Some Thoughts on Art and Existence

The trouble with existence is that it’s too much. The soul wishes that God had given us, shall we say, a less detailed world—a world of less overgrowth. For example, when my mind really gets going, when I really start thinking, it works like history. The more it goes, the more detail there is, and the less any sense can be seen in it. Detail begets detail, which obscures and chokes out the shape we seek, as honeysuckle increases and tangles while the shed wallows and goes under the burgeoning mass. The same happens when I write, as even now. Word begets word; sentence begets sentence. Writing becomes a vain attempt to catch up with and bring to a satisfactory completion the verbal profligacy. Writing sometimes seems like an arithmetic model attempting to solve an exponential process. It isn’t even so much that word begets word. It’s more like word begets twins, or quadruplets, or worse. Even now I can’t stop, satisfactorily. Oh, I can stop, and I will. But I can’t stop by having brought it to a satisfactory completion. That’s the real trouble with it. I utterly long to pursue words, sentences, existence; I long to pursue until all comes to perfect completion under one grand shape, and nothing is left to pursue. Yet I can’t do it. The more I pursue, the more I get lost; it’s all too much. I wallow and go under. There are always more words.

Here is where art comes in, though it’s a toss up whether art is more than a gloriously brave and orderly retreat against the overwhelming. As Frost said in the character of Job, “The artist in me cries out for design.” And elsewhere he wrote,

"The present

Is too much for the senses,

Too crowding, too confusing—

Too present to imagine."

As an example, the art of telling history is knowing what to include and what to leave out. Indeed, the art of every explanation is knowing when to stop.

Compare an example in another vein.

I saw a lovely ink drawing of a tree at the Sarah Scaife gallery of the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. I thought to myself, “It’s quite lovely and poignant, but it’s so ordinary a subject—a sketch of a tree. Why draw it? Why look at it?” And then it occurred to me. The drawing stops the tree in a very particular way; it stops the tree, and now gives it to us to examine. And here we have a tree, which in a forest or a meadow or a yard is far too much for us to take in. If we see a tree in any of those places, we see, as it were, but a glimpse of the tree, the barest fraction of what it was and is now and shall become. So when we see it we want to hold it still so we can get a good look at it and see it all. But the tree is in a jetstream of time; it never holds still long enough to satisfy our looking. And we have not the power to hold it still. Except in art. The drawing holds the tree still, and while I know in my mind that I’m still not going to satisfy my looking, I somehow feel that at least I’ve got a chance to look enough to see it all, or even to see all of a fraction. I feel I’ve got the time to look satisfactorily, or I would if I also could hold still. The soul sometimes longs for an Artist to hold it still.

Art then works to redeem the trouble with existence. Art takes life (actually, the barest fraction thereof), holds it still, and gives it to us to examine. Art takes all this unmanageable begetting and puts a kind of stop to it so we can try to make some sense of it. Or we could say that Art takes hold of this profusive begetting and tries to direct it to a satisfactory completion. The trouble with existence is that it’s too much: art perfects by reducing to essence. Then things have a chance at making sense. Art is a gardener. It clips the honeysuckle where necessary; the shed emerges, to be seen again.