"The Artist's Torah" - 5 new articles
V’zot ha-B’rakhah: Going Back, Going Forward(Deuteronomy
33:1 – 34:12) Parashat V’zot ha-Brakhah is the end of a long journey. We have now read all of the Five Books of
Moses, dozens of parashiyot,
encountering countless characters and stories, following the Israelites as they
wander and wander toward the promised land – and here they are ready to enter
at last. Yet we also know that it’s as
much a beginning as an end. Each year at
the holiday of Simhat Torah we read
the end of this final parasha – and
then we read the beginning of the very first parasha in Genesis. Before
the Israelites even set foot into the land, before they complete their journey,
we return to where we started, and we begin our journey all over again. At first glance, this might seem like a
bizarre anticlimax; we’ve come this far and we’re just going to circle back to
the beginning? On second thought,
though, most readers start nodding their heads in recognition. This is, after all, pretty much how life
works. It’s no
wonder that choreographer Meredith Monk once said, “I don’t think of my work as
a line. I always think of spirals or
cycles”; a line would take us into the Promised Land and bring us to a full
stop there, but spirals and cycles bring us back to the work – and is the work
ever truly done, truly complete? We tend
to define being an artist not as having
created but as being a person who is
in the habit of creating. It is, by
definition, ongoing. According to
novelist Walter Mosley, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write every
day….You don’t go to a well once but daily.
You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the
morning. Sleep comes to you each day,
and so does the muse.” Conceptual artist
Eva Hesse was so committed to her work that she continued to create sculptures
even from her deathbed. She had already
achieved a great deal by then, but nonetheless, rather than resting on those
accomplishments she always found herself starting at the beginning of a new
piece. This can be
a scary thought, the thought that one is forever beginning again. Is there no change, no growth, no
development? Of course there is. When Monk talked about “spirals” she was
talking about something that both circles and
moves in a direction. Consider the
experience of going through the Torah again every year. I can tell you that, in the experience of
many, this text is new each time we encounter it. But how can that be? We’ve read these parashiyot before; we know these characters and stories. What’s changed, of course, is the
reader. Consider the analogy of prayers
which we repeat regularly in synagogue.
According to Rabbi Reuven Hammer, “Of course, the main thing that is
‘new’ is oneself. Depending on my
thoughts, my mood, my feelings, my existential situation of the moment, what I
say, no matter how many times I have said it before, takes on new meaning.” Even when we engage with the same material again
and again, we are not static, because we are changing and our understanding is
growing. Similarly, there is a kind of
accumulation that comes through Monk’s spiraling. Visual artist Judy Chicago said, “The more I
grow as a person, the larger my ideas become, & the larger the framework I
have to build to accommodate those ideas.”
In this way you move forward even as you go back. Now, of
course it’s not quite accurate to say that the journey never ends. Ask Moses, who
dies not only before the Israelites enter the land but also before the Torah
ends, before we return to its first verses again. In his death we see that even truly great
people pass away before their work is finished. At some point we get off this loop – done,
without having completed what we meant to complete. How do we face this? The answer comes partly through a recognition
that we are not alone in our work, and that there will be others to carry it on
after we’re gone. According to songwriter Bob Dylan,
“Usually the way things go is that someone else comes out, out of the crowd, of
considerable ability who can cover what you’re doing and take it another step.” In fact, usually they’re waiting eagerly for
the opportunity. Author Norman Mailer
recognized that fact late in his career: “I think the younger writers are sick
of Roth, Bellow, Updike and myself the way we were sick of Hemingway and
Faulkner. When I was a young writer we
never talked about anyone but them, and that feeling grew into resentment. Since they had no interest in us, we began to
think, Yeah, they’re great – now get off the stage! We want the lights on us!” One other
thing: For me this is the end of one journey.
After a full, rich year of posting these commentaries on The Artist’s Torah, it’s time for me to
turn my attention to other things – like pulling all of this together into a
book, for starters. (Anybody know any likely publishers?) It’s been a pleasure
to share these thoughts with all of you.
May your work and your life be vibrant with meaning and creativity! Ha-azinu: Success(Deuteronomy
32:1 – 32:52) In 2001 I
was on a roll. I had been submitting my
work to literary magazines for six years by then, and in all that time I had
published just five short stories and no poems at all – but things changed in
2001. From December 2000 through
September of 2001 – only nine months in all – three stories and three poems
were accepted for publication, and one story was selected to be read
dramatically in a theatrical production.
