Now I cannot find a stylus that works well. Or, perhaps I have, the third stylus today seems to be working. The tips get hard and the iPad rejects them. Sad, so sad. There is refuge in humor. The man is an ass!
ah well, perhaps I should use all lower case letters to show that I am just one of the crowd, so to speak. That however, is the crux of the matter. I'm not just one of the crowd; no one is, really. And here we go again. Sorry. Death is imminent (i think that is the right one: imminent; eminent; seems as though there is a third to confuse my addled brain even more). For all of us. Just watch the local news. It seems as though we are living in an abattoir sometimes: three shot on Blueberry Hill Drive; accident on Tenth and Oliver kills two; flood waters reach High Street and seven drown. I am rereading a best-seller by Noah Hawley called Before the Fall. I bought it as a gift for an ill friend. I had read it when it came out and enjoyed it immensely; thought my friend might too. But all I could remember was that it started with a plane crash that killed all the passengers except for a painter, an artist, and a four year old boy. The artist was also a swimmer, fortunately; he found the little boy in the dark water and even with a broken collarbone, he swam in the dark Atlantic for eight hours with the boy on his back and saved himself and the little boy. All I could remember was the situation that began the novel and the fact that I had really enjoyed the story. The reviews were correct. The story is an enticing mystery.
Aristotle said that art is imitation, an imitation of life, an imitation of an action. All stories, good stories especially, lead us to insight into meaning. Consider the imitation involved. The author creates characters who act in a specific cultural context. A good author will have made his specific characters for an ontological reason. He breathes life into them, puts them into certain situations, gives them a past, and perhaps a future. The author knows the past of this group of characters who board this plane; out of the ten or eleven on this private jet, he knows that only two of them will have a future. Even so, the past lives of the other characters will impinge on the surviving characters. That one of the passengers was a money launderer for Iran and North Korea, I believe, modifies the meaning of the accident, which perhaps wasn't an accident after all.
Like us, these characters come into the story as "this one person" and not "that one." Scott Burroughs, he paints disaster events, looking for meaning. He has become reflective and insightful. He survived death; others didn't.
Dorothy Sayers, in her marvelous book, The Mind of the Maker, explores the relationship between the artistic process (she wrote good mysteries about her detective, Lord Peter Whimsy) and the way Christians define the trinitarian nature of God: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. When I think about art I am always aware of that trinitarian structure: the author is the source of being for all of his or her characters. Authors like Chaucer and Dante make themselves characters in their own marvelous stories; Dostoevsky doesn't do that. Still, each character in the story is unique, more or less, depending on the skill, talent, imagination, and desire of the artist. Father and Son. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the analogy may be to the power of the meaning revealed, seen or felt in the experience of reading the story. Stories move us, some more so than others. DS is adamant about claiming that her work is not a theological treatise but simply a work exploring the relationship between the two elements that she has grasped from her own artistic endeavors and her own understanding of Christian, trinitarian theology.
Or, you could read Henry James The Real Thing (a short story) and his Figure in the Carpet (a novella). James was also a very reflective and insightful artist. Both stories reveal that trinitarian nature of art, beautifully! With James one always needs to be an alert, really reflective reader.
I got up to answer the doorbell ringing. I went back to the beginning of the essay to see where I was going. Now I can't remember. The novel is about life, but the novel is also about the way in which death modifies life. Does one give a novel that begins with a character's confrontation with and escape from death to a very sick friend? Hmmm. Choice is at the heart of life. The significance of our choices can possibly only be known in the future or not at all. That is one aspect of life, art as imitation of life, that art makes possible. Characters or readers at least get to see immediate consequences of their choices. Hamlet chooses, vacilates, acts and so on. At the end of the play or story we see a stage covered with corpses and the dying Hamlet urging his friend Horatio not to take his own life but to remain in the world and tell Hamlet's story: "absent thee from felicity," he says, but even that request may need reflection. "Felicity?" Has Hamlet decided that he does know what dreams may come now or, since his death is inevitable, given his uncle's poison, is he simply thinking of the rest from further choosing and trying to sort out the right course of action. Felicity may simply be relief from the burden of a confusing and chaotic social pressure. In any case it is important to Hamlet to have his story told honestly and truthfully by his best friend. Wow, think of the deceptions and lies and falsehoods, "alternative facts" clouding and obscuring our cultural situation along with our concern for truth and justice, one can then understand Hamlet's dying request a little better. What would we give to have truth and clarity from those who try to govern us. Given our technology, we can have the politician's lies, reversals and deceptions clear before us at once.
I remember that I had a clear ontological concern when I started this essay, but it unraveled before me and the doorbell rang.