What is an Artist?

The word, artist, has had its meaning and value worn off by excessive use–misuse, abuse–especially in the world of popular music–“recording artist.” An artist is someone with extraordinary sensibility, uncommon sensitivity. He senses that which the most of us miss. He sees what Picasso said, “the eye of habit misses.” The artist hears the wind, the creek, the Carolina wren, the tone of voice differently than we do. She sees shapes, colors, textures, contrasts, balance, and repeated patterns that ordinary people fail to notice. The artist detects emotional states that we who are insensitive are unaware of. This kind of sensitivity is necessary before one can be an artist, but it alone is not sufficient. Many non-artists sense the same things. Psychiatric counselors, mothers and other lovers, naturalists, and just plain folks may have the same sensibility that painters, poets, sculptors, dancers, or architects have, yet lack the rest of what it takes to become an artist. An artist is a person who has the kind of mind that can give definite form to what they sense. As he walks across the barnyard listening to the simultaneous sounds of clucking chickens, the wind suddenly gusting through the cottonwoods, and the resonant baritone of the friendly farmer, it all comes together in his head as the unified melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre of a concerto for string quartet. She listens to her sobbing friend’s story of moral failure and the consequent loss of family, and involuntarily finds herself composing a stage play: the setting, characters, number of acts and scenes fall rapidly into place, along with costumes and dialogue. The drama would somewhat parallel the anguish of her friend’s story, but would not at all be a literal re-presentation of what she has heard. A poet might hear the same story and work it into a sestina-form poem. It is not that the artist has a more intelligent mind than others, rather, the artist has a mind that works in a different way, just as an accountant has a mind that works in a unique way. Again, although this kind of mind is a necessary element in the makeup of an artist, it alone is not enough. The artist is a person who has developed skill in the manipulation of some medium of communication: the fingering of the violin, piano, flute, or banjo; the handling of a paintbrush and an eye for mixing and applying pigments; the construction of sentences, the language of rhetoric, the ear for linguistic rhythm and harmony. These are only a few of the possible useful skills, but without them, a person can be sensitive to all sorts of subtleties, and be able to form in their mind a genuine work of art, yet if they cannot translate the mental image into a tangible form, they will never become an artist. On the other hand, they may have, as many popular singers, writers, and painters do, excellent skills in manipulating their chosen medium, and thus become a virtuoso. And perhaps therefore, become known as an “artist.” These three characteristics that I have named as necessary elements in the makeup of an artist are not original with me. I read these ideas somewhere almost forty years ago, and have never been able to give proper credit to the source. Meanwhile, I have bought into it. Almost completely. My memory is that the original source claimed that the possession of these three characteristics constituted a person as an artist. I take issue with this conclusion. I do concur that all three–unique sensibility, unique kind of intelligence, and skill with a medium of communication–are necessary elements in the makeup of an artist, they are not sufficient. One additional element is necessary: the person must actually produce a work of art. They must take it from the heart and mind and actually use their skill to produce. I suspect we would be surprised at how much and how great would be the art that might have been produced by those who had these three essential elements, but never gave them actual form. With some, they intended to do it, but procrastination or laziness kept it from ever being realized. Others were so overwhelmed with responsibility for their family or others that there was neither time nor energy left to pursue art. Some sensed a divine calling and made good use of these characteristics in a spiritual ministry to others. Many an artist has forsaken all sorts of responsibilities, sacrificed all sorts of values so they could devote themselves to their art. I don’t know how to judge their decision. Facing conflicting values and commitments, some chose art, others chose to ignore art. Thus, some artists, some great artists, lived with a broken soul. Some, people of character, highly respected and responsible, lived with a frustration that no one ever knew. No one can have it all.

