Arts of the Beautiful: Part II

This is a continuation of my post Arts of the Beautiful: here's Part I. In that post we noted four marks required by our interlocutor in a work of art:

1. The work must require skill.
2. The work must represent an object from nature.
3. The work must evoke an emotion.
4. The work must refer to something.

So far we've considered only the first mark. After discussing the other three, we shall, as promised, mount a (necessarily unsatisfactory) defense of the work of Paul Klee.

Whistler's Mother?

Arrangement in Gray and Black

In the introduction to Arts of the Beautiful, Etienne Gilson ponders an illustrative example, James McNiell Whistler's Arrangement in Gray and Black, popularly known as Whistler's Mother. He quotes a reference to it in an essay published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This essay, after pointing out that the purpose of the painting is more than merely to produce a likeness, goes on to assert that its real subject is a certain mood which the image presumably evokes in the viewer.

Gilson observes that this interpretation equally well ignores the evidence given in the painting's title, which would seem to indicate that the artist's purpose was to produce an arrangement in gray and black. It's curious. The author of the essay (one John Canaday) rejects the popular notion that the painting is merely a representation of nature, only to call it a representation (or evocation, rather) of mood. Whereas the painter himself seems to have regarded it first and foremost as a plane surface covered with pigment so as to achieve a pleasing unity.

So these, then, are our questions: Is the primary end of art to represent (an object or an emotion)? Is art that does not represent even possible?

Les Demoiselles d'Gotham

Some time ago I saw an outraged citizen set Picasso's bull from Guernica side by side with a bull drawn by Gustave Doré, and challenge a proponent of modern art to give a good-faith argument as to why we should regard the former as anything but the deranged scrawling of a conman foisting a piece of trash on a facile public. The unstated assumption here is that the better artist produces the better bull, that is, the bull more closely approximating the immediate visual impression the cerebral cortex receives upon looking at the live animal.

Guernica. See upper left for offending bull.

This is to say that the ends of the illustrator are the same as the ends of the painter. The idea is nothing new; in centuries past there have been no lack of those who assert that, yes, a painter is nothing more and nothing less than an illustrator on a grand scale. William Blake, who here agrees closely with Mr. Wright, rails about this in his "Descriptive Catalogue" of 1809 in several places, e.g.,

As there is a class of men, whose whole delight is in the destruction of men, so there is a class of artists, whose whole art and science is fabricated for the purpose of destroying art. Who these are is soon known: "by their works ye shall know them." All who endeavour to raise up a style against Rafael, Mich. Angelo, and the Antique; those who separate Painting from Drawing; who look if a picture is well Drawn; and, if it is, immediately cry out, that it cannot be well Coloured— those are the men.

William Blake, Isaac Newton

thus referring to the tendency of critics at the time to prefer paintings with muted colors and blended forms. As he elsewhere puts it,

When Mr. B. formerly painted in oil colours his Pictures were shewn to certain painters and connoisseurs, who said that they were very admirable Drawings on canvass; but not Pictures: but they said the same of Rafael's Pictures. Mr. B. thought this the greatest of compliments, though it was meant otherwise. If losing and obliterating the outline constitutes a Picture, Mr. B. will never be so foolish as to do one.

Or again:

The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: That the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling.

Though fashions change, and "wirey" bounding lines have come and gone, what Blake is saying here is much more far-reaching than a critique of a current style. He is saying that the ends of painting are properly the same as those of "drawing," i.e., illustration, his profession. (Incidentally, Blake knew the work of the "Antique" primarily through reproductions.) In something of the same sentiment, allowing for differences in the styles opposed, Mr. Wright routinely posts pictures of scantily-clad comic book nymphets with improbable bosoms as an antidote to the non-illustrative, nonrepresentational derangement of modern abstract art. To him, one well-delineated Catwoman with heaving mammaries is better than a full Pamplona of ill-drawn Picasso bulls.

Perhaps the real question is whether painting-as-an-art has an end outside itself. For illustration is clearly a subservient art: it must submit slavishly to the subject, even when not submitting to the demands of commerce. More importantly, it mustn't call attention to itself or announce itself as an independent product. Its nature is to go with something else, generally the spoken or written word. Works that violate this fail as illustrations (as many of Blake's works do), though they may be very fine paintings. Van Eycks and Michelangelos make poor illustrations except in books of art history. Take the Ghent Altarpiece. It is, admittedly, subservient to an end beyond itself, namely, the depiction of sacred themes, but the difference is this: in possessing that brain-electrifying "gleam of beauty" and fundamental unity that mark the arts of the beautiful, it serves to focus the mind on the altar and elevate it above the mundane, doing so insofar as it is a painting in its own right.

Doré's bull may be very fine, but what his bullfight illustration lacks that Picasso's painting possesses is the gleam of beauty considered as a whole, the mark of independence and unity.

Please recall, incidentally, that I am not attempting to prove such paintings as Guernica beautiful. I am merely using them to illustrate what I mean when I say that painting and illustration are distinct arts. If you disagree with my assessment of Picasso and Doré, well, I'll not argue the point; I'm only attempting to show that a reasonable person might distinguish between their roles as makers, as a great many persons actually do, without being guilty of bad faith.*

Art and Imitation

Now, even if it be conceded that the ends of painting are not the ends of illustration, perhaps one might still hold that a primary, or perhaps the primary, end of painting is the representation or imitation of natural forms.

William Holman Hunt, The Hireling Shepherd

The Pre-Raphaelites (some of them, anyway) are famous for their meticulous attention to natural detail. Their extreme naturalism was a conscious revolt against the muted formlessness decried by Blake; they were influenced by the critic John Ruskin, whose later invective against Whistler for "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face" brought about the famous libel case that marked the decline of his reputation.

Beautiful though the detail is in such paintings, there is a tendency for the parts to fail to coalesce into a unified whole. Good examples include Hunt's Hireling Shepherd, which seems to fall into several pieces, and Millais' oddly disproportionate Sir Isumbras at the Ford with its gradually diminishing horse. It has been said that detail serves to underline a section of a painting, and that nothing but confusion is accomplished by underlining everything. Unity and abstraction have to work hand in hand to bring the painting into a coherent whole. But as soon as you grant their roles, you arrive at the question: How much abstraction is too much abstraction? Is there a limit, and, if so, what is its nature?**

Pieter Claesz, Still Life

As Whistler said, if the imitation of surface appearance were the end of art, then the photographer would be "king of artists." Or again, if mere imitation were the highest end of painting, then the Dutch still-lifes would be the pinnacle of painting. It may be countered that this misrepresents the position: many paintings, it is true, are beautiful in that they idealize their subjects, and are thus not purely naturalistic, but their beauty still owes to what they represent. But this involves a confusion of categories, the categories of Art and Nature. The beauty of a flower is distinct from the beauty of a painting, even if the painting is of a flower. I have visited the Los Ranchos church, and I have seen Georgia O'Keefe's painting of it at the Amon Carter in Fort Worth, but my enjoyment of the church is distinct from my enjoyment of the painting. Again, a crystal may be very beautiful, but it is no sculpture; and a sculpture that mimicked a crystal would entrance us only until we discovered the deceit and the novelty wore off.

So suppose we grant that the beauty of a painting as such is distinct from the natural beauty of what it represents. Who can tell where the beauty of nature leaves off and the beauty of art steps in? I certainly can't. There are no hard divisions between beauty and beauty in concrete objects, but this doesn't mean that they are not distinct in principle.

Of course, there are plenty of people who are convinced that they love art, when in fact they love what is represented in art. But what harm does it do? It actually does a great deal of good, for many a painter has been able to please the lover of subjects (and thus secure patronage) while pursuing the ends of art.


Klee, Separation in the Evening

On the other hand, I submit that no painting, not even the most abstract, is entirely independent of naturalistic representation. For every painting abstracts from nature. Paul Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook, a short but profound illustrated handbook, documents how he translates sense-impressions from the physical world, which can be purely visual (line, perspective, color) or more abstract (force, energy, motion), into the terms of his art. In Paul Klee on Modern Art he puts it this way:

May I use a simile, the simile of the tree? The artist has studied this world of variety and has, we may suppose, unobtrusively found his way in it. His sense of direction has brought order into the passing stream of image and experience. This sense of direction in nature and life, this branching and spreading array, I shall compare with the root of the tree.

