The Artist is the Creator of Beautiful Things

The most important things in life are the stories we weave for ourselves. The truth of our lives, especially our deepest held convictions and beliefs, is first found in the fabric of our fictions.
And what a horribly wonderful and delightfully awful fabric the tapestry of human existence is!
Separate, seemingly mutually exclusive, threads wrap around one another–they together create a unifying, abiding series of tensions. The apparent paradoxes that trouble many of us each day are really deeply abiding harmonies. If only more of us had the eyes to see the surface for its tensions, we would be happier for it.
“We are all in the gutter,” says Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” This, despite my usual acerbic pose, is really the only elitism I allow myself. My cynical side flows forth from my disappointed sentimentality. I wish more of us looked with awe at the light of the stars rather than continuing to bicker over the shadows of the gutter — yet I fear bickering is much easier.
Thus, consider my elitism as an invitation open to all — an egalitarianism that respects distance and difference. It is an invitation I offer as a reminder to myself again and again while looking in the mirror. I now shout it from the rooftops.
Look to the stars!
Even they are surrounded in darkness. And when we see our existence tied up in theirs — that we are all made of stardust, as the secular evangelists like to say these days — we see the truth is found in our fictions and poetry we write for the stars.
The lives we lead imitate the stories we create.
As Wilde says in his dialogue “The Decay of Lying”:
“Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes
are always dangerous things–it is none the less true that Life
imitates art far more than Art imitates life……And it has always been so. A great artist
invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a
popular form, like an enterprising publisher…The Greeks, with their
quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride’s
chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear
children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her
rapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from art not merely
spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soul-turmoil or soul-
peace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours
of art……Hence came their objection to realism. They
disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably
makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try to
improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free
sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the
better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely
produce health, they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is
required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his
studio-imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be
they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in
a word, Life is Art’s best, Art’s only pupil.”
I once looked at the stars above and thought, “They are nothing to me.” Maybe the stars are an interesting intellectual pursuit, an enduring mystery of man, but they certainly lack practical meaning for my individual life.
“Leave the stars to the astronomers, astrophysicists, and astrologists,” I used to say, but now I see their being “nothing to me” was really something, a relation I had not yet fostered, a shallow story I had told myself. I had let the shadow of the gutter blind me. I now subscribe to a better story in regards to the stars.
I say now, “no man is wiser than me!” We’re all fools. Well, at least we’re all fools in this regard: we want an answer to the existential question of our being, we want a reason for why we’re here to soon be gone. Why do we die? Why do we live only to perish in the end? Why are our lives so much like a song thrown to the wind? How do we deal with our mortality?
Human beings long for integration. For an end, purpose.
If I had to venture an answer, the fiction I tell myself first and foremost is “look into the eyes of someone you love.” When I see their eyes with mine, informed by an enduring agape appreciation, I often forget time itself. I forget that we die.
It is only for a moment, but what a glorious moment! What an eternal moment!
I used to think our existence was a sad situation, a chronic case of crash and burn. But now, I see the truth behind this relation: the stars above, they’re ours to learn.
The wide world is ours to name because we’re all players in an eternal game. We seem to have sprung from nothing, yet we’re here to play, play, play!
It is in the face of a seemingly approaching nothingness that we must have the wherewithal to say nothingness is merely a trick of the mind, the gutter beckoning us to look down rather than to the heavens.
We can’t always be looking to the stars. Sometimes the abyss beckons our attention and cannot be ignored and should not be ignored. The dark side is real. The trick is to recognize you are free to look wherever you wish. You are free to craft any story you wish, especially in the face of events beyond one’s control. You are not inherently good or evil, but free. A creative, spontaneous being.
The question, then, is this: how will you use your innate freedom? What stories will your life shout from the rooftop or quietly whisper while sitting in nature?
In the light of such fundamental questioning, we can then begin to see how we may tell the stories of not only our personal lives but that of our communities.
How do we build the just city?
When I look at the political stories competing for our hearts and minds today, I must say their “Art” is completely lacking. They are copy cats in the worst way. Hand me down narratives often expressed in the the traditional “masculine” and “feminine” virtues that seem to create less and less only to consume more and more. I worry those who rule over our nations are not social artists or philosopher kings, seeking to bring about the best we have to offer as human beings, but charlatans who appeal to the average fear, envy, and eros of the average person. They seek power by bickering over the shadow of the gutter. Their rhetoric is that of an army on the march — the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, the War to End All Wars, the War at the ballot box.
These, my fellows, are the fictions of that “coldest of cold monsters,” the State.
As Randolph Bourne said of the State:
“Wartime brings the ideal of the State out into very clear relief, and reveals attitudes and tendencies that were hidden. In times of peace the sense of the State flags in a republic that is not militarized. For war is essentially the health of the State. The ideal of the State is that within its territory its power and influence should be universal. As the Church is the medium for the spiritual salvation of man, so the State is thought of as the medium for his political salvation. Its idealism is a rich blood flowing to all the members of the body politic. And it is precisely in war that the urgency for union seems greatest, and the necessity for universality seems most unquestioned. The State is the organization of the herd to act offensively or defensively against another herd similarly organized. The more terrifying the occasion for defense, the closer will become the organization and the more coercive the influence upon each member of the herd.”
