What is Art? (Mailbox)

What is art?

I'm switching the schedule around a bit since I've had another week that's already clocking in at 42 hours going into the weekend. (And that's not including the writing.) You may have noticed that I am posting today (Friday) with what would usually be a Sunday Short.  

Dipti asks:

Hey Chris. Try answering this: what is art? 

My reply:

Slow and over the plate, that's how I like them. Because nothing says "Sunday Shorts" like a question as low key as "what is art?"

And why can't I read this question without thinking "Baby don't hurt me...no more."

I know you probably intended this to be ironic, and that you knew exactly how difficult a question it is. But I'm a dragon; I'm going to answer it anyway.

Next stop: The Thatched Roof Cottage Land of BURNI (wait for it) NATION!

I could fill thirty pages with a treatise on the delicate relationship between form and content or the technical execution of the skill, and I could surely quote a lot of humanities professors on what they think art is (or rather what they think art isn't since that is what they tend to be infinitely more vocal about). In particular, I could focus on the elements of craft within fiction and how they work to emphasize a theme.

And at the end of it all, you wouldn't have an answer even close to what art actually is. Instead I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to show you what art is.

About ten years ago I was just going back to college to learn to write. I had had some awful criticism of my writing, and I decided that I needed some professional help with getting better. Well even an undergraduate degree in Creative Writing was going to require general education coursework, so I trucked over to my local junior college and started taking classes.

One of my first classes was a humanities class, and for one of the assignments, we had to go to the Oakland museum to look at art and write up a bit about various works. Sure we spent time in this class looking at The Mona Lisa and American Gothic and we did a quick run through impressionism and cubism, but we were also supposed to be able to think about humanities and their relationship to the culture of the time. Blah blah blah insertcollegecriticalthinkingstuffhere. So we were to go look at some modern art and artists and write up a quick impression of what they have to do with modern culture. There I was on a Saturday with my little clipboard and my lined paper going around to all the predetermined pictures to write stuff. And it's the last weekend to do the assignment, so half a dozen of my classmates are floating around as well. We were almost the only ones in the whole place. My footsteps echoed through the gallery and I could hear the guy in the opposite wing coughing.

And I saw a picture.

I don't remember the picture's name or who the artist was because at the time I didn't think much of it. I thought it was a moderately interesting piece, but there wasn't that much to it. The painting was of this elderly guy and he was sitting in the kitchen of a very, very small apartment–it looked like it might be a loft or a tiny one bedroom. I think I remember that there were sky scrapers out the windows, so it was some kind of crowded city. This guy had, in this tiny little kitchen, just dozens of caged birds. And the artist had done a really good job of making it clear that the old man was just delighted by these birds.

The weird thing was, this guy in the picture was slightly transparent. You could JUST make out the vertical line contours of the apartment and one of the birds THROUGH him.

And I looked at that picture and I wrote a blurb about it, and turned my paper in and got an A. No muss. No fuss. Bibbity bam.

And that night, I was lying in bed and I couldn't get to sleep. I couldn't get to sleep because of that fucking painting. Because I couldn't get it out of my head that the guy was slightly transparent. Like he wasn't really even a real person. Like he didn't even matter as an individual. Like all those vertical lines in his really small apartment and from the skyscrapers meant that he was in his own cage. And I imagined this old guy who couldn't get his kids to call and didn't have friends except his birds and even though they made him happy, in a lot of ways it was like he wasn't even there. Trapped and invisible.

And that's sort of what we do with the elderly in this society.

Ten years later, that picture still haunts me. Ten. Fucking. Years.  I'll be walking down the street or sitting watching Daredevil, and suddenly I will think about how people can be transparent and that picture of that man who seemed so happy––or rather trying desperately to convince himself that he was happy––but maybe wasn't really even there.

Ten years.

That's what art is.

Art isn't something I can explain in ten pages or ten thousand. It tends to have some things in common like its relationship with message and execution, but ultimately the more you try to lock down what is art, the more examples of the most breathtaking art of all time you will find outside your parameters.  Art crawls into the deep places of your soul whether you want it to or not and jumps unbidden into your mind. It might make you angry, sad, or hopeful, but it usually makes you think, and it always makes you skip a breath. Whether it is a line from Salinger, a strain of Mozart, or a smear on a cave wall from the first beings who we might have called human, it reaches across time and space and digs a barbed hook into your sense of humanity that you'll never remove.

And if I write something that someone can't help but think of a decade after they read it, I will count myself a great artist, no matter what someone with an elbow patch and a shelf full of books ever says.