From the root the sap flows to the artist, flows through him, flows to his eye.

Thus he stands as the trunk of the tree.

Battered and stirred by the strength of the flow, he moulds his vision into his work.

As, in full view of the world, the crown of the tree unfolds and spreads in time and in space, so with his work.

Nobody would affirm that the tree grows its crown in the image of its root. Between above and below can be no mirrored reflection. It is obvious that different functions expanding in different elements must produce vital divergences.

But it is just the artist who at times is denied those departures from nature which his art demands. He has even been charged with incompetence and deliberate distortion.

And yet, standing at his appointed place, the trunk of the tree, he does nothing other than gather and pass on what comes to him from the depths. He neither serves nor rules—he transmits.

His position is humble. And the beauty at the crown is not his own. He is merely a channel.

One of my favorite Klee paintings, Separation in the Evening, is clearly drawn from the muted golds and blues that drape themselves across the sky soon after the sun has set. (The image above is a tad oversaturated.) The opposing vectors embody the descent of dusk and the shutting-down of the day. It recalls to me a certain evening when I was a little boy, and went with my parents to the big downtown library, and looked out onto the street from the children's section. It fills me with a strange sweet melancholy. These are subjective impressions, I know, but the point is that I am responding to a naturalistic representation in this painting just as surely as a lover of grand American landscapes might respond to a Bierstadt or a Moran. The level of abstraction is just higher, and the focus narrower.

Piet Mondrian, The Gray Tree, 1911

Many abstract artists of the early twentieth century exhibit this slow, cautious groping upward from the roots of physical reality, from imitative art to pure, almost geometric abstraction, reminiscent of parallel developments in mathematics. Mondrian is the clearest example. Place side by side a tree-painting from his early career, his middle career, and his late career, and trace the development, the reliance on nature that becomes less and less imitative, more and more certain of its ends. But, as Gilson puts it,

To speak of non-representational, non-imitative or abstract painting is not to speak of an amorphous painting. No painting is more abstract than Mondrian's, but this geometric painting is also the most formal of all. Like formal logic itself, it is form without content. [Forms and Substances in the Arts]

Each artist must follow his own path, as Klee said, and nothing can be rushed. But the drive is in every true artist.

Andrew Wyeth, Christina's World

On the other hand, even artists who never move beyond representation abstract from nature in their own ways. Georgia O'Keefe, best known for her flower paintings, insisted that she be known as an abstract artist. Andrew Wyeth made much the same claim.

Painters and sculptors find in objects which they imitate an always-ready outlet for their urge to make. Still, the true artist does not make in order to imitate; he imitates in order to make. Imitation is the first step on the way to creation. [Arts of the Beautiful]

It is interesting, incidentally, that as soon as photography stepped in to assume one of the roles traditionally filled by painting, there began a prolonged drift into greater and greater abstraction, as though painting had been set free to pursue its own ends.


William Morris
Acanthus wallpaper

One last point. Our interlocutor argues that "geometrical" paintings may be very pretty decoration, like wallpaper or tile, but are not truly paintings. As I replied to him, and repeat here, the difference is that decorative work is not meant to be viewed as a whole. Wallpaper, for instance, represents a pattern that is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. If a painting were merely to reproduce such a pattern as far as finite bounds allow, then it would be a poor painting indeed. There would be no sense of unity or completeness, which means that no gleam of beauty such as a true work of art reflects would be possible. There could be no recognition, no "aha." Not so with even the most abstract works of Mondrian. They exhibit unity, completeness, balance, dynamism.

Art and Emotion

Millais, The Blind Girl

It remains to consider the assertion that art must represent or evoke emotion. I say these together, for it seems to me that the only way to know if a picture represents an emotion effectively is to see whether it communicates that emotion to oneself.

But how can a variable subjective response be used to gauge whether a painting is objectively a work of art? Beauty inheres in the object, even if different subjects may disagree about its presence, while mood inheres in the subject. Really, though, as I said before, the only emotion relevant to the question is the joy that comes with seeing a beautiful thing, and this joy may have very little to do with what is represented. The crucifixion in Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece brings me this joy, though the subject, whatever religious interpretation we may give it, fills me with horror and rebukes my soul.

Of course, many great paintings induce emotional responses, and it is in practice impossible to tell how much one's enjoyment owes to these emotions and how much to artistic beauty. John Everett Millais' The Blind Girl brings me great joy, but is this owing to the visual elements or the subject? Who can say? Still, this doesn't mean that the things are not distinct in principle. Certainly I can assert that this particular picture is quite lovely in its arrangement of color and form.

The main mistake made by those who insist on a painting's having a clearly recognizable and well-delineated visual subject provoking a universal emotional response is, in my opinion, the confusion of matter and form. Much like pigment or ground, a painting's subject and emotional freight are to the art-of-the-beautiful as matter to form. Perhaps we needn't expect to find a painting without a subject of some sort, just as we needn't expect to find a painting without pigment. But these things are subservient to the form. And what is the form? Gilson gives an admirably simple definition:

A picture is a solid surface which the artist covers with colored forms whose arrangement is pleasing to the eye through the unity of the form, the harmony of the parts and the perfection of the execution. [Forms and Substances in the Arts]

This discussion anticipates our next point, that of art and communication, which we shall continue in a subsequent post: Part III.


* For the record, I don't particularly care for Picasso's cubist work, though I do admire Guernica; I greatly admire Doré and own a number of volumes of his works, including his illustrations to the Bible, Paradise Lost, the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso, and the Idylls of the King; I think Blake was an artistic and poetic genius, and I concur strongly with his taste in art; I don't think a great deal of comic-book art, though I do enjoy me a good Roy Lichtenstein now and then; when it comes to delineations of female beauty, I find the princesses in H. J. Ford's illustrations to Lang's fairy books uncommonly pretty.

** Again, for the record, I would much rather see a good Pre-Raphaelite piece than hundreds of Picassos. When I was in London once I spent hours in the Tate on multiple occasions, and didn't so much as set foot in the Tate Modern. I think The Hireling Shepherd a lovely picture, but also recognize its failure to achieve unity.

Arts of the Beautiful: Part I

This is a post I began back in August but have worked on only at long intervals. For a time I decided to abandon it, because, really, who cares what I have to say about art? But trying to figure out what people would like to see me write about has never really been the point of this blog. So here it is, in three parts, imperfect and unformed, but as good as I could make it in the given format.

 

Introduction

Some time ago I happened to disagree with a sentiment expressed by the author John C. Wright on his blog. This sentiment concerns ART, particularly PAINTING. The exchange had to do with something I've thought a great deal about and concerning which I've held, at different times, a number of conflicting opinions. But my interlocutor made it plain in no uncertain terms that he did not wish to continue the conversation, so I'm continuing it here, with myself, as a way of clarifying my views. I've written about these things before, and shall not scruple to plunder my earlier posts, so some of this will be repetition.

The ideas I here express are merely my personal opinions. Art is by nature manifold, and doesn't admit easy generalizations; I think there is plenty of room for a multiplicity of views on the subject. It's not a field in which someone can be shown to be definitively right. If you disagree with my views, I can only say that I've probably thought the way you do before, and may very well do so again.

Before I begin, I should mention that this is merely a vulgarization – or popularization, if you will – of ideas formulated by Etienne Gilson, the great Thomist philosopher, in his books Arts of the Beautiful, Forms and Substances in the Arts, and Painting and Reality. I've studied a number of Gilson's other books, including The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, and The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, though I don't pretend to be any more than a dabbler in such things. In particular, the second volume, a synthesis of Thomas' philosophy, has been to me the key to the Summa Theologica, a great deal of which I have also read.

Any modern who considers himself a follower or fanboy of Thomas Aquinas would do well to pause and at least listen before rejecting outright an argument put forward by Gilson. I don't appeal to him as an authority, mind you; I'm just conscious that many of those likely to disagree with my views would be inclined to receive his arguments with more patience than my own. Though Gilson has some appreciation for what many apparently find so ridiculously stupid as to be unworthy of comment or criticism, namely, abstract art, those whose modus operandi is to attack every aspect of modern culture will find solace in reflecting that his views are now very much out of style in the art world.

