"Bad books always lie. They
lie most of all about the human condition."
-Walker Percy
If you have been following my blog the
last couple of posts, you will have seen several references to Steven Garber's
book Visions of Vocation,
specifically to the fact that we as humans are responsible for the knowledge we
have about the world – to sum up in a short quote, "Knowing what I know,
having heard what I have heard, having read what I have read, what am I going
to do? Being smart isn't good enough...always and everywhere, the
revelation [knowing] requires a response."
Ever since January 9th of this year when I
first published "romantic, Romantic, Romanticist,"
I have been intending to write this follow up post, due to its failure to
address the human condition, and due to criticism of my outlook on life as a
Romantic, specifically because, in my critics’ view, merely being a Romantic
isn't practical: humans need more than just a good story and an avant-garde vocabulary
as a solution to life.
In my previous post on this topic, I began
by quoting Lewis Carroll, and I shall do so again. "Who in the world am I?
Ah, that's the great puzzle." In my post I presented an aspect
of who I am as a person: I am a sappy romantic, I enjoy being a Romantic writer
and musician, and I am a Romantic in my outlook on life; that is, I believe there
is always a deeper story with wonderful vocabulary that is waiting to be
pursued. I admit this is a rather positive outlook on life; at first glance
it may seem that I am lying about the human condition. It may seem that I
believe all life is about is pursuing who we are as individuals, and pursuing a
good story.
In an effort to fully tell the Truth in my
writing (which is, to be honest, the only reason I even began writing in the
first place), I wish to convey to you the human condition. We are Broken.
Humanity has been broken for many, many years, and there is no possible
way that we can fix ourselves. The world in which we live is also broken,
and so it is often full of wounds that seem incurable (Hitler, Stalin, the
Israel/Gaza Conflict, Ebola outbreak, disease, and death). At first
glance, the world is not a positive place.
Indeed, at first glance, the world is a terrible place. At first glance the best possible outlook on
life is to live large today, for tomorrow we die. This is the human
condition. This would be my view if the story ended there. However, it is not the end of the Story.
The God who created us also gave us a
solution to our willful brokenness. He sent his Son to repair us in a way
that we cannot do on our own. Without Him, we are destined for eternal brokenness,
but He gives our meaningless lives a Purpose that we only have to accept by his
grace through faith.
Art is something that I discuss and think about quite often. Art is, if you think about it, a direct
expression of the current human condition by people who think deeply about it
and project their ideas into the future by words, paint, canvass, paper, stone,
lyrics, music, you name it. William
Barrett sums this up perfectly in his Irrational
Man: “Every age projects its own image of man into its art. The whole history of art confirms this
proposition, indeed this history is itself but a succession of images of man.”
So artists are the closest thing to real life “prophets” that we
have today? That’s not entirely what I
am saying. It is important to realize,
however, that artists tend to have insight into the future based specifically
on their understanding of the human condition.
Think about this:
To understand this cusp of a new century –
marked as it is both by the sociological reality of the information age and the
philosophical movement we call postmodernism – we have to pay attention to the
novelists, filmmakers, and musicians who are culturally upstream, as it is in
their stories, movies and songs where we will feel the yearnings of what human
life is and ought to be. Whether staged
or celluloid, in print or on computer disks, they are fingers to the wind. Why?
Artists get there first.
-Steven Garber
This quote sheds light on another facet of my life: if you were to
look at my movie collection, or my music selections, or the books I read, you
will not always find material that is, on the cover, “Christian.” As an artist, something I haven’t been able
to put into words until now, I believe that I should keep a finger to the cultural
winds of my time to be better able to understand which way it is blowing. But I suppose that’s another topic for
another post. For now, let’s focus on
the story-tellers themselves.
