So Seattle Pastor Mark Driscoll is all over the news this week. People are trashing him for all sorts of things, in particular his new book on marriage.
I could add some positive and negative things to the discussion, but who cares? In general, a lot of what Driscoll has taught over the years has been really good. Some of it’s been pretty silly but it’s not worth the effort for another person to denominate those things.
I will only say this: Mark has done little to put the brakes on his ridiculous rise to celebrity-hood. When the hype-machine came knocking, the door was open – again and again. I’m afraid the scale has finally tipped to the point that his persona is now eclipsing his message. There is only so loud you can say Jesus’ name on a website with your own name in the address bar.
This morning, in my email, I received a reminder with a list of things for faculty and staff to consider as the new semester begins. Right next to each other were these two bullets:
Instructors should proctor examinations diligently and should investigate all cases of suspected or alleged dishonesty, including plagiarism, in their classes.
These words are pretty straightforward. No stealing. No cheating. No lying. Do your own work.
Do not leave bicycles in entryways or hallways, and keep dogs out of university buildings.
Loose bikes and dogs can be obnoxious and distracting at best and dangerous to some at worst. Keep them outside. OK.
Under University’s charter, “no instruction either sectarian in religion or partisan in politics shall ever be allowed in any department of the university.”
Ah, interesting. So you can talk about religion, as long as it’s not “sectarian”. And you can talk about politics, as long as it’s not “partisan”. To do so is forbidden – no exceptions for your department.
What would a lecture on politics look like if it were not partisan? You could, perhaps, read the constitution out loud, and then a recent bill from congress and compare the language. Not a bad exercise actually. You could discuss the mechanics of the branches of government, though that would be utterly boring.
You could weight the pros and cons of the conservatives position. No wait! That could turn partisan very quickly – probably within the tone of voice of the first sentence. You could do the same with the liberal position, but how far can you go without making some (at least implicit) value judgements about the things you are discussing? Surely, there is more than one student in your class who may hold different views entirely. Do you try to represent them too? Ignore them in favor of a progressive vs. conservative dichotomy?
These sorts of discussions always flare up when religion is discussed in the modern public square. A frequent solution is to try and represent everyone and their dog equally. This leads to a wild display in the city park where you have a Nativity display next to a menorah next to a Christmas tree next to Atheist billboard next to a Wells Fargo billboard featuring Santa Clause. The next day, the city is sued for lack of a proper Hindu display. How could they be left out? Or what about reading a prayer over the loudspeaker at school? For some reason, certain fundamentalists are always campaigning to do this. Government administrators are quick to reply that, to be properly inclusive – they would have to read about 20 different prayers. Then, just maybe, it wouldn’t be “sectarian”.
The oft passed over detail is that not having ANY prayer is also making a very sectarian statement. A public square sanitized of religion is not something that occurs freely and naturally. It requires strong chemicals and harsh disinfectants, applied frequently with vigorous scrubbing.
The same is true for politics. Have the government hire teachers to talk about the government in public schools and universities. By nature, can they bite the hand that feeds them? They may think they flaunt their ability to do so, but only so much. They are already in chains held by partisans.
As Chesterton said in The Everlasting Man, regarding Christianity:
It is a stark hypocrisy to pretend that nine-tenths of the higher critics and scientific evolutionists and professors of comparative religion are in the least impartial. Why should they be impartial, what is being impartial, when the whole world is at war about whether one thing is a devouring superstition or a divine hope?
The same can be said about a thousand other topics, though not in as strong of language.
But I am not advocating war. What then is the alternative to impossibly inclusive mushy PC nonsense? Love. Fierce allegiance to truth as best as you can grasp it. Fierce selfless maximum appraisal of your neighbor (and even enemy), valuing his life and value as you do your own. This can’t be done by us – broken and petty people. But we have a forgiving model that has already done it for us. He asks us to do likewise.
This morning, NPR was blaring nothing but politics. I went channel surfing and landed on some authentic Rastafarian Reggae. They were singing about how Haile Selassie would lead us to the new Zion.
Well, just a few months ago I stood at the tomb of Rastafari at Trinity Cathederal in Addis Ababa. I can tell you that he is very much dead there in the ground. He isn’t leading anyone anywhere. Jesus the Christ, on the other hand, has an empty tomb. His life is in the present tense – as it was during man’s inception.
