Here’s a couple (non-sequential) panels from one of my DC Comics stories that sums up my feelings on the matter of ‘art’ vs. ‘reality’. (The white-haired gentleman is Alfred, Batman’s butler, btw.)

http://i110.photobucket.com/albums/n114/leeallred/sunshine_and_alfred.jpg

– Lee

This is a realization I’ve fully come to recently. Maybe it’s passing the half-century mark, but I find I’m tired of angst and self-revelation. What I want to do is to tell an entertaining story, and better it be trashy than chock full of “meaning.”

This is what I think McKee is getting at: don’t think that your “meaning” is so grand that you can dispense with story. The story is in control, not your deep thoughts, and you must always be prepared to move your ego out of the way and let it through.

Artists have always been drawn to the wild, wide elements they cannot control or understand — the sea, mountains, fire. To be an artist means to approach the light, and that means to let go our control, to allow our whole selves to be placed with absolute faith in that which is greater than we are. The novel we site down to write, and the one we end up writing may be very different, just as the Jesus we grasp and the Jesus who grasps us may also differ.

… And this is why art as self-expression is art of a lesser light.

Luisa: I think this should prove a natural side effect of art from Saints.

Jonathan: If reality is rated R, I want no part of it.

But I will say that I think all tasks can be art and if art is creation then in all actions in all fields we have the potential to become more like our Father.

What L’Engle is describing here, I think, is grappling with the stuff of Reality (with a capital R)–which is also something that other callings in life may, and perhaps all should, involve. I have long thought that talents represent areas where the veil between our mortal selves and our divine potential is thinner than elsewhere, so that it allows us to have a particular kind of experience that we could not have otherwise, as we struggle to bring the best of ourselves to the altar while at the same time grappling as Jacob did with the things of God. I don’t think it matters so much to God what the arena is where this kind of experience happens–science, art, farming, cooking, teaching–but rather that it DOES happen.

One thing I can think of that makes this different for artists than for, say, scientists is that because art is supposedly an invented thing, we may have the illusion that art is and can be entirely under our control. We are thus perhaps particularly subject to the sin of Babel–of trying to rival heaven. Of course, it is also our calling (as L’Engle points out) to imitate heaven in a perhaps more obvious way than many other types of work. (This is the basic paradox for the Christian writer: that in imitating God, our work is by definition both praise and blasphemy.)

Th: maybe artists were one of the types of people Joel saw when he wrote “And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions….”

I’m struck by how easily that description of the artist could be applied as a description of a prophet.