This is, in my opinion, the most prominent way the dark side of the gutter sneaks into our lives and takes up residence as master of our minds and communities: War!
It troubles me that so many of our national heroes are only found in the midst of great evils and never in peacetime. I long for heroes who seek the good for its own sake rather than the good as conquest of the other. A hero that is always seeking to slay dragons to the point that he creates them in his own mind may very be a fool at least and at worst a tyrant. The egalitarianism of wartime is no true condition for calling someone a comrade, for such a fellowship is often a case of “us” against “them” rather than an appeal to the fellowship of all. It is an appeal for the death of scapegoats dressed up in high ideals.
Yet, the rhetoric of an army on the march undoubtedly still remains powerful and prevailing in our day and age. It perverts the best of our narratives. It turns the great religions’ eyes away from contemplating the stars and towards the impending fights here on earth. It makes nihilists out of Christians, Jews, and Muslims by offering them the great sin of unearned pride, which fills them with the false certainty that their orthodoxy is unquestionably true and, most ominously, that the end times are near. In truth, it will be these lost souls themselves who will bring about a man-made eschaton — in their pride, they are engaged in a self-fulfilling prophecy of destruction. I hope they return to the good of their religions with haste.
The rhetoric of the army on the march: it perverts our values as a people, as Deirdre McCloskey would say, our bourgeois values. It renders us confused. Our understanding of our wealth as a people has been hollowed out into mere symbols, into ever-changing statistical short-hands, and ultimately simulacra of our former economic selves.
And accordingly, people — feeling this anxiety of our impoverished understanding — seek out snake oil remedies to cure their self-made problems.
Community and friendship, with all their illustrious benefits, are attacked until they rendered merely the handmaiden of state power. The beautiful, spontaneous order of the market is attacked. Private property is attacked. The innovator is attacked. And finally, human freedom itself is attacked as people with a sense of the well-established seize upon original discoveries with war-making and animosity rather than wonder and awe.
Yet, it is not control of wealth, or material resources themselves even, that makes us wealthier. It is innovation, the creative process of the entrepreneur helping his community that gets the job of prosperity done. When we respect and protect the innovator by culture and by law, we enable ourselves to reach for to the stars. When we offer celebration of these entrepreneurs through art, we bolster our ability to reach even greater heights. This is the great insight of Deirdre McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Era.
The rhetoric of the army on the march: it is our true enemy, if I may steal their language. So let us deal with this enemy with Art and not blows. Let us look to the poets.
What fiction has been weaved around such dark things?
Well, when I think of the dark side, I can only think of one poet off-hand — the degenerate, misanthropic drunk, Charles Bukowski.
As much as he engaged in the dark-side himself, he was also a child of it, a victim traumatized by it, a domestic soldier who thought the war of all against all was pointless yet inevitable. I would like to share with you now Bukowski’s “The Genius of the Crowd.” It is a poem that encapsulates, in my mind, the rhetoric of the army on the march and the bickering of lost souls in the gutter:
“there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day
and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace
those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love
beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average
but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect
like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock
their finest art”
Ah, art. There’s that word again. What will be the art that you create or at least propagate? Will you be average or an egalitarian who respects distance and difference? This is the question that is the key to soothing the savage beast of the army on the march.
I beckon you once again to look at the stars, to behold the stardust within and without you. The way we resist the darkness is by creating new fictions and restoring that which is beautiful within our religious, civic, and commercial traditions.
I will do my part as the poet, as the mob orator, as a fool for human liberty. In that spirit, I leave you with a poem of my own, but in the mean time what will be your role?
How will you help bring humanity to greater heights of freedom, solidarity, and prosperity?
Sitting upon a root
Eyes to the sky
Realizing my mind
And heart in
Harmony with
All that is was will be
The light moves upon the leaves
And a voice trembles a melody
Vibrating to plucked strings
As the sun finds a new frame
Moving amongst the trees
Projecting the shadow of
Curled, short hairs grown out of my
Skin stretched upon my forearm,
Upon my body, captured by eyes
That belong to my mind’s restless union
With itself and the world
So much movement
I
Tried
But
It is impossible
To
Sit still
Existence flows and will continue
Even when you and I are gone
Yet reality will not move on
For reality
Is a dance of existence to the music of consciousness
A union that rises to fall
Witnessing the eternal
In passing snapshots until the jig is up
But do not confuse something with nothing
They do not share sides of the same coin
Nada is merely a fool’s fallback,
the dirty trick of
the fallible, fleeting mind fighting change
and trying to tell existence that it must be still.
But it is impossible to sit still
The only possibility is movement
And for you and I this means
We only choose how to move
Yet too many of us are trying to create the phenomenon of movement itself,
Trying to stop the heavens and the earth for the sake of certainty and security
Soothing the savage beast of our fallibility
Much like the peoples of old
By placing it in many sacred forms
Upon a hilltop mountain.
But I say come down from the mountain
Sit upon a root
And witness the eternal all around and within as your music plays