Art as Unfinished: Why Is It Always about What’s Next? (I)
Life frustrates our ability to make art; but not so much as death.
“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” ― Oscar Wilde
The artwork is never finished, even when it is. The brush takes its last stroke, the camera its last shot, the body its final pose, and you finish. You’re pleased. Then you’re not. Every artist knows how quickly satisfaction turns to ash.
It’s always about what’s next because the ideas are never finished. Ideas plague us: ideas on how to take it further; different ideas to give it flavor; or newer ideas that are more exciting. You don’t really finish, you just keep working on it until you can’t anymore, and then you let it go. The show doesn’t go on because it’s ready, says SNL alumna Tina Fey, “it goes on because it’s 11:30.”
Why is this? Plato suggests there’s a whole world of ideas, separate from our world but from which our world derives itself; a world eternal and immutable, which we can only perceive in glimpses (the word “idea” means “I saw it”). He explains what we see in the natural world are representations, mere copies of a world beyond in which the True Form exists. Birds, for example, can be quite different from one another, but there is something that ties them together to make them all birds. This “bird idea,” after which all birds are patterned, exists in the world of ideas. Artistic vision is like this; it catches sight of something deeply significant but hard to tack down exactly.
In “Leaf by Niggle,” a short story written by the great architect of Middle Earth J.R.R. Tolkien, we follow a painter named Niggle. He was an ordinary sort of painter, and painted when he could. But there was one painting in particular that kept giving him trouble:
“It had begun with a leaf caught in the wind,”
He added to it:
“and it became a tree,”
And added and added to it:
“and the tree grew, sending out innumerable branches, and thrusting out the most fantastic roots…Then all around the Tree…a country began to open out; and there were glimpses of a forest marching over the land, and of mountains tipped with snow.”
But he also kept changing it:
“He ran up and down it, putting in a touch here, and rubbing out a patch there ... .He could not make up his mind what he thought about it.”
To make matters worse, life got in the way. Niggle kept getting pulled away by his neighbor, Parish, who routinely asked him for little favors. He really wanted to say no sometimes, and devote his time to finishing his painting; but he couldn’t help it that seeing his neighbor in need “made him uncomfortable.”
Life frustrates our dreams. Mundane tasks like working to pay the bills, raising a family, or being of service to a community makes it really hard to focus on our art. We set our intention to make progress and suddenly the week has flown by.
When we do get the chance, we’re further inhibited by our lack of skill. Our unsteady hand can’t draw what we see. It can only produce poor copies patterned after the glorious image in our minds. Even Anton Chekhov thought everything he wrote, once he had written it, displeased and bored him, while, he said, “everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me.” For Niggle, the tasks were not so much the enemy as was time.
What frustrates us the most isn’t life; it’s death. Underneath all our frustration is the deep-seated fear that we’ll never have the time to get it all done. We worry our vision will never be a reality. We curse others for distracting us. We curse ourselves for not being better. But more than anything we fear we’ll die before we accomplish it.
How do we deal with the emotional exhaustion? World wisdom tells us to be happy with the little wins and don’t obsess, but that makes us passive. We may successfully empty our souls of the anxiety to achieve, only to find it flooded again, this time with guilt and regret over not realizing our potential. It seems for the ambitious, nothing gets finished; but for the unambitious, nothing gets started. We waffle back and forth between trying and not, preoccupation and apathy, obsession and indifference, and we’re constantly miserable. Do we cast vision or cast it off?
What if the problem wasn’t the bigness of our desire, but the littleness of our world? While the reader roots for Niggle to find his peace, to set boundaries with his neighbor, and to finally finish his painting…he doesn’t. The stresses of life never leave him, they get worse as the story goes on, and then he takes his journey to the next stage, to use “that meaningless old expression.” He dies. But then something fantastic happens! Niggle enters into the world of ideas…
In the second half of this 2-part post, we’ll revisit concepts from previous articles in the “Art as” Series: that nagging notion of calling (pt. 1); unity in art for collective sight (pt. 3); and delighting in the work (pt. 2); and synthesize them into food for artistic ambition.
such a common problem -- finding time, but then once you find the time you don't like what you create