The Master Will Appear

IMBD insists he was in the movie, but whenever
you ask about it, he brings up his performance
in Titus Andronicus instead.
What's up with that?

Anthony Hopkins informs us in The Mask of Zorro: “There is a saying—a very old saying—that when the student is ready, the master will appear.” Of course, for writers no mentor comes out of the shadows to teach us (no matter what Finding Forester says). We may have a great instructor (and I’ve had a couple) or we may have worked with a writer of much higher skill who has a soft spot for helping us out.

But writing is a solitary affair. We don’t do training montages until we snatch the marble. We don't do the high kick or catch the chicken. Writers don't have these kinds of mentors.

A writer’s masters are Shakespeare and Faulkner; they are Asimov, LeGuin and Orwell; they are Chaucer, Joyce, Woolf, Carver, and Oats. These masters don’t go around finding students to carry on their legacy. Their legacy is their words. They pour their soul into their craft and create a work that is a tiny piece of it, and that work becomes a training manual for those who can decode it. Writers study them carefully—paying close attention to their word choices and sentence structures—to divine their lessons.  Any student who is ready can find library walls chock full of masters all too eager to give up their secrets.

The point of that expression, outside of Hollywood tropes, is not about some serendipity of the universe dispensing masters in seeming coincidence at the perfect moment to land on the heads of students. There isn't some fate magnet that works only on true loves and masters.

The master doesn't really "appear" at all.

The point of that expression is that masters are everywhere, all around us, always, and that the moment a student is ready to learn--really ready to learn--they will actually SEE the master for the first time. When they cast aside the sense that they are too good to learn, that there is nothing more they can be taught, that they are as good as they will ever be, they will realize that people with greater skill have been there all along. Nowhere is this more true than in writing.

But a good writer--a careful writer who is practicing the art of being a writer--can take this even a step further. They can learn to “read” situations that aren’t so transparently “useful.” Knowing that a study of Shakespeare will help a writer is a no brainer, but the tougher lessons are everywhere in our pedestrian world. A conversation on the bus might give you your next main character. A terrible television show might offer you ten fantastic suggestions for what NOT to do. A LARP can be a non-stop learning bonanza if you experience it as a writer. And of course, shelves are stacked with hundreds--thousands of examples of brilliant craft. For a good student of writing, masters are literally everywhere.

Be ready.

My Highest Compliment

This is NOT my mother.
Though I often did make my mother pull her hair out.
But images on Google that are labeled for
commercial reuse are tough to find.
Especially of my mother.

I wouldn't realize it for many years, but my mother paid me my highest writing compliments way back when I was a little tyke.  She did it with flushed cheeks and clenched fists, before she grounded me for a week or banished me to my room.  Before the yelling started.  Later, she did it with pressed lips and lectures about disappointment, and I needed an Epi-pen shoved directly into my heart after an hour not to slide into blissful unconsciousness.

And now, twenty-something years later, they are among my most cherished memories.

We miss so many of the real moments of genuine praise.  They slip past us at the time and sink into the sludge of our mercurial memories and filters and blinders, and they only drift back to the surface of our thoughts on their own time and in their own way when we are quietly contemplating something completely different.  "Oh," we think, "I didn't realize at the time what that really meant and how significant it was.  And here I was just thinking about how everything is better with bacon....including a groupie threesome."

Praise, even high praise, can wash over us if it comes in the form of flattery.  Compliments are cotton candy of the praise world.  They may taste sweet (sometimes painfully so) and give you a brief swell of energy, but their effects are short lived and have an inevitable and disproportionate crash.  And a million of them can't take the place of one solid chunk of negativity.

But there are other forms of praise that are like seven grain bread with dried fruits and nuts in it.  Imitation, for example.  Imitation is like dried fruits and nuts.  Yes it is.

If my mother had said: "You can write.  This is good writing.  I bequeath you with the title of 'good writer,'" I very much doubt that decades later I would be writing an entry about it.  I probably wouldn't even remember it...maybe if it had involved a knighting ceremony with an actual sword.

I was a kid.  I cared that I was getting yelled at.  I cared that I was getting into trouble.  I cared that I was getting grounded and I (actually) didn't deserve it this time.  I burned with rage and injustice.  Of course I burned with rage and injustice when I was asked to set the table after my parents had cooked for two hours, so I can't really trust that I had the most objective feelings about things. But I never saw until YEARS later the subtext of what was going on in those moments and what my mom was telling me without ever meaning to.

"You didn't write this, Chris," she would say to me.  "Where did you copy this from?"