Arts of the Beautiful, by the way, was written partly as a rejoinder to Jacques Maritain's Art and Scholasticism, which I happened to encounter first. I was introduced to both authors by Thomas Merton, whose Seven Storey Mountain I read as a graduate student. Merton was very taken with Art and Scholasticism, and it apparently helped him formulate a thesis about William Blake; with Gilson, I admire the work, but find that it doesn't match the practical experience of the artist.

An Internet Debate

The exchange follows. It is lightly edited so as to match the preferences of my humble blog, with some omissions made for the sake of brevity and to avoid repetition with what comes after. Bear in mind that this is a comment thread on a blog post, a form of communication lending itself more to the generation of heat than of light.

Mr. Wright (in a comment on his blog post): Someone who looks at Picasso and sees art is a nutbag.  [This is similar to many other statements Mr. Wright has made concerning modern art.]

Me: I must confess to liking a number of Picasso pieces. His early work (e.g., his Blue Period) is, I hope, beyond dispute, but if not I can only say that some of these, e.g., The Old Guitarist, are to me quite lovely. I also like some of his cubist pieces and collages, and I think that Guernica is beautiful for its arrangement of visual elements.

     I find it helpful to keep in mind Etienne Gilson’s simple definition: "A picture is a solid surface which the artist covers with colored forms whose arrangement is pleasing to the eye through the unity of the form, the harmony of the parts and the perfection of the execution."
     I see the rise of abstract art in the twentieth century as revolt against the idea of art as imitation or art as communication, and an attempt to return to art as beauty. [...] On the other side, I see conceptual art, Dadaism, etc., as being diametrically opposed to these ends. [...] 

Mr. Wright: I would dismiss the idea of beauty divorced from natural representation as a chimera, if not a logical absurdity. It is like trying to find a bride without a woman. 

Stephen J: Does "natural representation" have to mean something that already physically exists? The patterns, shapes, symmetries and colours of a Persian rug represent no real thing other than themselves, but I find many examples of them quite beautiful; perhaps what is being "naturally represented" there are the phenomena of colour and symmetry in themselves. 

Me: I don’t see it as a chimera, because it is possible for a non-representational arrangement of colors and shapes to be beautiful. As Gilson says: "To speak of non-representational, non-imitative or abstract painting is not to speak of an amorphous painting. No painting is more abstract than Mondrian's, but this geometric painting is also the most formal of all. Like formal logic itself, it is form without content."
     I think there's a distinction to be made. A painting’s beauty as a painting is distinct from the beauty of what it represents. Otherwise a faithful photograph would be more beautiful than any painting. Take, say, Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. I've seen the painting, and I've hiked in the canyon, and found them both beautiful; but my enjoyment of one is different from my enjoyment of the other.

 

Also, as Stephen J. points out, just because a painting doesn’t look like something doesn’t mean it’s not drawn from Nature. No tree could live without its roots in the earth; but we also needn’t expect the crown of the tree to resemble the roots in a strictly photographic (or pantographic) sense. The painter abstracts from Nature – this is what goes on in the trunk of the tree. As with mathematics, some abstractions are further removed than others. 

Mr. Wright: No one here is arguing against this point [concerning abstraction from nature].
     A group of repeated pleasing colors of simple geometric shapes may be nice as decoration, but it is not art. It evokes no emotion and refers to nothing. Art requires craft. Craft means skill. 

Me: I didn’t imagine that anyone was arguing against the point. You had said that the idea of beauty divorced from natural representation is chimerical. I was therefore pointing out that even very abstract paintings – even "geometric" paintings – are drawn from Nature, hence are, in some sense, representational. So perhaps we are in agreement there.
     The paintings of Paul Klee, which are quite abstract, evoke in me very great pleasure, because they are beautiful. That is the only emotion relevant to the question. A painting that is beautiful as a painting evokes the emotion of pleasure which comes from seeing a beautiful thing made by hands.
     I would say that decorative arts, such as wallpaper or tile, differ from painting in that they are never meant to be viewed as a whole. They don't form a unity. A painting forms a unity. And when the viewer sees such a unity, and something "clicks" in his heart, and he says, yes, this is, then that is art.
     Consider music, though the comparison is perhaps dangerous, since music is a liberal art whereas painting is a servile art. There are pieces of music that tell a story, or that aim to imitate something (a thunderstorm, a typewriter), but there are plenty of pieces that do neither. To call the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor a mere string of pretty noises because it refers to nothing else is to admit that music is to be enjoyed principally for something other than its audible qualities. To lump it in with modern attempts to mock the idea of beauty through cacophony is unjust.
     Beauty is truth, and truth beauty, but the beauty of truth is not the truth of beauty. Truth and beauty are each transcendentals in their own right, and not reducible to one another. To say that art must imitate something or refer to something or communicate something is to let truth usurp the place of beauty.
     You say that art requires skill. I say that many of the great abstractionists had great skill. It was honed through years – decades, sometimes – of tutelage under Nature. They mastered the technical virtuosity that allows the craftsman to imitate what he sees. You can see this in their early work. But their artistic skill lay foremost in the fitting arrangement of color and form. They each moved on to abstract various elements from Nature in varying degrees. In the end someone who has no taste for such things might call their works facile. The Nazis did, when they showed Klee’s work alongside that of the deranged. But truly, no child or lunatic could have produced Ad Parnassum.

The work of the great abstractionists of the twentieth century is a far cry from the products of modern art schools who never learned from Nature, and splatter canvas with paint, and call it art.
     To sum up, sir, I must disagree with your assessment of certain modern masters, though I respect you as always. I wish only to make the case that even a person who is not a lunatic, a fool, or a knave might revere such works.

Mr. Wright: You sound very reasonable, but then I looked up the works of Paul Klee, and they were so abominably ugly and deranged that I admit the gulf between us can never be crossed. Artistically, it is the same as trying to reason out the sound of one hand clapping: you are looking at something meant to hinder the ability to admire art, to blind the eye and benumb the brain. It is garbage, pure and simple, and even simple drawings by comic book artists or commercial artists doing magazine covers show far more skill, sanity, proportion, color, composition, and execution.
     It is as random as the image in a kaleidoscope. The images in a kaleidoscope of necessity are colorful and show a radial symmetry. But art, if it is truly art, cannot be produced at random. Anything produced at random is random.

Me: I can only say that I don’t think them abominably ugly, or deranged, or garbage, and I haven’t found that they hinder my ability to admire art, or blind my eye, or benumb my brain. They are not random. They were painted with an eye toward beauty. This is apparent in their composition and use of color, though you are, it seems, insensible to it. I enjoy them much as I enjoy certain symphonies. I was not trained to do so. No one told me I ought to be attracted to them. [...]
     If what I say sounds reasonable, then why not apply reason to argue against it? I have paid you the only compliment which I, as a Vulcan, know how to pay, which is to calmly and rationally argue with your position. In return you merely tell me that what I like is garbage, and that I am suffering from a form of insanity, and that this should be so obvious to everyone that no further comment is necessary. 

Mr. Wright: If you do not think these things are ugly, you have no ability to judge ugliness. I challenge you to find a picture that is ugly by your standards and point me to it. I doubt you can.
     I have applied reason to argue against it, and you have flatly stated that you do not accept the conclusion. Why do you vainly tell me to ignore the evidence of my eyes, which I trust, and believe the conclusions of your judgment, which even the limited experience of this exchange proves is execrable.
     Had you pointed me to some painting that was merely odd or incomprehensible to me, my reaction would be different. I could continue to give you the benefit of the doubt. Instead you have pointed me to the most absurd, ghastly, and disproportion bits of ugly lunacy imaginable, pieces that make me physically sick to look at, and call them good work.
     I did not merely dismiss you argument with an insult, as you claim, but gave you my reasons, which concern proportion, perspective, representation, symmetry, and skill of craftsmanship.
     I am an artist. I know what art is because I can do it. I also know when I am looking at something far better than I do because I lack the skill, and I can see the garbage you like and I know I could draw as well with my left foot after my foot was run over by a tractor and I was pumped so full of painkillers that the lower half of my brain was sloshing.
     It is also obvious that no further comment is needed. Why do you think words can make me see beauty where there is nothing but filth?