Beginning and End

I am alive today because the United States was not at war in 1955-1957. In college, I had spent four years in the Reserve Officer Training Corps. Soon after graduation in January 1955, I spent four months at Fort Benning, Georgia in the Basic Infantry Officer School and went immediately from that into the strenuous six-weeks course at the U.S. Army Ranger School. I was on active duty as an infantry officer from April 1955 until April 1957. If I have ever had to lead a group of soldiers into combat, I and at least some of the men would have been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner because I would not have known what I was doing. I would not have understood what was going on. Nor would I have known how to go about doing the things I had spent almost five years learning to do. How do I know I would not have survived, and would have been responsibility for the death of others? Why did I not understand my part in war? I would have been leading blindly, because the entire pattern of my life, at least until I was forty-years-old, was that I never understood what was going on in life around me or life within me. No one had ever explained anything in terms of the big picture. Not even in terms of the larger picture. On the other hand, I may be misrepresenting parents and teachers. I do know that if the big picture, the meaning and relationships of things were ever presented to me, it was not in a way that caught my attention or held my interest. I was a fairly immature human for the first half of my life. Somehow I made good grades and established a reputation among teachers and peers as a very intelligent person, but although I could see and identify the trees, I was only vaguely that there was such a thing as a forest. I earned a place on a college livestock judging team that won the International Livestock Judging Contest in Chicago in 1954. I earned a commission in the U.S. Army, and in the Army Ranger School was one of the two-thirds of my class members that successfully completed the course, but I was clueless about what any of it was about. I wandered through the years lost and confused. I don’t know all the reasons behind my failure to understand, but I know that much, perhaps even most, of it can be because all my education (two master’s degrees and a doctorate) can be likened to the 1950s classic television police show, Dragnet. Each week the episode would find Sgt. Joe Friday and his partner questioning a talkative witness who took the long way around telling what they had seen. Sgt. Friday, an abrupt man of few words and limited patience, always interrupted, with his flat, uninflected voice, saying, “All we want is the facts, ma’am.” That is the way I remember schools. I was taught to learn the facts, and was good at it. I was told the facts, and I was told what to do, but no one ever talked about the “why” of things, except the authoritarian, “Because I said so.” I grew up in church, faithfully attended Sunday School, and memorized hundreds of Bible verses. I received three advanced degrees from a theological seminary. Yet, when in 1974 I was hired to teach not only philosophy, but also introductory Bible courses, I realized I didn’t know the Bible as a whole, didn’t know how it all fit together. I found myself wanting to understand in order to teach effectively. There were seven of us teaching Bible in the university. The others emphasized teaching the students all the biblical facts they could stuff in their somewhat resistant heads. Because by then I recognized the failure in my own education, I knew I had to teach the big picture, help them see how it all fit together, and what it was ultimately about. It took me a few years to get it together, but in the process I learned a new way to go about understanding. Now I could come to understand almost anything that can be understood. (I also understood that there are many things that cannot be known or understood.) To understand anything, three things must be learned: the beginning, the end, and the major steps involved in getting from one to the other. The end should be the beginning of our search for understanding. We need to learn what the goal is, the purpose, the point, what the use of it is. Now we understand the “why” of our learning all else. Next, we should attempt to find out what is behind it all, where it began, what motivates or drives our subject, where this person is coming from. If we know that the poet, Oliver Wendell Holmes, was opposed to and offended by the Calvinist theology of his day, then we are able to understand his satirical poem, “The Deacon’s Masterpiece,” which, on the surface seems to be the story of a “wonderful one-hoss shay,” but rather is a fable about the demise of Calvinism. When we know that our stoneware dishes came from clay dug from a hillside pit, we are position to understand the nature of our pottery, including its hint of earthiness. Once we know what the goal is, why something is of significance, and we know its origin, we are prepared to discover the few overarching steps or stages that lead from beginning to end. At this point, we have a framework on which to hang all the facts we might need to know. We understand the facts as parts of a whole. Now we not only know the facts, we can comprehend their meaning. The purpose–the point, the goal, the reason why--of these paragraphs is to explain what is involved in understanding anything. The starting point–the motivation, where I am coming from, the driving force for this writing–was my decades-long experience of confusion, lostness, and lack of understanding. This essay moved from where I have come from to a brief statement of the ultimate purpose of the writing. It got from one to the other by describing the development of a three-step method of understanding.

Facts or Faith?

Yet, too often, we teach the Christian faith as a body of facts that we should know and affirm. We do this not only in Sunday School classes but also in required religion classes in Christian universities and in theological seminaries. We reduce the Christian gospel to a body of objective facts that we then set out to prove scientifically. We assign priority to knowing all the relevant facts, and having certainty of their objective truth. But naked facts don’t mean anything until we link them appropriately. We must interpret the texture they form. We must add value. We must discover and illuminate the purpose of the whole. If we make the Bible our starting point, we find that it does not present us with a body of factual truths, but with a narrative story of Truth. It forms a storybook: one great, complex, overarching story which comprises a multitude of stories, parables, metaphors, and poems. All of this can be reduced to facts and their importance and truth can be debated. There may be value in this kind of study. But when we analyze it--take it apart-- we lose its life and meaning just as surely as the microscope slide of an alfalfa stem can be analyzed, but no longer flows with the life of the entire plant, root and all.

