Disguising the Truth

I am an immature artist.

This doesn't really come as a surprise to anyone who has read my stories. You all know that I need to improve my writing. But the reasoning behind my confession has very little to do with the quality of my work; in fact, even if I attain a certain level of skillful prose, eloquent turns of phrase, and profound insights into the nature of reality, my art will always remain immature if I continue on my present course.

Best of all, it occurred to me while roofing.

Hauling loads of shingles up the roof, getting grit under my fingernails, and sweating rivers of sweat--not exactly the typical setting for an artistic epiphany. Yet while I tore off the old shingles from the slant of the roof, I constructed a brief theodicy. Consider the act of tearing off shingles: For a roofing team, it's necessary and good. For a random person, it's usually called vandalism. So, it's not that it's right or wrong, but rather that the action's morality is contingent on authority.

From there I started thinking about God's inherent authority, and thus His inherent arbitration of right and wrong, not as standards, but as extensions of His character. Then it struck me: I was more concerned about the ideas and concepts of the roof than the roof itself. I had missed its reality in the pursuit of its supposed metareality. Not to mention that I had left the rest of the roofing team to toil on without me!

This physical, concrete reality is not superior to an amorphous metaphysical system of truth or forms, however. That is most emphatically not what I'm saying. Nonetheless, if we divorce the symbolism from its reality, then we have, essentially, a disembodied bit of heady theory (not to be confused with a disembodied head, of course). I want to reconnect the two, not advocate one at the expense of the other.

It's part of the sacramental view of reality that Jeremiah referenced in his exceptional blog last month. For everyone that missed it, the blog (and the accompanying link) provided an excellent and thought-provoking discussion. But at the time I didn't really understand the significance of what was said. Until my experience on the roof, I failed to grasp its import.

My work on the roof, which has continued into this week due to inclement weather, has given me considerable time for rumination. After careful consideration I have come up with the following points:

1) My art is immature because of its cowardly subject matter. I am afraid to tackle meaningful issues and significant elements of life, opting instead to write about safe topics and supposedly 'interesting' segments of life. Face it: car chases, gunfights, and alternate galaxies are more fun than cleaning the toilet. But most of us don't flee from international assassins, fight off mafia thugs, or wake up in another world; we do, however, clean the toilet. (Or so I hope.)

2) My art is immature because of my insistence on the fantastical over the real, the bizarre over the ordinary, and the mythical over the historical. For example, I have a fascination, currently, with steampunk and Gypsy culture. Any guesses as to the subject matter of my next novel? None of these are wrong, of course, but if I refuse to deal with the real, the ordinary, and the historical, then I have effectively cut myself loose from my moorings. The sea may be a marvelous place to explore, but I will want to bring along a tried and true map if I want to voyage successfully.

3) My art is immature because of my refusal to engage objects, people, and places as objects, people, and places; instead, I always turn them into symbols and emblems of a larger, somehow more mysterious reality and thus divorce them from their current concrete reality. Christians especially fall prey to this tendency--worse, they use Jesus' parables to reinforce their laziness.

(Stay tuned for more musings about the parables. My next series of blogs deals with story principles according to Christ.)

4) My art is immature because I insult my reader's intelligence on a regular basis. Instead of allowing them to draw their own conclusions and to interact with the work as a piece of art, I transform beauty into a bludgeon. This is awkward, ugly, and hardly beneficial.

Before I go any further, let me say that I do not consider immature art bad art; it simply is less refined, sophisticated, and significant than more fully developed mature art. Moreover, sometimes disguising the truth is beneficial or necessary. We often need a fresh perspective, a new insight, before we truly understand something (cf. my earlier entries about the power of fantasy and myth).

As a friend pointed out, and I completely agree, I can certainly make a fantasy story which is significant and meaningful: I can create a sort of pseudo-reality and hide real life in a fanciful package. This is an excellent and powerful form of storytelling. Currently it's the bulk of my art. But, as stated, I believe it's a halfway point, a transition phase along the way. This current stretch of the road that leads to maturity is concerned with disguising the truth to make it more palatable to my readers--and to myself.

I hope that in time, however, I'll write less fantasy/surreal pieces. I want to talk about real life without any trappings. But I know that I'm 1) not a skilled enough writer and 2) nowhere near experienced enough with The Way Things Are to say much worth saying.

Please note that the point is not that some art isn't as advanced as other art; the point is that people mature at different rates, and many people (myself included) are not ready to understand reality in a non-mediated form. We need a filter, a buffer, so that we can understand things in more manageable bits and pieces.

The most mature art has to do with reality and everyday life. But creating significant, meaningful art about real life is hard work. It's sweaty and smelly and dirty. In the end, both the process and the result are often not very attractive. But they take on their own beauty because of their fundamental authenticity: they are, for all their faults, real.


Grace and peace,
Andrew <><