I returned to “Life is a Miracle” today, Berry’s explanation of art and how it is not valuable in what it might be reduced and explained to be, but for how it exists and what it tells by the form in which it appears, the story told, the perception shared; how art and science are both tools to shape our culture and existence, and how both are necessary to make and complete our “worlds.”
I think I highlighted half the two chapters I’ve been in, how art is able
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.”
I’ve lived and perceived that. Isn’t that a part of the transcendence Percy speaks of in the writer: the high we hate coming down from, what drives us to drink, chase the flesh, and all the other lesser highs we seek to try and reach transcendence once again?
He described the greater artist as seeing the difference in boards that are both good, but one finer in its qualities than another and chosen above and before the rest. Do we not do this with friends, lovers, and others in our lives?
It’s what gives our lives its “art” its qualities worth sharing, living, and telling in our singular known experience. There are universalities to our lives, sure, but it is the fineness of details, and differences that give each our special accents.
Life is not a science, to exist, procreate, and die. It is to be lived, expressed, and communed with others whom we recognize and see as worthy, and for whom we desire, to know our details. Life is not an organization of dates, accomplishments, and ends. It is the story we tell by living, the pieces we take from it and shape to become autonomous and worthy to stand alone for their own beauty: whether they be Light or Darkness, Joy or Pain, revelations or merely gateways to greater wonderings.
How do we tell our Truths? What do our Truths tell of us? “The truth too, as it appears in art, cannot be extracted as an idea or paraphrase. If we didn’t, to start with, feel that a work of art was true, we wouldn’t bother with it, or not for long.” How do our truths define the way we choose to live?
I don’t know, and maybe that, too, is a piece to the art. It doesn’t have the answer. It only shares the thought. The answer is for each of us to find, the truth it strikes in us.
*The reference to Percy is from Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy in which he explains the rollercoaster spirits of artists and writers who come down from work in spirit and mind to their living immanent worlds around:
“But the most spectacular problems of reentry seem to be experienced by artists and writers. They, especially the latter, seem subject more than most people to estrangement from the society around them, to neurosis, psychosis, alcoholism, drug addiction, epilepsy, florid sexual behavior, solidariness, depression, violence, and suicide.”
The book provides multiple choice answers for which to explain such tendencies. I will write my own: it is the disconnect and distance from an ideal into which one rises and, completing or stepping away from the work, falling back into a world that—after perceiving and creating the dream—seems less than it should be. This is the reentry Percy speaks to, the falling from something greater than physical condition—a state of being of spirit, soul and mind—and the crash that comes in falling from this state. The immanent is not enough. We seek to raise again into transcendence—by whatever means possible. I’ve tried, and failed, to find this rush in every way but God and his greatest power: the ability to create, which I return again to do, writing new worlds and dreams from words.