Reflections on The Menu

 

“When you painted on earth—at least in your earlier days—it was because you caught glimpses of Heaven in the earthly landscape. The success of your painting was that it enabled others to see the glimpses too. But here you are having the thing itself. It is from here that the messages came..."

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce 

All art, all true art, is always prophecy. Always. And prophecy helps you see the world as it truly is... which may include some element of being able to see the future. The function of prophecy is that the future may help you see the whole picture.

Art of any kind is soul-crushingly difficult. Through some remarkably fallible sense perception you stumble across something. Something good, pure, beautiful, untouchable, incorruptible. It is hard to communicate the experience if you haven't had it. Something explodes in your heart, quietly devasting. Light gently breaks in, and you realize you've been in the dark your whole life and in fact you never saw anything before this moment. And, so long as you keep doing your art, really do it, you can bathe in that light.

But there's a trick. The material you have to work with is fallen. The people who interact with your art are even more fallen than the materials you work with. Some level of mastery of people and your materials is required. The media is a pain, but the people. The people are the worst part. People aren't just fallen passively, but have actively lied to themselves all their lives, to the point of actual blindness of soul. So when they look at your work are they going to see what you tried to put there?

By default the answer is no. At best you'll typically get indifference or a mild reaction. It didn't touch them because they weren't looking. That's to be expected. Humans don't look at the world around them, and those that claim they do are very good at self-deception.

You want to know how I know?

Because to perceive, to truly perceive, is to be changed. 

So if someone goes "Oh cool! That's neat." By default they couldn't have actually looked. And yes, that's demoralizing.

The second worst is a sycophant. "Oh I love your work!" Instead, they made the mistake of seeing you as a necessary part of The Vision. The vision is what matters. Can you develop a predilection of engaging with a specific artist's way of channeling The Vision? Absolutely! We do this all the time! I love Ivanka Demchuk's iconography. I see this icon of Christ being betrayed to Pontius Pilate and I can feel The Vision of it. She saw something about this scene with the eyes of her heart, and was faithful to that vision. I love her craft so much I am going to learn how to do it for myself. Ivanka's work has inspired me to do something for myself. I want to learn for myself.

So, I am not talking about a fondness. I am talking about obsession with the artist. You are not on this planet to turn off your own spiritual vision and worship someone, but to find your way Home. That's hard enough without degenerating into fandom. And it is degeneration. There's a reason why the "fan" hangs himself in this movie. He has made nothing of himself and has become such a bootlicker that death really may be the most merciful option. Certainly not the soul-crushing that happens in the film.

That's not the worst reaction to your work, however.

The worst reaction is one of the fully neutered expert. Remember how I said that the materials of this world, whether they be paint or a damnably thick tome on theology, are inherently rotten, if not actively rotting? What could be grosser than someone who wants to get into that mess? To get covered in the rotting feces that is this world and go "I am very familiar with the smell and viscosity of feces, and so therefore I know you didn't use it right"?

All of this world, at best, is straw.

This isn't to say that technical mastery can't help you point people back to The Vision more reliably. But there is a difference between saying "This is what I think got in the way of helping me escape the fallen world for a minute" and "You failed the fallen materials you were working with", when in reality the materials failed you.

The sycophant and the neutered expert can kill an artist's soul so quickly. Listening to the sycophants will get you pride. Listening to the neutered expert will kill your ability to see The Vision at all. And once those two things happen, you're stuck. You either burn out and collapse in on yourself or take it out on everyone else.

And if you're especially dramatic you'll take all those idiots and kill them all in especially earnestly vulnerable, if not sometimes predictable, movie. And yeah, the movie isn't perfect. I saw the twist coming a mile away. But you know what? So what? it showed me something I needed to see, helped me reflect, and helped me process something that I've been unable to work out for myself for years. The movie did its job. It got me to see something I needed to. I changed, watching it. I saw it.

And isn't that the point of art?