Let me first point out that we are at cross purposes here toward the end, for it was not my intention to argue for the beauty of any particular artist's works. Such arguments can be made, of course, but they will never be wholly satisfactory, because, however it scandalizes critics and pedants, there is an element of the subjective in all judgments concerning beauty. The field doesn't admit of axiomatization; "rules" of composition are of necessity ad hoc.

My only point in bringing up Klee's work was that, if I, as a reasonable person, well-informed about the ends of art, could find his and Picasso's paintings beautiful and worthy of being called art, then it is false to say that someone who thinks that Picasso is art is a "nutbag" or a "lunatic." I was only providing a counterexample to the general statement; the counterexample is myself, not Klee or Picasso. I thought I made this clear, but perhaps I did not.

I would also like to point out that, despite claims to the contrary, our interlocutor has hardly argued against my position at all. He has chiefly argued against the beauty of certain pictures, under the impression that I was attempting to prove them beautiful, whereas I was merely citing the fact that I (and many others) find them beautiful, and that they were produced with the intent of creating beauty, which is an historical fact, however much he may dispute the success of the endeavor. Further, his argument against their beauty is to assert that they are ugly (an opinion) or merely random (an error of fact), that they violate what he considers the laws of composition (these laws are not enunciated, nor are their universal applicability established, nor in what ways the pictures violate them), and that their production was part of a conspiracy to make man call the ugly beautiful (the conspirator being an isolated artist driven out of Germany by the Nazis as a "degenerate" and a "Galician Jew").

Paul Klee's Revolt of the Viaduct:
speaking truth to power.

But again, my intent was not to convince anyone of the beauty of any work in particular. The thesis which I am putting forward is not that this or that artist produces beautiful work, but that the end of painting as an art of the beautiful is visual beauty, as opposed to the communication of ideas or emotions, or the representation of natural objects, however beautiful these things may be in themselves, and that the idea of non-representational painting is not madness or subversion of the ends of art.

Despite all of this, since the challenge was issued, I shall endeavor to justify the art of Paul Klee, or at least to indicate how it might be justified. I shall also use his paintings as illustrations, but no argument shall depend on the reader finding them beautiful.

Views of Art

Let us begin, then, by listing some of the qualities our interlocutor seems to require in a work of art:

1. The work must require skill.
2. The work must represent an object from nature.
3. The work must evoke an emotion.
4. The work must refer to something.

Perhaps he requires all of these qualities all of the time. Perhaps he requires only one or two or three at a time, depending on the work. It doesn't really matter, as we shall consider them each in turn.

Consider the first item. Our interlocutor speaks of skill, presumably because he regards the pictures I mentioned as not requiring any skill in their execution. There are, of course, many kinds of skill that go into making up a good painting, but the skill of the painter as such is not exactly the same as the skill of the draftsman. We shall return to this point presently. First, though, I'd like to discuss a related point that was not specifically mentioned, but which I think is often a cause of trouble: some viewers tend to be suspicious of works that appear to have been executed with ease.

Difficulty of execution is, of course, an accidental quality, as I assume our interlocutor would grant. Any true work of art must have cost great effort, but at the same time there is nothing logically absurd in imagining a natural virtuoso producing the Mona Lisa in a matter of hours, without any training or discipline, through a kind of artistic miracle.

Christoph Schönborn's God's Human Face: The Christ-Icon, a theological work, contains some discussion of images reputedly "not made by human hands" (acheiropoieta), such as the Image of Edessa and the print on the Shroud of Turin. There's also the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the tilma of Juan Diego, and the icon begun by Luke the Evangelist but finished by angels, which is at the Lateran Palace in Rome. Surely such images might be considered works of art on their own terms?

Very well, so difficulty and discipline are accidental, though probably humanly necessary, qualities. Now, a painting that took years to create, or required extreme precision or technical skill or highly developed powers of observation, commands interest for that reason alone, apart from its beauty. But such paintings can be ugly; and some beautiful paintings were done in a single day. In my opinion, a mere squiggle drawn by someone who has perfected his art is more beautiful than an elaborate drawing by someone who has not.*

It is true that, absent any sensibility to purely visual beauty, the viewer may suspect that a painting which appears to have been executed with ease is simply another case of the Emperor's New Clothes. However, each of the great abstractionists of the first half of the twentieth century – Picasso, say, or Klee, or Mondrian, or Matisse – spent decades honing his skills. Their great skill insofar as they were artists (as opposed to draftsmen) lay in the fitting arrangement of color and form, not in trompe-l'oeil effects. As it happens, they were, in fact, accomplished draftsmen, but their true interests lay elsewhere.

Let us suppose that some of their later works were painted relatively quickly and with ease. In much the same way, an accomplished pianist makes piano-playing look easy. The tyro looks on and says, I could do that! But just let him try. And if he does try, and is pleased with his performance, then we shall know how to think of him. If he tells us that there is no difference between what the pianist produces and the noise made by a cat running down the keyboard, then we shall simply have to reply that perhaps he is not a good judge.

Mozart, as everyone knows, was a prodigy. There is a memorable scene in the movie Amadeus in which the Mozart character is dared at a masque to play upside-down. This he does, making it look no very difficult thing, to the enchantment of all. He then begins to do comic impressions of various composers. When the envious Salieri, masked as everyone else, calls out for him to do Salieri, Mozart assumes a pedantic air and proceeds to labor over the keys with a look of intense concentration, farting with dramatic flourish. This (minus the fart) is the image of the artist that the philistine respects; Mozart he would regard as a trousered ape who puts "too many notes" in his pieces.

Philistines with jackboots: Goebbels
at the Degenerate Art Exhibition.

A parlor trick the philistine often plays is to place an abstract painting side by side with a drawing by a lunatic or a child, and demand that you judge between them. This is the trick the Nazis, who were philistines with jackboots, played in their Degenerate Art Exhibition. Personally, I've never found myself unable to pass the test, though putting the reasons for my choices into words is not easy. My response to art takes place on an intuitive level. Generally, my response to a work of art is joy, the joy of seeing a beautiful thing, while my response to the drawing of a lunatic is a mixture of disgust and pity. Such judgments are subjective, and by their very nature cannot be infallible, but the one who demands that I decide between a Kandinsky and a Koko usually strikes me as having rather poor taste in such things.**

Consider that many a mathematical genius has boldly leaped to unforeseen conclusions without being able to justify themselves. Some of the greatest mathematicians in history have left such things to the pedants and textbook writers. The situation isn't perfectly analogous, of course, because in mathematics we have axioms, whereas we lack them in art. The viewer's reaction to a painting is essentially intuitive. No one can deduce from first principles that such-and-such a painting is beautiful or ugly. In the end it boils down to, "I like it," or, "I don't like it." This bothers some people. We'll return to the matter in a moment.

Incidentally, since I'm using the word "philistine" rather freely here, and it tends to be an offensive term, I should mention that I don't intend to use it in a pejorative sense.*** To me (as to Gilson) it refers to a person who is insensible to the beauty of art as art. The philistine is perhaps to be pitied for missing out on what gives so many people joy, but he is not to be despised, for it is not a moral failing. Of course, upon being called a philistine, even by implication, a person will often become extremely angry, especially if they pride themselves on their taste. So might a person who can't distinguish between red and green, and who in fact denies that there is any difference, grow angry upon being called color-blind, and show you a red picture and a green picture, and demand that you explain the difference.

"Is it modern?"

But this needn't be. There is nothing shameful in admitting oneself to be a philistine. I, for one, am a philistine as to modern dance. I've known several professionally trained practitioners of this art, and have witnessed a number of performances. I can appreciate the beauty of a human body, but, when I watch such a body swaying and gyrating and gesticulating as they generally do in modern dance, I find myself merely bemused. Even classical ballet leaves me tepid, unless, of course, I'm interested in the story or the accompanying music. Otherwise it's just a lot of people tiptoeing about. I accept that there is such an art, because people of sound judgment tell me it is so, but, for whatever reason, I am insensible to it. Now, it may be that, with some guidance, I could form my taste, and slowly come to grasp the essentials of the art, and at last truly perceive beauty in it. This isn't to say that the perception of beauty can be learned by rote. It's only to say that, like perception of truth, it must sometimes be drawn forth by a midwife.