All of a sudden it felt like I had figured the game out, had conquered
the publication world. I would meet
someone at a party and, after introducing myself as a writer and getting the
question that always comes in
response to that – “Are you published?” (how unhelpful and off-the-point this
question is!) – I would sigh a contented sigh and say something like, “Oh,
sure. The big thing for me now is to get
the book in print, now that I don’t have any problem publishing individual
stories and poems.” You can see where
this story is going. After that last
acceptance in September of 2001, I got nothing but rejection letters until June
of 2003 – twenty-one straight months of nothing but rejection letters. Over those dry months I became, as you can
imagine, increasingly distraught. It
wasn’t as though rejection was a new idea for me – the typical writer who’s
trying to get published receives rejections on a daily basis – but my string of
successes had convinced me that maybe those old rules wouldn’t apply to me
anymore. I began to think I’d risen
above it all. In the twenty-one painful months
that followed my burst of publications I realized that success had been far
more dangerous to my well-being than rejection ever had been. Unfortunately,
I am not alone in having this problem; this has been a troublesome part of
human nature for a very long time. For
evidence of that, we need look no further than the Torah. In Parashat
Ha-azinu, Moses offers up a poem containing his final thoughts. This is his last moment with the people
before he climbs Mount Nebo It is, in
fact, a constant struggle for many artists.
As we explored in the commentary on Parashat
Mattot, the striving for material or social success can itself be
destructive. Here we see that it can be
destructive to attain it. Author Norman
Mailer is an interesting study. Rather
than laboring for many years to get recognition, he became famous with his very
first novel – The Naked and the Dead. Mailer remained famous all his life, never
really struggling seriously to get a book into print again. Certainly many young writers would be happy
to have such a big success so early on – yet they might want to consider the
downside of Mailer’s story. First of
all, some might argue that he never again wrote a book more successful than
that first. What Mailer faced, then, was
the problem of trying to maintain
success, and trying to live up to his own hype – and dealing with the suffering
that came when he couldn’t do these things.
He wrote: “Some writers receive not enough attention for years, and so
learn early to accommodate the habits of their work to little recognition. I think I could have done that when I was
twenty-five. With The Naked and the Dead a new life had begun, however. I had gone through the psychic labor of
changing a good many modest habits in order to let me live a little more
happily as a man with a name which could arouse quick reactions in strangers….I
had learned to like success – in fact I had probably come to depend on it, or at
least my new habits did.” The problem
is that the publishing world, the literary establishment and the reading public
are fickle and unpredictable, and one can’t possibly hope to depend on ongoing
adoration from any of them. Mailer had
unwittingly set himself up for a fall: “I’d taken myself a little too seriously
after The Naked and the Dead. Do that, and the book review world will lie
in wait for you. There are a lot of
petty killers in our business.” Coming
down to earth is awfully hard after your successes float you up way too high
for safety. Mailer later wrote this
about watching The Deer Park come out
and seeing it do somewhat well in sales, but not incredibly well: “Like a
starved revolutionary in a garret, I had compounded out of need and fever and
vision and fear nothing less than a madman’s confidence in the identity of my
being and the wants of all others, and it was a new dull load to lift and to
bear, this knowledge that I had no magic so great as to hasten the time of the
apocalypse but that instead I would be open like all others to the attritions
of half-success and small failure.” Mailer
had to learn to deal with the fact that he was, after all, not much different
from the rest of us, and that success (as defined by sales and reviews) was an
absolutely undependable source of support. Just as our
striving for success can make us forget the point of our art, so can our
attainment of success make us forget the point.
As Ecclesiastes would say, this too is vanity. This, too, is a kind of idolatry that values
the wrong thing and devalues the thing that is most crucial. If we are not careful, what we lose is the
work itself. Successful artists – truly
successful ones, in the best sense of the word – are the ones who don’t lose
sight of the goal. As painful as it was
for Mailer to see his later books received less enthusiastically than his first
one, he wrote them anyway – forty books total over his lifetime. Ultimately he was able to develop some
healthy perspective. He wrote: “Getting
a bad review these days in the Sunday Times
affects my wallet. My ego, however,
remains relatively intact.” As for me, I
can’t claim that I feel just as happy in times when it’s hard to get things
published as in times when it’s easy – but I can claim that, either way, I get
up in the morning and get back to the original task of writing. That, I think, is a measure of success I can
believe in. Louise NevelsonOn this date, September 22nd, in 1941, sculptor Louise Nevelson had her first solo show. It was mounted in New York's Nierendorf Gallery, a prestigious gallery that had been known for showing well-known European artists. Her work, plaster pieces heavily influenced by cubism, met with positive reviews in the art world, and this led to more exhibitions in the Nierendorf Gallery and elsewhere. Certainly it was the beginning of a stellar career. What’s interesting is that Nevelson was no early-twenties whiz kid when she got this major break; she had been working as an artist for years, and was already forty-one years old. The Days of AweTonight begins
the first night of Rosh Hashanah – the Jewish new year. This holiday is joyous, but it isn’t about
parties and Auld Lang Syne. Instead it
opens the Days of Awe in Judaism, a stretch of ten days that culminate in Yom
Kippur – the day of atonement. All in
all, this is a time to think intensely about where we’ve been and where we’re
going (themes I’ll be discussing at length in a few weeks in response to Parashat V’zot ha-Brakhah). It’s a
time to take careful note of our current course and to correct it if necessary
– and it so often is necessary. As
people, we think about how we behave toward others, about whether we are living
with integrity. Certainly as artists,
too, we might think about what our art does in the world and about our artistic
integrity. We wonder, too, about whether
we’re properly examining our assumptions, our motivations and goals as
artists. It’s fitting
that Rosh Hashanah – a time for celebration – comes before the unsparing self-examination
of Yom Kippur. We do have a great deal
to be thankful for; at the very least, we’ve made it to this moment, which is
no small thing – and we recognize this first because we gain strength from
celebration. Then we can turn to the
hard work of questioning ourselves. At
times, this can seem too earth-shaking to bear.
