We play the game, but fate controls the cards.
-Algiers, 1938 with Hedy Lamarr and Charles Boyer
If only. We actually control the cards - the ones we’re given, which I guess could be argued is dependent on an act of fate. What we can do with what is given us is to create work that, with practice and application, express something within us.
What is our work about?
I’m not thinking on a grand existentialist level, but specifically of the novel, poem, painting, composition that you are creating. I find that having a thesis or idea to aim for is much better than flailing about. I’ve written music that started with no thesis; this is possible, but not always satisfying, and, ultimately it comes down (at least) to meaningful connections in my musical material: motives, rhythms, textures that repeat, or create a satisfying melodic/harmonic whole (whatever the term “satisfying” means).
Subjects are endless and everywhere. They can be outside or inside ourselves; Hegelian bits of self-analysis that state: “‘Everyone ought to speak the truth.’. . . if he knows the truth. The commandment, then, will now run: everyone ought to speak the truth at all times, according to his knowledge and conviction.” Although Hegel goes on to say that this, as “an ethical proposition, . . . promises a universal and necessary content, and thus contradicts itself by the content being contingent.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, #424).
But, one must be committed to work and expression and, hence, you define your work and meaning guided by inner truths as you know them.
A work of art could seem perhaps meaningless, except that even when I look at abstraction, I see line, color, and balance as content that relates one to another and then exteriorizes and relates to me as a sentient viewer.
“All in all,” wrote Marcel Duchamp, “the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” (https://www.moma.org/learn/moma_learning/themes/media-and-performance-art/participation-and-audience-involvement/)
The inner truth we hope to express with our work may just be out of our hands.
Comments