At times art-making seems like such a pointless exercise and I question the value I place on beauty - whether it's shaping clay, making a painting, taking a photograph, singing an opera or crafting words.
At the other end of the pendulum, I'm swept up by an all-consuming urgency to create something out of nothing - feeling as close as I can to the Divine, knowing that act to be a confirmation of my created-in-the-image-of Godness. No one can express this turmoil and creative angst better than one of my favourite artists, Madeleine L'Engle (from her book Two-Part Invention):
"I do not want ever to be indifferent to the joys and beauties of this life. For through these, as through pain, we are enabled to see purpose in randomness, pattern in chaos. We do not have to understand in order to believe that behind the mystery and the fascination there is love.
But love has pitched her mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent (Yeats)
There are many times when the idea that there is indeed a pattern seems absurd wishful thinking. Random events abound. There is much in life that seems meaningless. And then, when I can see no evidence of meaning, some glimpse is given which reveals the strange weaving of purposefulness and beauty.
In the face and weight of present misfortune, the voice of the individual artist may seem perhaps of no more consequence than the whirring of crickets in the grass, but the arts do live continuously, and they live literally by faith; their names and their shapes and their uses and their basic meanings survive unchanged in all that matters through times of interruption, diminishment, neglect; they outlive governments and creeds and societies, even the very civilizations that produced them. They cannot be destroyed altogether because they represent the substance of faith and the only reality. They are what we find when the ruins are cleared away. And even the smallest and most incomplete offering at this time can be a proud act in defense of that faith."
Today I will add my stone to that altar, burn my stack of carefully gathered experiences and build with small acts of faith - may it be a worthy offering!