I personally suspect that many of the people who visit museums and galleries are utterly insensible to the purely visual qualities of paintings. One person enjoys learning about the history of art and the lives of the artists and the occasions behind their paintings; another person marvels at the technical skill apparent in carefully rendered details; a third takes pleasure in viewing pictures of things he likes, such as religious images, or nature scenes, or beautiful women; a fourth likes solemn, quiet places with a transcendent purpose. And there's nothing wrong with all of that. It only becomes dangerous when the philistine arrogates to himself the right to condemn the products of a culture to which he has not been inducted. When this philistinism acquires power you get brownshirts.

To be continued in Part II and Part III...


* Our interlocutor somewhere mentions Picasso's sketch of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in tones of disdain. However, I recently saw a large print of this sketch in the office of the border-town body shop where I take my truck, which is also adorned with humorous off-color signs, a clock with hands mounted on a picture of a whitetail deer, a poster montage of the Dallas Cowboys, and an old-fashioned barber chair, so it can't be that such art appeals only to elites with warped tastes.

** Not that I'm enthusiastic about Kandinsky; there are some works that many people apparently find beauty in, but which don't strike me as being particularly attractive. Of course, an artist might deliberately strive to produce art that is indistinguishable from a lower primate's, and in this case I hope I may be excused from judgment, though I still suspect that the mark of the rational animal would be plain. But I aver that Klee and his colleagues were not so striving.
     It occurs to me that a fitting revenge might be to place a picture by a child and a picture by a lunatic (or a lower primate, or an artist) side by side before our modern art skeptic, demand that he state which is which, and label him an inhuman monster if he chooses wrongly, or a hypocrite if he refrains from judgment. (And we can certainly arrange for him to choose wrongly; even well-adjusted children can produce some pretty bizarre things!)

*** I also don't use it of any person in particular, because one never really knows what is in another person's heart or mind.

Nightcrawler

I went and watched Nightcrawler on Friday night. I was one of five in the theater, and the movie opened only a week ago, so clearly the film is not of great interest to my fellow townsmen. As a rule, I don't watch movies at the theater unless they involve explosions, space ships, giant monsters, and/or awesome stunts, but I made an exception for Nightcrawler because everyone keeps calling it "neo-noir" and comparing it to Taxi Driver, a film I greatly admire. Whether it lives up to these comparisons I'll discuss below.

The film, if you don't know, is the origin story of a "stringer," a freelance cameraman who films bloody wrecks and crimes and sells to the local news. The protagonist (Lou Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal) works his way up from a life of petty thievery of copper wire and fencing. It's Gyllenhaal's acting that really makes the movie. He's like a human gecko with his unremitting, unblinking, bug-eyed stare, dashing from shadow to shadow to get his footage and peer fascinatedly into sinks of human suffering and depravity. Skinny and pale, with glistening, glowing eyes, he reminds me of Gollum more than anything else, a nameless thing creeping out from beneath a stone.

How realistic Lou's path to success is I can't comment on, not being privy to trade secrets of the morning news. Now, I never watch the local news. It's all about pushing your buttons to get you to watch massive amounts of commercials. But despite my dislike of the industry, I'll cautiously submit that the events of Nightcrawler are preposterous. Not that that's a bad thing; I'm usually willing to suspend my disbelief if the story is good. But when a stringer sabotages his rival's van to cause a near-fatal wreck you know you've crossed from quasi-reality into fantasy or farce. Not to mention the ridiculously over-the-top footage this news show releases. Lou brazenly uses his growing importance to obtain favors from the much-older morning news director (Rene Russo) to whom he sells his footage, but (strangely) this takes place off screen. It also results in no EEOC complaints.

The film, shot mostly at night in L.A., is visually beautiful. The banal glow of nighttime traffic and corporate signage and street lighting is used to paint picture after picture with supreme artistry, and this, I suppose, is one thing that has earned the comparison with Taxi Driver. The glowing pools of light spilled into a sea of urban darkness and alienation remind me of Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks as well.

All in all, though, I find myself a bit disappointed with the movie, especially considering the high ratings it's gotten. Based on reviews, I went to the theater in the hope of finding something that really approaches noir in its pointed dialogue and exploration of the seamy underbelly of humanity. Alas, the "dialogue" was mostly dull monologue, and the depravity was flat and cartoonish.

By way of comparison, consider Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Both movies take place in the electric glare of urban night. Both feature despicable protagonists with high ambitions in media professions. In Sweet Smell, press agent Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) sinks from depth to depth in trying to ingratiate himself with the great syndicated columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). His depravity unfolds gradually, like a flower; this is where much of the interest lies.  Hunsecker himself is a monster who takes pleasure in making the elite debase themselves for his favor, to whom the rest of humanity are nothing but insects. He is a great man where Sidney is a small one, but he has one weakness: his unhealthy, creepy attachment to his younger sister.

In contrast, Lou Bloom of Nightcrawler is too flatly bad to be shocking. After he crawls out of his hole in the first minutes of the movie, nothing remains to be guessed about his character. His grasping unscrupulousness makes him a cartoon rather than a human being. He crosses no Rubicon. Sidney Falco, on the other hand, crosses line after line, at least in the viewer's estimation. And as to the differences in the scripts, Lou Bloom delivers monologues seasoned with the corporate-world clichés he's picked up from online business courses. These are supposed to be ironic and humorous. The dialogue in Sweet Smell, on the other hand, is barbed, wicked, and witty. It achieves a shocking brutality without the use of a single f-bomb.

Jules Dassin's Night and the City (1950) is another delightfully bleak and dark urban film about the self-degradation of the social climber. Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), an American club tout and conman in London, just wants "to be somebody." He's a hustler who goes from one get-rich-quick scheme after another, wearing suits one size too big (literally) and trying (usually unsuccessfully) to swagger his way though trouble. He's "an artist without an art," a phony out to make a name for himself by taking advantage of the real artists, practitioners, craftsmen, and tradesmen (honest or otherwise) with whom he is surrounded. For some reason, Mary, a nightclub singer played by the lovely Gene Tierney, is in love with him. His schemes to set himself up as a wrestling promoter blow up in his face, bringing ruin on pretty much every person he knows, and drawing him into the utmost nadir of moral abjection: betraying Mary. The last act is a frenetic all-night chase through a lurid urban underworld: he's the rabbit, and the greyhounds are in pursuit. Even his last-ditch effort to redeem himself in death fails miserably, as he's strangled by the Strangler and tossed like refuse into the Thames. Just my kind of film! The parallels with Nightcrawler are numerous, but the principal difference once again is that in Night and the City we have a thrilling descent into depravity – a narrative arc – rather than the static depiction given us by Nightcrawler.

However transgressive Hollywood types nowadays like to paint themselves, they're really too squeamish to depict true depravity. They can't have an unsympathetic protagonist without either making him out to be Robin Hood (and, thus, not unsympathetic) or else turning him into a farcical cipher. What makes Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver) so engrossing a subject is that you see his good points, and see also how isolation and alienation drive him into psychosis. He's a man who just doesn't know how to act, how to relate. You're also kept in suspense as to what his final actions will be, and the fact that he ends up a media hero instead of an assassin owes to pure chance. Louis Bloom, by contrast, has the flatness of allegory, much like Nicole Kidman's character in To Die For (1995), who's also driven by media aspirations. The comparison goes even further, for Lou subverts every person around him just as surely as Kidman's femme fatale. But To Die For is a black comedy, a farce, while Nightcrawler seems to be aiming at something else.

Sweet Smell of Success and Night and the City have protagonists who get what's coming to them. That's partly production codes, I know. But still, a film about human depravity is essentially moralistic (or else boring), and the viewer is left a bit deflated if the worm escapes without being crushed. Really it's not so much a moral requirement as a requirement of the story's logic. Even Nicole Kidman's character ends up under ice, with someone skating on her grave.

Hollywood has largely lost its ability to depict virtue, heroism, goodness. In my opinion this has more to do with unintelligent, uninspired writing and muddled characterization than lack of moral education. Unfortunately for me, it seems to have lost its ability to depict abject depravity as well.

Works & Days

In the midst of various mundane tasks, such as working toward tenure and preparing for a coming baby, I've had little opportunity to post lately, but, naturally, I've continued to write and to paint. If I didn't do these things I would swiftly find myself in the Slough of Despond. In the past I've tended to be a single-focus kind of person, and this lifestyle of getting up early, painting and/or writing, going to work (until nine p.m. a couple days out of the week), then coming home, spending time with the fam if possible, and staying up late to paint and/or write again, does not come natural to me. Somehow, though, I feel that if I were under less pressure and had more free time, I would get less done, not more.