Chagall once worried about artists that are “afraid of plunging into
chaos, of shattering, of turning upside down the familiar ground under our feet.” Luckily, we have been here before. There’s nothing to be afraid of, because we
know what this intensity leads to: the fullness of the new year. We celebrate, we walk through the gates of
self-questioning, and we emerge into our promising future. Having worked toward re-creation of the self,
we are all the more ready to get back to the work of artistic creation that
roots in that self, that finds its nourishment there. Nitzavim-Va-Yeilekh: In Your Mouth and In Your Heart(Deuteronomy
29:9 – 31:30) There are
many places of illuminating wisdom in the Torah – places where something
crucial becomes clear. For me, there is
probably no brighter moment in this respect than the one we find in chapter 30,
verses 11-14, of Parashat Nitzavim. The people are assembled before Moses, hearing
his final words, thinking about this covenant they’re entering with God and one
another, listening to some pretty exciting promises of blessings (if the people
live up to expectations) and some fairly daunting threats (if they don’t), and
then Moses says this: Surely, this
instruction which I enjoin upon you this day is not too baffling for you, nor
is it beyond reach. It is not in the
heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it
for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it?” Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should
say: “Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and
impart it to us, that we may observe it?”
No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to
observe it. This is, of course, a
pep talk, a reassurance: you can do it!
It’s also, however, a statement about ownership. Are the ideas of Torah in heaven? You would think so, if heaven is where God
dwells – but in fact the Torah is not
in heaven but on earth, in the people themselves. This wisdom and these commandments are rooted
in human beings – not imposed on them.
These words are also a charge: this Torah is yours, and so all the more
reason that you’d better take it on. The
minute that charge gets daunting, though, you can return to the sense of
reassurance offered by these verses. You can do this. It’s yours.
You must, in fact, do it – and you can. That
tri-fold message of reassurance, ownership and obligation is a good message for
artists to hear. If the Torah is a map
of engagement with creation, and artists turn to it to navigate their own creation,
these verses – all aspects of them – become awfully relevant. First of
all, many potentially creative people struggle with the issue of
entitlement. Am I worthy of the
arts? Do I have a right to claim a place
as an artist? At times we all feel
unworthy, but successful artists – those who do the creative work – are those
who have found a way past this struggle.
The working artist claims a place for her- or himself. Sometimes this takes the form of just doing
the work without settling the entitlement question. “You do it because you do it,” writer Natalie
Goldberg has said. Similarly, art
historian Donald Kuspit referred to painter Chaim Soutine’s “radical naiveté” or
even “defiant naiveté” – the artist instinctively doing things his way without
concern for what the “old masters” might say.
In other cases, though, one makes a more explicit claim, as in the case
of visual artist Judy Chicago: “What is art?
That is debated all the time. I
have a right to be thrown into the debate.”
According to psychologist Otto Rank (as summarized by art historian
Laurie Lisle), “The first step in becoming an artist…is when one calls oneself
an artist.” Either way, doing it
consciously or not, a working artist is someone who has overcome the
entitlement problem. To make
your claim, you have to make the art form your own, to find it in your mouth
and in your heart. Composer and
choreographer Meredith Monk describes her relationship to dance in this way: “I
had to find my own style, my own way of thinking about movement, my own way of
structuring in space.” Many artists go
through a process like this, figuring out how to take personal possession of a
form that has been in the hands of so many before them. Yet one of the central messages of this blog
is that art is yours for the taking, is yours personally, is in fact already
in you. Perhaps
more dauntingly, the other message is that you must claim your creative life.
Successful artists feel this urgency intuitively. “I have to make Art,” wrote Chicago More Recent Articles |