"I didn't," I swore (and I hadn't).  "I wrote it myself."  (And I had.)

"You couldn't have written this, honey.  It sounds like it came straight out of Cliffs notes.  Did one of your little friends' parents get them a Cliffs notes?"

If I was lucky, she made me sit down and write it again in front of her. Usually what I got for my trouble was a half-hearted concession: "well, there's clearly nothing wrong with your memory."  If I wasn't so lucky, I ended up on the business end of one of those punishments that only sounds awful when you're a kid.  (Seriously, I look FORWARD to going to my room these days.)

What I didn't realize until years later--what you've probably picked up on already--is that my mother, the English major, was having trouble discerning a teen-ager's writing from something copied out of a professional publication.

And that this event played out multiple times.

Every time she accused me of plagiarism, all I cared about was that I was going to get in trouble. Because I wasn't noticing that I was being given some of the highest praise imaginable--an inability to tell my writing from "the real thing."

Now I realize ever one of those moments was my mother telling me, without telling me, that I was good--pretty darned good.  No amount of fluffy praise ("Oh this is just so good!  You're just my little writer!") could ever, EVER take the place of any one of those knock-down-drag-out fights, and each is worth a hundred pictures stuck with magnets to the refrigerator.

I know moms are supposed to tell their kids they're awesome and everything they do is awesome.  And when kids do something artistic, moms are supposed to encourage their creativity by telling them they are simply wonderful, and they have the Midas touch.  That's one of the eight great lies moms are required by the mom statute of motherhood to tell (along with "It'll make you strong like Popeye," and "It won't hurt that much.")

Me? I'll take an accusation of plagiarism any day.  Because some twenty-five years later, I still remember it as one of the highest compliments I ever got.

The Talent To Go Forth

[Ray Bradbury passed away last night.  The news broke a few hours ago. I'm having a bit of trouble being my usual silly self today when I think of just how much our light is diminished when certain candles flicker out.]


I heard this story several years ago.  I've no idea how many chains of transmission it went through before it reached me. I've no idea its accuracy.  It seems like it can't be "true." But I like it nonetheless.

Crap.  I ended another line in "orange."
Jupiterimages/liquidlibrary/Getty 

The Talent to Go Forth  

A 19th century Russian mother does not want to find her child pursuing art. This is a terrible thing.  Russia is a hard, unmerciful land, and those without good jobs can literally freeze to death--or even worse, have to go a weekend without vodka. Art for art's sake is a concept alien to those who struggle to put a few mouthfuls of hot food into their bellies, and Bohemians quickly adjust their priorities when autumn's air first snaps. So when Nadja found her darling ten-year-old boy writing poetry, she was furious. This was not proper behavior for a little man.

She told him to stop writing poetry.  He refused.

She took his paper, later when he wrote on the walls and floor of his room, she took his writing implements.  The boy took to memorizing poems in his head and smuggled pens and pencils into his bedroom.  She forbid him to compose any more poems.  He screamed and shouted.  He cried.  He refused to stop.  He said this was his passion, and that he didn't care about a proper job.  He would never work an office or a mine, but would instead be a poet.

Well, Nadja was having none of this nonsense, of course, but she was still the young boy's mother, and his pain and suffering was her pain and suffering.  She could not callously watch his heart breaking.  (This was something she reserved for his deadbeat father.)  His tears and howling had put the tiniest of cracks into her resolve, and so, the next day, she marched the young boy to the local university to discuss the matter with the professor of literature there, who was himself a poet of no small repute.

She gathered up his sheafs of paper with his scribbled poetry from around the house, and the two of them set off early.

"Does he have talent?" she asked, thrusting the young boy's poetry towards the professor.  "He wants to be a poet, of all things.  A poet!  I will not abide this nonsense unless he has great talent.  He must be able to to feed himself and put a roof over his head.  So unless he has considerable talent, I am going to call a stop to all this nonsense."

The professor gingerly accepted the poems, and put on his reading glasses to look them over.  Of course they were terrible.  The young boy was only ten, and was barely able to read, much less write.  They had small ideas and terrible execution.  They showed no aptitude or ability whatsoever.  If anything, the young boy was far behind peers of his age when it came to writing ability.  But the professor wasn't really looking at the poetry.

He was watching the young boy.

 The boy stood rigid next to his mother, chin trembling, with fists clenched at his sides so tightly they turned purple.

The professor thumbed through a few of the poems and handed them back to the mother.  "He has a remarkable talent, ma'am.  You should allow him to continue."

And so young Alexander Pushkin was permitted to go on writing poetry.