In the midst of all of this I have found some time to read. I recently finished Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, and, surprisingly, was somewhat disappointed by it. I've read his Book of the New Sun avidly several times, and have written about it once or twice, but somehow Long Sun never really clicked with me.

For one thing, the plot moved forward at a glacial pace, reminding me of those anxiety dreams where you're about some task but nothing seems to get anywhere, and strange, irrelevant events happen for no reason at all, leading you further and further from your goal. It's written in an elliptical style – and this style is one of the things I love about Gene Wolfe – but I didn't feel like the parts really coalesced. The fourth and final volume just kind of falls apart, with long, long scenes where people ramble and ruminate and discuss and seem to forget what they were talking about, separated by scenes of action that are hinted at but not shown. The gaps get longer and longer, as though Mr. Wolfe were under contract to write four volumes but found the story stretching beyond these limits, as can easily happen.

Another thing that made it a difficult read was the constantly shifting viewpoint. Half the third volume is spent shifting to and from a party of people wandering around in dark tunnels without much happening in each scene. The book has a tremendous number of characters (there's a catalog of proper names) and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who, partly because I went a number of months between volumes two and three. The whole thing has a rather Dickensian feel, as opposed to the Melvillesque feel of New Sun. It reminded me a bit of David Copperfield or Bleak House or something like that.

The world of the Whorl is certainly an intriguing one to explore. That's what really sustained me through to the end, I think. It's a generation ship, but it's unclear how much the people inside it, who live in a Balkanized assortment of city-states, really understand or guess. The slow revelation of the Whorl's true nature is what makes the book an interesting read, but it closes without a clear resolution or elucidation, not even elliptical. New Sun closes with all lines converging upon an as-yet unrealized point; Long Sun just seems to end with a big splat. But then again, possibly I just need to read it again. It's quite possible that I'm simply missing the point.

The protagonist, Patera Silk, begins as a priest in the official pagan religion, dutifully obedient to the pantheon of AI gods that preside over the Whorl, but is enlightened and increasingly drawn to the Outsider, whose identity I'll let you guess. The details of life in his "manteion" are drawn from the life of the Catholic parish priest. Aside from the whole blood-sacrifice thing, he could be my own parish priest, who inhabits a tiny set of rooms at the back of the parish office with a temporary parochial vicar, and works with three sisters (our sibyls) who live in a house a block away and run a center that provides tutoring to at-risk students. Anyway, Silk is an interesting, charismatic character, who falls in love with and marries a shallow, unfaithful, somewhat cruel narcissist. Strange.

Mr. Wolfe's next series, The Book of the Short Sun, apparently continues the narrative to some extent, but sounds like it has a style more closely approaching that of New Sun, so I suspect I'll like it more. I've tried to find it in used bookstores, to no avail.

On the reading-books-out-loud front, I'm currently working through George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin with my kids. I always use my four-year-old daughter to gauge our books, because if she's interested then she'll soak the story up like a sponge and be able to repeat every minor detail weeks or months afterward, but if she finds it boring (which is to say, incomprehensible), then she just squirms around and makes trouble and can't recall anything afterward. Well, Princess is definitely a hit. My son is also into it. The "scary" chapters simply terrify them (naturally, I ham it up a bit), and the other night I had to spend time comforting my son as I tucked him in, because our chapter had ended with the hero, Curdie the miner boy, locked in a room with an arrow wound and a high fever. So you see, it's very real to them.

It has me thinking. I've mentioned that we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe over the summer, and both my kids loved it. My daughter remembers all these crazy little details that we haven't talked about since. And she was the White Witch for Halloween. (Obviously she wasn't going to be someone boring like Lucy or Susan.) My son was Curdie, pick-ax and all. They chose their costumes for themselves, so clearly these books in particular have made an impression.

But Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Meh. I've made it no secret that I've never cared for Prince Caspian, but Voyage was definitely one of my favorite books when growing up. The reading level is higher than Wardrobe, one might argue, but I personally don't see a great difference in difficulty. And look at Princess, which is a Victorian novel and quite wordy. (Though I cut out the annoying meta passages that address the reader, of which there are few, thankfully.) So, why exactly are Wardrobe and Princess hits, while Caspian and Voyage are not?

I'll have to ponder that one. But this I can say. My kids love a straightforward, linear story that states the facts and events simply and plainly, without cute self-referential fripperies, and they love dialogue in which people mean what they say and say what they mean, and they love curious little details and descriptions that combine the familiar with the strange, like a fire of glowing roses. Oh, and they hate being patronized.

On a wholly unrelated point, my blog is about to reach its twenty thousandth visitor. To all you loyal readers, occasional visitors, random strangers, roving bots, Ukrainian referrer spam, and the rest, my humble thanks is owed.

Clark Ashton Smith

As I mentioned recently, I've been listening to a book of Clark Ashton Smith's short stories as I paint at night. My knowledge of his stories comes chiefly from the Ballantine books (Poseidonis, Xiccarph, and Hyperborea; the fourth Ballantine volume, Zothique, is inexplicably hard to find and expensive, and I don't have a copy). Some take place in the prehistoric, Atlantean past; others in the Dying-Earth future; and still others on weird planets circling unknown suns. I've also read a number of stories at the excellent, excellent website, Eldritch Dark, which features the text of many of his stories as well as images of his drawings and sculptures, articles, bibliographies, and more.

Smith was born in California in 1893, and stayed close to home until his death in 1961. He is said to have had a fear of crowds, and never went to high school, completing his education at home instead. You can sense his self-educatedness in his writing, which exhibits an encyclopedic scope and (perhaps) shallowness, and a varied, idiosyncratic, precise use of words, ranging from a staid, journalistic prose to ironic detachment to heavy-laden verbal ornament. His wide reading and knowledge of history and mythology add a pleasant depth to his fiction. Many of his stories are really prose poems, and he achieved some fame as a poet before becoming known as a fiction writer.

He had his heyday in the period from 1929 to 1937, when he was one of the First Triumvirate of Weird Tales authors, together with the better-known H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. With the death by cancer and suicide, respectively, of these two author-friends, as well as of his parents, whom he supported through his writing endeavors, he largely ceased to write. To the best of my knowledge, no one really knows why. He married late in life, and seems a person who was fairly content with loneliness. He was generally poor, and supported himself through hard manual labor at times.

I am a great admirer of his work. My favorites in this particular collection (The Door to Saturn, the second volume of the collection put out by Night Shade Books) include the title story (a Hyperborean tale taking place largely on the superbly imagined, inhospitable ringed planet), "The Gorgon" (a George MacDonald-esque horrific encounter with mythology in a London backstreet), "The Red World of Polaris" and "A Captivity in Serpens" (long science fiction stories featuring the circumnavigating Captain Volmar and the crew of his ether-ship), and "The City of the Singing Flame" and "The Hunters from Beyond" (weird tales set – partly! – in California, and narrated by bookish pulp fantasy author "Philip Hastane," who happens to be second cousin to a middling sculptor of the grotesque).

Smith's Vathek-esque oriental pieces and Averoigne stories are less appealing to me. The stories I like best are those that take place in bizarre, surreal landscapes brooded over by cruel adepts and high priests and nightmarish yet eminently practical primeval monster-gods. But there's also something about the sheer inventiveness of the pre-Golden Age science fiction you get from the thirties; the Volmar stories exemplify this.

I identify with Smith for many reasons, including my dislike of crowds and almost paralyzing fear of personal interaction, my isolation in an insular provincial town, my self-education (for, though I have a doctorate in mathematics, I am largely self-educated – such are the vagaries of modern schools!), and my struggles with material limitations. His most well-known literary model was Poe, whose complete works I carried around in my backpack when I was a boy, but he also apparently admired George MacDonald (e.g., Lilith) and (later) Tolkien. He pursued his own lodestar, now through poetry, now prose, now painting or sculpture, all of a grotesque turn, with little regard for worldly approbation. My short fiction approaches his style more than anything else, though I feel that my pieces are both more serious and less charming. Well, everyone is different, as my mother would say.

