Issue #5 - Portrait of the Artist as a Newsletter
Artist’s Statement
On the last page of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, his narrator proclaims, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” Divorced from the rest of the book, that statement is preposterous. But when you read the book and see how he arrives there, it seems perfectly natural.
There’s quite a bit of Joyce that strikes me as a “private language for sophisticates.” I had a professor in college who said, “I need two glasses of wine before I can read Joyce.”
For example, any random passage from Finnegan’s Wake:
Yastsar! In sabre tooth and sobre saviles! Senonnevero! That he leaves nyet is my grafe. He deared me to it and he dared me do it, and bedattle I didaredonit as Cocksnark of Killtork can tell…
I read that and think Joyce must have had two bottles of wine for breakfast. Or he’s just being obtuse.
I’m not really writing about Joyce. I’ll never have the time or faculty to understand what he was doing in most of his work. But Joyce did set out to forge the uncreated conscience of his race. Joyce himself grew up in impoverished Ireland, a remnant of those who’d fled the famine. To be Irish then, especially in the shadow of Britain’s massive, sophisticated, cultural machine, was to be ashamed of being Irish. There are many ways to react to shame, but at its root, shame is hatred for people who shame us and hatred for ourselves because they might be right.
Acedia is another word for hatred. Literally, it means “without care.” Sometimes it shows up in theology as one of the seven deadly sins. The modern version is sloth, which we usually think of as laziness. But I know a lot of slothful people who are quite busy about their jobs with very little love for the work (me, anytime I sit down to grade papers written by people gnashing their teeth to a minimum word count). If that lack of love deforms an individual’s work, imagine what it does when it becomes ingrained in the culture. How would it affect the stories and art (or architecture or housing developments or food production) produced half-heartedly by that culture?
One author I read even defines acedia as “a hatred of place” or more specifically “a hatred of the gift of place.” A hatred for the gift of oneself being called into the existence one knows. A self-loathing. Shame. Take a look at the comments section of any local newspaper in the country and you’ll know that this is a universal problem.
So it could be Ireland in 1900, or desert monks in third-century Egypt, but I am writing about my little corner of the world: the Panhandle of Texas. I’m not forging any consciences out here, but if conscience means “with knowledge” then, like science teaches us, perception is necessary. I reckon the artist (or rancher or butcher or real estate developer) needs to operate with keen perception.
The first thing one learns when drawing is to develop perception. Some of that is simply a skill: can you see how lines converge on the horizon? Do you see how light affects different materials and shapes? But there’s a deeper sense of perception that must also be trained. How can we train ourselves to perceive the “dearest freshness deep down things” which lies beneath line-convergence and material?
The Aristotelian view stresses that bonds of close friendship or love (such as those that connect members of a family, or close personal friends) are extremely important in the whole business of being a good perceiver. Trusting the guidance of a friend and allowing one’s feelings to be engaged with that other person’s life and choices, one learns to see aspects of the world that one had previously missed. One’s desire to share a form of life with the friend motivates this process. (Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum, 44).
This perception, then knowledge, achieved by love has to be trained. Paul, the philosopher of apostles, provides some guidelines, “Charity envieth not, is not puffed up…Charity thinketh no evil.” This posture towards the place we exist allows us to dispense with shame and opens us to receive the gift of our neighbors and be a gift to them. If I were to draw a portrait of this person, she would be bent over, one hand in the soil, the other hand signaling the viewer to come and see what she found.
I’ll continue this line of thinking in the next issue, until then:
Drink
Two Glasses of Wine
After my college professor’s prescription, drink two glasses of wine, but I’ll add to share the other with someone. Maybe you’ll find some love in Joyce. As Bob Dylan says, “Be safe, be observant, and may God be with you.”
Hawk Lies Down with Rabbit - A Poem by Seth Wieck