Art, Storytelling, and Awe

  Thinking on storytelling in all its many forms...  And how we would all find ourselves filled with more awe, more joy, more passion and compassion, and more of God's own heart if we learned to SEE the miracles of everyday life happening every moment around us.  Artists get close to this frequently; artists must SEE life in all it's spinning, sparkling, shadow-and-light variation in order to create.  But too often, even artists are only really looking when they're creating.

  Let's ask our master Creator to help us each focus on all the brilliant LIFE pulsing around us minute by minute, that we might appreciate His fingerprints all the more.

 

‘Art and Awe

  “An old silent pond. / Into the pond a frog jumps. / Splash! Silence again.”  It is perhaps the best known of all Japanese haiku. No subject could be more humdrum. No language could be more pedestrian. Basho, the poet, makes no comment on what he is describing. He implies no meaning, message, or metaphor. He simply invites our attention to it no more and no less than just this: the old pond and it’s watery stillness, the kerplunk of the frog, the gradual return of the stillness.

  In effect he is putting a frame around the moment, and what the frame does is enable us to see not just something about the moment but the moment it’s self in all it’s ineffable ordinariness and particularity. The chances are that if we had been passing by when the frog jumped, we wouldn’t have noticed a thing or, noticing it, wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But the frame sets it off from everything else that distracts us. It makes possible a second thought. That is the nature and purpose of frames. The frame does not change the moment, but it changes our way of perceiving the moment. It makes us NOTICE the moment, and that is what Basho wants above all else. It is what literature in general wants above all else too.

  From the simplest lyric to the most complex novel and densest drama, literature is asking us to pay attention. Pay attention to the frog. Pay attention to the west wind. Pay attention to the boy on the raft, the lady in the tower, the old man on the train. In sum, pay attention to the world and all that well is therein and thereby learn at last to pay attention to yourself and all that dwells therein.

  The painter does the same thing, of course. Rembrandt put a frame around an old woman’s face. And he seemed with wrinkles. The upper lip is sunken in, the skin is waxy and pale. It is not a remarkable face. You would not look twice at the old woman if you found her sitting across the aisle from you on a bus. But it is a face so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably just as Cézanne makes you see a bowl of apples or Andrew Wyeth a muslin curtain blowing in at the open window. It is a face unlike any other face in all the world. All the faces in the world are in this one old face.

  Unlike painters, who work with space, musicians work with time, with  note following note as second follow second. Listen! says Vivaldi, Brahms, Stravinsky. Listen to this time I have framed between the first note and the last into the sounds in time. Listen to the way the silence is broken into uneven lengths between the sounds and to the silences themselves. Listen to the scrape of bow against gut, the rap of stick against drumhead, the rush of breath through reed and wood. The sounds of the earth or like music, the old song goes, and the sounds of music are also like the sounds of the earth, which is of course were music comes from. Listen to the voices outside the window, the rumble of the furnace, the creek of your chair, the water running in the kitchen sink. Learn to listen to the music of your own lengths of time, your own silences.

  Literature, painting, music—the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look, and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

  Is it too much to say that Stop, Look, and Listen is also the most basic lesson that the Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us? Listen to history is the cry of the ancient prophets of Israel. ...And when Jesus comes along saying that the greatest command of all is to love God and to love our neighbor, He too is asking us to pay attention. If we are to love God, we must first stop, look, and listen for Him in what is happening around us and inside us. If we are to love our neighbors, before doing anything else we must see our neighbors. With our imagination as well as our eyes, that is to say like artists, we must see not just their faces but the life behind and within their faces. Here it is love that is the frame we see them in.

  … 

  I remember seeing a forest of giant redwoods for the first time. There were some small children nearby, giggling and chattering and pushing each other around. Nobody had to tell them to quiet down as we entered. They quieted down all by themselves. Everybody did. You couldn’t hear a sound of any kind. It was like coming into a vast, empty room.

  Two or three hundred feet high the redwoods stood. You had to crane your neck back as far as it would go to see the leaves at the top. They made their own twilight out of the bright California day. There was a stillness and the stateliness about them that seem to become part of you stood there stunned by the sight of them. They had been growing in that place for going on two thousand years. With infinite care they were growing even now. You could feel them doing it. They made you realize that all your life you have been mistaken. Oaks and ashes, maples and chestnuts and elms you had seen for as long as you could remember, but never until this moment had you so much as dreamed what a Tree really was.

  “Behold the man,“ Pilate said when he let Jesus out where everybody could see Him. He can’t have been much to look at after what they done to Him by then, but my guess is that, even so, there suddenly fell over that mob a silence as awed as ours in the forest when for the first time in their lives they found themselves looking at a Human Being.’

                                                            —Frederick Buechner (‘Whistling In The Dark’)

  ‘[Suddenly Glory could hear] a song playing in [her friend Sam’s] heart, a song that told a story, that rose and soared and battled and rejoiced and then sank into peace. Every beat was more intricate than any opera, as simple as something played perfectly by a galaxy of orchestras, and she knew it was only one part of a single heartbeat. ...It would take countless lifetimes to learn the first movements of just one beat.

...The beauty of it all ached inside her, although it throbbed like death and sorrow, but with that came a deeper joy than she had ever dreamed of. Tears spilled down her cheeks like laughter and new sun-filled rooms opened in her soul. Until this moment, she had never known how dead she had been. Now she was alive. She felt...real...

  She was a dead girl, rising from an unknown grave in a garden world.
  “Well done,” Ghost said. “You can now be still and see with a sight that cannot be taught. ...This is knowing. This is being known.
...Knowledge of the words within written inside the words and the Word outside all words... Taste and see. Hear. Touch. Move in this song. Make your own songs inside of it.

...Dance with darkness, because you are the dawn. May every tongue of your fire burn white-hot against the chains imprisoning others. ...This is the purpose for which you were made.”’

                                                           (Song of Glory and Ghost —N.D. Wilson)

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