Better Than Caravaggio
Art is just a bunch of valiant and worthwhile attempts.
No. 140: Better Than Caravaggio
As artists, readers, and writers, we aim for the beautiful, don’t we? That seems to be the goal, the intent, the mark—to create something so true and beautiful that we know not only at an intellectual level, but in our gut, that a work comes from “the heart.”
Then it’s interesting to grapple with the fact that everything that already exists seems most beautiful of all. The world and all that populates it, us included, is perfectly beautiful without effort or intervention. It is art perfected.
Take a gander at the plants and the trees, the sky and the ocean, the sunrise and the sunset, the myriad stories and events that unfold in this fantastic drama called human life—no human creation can match that natural and unfettered and unrelenting beauty. It’s everywhere all the time and always has been and will be. Look into a telescope and see the cosmos; or into a microscope and see a cell. Both the cosmos and the cell are the artist’s greatest teacher. Even the terrible is unmatched in beauty, and I don’t mean this in a facile romantic sense—Goya’s somber gore merely hints at the awfulness humans have endured in this world, a representation rather than the thing itself: oil paint as substitute for the metallic crimson of spilt blood.
What is the greatest painting—say, a Caravaggio—beside the hundreds of thousands of masterpieces we absorb with our eyes each day? What is the film festival grand prize winner compared to the hundreds of thousands of stories playing out in the interior and exterior lives of humans around the world right now? What poetry matches the emotion of the teenage girl who’s tenderly sobbing in her bedroom at this very moment because she learned the boy she loved in fact loves her best friend?
We live in a masterpiece that cannot hold a flame to the greatest feats of man-made art. This is spectacular and not to be forgotten by way of familiarity. And yet, the art of men and women is not to be discounted, either.
Rather, this is precisely the virtue of art. The artist approaches her ideal when she makes something so true and good and beautiful that it begins to approximate that which we see, and feel, and know to be true and good and beautiful by instinct. Put another way, the artist is always aiming upwards, taking her shot at a target so high and so distant that a bullseye is impossible. Luckily, however, landing somewhere near the bullseye is. What is that great and perfect beauty? That instinct? Truth is, I don’t know. I doubt anyone does. But the implication is a gigantic one: that for art to exist, some highest good must lay out there somewhere for us to set our sights upon in the first place.
Great art let’s us taste true beauty without ever seizing it completely. That highest beauty, I think, is only experienced unsuspectingly in the course of our lives. It happens to us, but is not made or contrived as man’s art is. Whatever the case, upon realizing this, it’s hard not to simply stop what I’m doing, lay on the ground, and look up at the passing cloud formations in pure awe. It’s a challenge not to merely observe, and to also create.
Accounting for that perfection, that the archetype of the highest beauty is always swirling around me, I’ve come to realize a grievous error I’ve made in my own practice of storytelling and art-making in general.
I tend force things.
At least in the realm of human stories, what moves the narratives unfolding in our world each day is not the pushy hand of a distant God but the personalities, backgrounds, and desires of each individual person—and all of these coming together to make the mosaic of human experience. People are moved by what has happened to them, their various tendencies, and what they are striving for (or avoiding), and if all that already exists is the unequivocal model for perfect beauty and truth, what more can the writer do but conjure up a detailed, fictional person, then let them go where they will? The storywriter’s job, I think, is perhaps one-hundred-thousand-million times easier than previously suspected…
Step 1: Make a character.
Step 2: Set them free.
Too often, I’ve pushed my characters around according to what I was trying to do, or say, with a story. They were my chess pieces and I the low-ranked player. This results in something less than true beauty, because I am no heightened mind but yet another simple and flawed dude. By noticing the effortless beauty in the people and stories around me, I see that potentially all that needs to be done is to faithfully carry out the story—a fragment of a life—that might naturally follow from a given character disposition.
i.e. Not the writer’s will be done, but the character’s.
After all, how dare I, or anyone who’s erred like me, dehumanize my supposedly human—if fictional—creations? The storywriter is in a business not unlike God’s, the storywriter must trust and love their characters, which ultimately means giving them free will to move about a narrative as they will, and not as we might like them to.
I notice this in my other art practices as well. As some of you may know, I play also with documentary-type videos, and if there’s a single thing I’ve learned from this experience, it’s that people are the greatest show on earth with our adornments or add-ons. I have nothing to add, and can add nothing, to someone else. They are an infinite galaxy of intrigue with depths unknown, even to themselves. This is true of you. This is true of me. This is true, even, of the smallest flower. Even now in the act of writing—or when we read—we see this truth exemplified, for what is the experience of reading but watching an author unselfconsciously spin.
As with all things, I humbly admit this may not be golden key to the door of great art-making. But it is, to it’s credit, one attempt at understanding our unique practice taken directly from the source of sources: all that ever was, is, and will be—existence itself, that masterpiece from which every work of art humbly collects its little seeds of truth one by one.
The takeaway, in any case, is a healthy one. The burden is not on us to contrive the greatest story ever written, but simply to participate in it. If you’re looking, you’ll see. If you’re listening, you’ll hear. Even now, that story is playing out right before our eyes.
Matt, another very well realized investigation into the nature of things. It got me thinking about a quote I read some time ago in a Haruk Murakami novel, don't remember shcih one but here's the quote: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
― Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory
this quote struck me like a koan, still does. The fact is we can’t stop time and live in a hyper-realized moment of truth and beauty. The flow of time is outside our control and moments of anything must always be fleeting. In this incomprehensible, ongoing rush of reality we rely on the artist to step outside the flow and through their work give us a glimpse of this nature of reality that we can hold on to. Keep creating both for yourself and others because the truths you uncover fill us and carry us forward and we are all fortunate for the experience.