Live Like an Artist – Vertical Time, Comedy, Joy
I’ve talked about vertical time here before but I thought it might be a good thing to think about at this time. And how do we now as humans, some of us who happen to be creators — maintain our mental health and also our desire and ability to create. (All of which go hand in hand). It helps me to try to find my way into, and to think about how vertical time is created, made. Why do we need art? What does art give us?
From my book of the year, The Art of Resonance by Anne Bogart — “Usually we think of time as a sequence of events that happened in the past or that we want to happen in the future,” says Bogart, referring to horizontal time. She says that art helps us experience another kind of time: vertical time. It feels like “plunging a stake or dropping an anchor into the endless flow of time, thereby creating a sense of eternity in the human body.” It is a real feeling of “nowness” and being present. We feel outside time, part of a continuous present.
Adam Zagajewski in Slight Exaggeration says, that he would “like to imagine the kind of ardent reader who could spend his life between two books.” And these are the notebooks of both Simone Weil and Emil Cioran. You can admire one after the other but not both at the same time. Cioran, says Zagajewski, holds nothing “sacred, except the music of Bach, Handel, and Mozart.” We get either, “mockery or sanctity and prayer.” Cioran he says, cultivated, “a geometry of sharp angles, caustic, cutting, horizontal. You need Simone Weil for verticality.”
Here I will admit that I’ve read Simone Weil repeatedly, never Cioran. A failing, I’m sure.
I have a copy of Another Beauty by Zagajewski but the spine has cracked and I need to repair it. I don’t want to delve into it too much until I’ve done so but it does open at a story about looking at the Vermeers in the National Gallery in Washington. A man, about forty, an American, says to him with joy: “I’ve been looking at reproductions of this paintings since I was twenty, and today I’m seeing it with my own eyes for the first time. I’m sorry to bother you but I had to tell someone.” Zagajewski writes, “I can take such lack of culture any day.”
I read The Upside-Down World: Meetings with the Dutch Masters by Benjamin Moser in Rome a few years back now. That book will always be connected for me with Rome — something I love about the experience of reading. Anyway, in the book he describes the ending of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The protagonist (a writer) has read a review of a Dutch painting exhibition but he hasn’t noticed something the reviewer has noticed when he himself went to the museum, and this burns him. The View of Delft is said to be “so well painted that it was, if one looked at it by itself, like some priceless specimen of Chinese art, of a beauty that sufficed unto itself.”
From the Moser book: “He eats a few potatoes and goes to see the Vermeer.” He becomes dizzy on the museum steps and when he sees “the precious substance of the tiny patch of the yellow wall” he remarks, “That’s how I ought to have written…my last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.”
What we want, I believe, from art, is the experience of seeing the little patch of yellow wall.
“You must believe: a poem is a holy thing — a good poem, that is.”
“Remind yourself once more of the absolute holiness of your work.”
This is Theodore Roethke.
“The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.” This is Joseph Campbell.
He also guided us to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world,” and said that “We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.” And maybe that’s useful to think about right now, too. Joy and comedy are two pretty good places to be in the moment, as an antidote to the sh*tshow.
I was watching this clip on insta and the line “all living is standup comedy” really resonated for me.
Again, Roethke: “I think we could do with more style, more assonance, more élan, more verve, more animals spirits, more fun. These are not solemn matters.” He also says that the comic “is harder to achieve than the lyric; more anguishing, more exacting, more exhausting to its writer.”
I’m not sure how we’re going to get through this time but we will get through. Better to have created some art and leave that behind for context, right? This is a huge historical moment that will be studied in the year 2125. Where are you right now? What is possible? Because the goal of life, not just art, really is rapture — dropping into that eternal now.