Smith never has been extremely well known. I don't know why this should be. Perhaps he is too poetic, too insubstantial to appeal to a popular taste for plot-driven narrative. But if you have any interest at all in the idiosyncratic speculative fiction of the Weird Tales era, you'll want to take a look at Eldritch Dark.

Religion and Fantasy

Last spring I submitted a religious-themed science fiction story to a religious short-story contest. I don't usually submit to contests, and I never submit to religious markets, so this was doubly out of character. Still, the story was a speculative piece about a possible solution to a relevant bioethical issue that hasn't (so far as I know) been seriously considered yet, and perhaps rather too specialized for a more general market.

After I submitted the story I forgot about it, figuring it wasn't likely to get anywhere. So I was surprised when the editors contacted me to tell me that it had made it to the final round. Eventually it was one of the top fourteen (out of hundreds, with ten winners in the end). But when we spoke on the phone, I was informed that there were serious qualms about the story, to the effect that the thought of publishing it scared the hell out of them (well, the word they used was "heck," but I knew what they meant), and that one reader had had a very bad visceral reaction to a particularly shocking image.

Mission accomplished! Unfortunately, after some highbrow literary back-and-forth, the story was rejected. Structural problems were cited as the cause. Fair enough. How did it get as far as it did? Got me. Why was a personal interview felt to be necessary? I don't know.

Now, none of my other stories have religious themes. If anything they have philosophical themes. Religion is divisive. I suppose the same could be said for any strongly held opinion. All the same, there are plenty of religious sci-fi novels – VALIS, A Case of Conscience, and A Canticle for Leibowitz, to name a few famous ones. I'm not saying they're all necessarily friendly to traditional religion, but they at least treat it seriously and try to grapple with the issues involved, as opposed to the silly Carl Sagan, "Nightfall" approach.

So suppose I sit down to write a religious sci-fi story. Not a trite religion story that happens to take place in outer space, or a sci-fi story that happens to have an ironic genuflection thrown in, but a sci-fi story that has religion woven into its very fiber. Well, clearly speculative fiction can only be religious as such if it speculates about religious things. If you have what we might call a dogmatic religion, this involves the possibility of coming to the wrong conclusion about an issue that hasn't been settled yet, or deliberately denying or questioning some tenet that is held to be settled. And that bugs some people.

But what are the duties of the fantasist or scientifictionalist to his religion? Here I speak as what I happen to be, a Catholic. Our beliefs are clearly enunciated and organ-ized, but at the same time there's this constant outgrowth and deepening and process of maturation, or what John Henry Newman called the development of doctrine.* Sometimes an idea which was once seemingly universally rejected later becomes an article of faith. To someone interested in such things, there is a rich field for speculation. But suppose you get something wrong? Or suppose that you decide to write a story that clearly contradicts some received article? Is that bad? I think it's fair to say that a lot of people who consider themselves very religious would say, yes, it is bad.

Let's look to Tolkien, the great exemplar for Catholic fantasists. Tolkien, it is often claimed, wrote in a purely Catholic universe. This is debatable, depending on what one may mean by it. But he seems to have departed from established doctrine for literary effect on at least one occasion. In The Silmarillion it is intimated that death is the gift of Eru, the One, to Man, rather than a punishment for transgression.** In a letter he notes that this understanding of death is an Elvish myth, told from their perspective, and perhaps neither here nor there as regards the Christian myth. But he goes on to say:

I suppose a difference between this Myth and what may be perhaps called Christian mythology is this. In the latter the Fall of Man is subsequent to and a consequence (though not a necessary consequence) of the "Fall of the Angels": a rebellion of created free-will at a higher level than man; but it is not clearly held (and in many versions is not held at all) that this affected the "World" in its nature: evil was brought in from outside, by Satan. In this Myth the rebellion of created free-will precedes creation of the World (Eä); and Eä has in it, subcreatively introduced, evil, rebellions, discordant elements of its own nature already when the Let it Be was spoken. The Fall or corruption, therefore, of all things in it and all inhabitants of it, was a possibility if not inevitable.

Despite what he says regarding the divergence from Christian myth, this reminds me of the Catholic understanding of "physical evil":

[...] God freely willed to create a world "in a state of journeying" toward its ultimate perfection. In God's plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection. [CCC 310]***

For my argument, though, that's immaterial. What seems clear to me, based on Tolkien's manner, is that he was not at pains to align his secondary world with his beliefs regarding the primary world, though he plainly regarded Middle-Earth as a mythical prehistoric precursor to Europe. In fact, the various parts of The Silmarillion contain a good amount of theological speculation.

My own opinion is that a story is a literary artifact, not a profession of faith, and that an authentic religious impulse in an artist will move him to make the best work he can make, regarded as a work of art and nothing more. Of course his faith will inform it, as it must all he does, but this is not a matter of particular concern to him, and may be quite hidden to casual observers.

Consider the bee. The bee spends her days gathering nectar and making honey. It is not her concern to deliver a message, to illustrate a virtue, etc. Her task is simply to make honey, and she goes about it assiduously until she dies. In this she glorifies God, for such a honey-maker God has made her to be. Be what you are, Catherine of Siena said, and you will set the world on fire.

Further, fantasy is a kind of play. We are regular mass-goers here at Casa O., and my children have played mass since a very young age, using makeshift surplices, thuribles, candles, and the rest. Well, because they're children, they sometimes don't get it exactly right. They even introduce terms and ideas that might raise the eyebrows of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Do I correct them? Of course not. Why? Because I'm not a narrow-minded wet blanket, and I recognize that playing is a way for children to process their experiences and grow into adults. Well, we are all children in the eyes of Eru Ilúvatar.

As regards Tolkien's popularity among my co-religionists, and my own seeming propensity to be put on the Index, well, there was a time when Tolkien's works were more beloved by heavy metal bands (and by Leonard Nimoy – watch only if you hold sanity cheap!) than the would-be architects of Catholic culture. But now he stands canonized. In religious circles one hears unceasing praises of him and Dante and Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh, but what really strikes me about these authors is that they established themselves on their own merits, in the world at large, and not in a religious literary ghetto. And if they didn't now have a kind of communal Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur one suspects they'd be rejected out of hand. As Solon said to Croesus, no man can be called happy until he's dead.

It's this perceived adherence to the faith, and not literary merit, that a certain religious critic looks for. They stand diffident, reserved, careful to neither praise nor censure, until they have some kind of idea about where the author stands. They want to be certain whether the author is on their team or the other team before they commit.

Take Anne Rice. Not many years ago she returned to the Catholic Church and proceeded to write a multi-volume fictionalized life of Christ. (I don't think vampires were involved.) She actually took out ads in First Things and sent a review copy to Richard John Neuhaus, who responded with a backhanded compliment, something about how it wasn't exactly Dostoevsky but maybe people would benefit from it. Anyway, everyone lauded her. Catholic-types talked about how they'd always felt there was something special about her vampire books. I actually heard a nun speak about it in front of a group of catechumens. Then, not long after, she left the Church again, in something of a huff, and Catholic-types talked about how they'd always felt there was something not quite right about her Christ novels, something not altogether real about her conversion.

Then there's Oscar Wilde, an author I happen to admire. He experienced a deathbed conversion, so he's canonized. But if that conversion had remained unknown, or if he had lived to repudiate it, then (one suspects) certain critics wouldn't care about him except to make snarky triumphalist comments about his lifestyle.

In the end, then, the attitudes here are not far from those of the diversity-obsessed. They're primarily concerned with secondary elements, and not altogether honest in their criticism. If you're religious and just want to write then it seems you must steer your way between this Scylla and Charybdis. Or, to continue the analogy, maybe just ignore all voices as you would the Sirens.


* As a matter of fact, Newman wrote a speculative historical novel about the early Church (Callista), which I read in grad school – read it aloud to my wife, in fact, if I recall correctly – but didn't much care for. It's richly detailed, but rather too minute in its descriptions, and the characters are wooden, which isn't surprising, seeing as Newman was a great admirer of Ivanhoe. My wife adores Ivanhoe, but me, not so much. I read it in the cab of my pickup truck during lunch breaks at a warehouse job across from a brewery when I was sixteen. I enjoyed it then, but have never been able to stomach it since: it reminds me of the overpowering smell of cooking barley.