Conscience II

Most of what we do in our daily life is not controlled by law. We eat, sleep, shower, go shopping, and go to work, all with little need to be aware of any laws. When, however, we get in our motor vehicle and drive onto public roads, we are immediately subject to traffic laws. These laws regulate traffic in order to make the roads as safe as possible and to facilitate the flow of traffic. Once we get out of the vehicle, we live apart from traffic laws. Most of what we think and do in our daily lives is not controlled or regulated by our conscience. For the most part, conscience ignores the way we comb our hair, what we eat for breakfast, or how many hours we sleep at night. When we are thinking about how to pay our bills, which college to attend, what message to leave on our answering machine, or whether to play scrabble or watch a video, our conscience stays in neutral. It is only when we think about moral/ethical matters that the flashing red and blue light of our conscience lights up and the alarm goes off. Like the sight of the highway patrolman parked beside the road, the flashing conscience warns us that our thinking and its potential practice is regulated by a set of shoulds or should nots. If we are thinking logically about whether our actions would be right or wrong, our conscience is an auxiliary premise that must always be reckoned with. We can go against our conscience just as we can ignore the traffic laws, but thinking about or doing either is always risky. If we ignore the law, we risk an automobile accident or a costly traffic ticket. If we override the conscience, we will be haunted by guilt, depressed by the violation of our own self-image, and possibly be subjected to the disapproval of our closest associates. The conscience--like the traffic laws, or the rules of a game--can be set aside, but this cannot be done painlessly. And once we violate our conscience–or any other regulatory agency–it is easier to do it the second time. The conscience is malleable and can be given new shape. With time enough, it can even be erased. Of course, the person with no conscience at all–the sociopath, the person with an antisocial personality–can never be a trustworthy, socially responsible, or wise thinker. If we are to be the best thinkers, we must guard our consciences.

Conscience I

Our conscience sets some of the boundaries of our thinking and actions. It tells us when we are in danger of going out of bounds, or shouts out when we are out of bounds. Our conscience is that thing inside of us that makes us hurt when we violate our accepted–personally accepted--inner standard of thought or conduct. It threatens to hurt us if we near the margins of our standard. John Stuart Mill called it a feeling in our mind, a pain more or less severe, that arises when we violate what we believe to be our duty. A well-developed conscience is such a strong deterrent as to make almost impossible to violate it. It seems to me that the conscience is similar to, if not the same as, the “Adult” of Transactional Analysis and the “Super Ego” of Freudian thought, the voice that sets certain limits for us and threatens us with pain if we ignore those limits. For a lot of us, society–family, community, or society at large–functions as our conscience. We have learned that if we go off limits from the accepted standards of society, we suffer. Society has many kinds of sanctions to keep us within bounds, so we accept those standards because life is much more comfortable if we do. Most people seem to believe that we are all born with a conscience that tells us right from wrong. Some think the conscience is innate just as sight and haring are inborn standard equipment that humans are issued by nature. Others believe that God has placed the conscience within us. While it may be true that we are born with the awareness that there is such a thing as the distinction between right and wrong, we cannot depend on conscience to tell us what to do in particular situations and circumstances. It is not wise to advise everyone to “Let your conscience be your guide.” It depends on whom we are talking to. It is unwise because a little observation of humans in action demonstrates that the conscience is not inborn. Rather, it is acquired. Ordinarily it is acquired by the process of socialization. We take on and accept the standards that society imposes on us. We are unaware of most of this imposition. As with all socialization, it just seems perfectly natural to unquestioningly accept these standards, whatever they might be. The capacity to develop a conscience may be innate just as the capacity to speak is innate, but language does not come naturally. We acquire the language of our native community, and do the same with the conscience. However, we can learn other languages. In situations where we move and make our lifetime home within the culture of another language group, it is possible that a second language will displace our native language. Even within a given language, we can change our grammar, vocabulary, dialect or accent. The point is that the conscience is plastic; it is malleable; it can be molded, formed, reshaped.

Bible a Witness to God

I don’t believe in the Bible; I do believe in the God the Bible testifies to. The Bible is a witness, and a witness is never to be identified with that to which it testifies. The Bible is not to be worshiped. I witnessed the early morning flames that engulfed and carried skyward all of the Old Main building, except the stones themselves, at Howard Payne University in 1984. I was there. I saw it. I had taught classes in this sandstone structure that had been built in 1890. I was a witness, obviously was not the building, but I am an authority on the event. Matthew and John were witnesses of key events in the life of Jesus. There were there, saw, heard, touched, and traveled with Jesus. They wrote their testimony. They were authorities on Jesus. They were not the ones to be followed. That one, they gave witness to. So it is that Bible is not to be worshiped; it is not God. It is an authoritative witness, but it has no inherent power of its own. If we are the judge or jury in a courtroom, we are to listen carefully to all the witnesses and then are required to arrive at a judgment of what we believe to be the truth. But we find that even witnesses who have sworn to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth do not always give coherent testimony. Even as the attorneys attempt to clarify and untangle the vague language of stories and ambiguous wording that come out before the court, eye-witnesses often contradict each other or even other parts of their own testimony. The judge and/or the jury are called on to sort out all the testimony and arrive at what, in their judgment, is the truth. The Bible–the Christian Holy Scriptures–is, in my judgment, the best, in fact the authoritative, testimony to what God is about in this world, and to what the character of God seems to be. It is not, however, a consistent witness. Much of it is unclear. Much of it is contrary to other parts of the entire witness. Each one who reads it must sort, interpret, and arrive at their own judgment of its validity, value, truth, and meaning. And how do we do this? We do it by following our habitual ways of thinking, evaluating, judging, and deciding. Others do it by following their own, differing, patterns of decision-making. We do this, ordinarily, in accord with the consensus of those whose word and character we trust. Habit and consensus rule our understanding of, and thus, our relationship with God. It always is possible that we have developed bad habits, and are in consensus with the wrong crowd. We may have lived in a small and restricted life-world. Gretel Ehrlich, in her book, The Solace of Open Spaces, tells of a Wyoming rancher’s wife who did not get off her large and self-sufficient ranch for eleven years. Ehrlich writes that, after her husband died, she bought a car and began traveling this large country of ours to see what she had been missing. This anecdote is all that is told of the story, but we may be assured that after traveling beyond the wild emptiness of Wyoming, this ranch wife had acquired a much larger frame of reference and thus the likelihood of a different personal perspective on life. None of us should make dogmatic judgments about the biblical testimony until we have been exposed to a world at least a little larger than our own home pasture.

