Last week I wrote a post about gentle contradictions. Another one came to my mind over the weekend.
One of the beautiful things about music and the written word for me has been the ability of an lyricist or writer to write something that has mass appeal while at the same time speaking directly to a specific situation in my own life. It helps somehow.
At the same time, I don't like to see the written word taken out of context. It really bugs me. So much so that in the past year or so I've sort of steered clear of jotting down or even thinking about quotations if I couldn't see their context. I wrote a post about this back in 2006. Here's a link if you are interested.
So, with that contradiction rattling around in my brain for the past year, I started reading Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle (who died last September). Early in the book, she says this:
"Over the years I have come to recognize that the work [in her case, authoring books] often knows more than I do. And with each book I start, I have hopes that I may be helped to serve it a little more fully."
She continues on the same page:
"When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist..."
And a paragraph later she says:
"When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens."
With the topic of obedience in mind, she says this later in the book in a chapter called "Probable Impossibles":
"Does the work of art have a reality beyond that of the artist's vision, beyond whatever has been set down on canvas, paper, musical notations? If the artist is the servant of the work, if each work of art, great or small, is the result of an annunciation, then it does."
These four statements changed my mind. Well, they didn't change my mind as much as they allowed the gentle contradiction to peacefully co-exist in my mind. And now I'm ready to start being a little more subjective again when it comes to art.