Steven Garber quotes Bono in his book Visions of Vocation. He
quotes Smashing Pumpkins. He references
movies and articles and books and people on a fantastic scale, and it is
evident to me that he believes “stories with legs” – stories that tell a tale
and then live that tale out in real life – these stories are the most effective
way to convey the human condition and hint at a solution to it. As I read his book, I keep feeling myself
grow in that “haughty without being so...proud, but humble about it” attitude
of being a Romantic. I keep reaffirming
in my mind that “I am most certainly not afraid to pitch my tent in the
Romantic crowd.” I reiterate to my critics that “Here, to be famous is to
be dead. But I'd rather it be that way.” However, Mr. Garber opened my eyes to the
facet of “romantic, Romantic, Romanticist” that was incomplete.
“Epistemologies have ethical implications . . . ways of knowing
are not morally neutral but morally directive.”
Mark Schwehn, quoted by Garber, put this reality into perspective for
me. In simple terms, Schwehn is saying
what Mr. Garber has been advocating for his entire book, and what I wrote about
last: knowing must mean doing; in
fact, that truth is so strong that it carries moral implications: knowing without doing carries dire
consequences. Even if we don’t see those
consequences today, they will carry themselves out somewhere, somehow, bringing
with them more of the broken condition that we are so vehemently striving
against. Therefore, I acknowledge that
we cannot view the world merely through Romantic lenses: we need Realistic ones
too. Think about it; you feel this way
all the time:
“Why else do we care about what
someone knew when? Our newspapers, courts, even family
conversations are full of the assumption that if one knows, then one is
responsible. If you knew, then why didn’t you do.”
Visions
of Vocation
Reading this quote for the first time, I
realized something that, perhaps, my critics didn’t even realize they were
touching on: I have found words for a new, small, area of my life, but my post
was, in a way, lying because it didn’t take that knowledge and apply it to the
human condition. It didn’t practically put my new knowledge to work.
“Very, very bright people do not always make very, very good
people.” Yes, I think Mr. Garber is
correct. Just writing about bright ideas
does not make a person good, and I think I may have been taking too much
satisfaction in just philosophizing and not actually applying these
philosophies to my life.
The fact still remains however, that I am
a die-hard romantic, Romantic, Romanticist.
I am a Dreamer, and this is evident in nearly all of my writing. To some degree though, I do think that two
authors Mr. Garber reveres were dreamers too, and the world would be far worse
a place if they hadn’t been: Vaclav Havel and Albert Camus. If you have read nothing about or by these
two men, you should. They were dreamers who
saw the human condition, wrote eloquently about it, either in fiction or
lecture, and then applied that writing to their lives. They gave their ideas legs. This is what I was missing: a good Romantic isn’t
one who merely invents immortal heroes for pleasure. A good Romantic invents immortal heroes and
then physically demonstrates with his life why those heroes matter.
"As the poet Bob Dylan once sang, 'Everything is broken.'
Yes, everything, and
so we must not be romantics. We cannot afford to be, just as we cannot be
stoics or cynics either." I will
disagree with Mr. Garber on this one point.
Some of us must be
Romantics. It’s in our daily life, our chemistry,
our DNA. We have been called to be Romantics, and that is
extremely important. The world needs
artists to put their fingers to the pulse of culture to measure where it is
going. The caveat is that we must be
Realistic Romantics.
Artists
see first,
Humanity's
worst,
We
Romanticize the Story,
To
create hope and glory:
A
Realistic Romantic.
As a Realistic Romantic, I want to know the human condition for
what it is. I want to constantly observe
the catastrophes that pervade our history, Romanticize them in ways people will
remember forever, and then remind them why it all matters. Why are we drawn to the knight in shining
armor who slays the dragon of Evil?
Maybe it is because we are daily fighting our own dragons that desperately
need to be slain? Maybe because we are not the knight ourselves? This is a small responsibility of my
life. I may not be good at it, but I know about it, and I thereby have a
responsibility to use it.
“Whether it is kids in Brooklyn or political complexity in nations
scattered across the glove, [we want] the work of [our] hands to matter, to be
part of ‘tearing a corner off of the darkness,’ in Bono’s poetic image.”
So, dear reader, knowing what I know, I am striving to satisfy my
implicated responsibility because of that knowledge. I am a Romantic, but not just. I must also be Realistic, both in my stories
and in my life.
What corner of the darkness are you tearing off?
An excellent, and very thoughtful follow up.
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