It turns out that Haile Selassie’s greatest legacy came via the resources he directed toward having the Bible translated and distributed to his people. Long after his tomb is full, they continue to read about the tomb that isn’t.
Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker. Simply put, you have to be there. The surprising (and probably disturbing corollary) to this is that we don’t learn much about making art from being moved by it. Making art is bound by where we are, and the experience of art we have as viewers is NOT a reliable guide to where we are. As viewers we readily experience the power of ground on which we cannot stand – yet that very experience can be so compelling that we may feel almost honor-bound to make art that recaptures that power. Or more dangerously, feel tempted to use the same techniques, the same subjects, the same symbols as appear in the work that aroused our passion – to borrow, in effect, a charge from another time and place. (p.52)
This is one of many passages where authors David Bayles and Ted Orlund communicate their philosophy of “artmaking” in their fine book Art and Fear. What we find over and over again in their position is that the key to remaining an artist has nothing to do with following the muses or chasing inspiration but in establishing steady work habits. The best way to refine your skills is to just work a lot. The best way to make a lot of good art is to just make a lot art. Sure, some of it will suck, but then some of it won’t.
Though the book deals mostly in the language of painting, the authors do make room in their discussion for sculptors, musicians, and occasionally dancers. Nearly everything they said can be applied directly to writing and even scholarly study (where my interest lies), though not all of it.
The book is short and takes a shot-gun approach to different topics. It makes it hard to blog about, so I’ll just be posting some of my favorite passages below and offering some brief comments.
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On how you can’t just borrow meaning and power from other times and places. This makes me think of neo-pagans dressing up as druids in the forest and chanting about the holly – and checking their twitter feed on their iPhone during the slow moments. Uh, no.
Today, indeed, you can find urban white artists – people who could not reliably tell a coyote from a German shepherd at a hundred feet – casually incorporating the figure of Coyote the Trickster into their work. A premise common to all such efforts is that power can be borrowed across space and time. It cannot. There’s a different between meaning that is embodied and meaning that is referenced. As someone once said, no one should wear a Greek fisherman’s hat except a Greek fisherman. (p.55)
—
On average, the younger artists tends to experiment with a large and varied range of tools and materials, while the veteran artist tends to employ a small and specific set. (p.59)
You see this with a lot of old guys. Most even. Girard, Freud, Plato, you name it. If you have a nice hammer, everything looks like a nail. Younger guys are still trying to figure out what works.
—
I really liked this passage with some conjecture about Chopin. The idea that an artist has certain things he does to keep him warmed up or push through creative lulls are laziness – this seems to be a VERY important observation and something worth applying immediately.
The discovery of useful forms is precious. Once found, they should never be abandoned from trivial reasons. It’s easy to imagine today’s art instructor cautioning Chopin that the Mazurka thing is getting a little repetitive, that the work is not progressing. Well, true, it may not have been progressing – but that’s not the issue. Writing Mazurkas may have been useful only to Chopin – as a vehicle for getting back into the work, and as a place to begin making the next piece. For most artists, making good art depends upon making lots of art, and ANY device that carries the first brushstroke to the next blank canvas has tangible, practical value. (p.61)
—
I loved this quote – especially since I have a seven-year-old daughter who loves to draw.
When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college – that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, “You mean they forget?” (p.79)
-Howard Ikemoto [A Japanese-American painter]
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Here, a professor recounts how he was able to carve out time to keep working on his art, even with lots of time-consuming academic duties.
“From the day I was hired I began cultivating a reputation with the Art Department of being sort of a flake. I found that after a year or so of losing track of my committee assignments, forgetting to answer memos and missing departmental meetings – well, after a while they just stopped asking me to do all those things.” (p.85)
I have really mixed feelings about this sort of “planned flakiness”. Clever? Yes. Christian? Not exactly. Some of my favorite and LEAST favorite professors in university did something like this. The best ones blew off the waste and reinvested in their students personally. The crappy ones blew it off and reinvested in their own self-contained hobbies.
—
Some excellent commentary here on graduate school, especially in the arts:
That prospect is daunting enough that many artists drop out before ever completing their studies; others do graduate, but then – pressed by economics – find no way to continue artmaking afterwards. And yet others prolong the death-watch by entering graduate programs. The latter approach, placed atop fifteen-odd years of already-completed education, is superfluous at best and often actually harmful to the student’s artmaking capacity. (Jerry Uelsmann refers to coaxing art from graduate students as a process of “rehabilitating the over-educated”!)
