“The Church needs artists because without art we cannot reach the world. The simple fact is that the imagination ‘gets you,’ even when your reason is completely against the idea of God. ‘Imagination communicates,’ as Arthur Danto says, ‘indefinable but inescapable truth.’ Those who read a book or listen to music expose themselves to that inescapable truth. There is a sort of schizophrenia that occurs if you are listening to Bach and you hear the glory of God and yet your mind says there is no God and there is no meaning. You are committed to believing nothing means anything and yet the music comes in and takes you over with your imagination. When you listen to great music, you can’t believe life is meaningless. Your heart knows what your mind is denying. We need Christian artists because we are never going to reach the world without great Christian art to go with great Christian talk.”
[Dr Timothy Keller]
There was an amazing series called School of Sachi on BBC a while back where some modern artists went into a church and reimagined what church art could look like. So there was a glass tear suspended from the roof filled with a dark red liquid, and there was a metal plate with a low current going through it on the floor behind the sanctuary, connected to a loudspeaker so if you step on it you heard a note, different for everyone, that makes you think you’re connected. The church used to be such a driver for art. And it can be beyond the building.
Creativity’s a great way of influencing your culture with the good and the pure and the beautiful…Seems we reinforce our culture a million times a day in every act…so to with our arting, intentionally or otherwise. It seems strange with musicians though especially that we always wanna read about what they think or do, so we buy that slipknot hoody (am I old?) or we buy the magazine…its a one way thing. We never dream of actually influencing the influencer. Its like a one way conversation. Maybe that’s the danger of being famous too fast. I’m interested in a creativity which can be two way as well, listening, talking.
A wean apparently criticised Liz Lochead for making her poems rhyme. Make something rhyme gets under your skin and convinces you of something you didn’t mean to think.
Have you tried by any other way to eff something so ineffable?
A poem is just words. And words are just grunts and moans, breaths and stops and silences- but brooding within them is a Spirit; a nebulous ghost who in the beginning brought order from chaos.
And the Spirit endows our limited contemplations with something limitless that could, imprecisely because of the paucity of expressive power in language, be called meaning. Not in a grammatical sense, which can be a distraction and we know that some great poems actually make very little sense, but something else. Something eternal that will make that poem sound just as beautiful and perhaps more so to someone who doesn’t understand the language in which it has been written and which will persist long after that language has been lost and on into eternity..
This is the difference between scientific writing, which is my day job that seeks to arrive at truth in some objective sense and so is filled with verbose syllogisms and hypothetico-deductive reasoning, and creative writing, which has no frontiers save those we erect for ourselves..
..so here’s to sounding the charge and swarming like an army across them..
I’ve been wanting to comment here, but you both know I’m with you on this…
David, I’ll check out that BBC series – thanks for the heads up! I like what you say about making it a two-way process… any ideas on how that looks in practice? It’s challenging me…
Graeme, what you said reminded me of a poem by Amena Brown, In Your Pure Light. You can read it in full here: http://iamnathlong.blogspot.co.uk/2009/12/in-your-pure-light.html.
“A cry.
A cry lies within us in the depth of a place which we cannot touch.
Waiting to escape the enclosed gates of our expression.
Something is happening inside of us, beyond what we can articulate.
So we respond. We respond to You; we respond to You Jesus.”