donald Justice (cameo three) has written an essay called Oblivion. He is also concerned about what it is that makes someone an artist.

Experience teaches one to believe that there is a dimension to the self that all those who are not artists lack; I believe it myself. There is a mysterious and hidden consciousness within the artist of being other; there is an awareness of some reality-beyond-the-reality that lures and charges the spirit; it charges and gives power to one’s very life.

This otherness of the artist, however, is dependent for its dissemination upon the overpowering mass of non-others. Having one’s art or music or poetry displayed or heard or published is not just difficult: “There is a randomness in the operation of the laws of fame that approaches the chaotic.” Because of this inequity, he takes it upon himself to resurrect the oeuvres of three undeservedly neglected poets of his acquaintance. He performs a biographical autopsy on each one: why the work should have been preserved, and why it was not:

But with neglected writers such mysteries and losses are common; they constitute a part of the very definition of the type of oblivion we are dealing with. Think of the letters given over to flames and garbage dumps, the unsorted boxes of papers lying about in attics and basements, the notebooks scrawled in drunken, half-legible squiggles and codes, kept in fading ink, never to be deciphered. What glories, what banalities, what secrets!

Neglect drives each of these three to abandonment of careers, families, even their lives, which is the ultimate irony, since death itself – the event against which the work is supposedly shored – can drag the work down with it as well, as can be seen in Justice’s attempt to get one recently deceased author’s work back in print:

Feeling that those last years had produced some of his finest work, I wrote, not long after his death, to an editor with whom I had a certain acquaintance. Here is a part of the well-meaning reply accompanying the return of the manuscript: “I’ve showed them [the poems] to some of the staff here and alas the word is no… This is not because we’re not doing poetry anymore. Rather, it’s because the powers that be here want to publish people with a future— i.e. the newly established. We simply aren’t in the market for poems from non-living authors.” By such terms, which of us has a future? Is this oblivion?

Science—especially astronomy and physics—has taught us to see the big picture and recognize how fleeting is the term of the human race upon this little world. Shakespeare, Dante, Homer will all be forgotten some day:

In the end, of course, we must face the simple fact that most publication too is only a somewhat more benign form of oblivion, a variation on the theme, but it is about all that can be expected or even, perhaps, hoped for. There will be this much then, we say, as a record; there will be this trace.

Is Susan still on the bus? Yes? Granted this is the shortest Musing yet, perhaps it is not short enough. Perhaps it should be turned sideways. Perhaps I should pin it to the wall as Susan does, and see what it looks like in tomorrow morning’s June-gray light. Perhaps I need to let it push me back so hard I miss my deadline.

One more inspiration from Susan’s art wall: she has what Marianne Moore calls the courage of one’s idiosyncrasies. Against all odds, we are each unique. In the face of ultimate oblivion there is some comfort in the thought that, though we be erased, we can never be replaced.

Heart...better

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Copyright © 2014 by Eric Meub

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