Characteristics of an Artist

The word, artist, has had its meaning and value worn off by excessive use–misuse, abuse–especially in the world of popular music–“recording artist.” An artist is someone with extraordinary sensibility, uncommon sensitivity. He senses that which the most of us miss. He sees what Picasso said, “the eye of habit misses.” The artist hears the wind, the creek, the Carolina wren, the tone of voice differently than we do. She sees shapes, colors, textures, contrasts, balance, and repeated patterns that ordinary people fail to notice. The artist detects emotional states that we who are insensitive are unaware of. This kind of sensitivity is necessary before one can be an artist, but it alone is not sufficient. Many non-artists sense the same things. Psychiatric counselors, mothers and other lovers, naturalists, and just plain folks may have the same sensibility that painters, poets, sculptors, dancers, or architects have, yet lack the rest of what it takes to become an artist. An artist is a person who has the kind of mind that can give definite form to what they sense. As he walks across the barnyard listening to the simultaneous sounds of clucking chickens, the wind suddenly gusting through the cottonwoods, and the resonant baritone of the friendly farmer, it all comes together in his head as the unified melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre of a concerto for string quartet. She listens to her sobbing friend’s story of moral failure and the consequent loss of family, and involuntarily finds herself composing a stage play: the setting, characters, number of acts and scenes fall rapidly into place, along with costumes and dialogue. The drama would somewhat parallel the anguish of her friend’s story, but would not at all be a literal re-presentation of what she has heard. A poet might hear the same story and work it into a sestina-form poem. It is not that the artist has a more intelligent mind than others, rather, the artist has a mind that works in a different way, just as an accountant has a mind that works in a unique way. Again, although this kind of mind is a necessary element in the makeup of an artist, it alone is not enough. The artist is a person who has developed skill in the manipulation of some medium of communication: the fingering of the violin, piano, flute, or banjo; the handling of a paintbrush and an eye for mixing and applying pigments; the construction of sentences, the language of rhetoric, the ear for linguistic rhythm and harmony. These are only a few of the possible useful skills, but without them, a person can be sensitive to all sorts of subtleties, and be able to form in their mind a genuine work of art, yet if they cannot translate the mental image into a tangible form, they will never become an artist. On the other hand, they may have, as many popular singers, writers, and painters do, excellent skills in manipulating their chosen medium, and thus become a virtuoso. And perhaps therefore, become known as an “artist.” These three characteristics that I have named as necessary elements in the makeup of an artist are not original with me. I read these ideas somewhere almost forty years ago, and have never been able to give proper credit to the source. Meanwhile, I have bought into it. Almost completely. My memory is that the original source claimed that the possession of these three characteristics constituted a person as an artist. I take issue with this conclusion. I do concur that all three–unique sensibility, unique kind of intelligence, and skill with a medium of communication–are necessary elements in the makeup of an artist, they are not sufficient. One additional element is necessary: the person must actually produce a work of art. They must take it from the heart and mind and actually use their skill to produce. I suspect we would be surprised at how much and how great would be the art that might have been produced by those who had these three essential elements, but never gave them actual form. With some, they intended to do it, but procrastination or laziness kept it from ever being realized. Others were so overwhelmed with responsibility for their family or others that there was neither time nor energy left to pursue art. Some sensed a divine calling and made good use of these characteristics in a spiritual ministry to others. Many an artist has forsaken all sorts of responsibilities, sacrificed all sorts of values so they could devote themselves to their art. I don’t know how to judge their decision. Facing conflicting values and commitments, some chose art, others chose to ignore art. Thus, some artists, some great artists, lived with a broken soul. Some, people of character, highly respected and responsible, lived with a frustration that no one ever knew. No one can have it all.