First Blog

All Too Familiar

All the great works of art display something of the disciplines of which they are not. In sculpting, one finds in Michelangelo’s statue of David a truthful declaration about the frailty of man. A truth one could have read, in a literary work, only in a book or heard only spoken. But how could this be so? Have we noticed that when we gaze, we gaze upon truth? Who has since thought truths could be gazed upon? And does this gaze not lend sound too? Do we not seem to hear marble and stone, rock and chisel, singing along to David’s harp in refrained acclamation of his delight? In Monet one sees the impressionistic contours of a Debussy or Ravel, the impression of a far off feeling resounding in fragments at every stroke of the brush. In this phrase of music and mosaic, are we ignorant of the lyrics that sound along – the multitude of voices following every past stroke of the artist as a choir sings to the conductor’s baton? As though we could say, upon leaving its view, truthfully “I have received nothing?” And if so, is there then nothing to see or are our eyes only closed, nothing to hear with our ears calloused and deaf? The narratives of Homer and the Hebrews are stories not without accompaniment of the mightiest requiems ever heard with our eyes. The tritone chord blares unannounced in plots of betrayal; in tender poetry, the kindest nocturnes play and end in tandem. 

What is evident in the other disciplines advises the artist. They suppose, unless one can hear the music from one’s writing or see the colors of one’s plot, one fails to find beauty. So they advise: when one sits down to write, one should seek to write a painting and a melody as much as one seeks to write a literary form. Or when one composes a musical phrase, one should seek to say something truthful and seek to present something visually fair. And when one gets up to shovel the dirt, one should do it as though it were a dance.

A Lingering Beauty

For even here beauty is present too. Truth and kindness, a certain strength and sensitivity, persistence and submission, the forte and the piano, the bright glare and the dark shades, crescendo and decrescendo in accord with the metronome’s click and the rhythm of prosody. As much as there is a difference between the objects used in the disciplines, it seems as though the distinctive products peculiar to the disciplines are only shades of a single beauty. We have not got different things, but only an all too familiar longing and a lingering inability to confine it’s expression! That our lives burst with this yearning and be evinced in everything we do! A resolve to let beauty show where she will, for even the differences in disciplines fail to forbid her entrance. That we too not forbid her on account of how we live so that it might be said of us – as is said of the painting and the essay, the sculpture and the portrait – that “though he was a plumber and she was a painter, I found beauty in his life as much as in hers!”