Raison D’être
From The Pen Woman, Fall 2018
By Nancy Dafoe, Central New York Branch, National Letters Chair
This essay was a finalist in the international William Faulkner/Wisdom Creative Writing competition in 2018.
What is the purpose of art? As if such an often asked, naïve question could be fully answered with a single response: a jazz musician on Royal Street in New Orleans reaching that maximal note. Ask Doreen Ketchens, jazz clarinetist and band leader, why she plays in the streets of the French Quarter when she has performed for presidents. What is it that leads her to reach for one note higher than is seemingly possible?
Question the landscape or plein air artist — standing in the bitter cold on a high hill overlooking Skaneateles Lake in New York State — what she is doing when she disguises a pink pastel beneath green grass fields. Interview the poet, composing in Union Square in San Francisco, who tucks his poem away before reciting in cadence to his heartbeat.
Although the responses are as varied as the artists, the question is valid and necessary if for no other reason than the arts have come under dangerous political attacks throughout history, even in seemingly democratic republics.
As I write, a child with dark, curly hair and wide, frightened eyes struggles to hold a mask to her face. She is a victim of Assad’s gassing of his own people, the child crying out from the top left margins of this page. On the top right margin, ghost images of a baby’s body appear, the infant beaten to death by a grown man. Fending off despair over knowledge of these and so many horrific events, I recognize rage and madness around me but must continue to attempt to make meaning.
No survey nor erudite lecture on the philosophical origins of art theory, this essay simply asks why we create. I hear my friend’s response. She has openly admitted her struggles with depression and tells me her en plein air paintings have lifted her out of those dark hours.
When I was teaching in high school, students would often demand to know why they were given literature that they considered depressing. My response was not immediate; rather, I guided them through months of the course and books, allowing them to come to the realization that the literature was salvation from, not cause of, despondency. The literature is also about cause: causing us to think about what it would be like to be in someone else’s shoes.
I would love to illustrate like my friend, Joan, who paints not an arch but arches of Ireland under which those who have passed beneath voussoir and keystone step into and out of history on Portofino Watercolor sheets. After getting lost in Joan’s arch, I turn back to this awful blank paper, only then noticing a young addict slumping in the bottom left-hand corner. I see and hear him, his dark hair matted, his words mumbled and slurred, but something about his hands, his fingers still reaching for someone, causes my eyes to well. My words gently touch the top of the young man’s head. I suspect he’s a poet, as well.
On any given day, there is an exploding airplane engine and a mother sucked halfway out the blown-out window. A Parkland surviving teenager is verbally assaulted by a coarse bully with a radio show who threatens to rape David with a “hot poker.” These grotesque invasions are a constant in our lives.
Coming in from the right side of the page, information on the fiscal recklessness of Congress giving away American wealth to the absurdly wealthiest in the land, mortgaging the future. Pushing at boundaries, tensions between a North Korean little despot and a big American one in our Oval Office stir talk of nuclear war on a scale for which there is no possible equilibrium. Entering from the bottom of the page, scared and undertrained police shoot an unarmed black man, another sacrifice to implicit but pervasive racism of this nation.
All of these events in real people’s lives and deaths swirl around my page, on this one particular day. It is not like the good guys win or justice prevails. Assaults on our senses, morality, sanity continually frame our days and nights, but we may construct, design, shape chaos and horror into something else entirely. Make meaning or take meaning and restore natural chaos of the universe, rather than that imposed by man. The transience of our joys, even our most complex thoughts, disappear with our lives, but the making of art exists. Whatever reason artists give for their acts, there is always the faint hint of immortality in the act even if not in the product.
British author Graham Greene has been quoted as stating, “Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose, or paint can manage to escape the madness, melancholia, the panic, and fear which is inherent in a human situation.” I wonder about that, as well.
Art is never merely. Even with the constraints and limitations of our fragmented schemata, something remarkable happens in the transaction to the musical note, painterly stroke, dance across the stage, the amalgam of language symbols on a page. Unlike some business transaction, however, art is not merely the product of the artist. This facility to make something new is not bound by a creator’s intentions or even materials, the aesthetic finding its independence in properties not necessarily causally directed. Interactions between reader and symbols, between audience and symphony — that synergy may be indifferent to a creator.
Generating and appreciating art in any of its myriad forms is more than delivery from “panic and fear,” although that would be reason enough to take in art. The making of art in any form is the water from which ideas spring, the source of innovation and invention, the impossible realized, the highest forms of expression of our existence, but today, and the next day, it is enough that art is present before us, around us, through us.
At the top of this sheet pressing down with great urgency and a foul-smelling weight are the heads and tails of alarming political turmoil and rampant presidential corruption on a never-seen-before scale in our national life. Whatever the eventual outcome of our national trials, there is also awareness that our nation will likely be left with horribly distended norms, severely injured institutions of our increasingly fragile democracy, as we have moved steps closer to autocracy.
But the words at the center of a folio, my art, your art, our magnificently failed attempts as well as sublime successes in creating, continue to rescue us from unreason, from ordeals and pain, the anguish of our perilous human condition. Art is raison d’être.