This whole scenario is a tragedy seldom addressed by academics, and even then is rarely acknowledged as a failure of the system. Watching from a safely tenured vantage point, the system instead laments the failure of the student. Poor therapists, I’m told, always blame their clients. (p.88)
If the modern university is going to survive, it needs to stop making false promises. It will not survive – at least not on near as large a scale.
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This section about over-focusing on technique rights true to me. This excerpt came after a section where he talked about how photography, for a couple decades anyway, had been taken over by folks whose chief concern was achieving a certain sort of color tone and contrast, to the ignorance of many other aspects.
An equivalent fate befell much of twentieth century symphonic music, which was seduced by arcane harmonic theory to the degree that its critical audience drifted progressively to other idioms (like jazz) that remained ground in the rhythms of the real world. (p.96)
Yes, a drive-by criticism of 12-tone atonality. But it deserves it.
—
What do you practice? What do you work toward? As a musician, I often feel limited by my technique. However, there is an easier solution to this than the composer who feels limited by lack of ideas.
While mastering a technique is difficult and time-consuming, it’s still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal – a “right answer” – than to give form to a new idea. (p.96)
This principal can be seen daily in Ph.D. dissertations and other scholarship. It’s a lot easier to recycle someone else’s work and synthesize it into a 400-page paper then to come up with your own clever idea.
—
Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique. (p.97)
This is true and also explains the appeal of much pop music that may not necessarily have proper technique. I once heard a man tell me how much he hated Sheryl Crow’s music because “she can’t sing worth crap”. Well, though I’m not a big fan, I still like some of her stuff. It’s interesting because of the ideas (the songwriting, the emotion, the Americana), not her raw singing technique. If you just want that, listen to Dawn Upshaw.
For scholars, some of their best works is often their sloppiest since it is about ideas and not footnote density.
—
G.K Chesterton is quoted (on page 101). He’s referred to as a mathematician though. Ha! Oops.
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Try, if you can, to reoccupy your own aesthetic space of a few years back, or even a few months. There is no way. You can only plunge ahead, even when that carries with it the bittersweet realization that you have already done your very best work. (p.54)
“Occupy aesthetic space” eh? Gosh, for just a sec I thought I was back to reading Kierkegaard.
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A great description here of growth. This is exciting.
It’s demonstrably true that all of us do (from time to time) experience conceptual jumps, and while ours may not affect the orbit of planets [like Newton], they markedly affect the way we engage the world around us. Study French, for instance, and you’ll likely spend the first month painstakingly translating it word by word into English to make it understandable. Then one day – voila! – you find yourself reading French without translating it, and a process that was previously enigmatic has become automatic. Or go mushroom hunting with someone who really knows mushrooms, and you’ll first endure some downright humiliating outings in which the expert finds all the mushrooms and you find none. But then at some point the world shifts, the woods magically fill – mushrooms everywhere! – and a view that was previously opaque has become transparent. (p.110)
Religious conversion is like this too.
And continuing…
For the artist, such lighting shifts are a central mechanism of change. They generate the purest form of metaphor: connections are made between unlike things, meanings from one enrich the meanings of the other, and the unlike things become inseparable. Before the leap there was light and shadow. Afterwards, objects float in a space where light and shadow are indistinguishable from the object they define.
—
This sounds a bit like “you can win with the hand you’re dealt.” It would be probably more accurate to say “you can only play with the hand you’re dealt.”
We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in – and why should any of us have more than a handful of those? The only work really worth doing – the only work you CAN do convincingly – is the work that focuses on the things you care about. To not focus on those issues is to deny the constants in your life. (p.116)
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Overall, I really liked this book. It was a lot better than “War and Art”. It’s one of those that is worth rereading again in a few years.
Tolkien illustrator Alan Lee comments in his afterward to Tales from the Perilous Realm that most of Tolkien’s work had a specific person in mind as their audience. The Hobbit, as well as pretty much all of his short stories, each had an actual child he knew who was to become the first person to hear them – read out-loud typically. This is an additional constraint. You can’t say just anything you want, you need to put it in words that particular person will understand and enjoy. You may flavor the story a certain way – maybe mix in some things you know that person will like. The result though is a more powerful piece of artwork (in this case, fiction). By forcing yourself to write for a real person (out of love, not harsh constraints) you end up producing something that is better than if you set out to write something for generic children. Too many possibilities paralyze. By narrowing your parameters, you free yourself. More of the pieces fall into place without the exertion of willful thought.
