Monday, October 1, 2007
Randall Jarrell's Affirmation
Jarrell, in his essay about The Obscurity of the Poet says,
Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself. … art is indispensable because so much of … truth can be learned through works of art and through works of art alone…
Jarrell goes on to name many of the greats, from Shakespeare to Blake and revels in the truths they made us see. I admire his unvarnished affirmation. I've felt for a long time that art is what first made us human, and that it is our finest hour as beings. No other expression of our humanity takes in the ambivalence of consciousness and the ambiguity of experience, combining our interior lives and our investment in our physical vessel as it moves through time. At its best, art combines the spirit, the body and the heart. These are difficult assertions to make in a time of distanced irony and sated senses, but it is still important.
Jarrell quotes Proust about the plangent dedication and integrity involved in the creative act,
All that we can say is that everything is arranged in this life as though we entered it carrying the burden of obligations contracted in a former life…[making] the talented artist consider himself to be obliged to begin over again a score of times a piece of work that admiration aroused by which will matter little to his body devoured by worms…