** This would seem to be tied to the idea that the men of Númenor lay down their lives voluntarily, in full possession of their faculties, rather than seek to prolong their years through dotage, and are praised for it, another idea that is problematic from a Catholic point of view.

*** It seems to me that the ideas expressed in this part of the Catechism, about physical evil, the angels and the visible world, the intrinsic goodness of each created thing, the interdependence of creatures, the beauty of creation, the hierarchy of creatures, and the cosmic sabbath-rest, form the central theme of The Book of the New Sun, another monumental Catholic work.

Night Thoughts

A few random updates.

I've written a longish short story, an homage to some of my favorite pieces from the wild and free pre-Tolkien epoch, with flavors of H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Mervyn Peake, and others. Right now it's simmering on the back burner. Maybe I'll submit it, maybe not. I hold half my stuff back. They say you're not supposed to do this, but all the stuff I've actually published contains material incorporated from stories I've deemed unsuccessful for one reason or another, so I don't feel that I'm wasting my time.

My evenings have been taken up with painting. I'm still working on my groovy Ballantine-style mass-market fantasy book cover. I've gotten into the painting stage at last. I think it's going pretty well so far, but I never can tell if the parts will coalesce in the end. As I paint, I'm listening to the audiobook of The Door to Saturn, Book 2 of a Clark Ashton Smith collection put out by Night Shade Books. The stories vary from middling to excellent, but the readings are all quite good. Smith's stories are often mordantly humorous, and the best way to achieve the proper effect when reading aloud is to adopt a rather dry, reserved manner, as most of the readers, happily, have done.

Next I'd like to do a couple of maps. I'll need one large-scale "overworld" map and one local city map, perhaps with a cut-away view to show the layered structure. Seems to me there are two kinds of maps in fantasy: those that are shaped by the story (and therefore subservient to it), and those that shape the story. The latter tend to generate bad coupon-quest stories, but not always: Orson Scott Card's Hart's Hope, which I'm fond of, apparently began as a city map.

Me, I've been drawing fantasy maps since before I started reading fantasy. My third grade teacher was into various New Age ideas. She told us stories about having personally seen flying saucers and communicated with them with her mind; she made us talk to the plants when we were on watering duty, to encourage them to grow; and, most significantly, she conducted meditation sessions in which she would sit cross-legged on her desk, rub a crystal bowl with a crystal rod, and narrate a sequence of events beginning with a giant egg that was also a house and had our name on it. The egg-country took on a life of its own in my mind, and it wasn't long before I was peopling the land and drawing maps of it. These were always contour maps, and used standard map symbols, with a legend and a compass rose, as my dad had recently taught me map-reading and orientation.

So it should go without saying that the maps in Tolkien's books were a big draw when I encountered them in high school. The map in The Lord of the Rings is definitely the first kind of map, the kind shaped by the story, a literary artifact, as is apparent from his correspondence. What gets you when you read LOTR is all the walking. The story takes place in plains, mountains, forests, deserts, swamps; there is only one city to speak of, and it's a compact walled fortress. The sense of space is what really made the book appeal to me. My own fantasy is rather more urban, though it certainly isn't "urban fantasy." Most of it takes place along the weedy margins of a great city. Actually, my city is little more than margin, being long and thin and all-encompassing, like Dido's stretched hide.

Much of it is inspired by my own experiences in San Antonio, where I grew up. In its slow growth, the city has reached arms around tracts of countryside and then enclosed them on the far side, so that now you have these hidden pockets of farmland or brush country surrounded on all sides by urban development. Some of these pockets are quite old. On the South Side there's an old Spanish acequia and aqueduct that still function to irrigate crops. The inner city is a strange otherworld, larger on the inside than its perimeter would seem to allow, with very old things here and there, like fossils in a prehistoric fluvial deposit. My most recent story, "Day of the Dragonfly," was prompted by a quest into its depths to find an actual fossil, an ammonite, for my little boy, who requested one for his birthday.

I worked on a land surveying crew in high school. We had to crawl or hack our way through all the forgotten nooks and crannies of the city, through the back rooms of warehouses that stank of urine, under bridges and around stagnant pools lined with rank weeds, across back lots overgrown with mesquite where people had left old cars to rust decades ago, into the foyer of Planet Hollywood on the Riverwalk. Sometimes we saw beautiful things, like a family of roosting barn owls in a short brick structure with a twisted metal roof. At other times we saw ugly things, which I'll not describe here. Once I was bitten by a dog as we crossed a series of unfenced lots, and had to be taken to a hospital, where I shared a room with a young man who'd just been savagely beaten with a baseball bat because of road rage. It was summer, with temperatures in the triple digits, and clouds of mosquitoes in the heavy humid air.

The men I worked with had a certain Dickensian eccentricity. There was one guy who would sidle up to the rear-view mirror to pop his pimples, who liked to take us to the Taco Bell where his wife's former lover worked, to gloat. There was another guy so skinny and stringy he looked like he'd been microwaved too long; he lived on peanuts and coffee, until one day he turned purple and fell over in a juniper thicket, the victim of heat stroke and exhaustion. Then there was the guy with the braid, biker mustache, and bandana, who lived with his mother, and liked to get me alone to tell me cautionary tales about his former crack habit. Another guy, a Louisiana Cajun, had a vendetta against prickly pear, which he believed sucked the moisture from the land, killing the "good" plants; every time he saw one (which was quite often) he hacked it to pieces with his machete, not reflecting, I suppose, that this is one of the ways such cacti propagate.

None of them wore seatbelts, but they would loop the belts over their shoulders so as not to get pulled over. They honked the horn and shouted lewd things at every pretty woman they saw. They lied to their superiors daily, about the pettiest of things. Once they chewed me out for emptying the trash bucket in the company dumpster, because they knew the foil wrappers would give them away – they'd been getting breakfast tacos while on the clock, which wasn't allowed.

All in all, it was dirty, oppressive work. I lived from one little touch of beauty to the next. One morning as I left the house for work I looked up in the eastern sky and saw Venus centered just above the upturned horns of a thin crescent moon. That one vision bore me through weeks of work.

Like Tolkien, I find myself deeply troubled by modern urbanization and the general speeding-up of life. But unlike him I feel that I've had to make my peace with it. I'm not an Oxford don, but an anonymous guy of very mixed ancestry stuck – permanently, it seems – in the South Texas brush country. I write to cope with it.

On a related note, one reason for my low output on this blog lately has been a serious mental disturbance. It may seem ridiculous, but this stemmed from the renovation of the house next door. You see, I live next to this big, fine house built by a great public figure of yore for his mother. Harry S Truman actually spent the night there once, supposedly. I've seen the room he stayed in. Also, as everyone within a thirty-mile radius knows, the bathroom is marble and has gold faucets, and the master bedroom is big enough to play arena football in. Our own humble domicile used to belong to the family as well, and once housed the foreman of their massive ranch.

Anyway, the house is kind of a status item, and was recently bought up by an old branch of the local gentry. (We have gentry here.) They proceeded to cut down every one of their pecan trees, trees that provided my property with as much shade as theirs. The yard is a now a gravel pit surrounded by a temporary chain-link fence. Half the bricks and siding have been cut off the building. A sheet-metal portable lies alongside my driveway. There's a constant sawing and dumping and shouting and jackhammering. It's been going on for over a month. And I haven't even ever seen the owners! They've never deigned to stop by to say, hey, we're super-rich and are going to be causing some serious disturbance in your lives for the next half-year or so. This is Texas, the Friendship State, and we just don't do things like that here. But as I said, this is the local gentry, and around here I'm regarded as singled out for a special blessing on account of my new neighbors' mere presence.

It's the trees that really get me, though. They were big, old trees, and they just hacked 'em down. Some were kind of in bad shape from the drought, granted, but certainly not all. The tree trimmer himself felt so bad for us he brought us a pizza one day (hey, we take what we can get), and, on his own time and without my asking him, took up a big brush pile I'd had in the backyard, which would have taken me days to break up and haul on my own. Now that's Texas decency. Anyway, without the trees I feel like Sam in the scouring of the Shire, but I have no mallorns to plant. I've gotten more used to it now, but for a while I felt like I was just drifting through space.

Now I'm tempted to plant a line of hackberries down the property line, and maybe build a big ugly chicken coop for my chickens up against the fence.