The True Narrative

“There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” 

GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy

It's been a really rough year. Some really nasty stuff went down with my old landlord. It kept going on and on and on into what felt like an infinity of a stupidity so incredibly overwrought that its difference from malice was impossible to determine. Laws were broken and there was very little I could do about it at the time. It. Didn't. Stop. And then other stuff came up, some of it really good, some of it really bad, but it was all intense. I do not hold up under that kind of stress well. I can do one incident. Maybe five. But if it's just thing after thing a ding a ling ring ring, I get more than pessimistic. Nihilistic.

There's an interesting piece of advice that I've read across the Church Fathers. I can't really pinpoint which one said it right now. But I've seen it across the centuries and places compressed into pages between multiple softcovers. Enough for it to stick in my head. To burrow in. To marinate.

"Learn your own story of salvation, of how God is saving you."

And they all give the same broad explanation. God is acting in your life. He reaches across the eons and pushes Old Father Time out of the way. It doesn't look like it does for others, because He knows you. It is the only truly unique experience you'll ever have. And yet, if you share it with others, you'll notice the least important parts match up. 

The Quiet. 

The Peace. 

Sometimes The Terror. 

Everyone has these little moments, even if they only last a millisecond. The advice from between the softcovers is to let these moments and the moments between them form a narrative-- The True Narrative -- of your life.  Once The True Narrative is constructed, it's yours. You are meant to hold it in your heart. Think on it. Come back to it. Prioritize it over the massive absurdity that is your life. You're supposed to say "I know the rest of this doesn't make sense but this is what God has done for me so far."  The True Narrative isn't going to answer the absurdities. The questions. The pain. Faith is not the pillow placed on your face so you don't feel pain anymore. Your doubts are a part of you, and any attempt to shut those things down is a quiet suicide.

The thing is that, when under stress, it's easy to forget that the light that's inside of you is of paramount importance. This light gives you an ability to find ways and paths that would be otherwise impossible. Without this light there is no hope in the human soul.  And without hope all is lost. This light is arational. It can use rationality, but it is not rational itself. Its job isn't to argue, but to shine. Humans are supposed to navigate by the light that shines from within them.

The human, under stress, tries to figure out why they aren't comfortable. This is a rational process. Stress pushes you to find a solution quickly. And if you can't find a solution to a problem quickly? You just stay under stress! And you keep trying to figure out why. And this is good. You should try to figure out why you're in pain, or under stress, or whatever else is going on. Humans don't just have pure light, but an ability and duty to relate to the world in a coherent manner. 

But what if you can't right now? What if you can't figure it out... for a long time? The stress doesn't stop. It piles up on top of other stresses atop more stresses and before you know it... when was the last time you were relaxed? You're just exhausted now. How do you come back to normal? Is there a normal? 

And then the thought comes. That light was what put you here. Maybe you're better off without it. 

There's the endgame.

That thought is the deadly one. This one thought will kill everything within you. And it is so quiet, you may not even hear it on a conscious level.

The problem is, of course, by now you're tired. And you really need to focus on something else. Which takes energy, right? You have to construct an argument, right then and there. I hope you can argue well, because the type of wretchedness I'm talking about is so thoroughly exhausting, so overwhelming, that it would take a miracle to come up with something convincing to yourself.

This is where The True Narrative is meant to intervene. You pull up this history of mercy, of grace, and try to sit in these memories as strongly as you can. It is literally only yours. No one else has it. Go back to those moments, drink in their particularity.

Bask.

If you're still being asked to betray yourself, just go back. And wait. Throwing out that spot of life within yourself is never the answer. I'm not saying there's any good answers. I'm not claiming to solve the problem that put you there in the first place. I am claiming that a better solution will present itself if you bide your time and hold onto hope.

But that ambiguity is pure Hell, isn't it? It's not something humans do very well. We want to be able to relate to everything. Ambiguity doesn't relate to us in a way that we like. We want to be able to control it. To put our power over it. Ambiguity refuses that kind of relationship. It gives pain and darkness, and humanity's form of relationship to it is to endure it until it leaves. But your mind doesn't like doing that. 

So give it something to chew on in the interim.

The mark of a mature person is the ability to endure ambiguity by embracing what one knows. Give it something to chew on while enduring. Give it a True Narrative.