Composers did this too. Most of the famous concertos were written with a particular soloist in mind. Does this limit the piece so only that person can play it? No – anyone can still play it. It’s just as good. But it makes it easier to write. More likely to ACTUALLY get written instead of abandoned. Vaughn Williams famous Tallis Fantasia has some of the best orchestration for strings *ever*. Why? Well, I would like to suggest that it is perhaps because Ralph could focus on the arranging since the melody (and even harmony) were already taken care of. A constraint? Yes, but a freeing one.
You can apply this to art, writing, and all sorts of endeavors.
Joan Didion nailed this issue squarely (and with trademark pessimism) when she said, “What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first TWO sentences, you options are all gone.”
It’s the same for all media: the first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only THAT painting – they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined pieces into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one – and only one – possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.
-Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland
To pull together one more scrap – Singer/songwriter Jennifer Knapp (who I saw in concert a couple years ago) sings about her partner:
You’re no ball and chain, your the comfort.
I love the steady pull, I love the steady pull.
“Better a little doll maybe, then no memory of faery at all.”
The Fairy Queen tells Smith this in Tolkien’s short story Smith of Wooten Major and she’s right.
My daughter has all manner of modern toys at her disposal, but she gets by far the most milage out of her toy dragon/dinosaur “Spikey”. This, despite the fact that she has declared that “dragons aren’t real” and “dinosaurs are all dead”, this one is probably the most alive thing in our house. He hides, he seeks, he fights knights, Orcas, and other monsters. He even “roars” the melody to “Oh Come All Ye Faithful”.
Today though, he was put in a precarious position when a high toss landed him on a light-fixture shelf near the ceiling of the mall. Fortunately, I was able to get Spikey down by using a long pole used to prop up one of the fake trees, while standing on a chair, and tying my jacket to the pole as a “hook”. Whew.
Tom Shippey, in his introduction to the collection of minor Tolkien stories presented in Tales from the Perilous Realm, describes Tolkien’s writing as “time spent on details, even when they lead nowhere”. As other people have pointed out though, this is what give’s Tolkien’s work, even his light short-stories, an epic “big world” sort of feel. Every page contains hints of a larger story that we aren’t ever told. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. This gives space for our imagination to fill in a LOT of blanks – or not. It works either way.
Some people assume that the Bible authors must NOT have written this way. But I think they did. John the Apostle said that if you were to write down every thing that Jesus did, it would fill all the books in the world. The Gospel authors and the old Jewish historians knew that they were writing about a very big world – our world – the real world. The prophets weren’t even sure what they were talking about sometimes – but they knew it was, somehow, for all mankind, not just their little nation. They were not so narrow-minded as some suppose, despite their agenda. This results in a boundless potential for interesting scripture study.
St. Thomas Aquinas, G.K. Chesterton
The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis (read aloud to kids)
The Last Battle, C.S. Lewis (read aloud to kids)
The Essential Kierkegaard (anthology, most of it)
The Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton
The Hobbit, Tolkien (Read aloud to kids)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Verse translation by Tolkien
The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry
Bible Matrix, Michael Bull
The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers (again)
The Mythical Man-Month, Frederick Brooks
The Design of Design, Frederick Brooks (half-finished)
Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
What are People For?, Wendell Berry
Lives of the Saints (Brendan and Cuthbert), Anonymous and Bede
The Silmarillion, Tolkien
I am an Impure Thinker, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
The Evangelical Movement in Ethiopia, Tibebe Eshete
Defending Constantine, Peter Leithart
The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins
True Faced (multiple authors, as part of a bible study)
The Truth is the Way: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum, Christopher Ben Simpson
Parenting the Hurt Child, Gregory Peck and Regina Kupecky
Art and Fear, David Bayles and Ted Orland
Last night (the middle of the day in Africa) I received a note from the United States embassy in Addis Ababa giving us approval to travel and pick up our daughter. Hooray! I was hoping very, very much that this would happen before the end of the year. It did on the last possible day. We’ll be buying plane tickets now for the middle of January. This time, only my wife will go to pick her up while I watch the other three.
We’ve been learning Amharic together using flashcards made on her iPod with the most useful words we could find from a travel phrasebook and a larger dictionary. We are up to 340 that we know now! It’s been a lot of fun – whether it ends up being that helpful for talking to our daughter or not.
