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- Here Was One
Here Was One
No. 10
Grant Hodges
August 13, 2023
Art Can Help
Dear Reader,
Because this will be my tenth installment of the newsletter, and because I will be on vacation by the time you read this, I wanted to switch things up a bit. Rather than choosing a work of literature and adding a bit of commentary, I wanted instead to provide an excerpt from an essay that largely speaks for itself.
The writer of that essay is Robert Adams (b. 1937), an acclaimed American photographer and the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Besides being a wonderful photographer, Adams is also a remarkably insightful writer, and in his 2017 book, Art Can Help, he sought to tackle the essential question, “What is art for?”
It’s a question that might be at the top of your mind. With all that’s going on in the world, I think it’s tempting to ask what art (and obviously literature as a subset of art) can do for us. A poem can’t solve climate change. A short story won’t cure COVID-19. No novel will end world hunger. In some ways, it can feel like art has no role for humanity beyond mere entertainment.
Adams, however, drawing from the wisdom of poets, painters, photographers, and novelists, provides this response:
From Art Can Help
By Robert Adams
It is the responsibility of artists to pay attention to the world, pleasant or otherwise, and to help us live respectfully in it.
Artists do this by keeping their curiosity and moral sense alive, and by sharing with us their gift for metaphor. Often this means finding similarities between observable fact and inner experience—between birds in a vacant lot, say, and an intuition worthy of Genesis.
More than anything else, beauty is what distinguishes art. Beauty is never less than a mystery, but it has within it a promise.
In this way, art encourages us toward gratitude and engagement, and is of both personal and civic consequence . . . .
Art has never been easy. It happens only when a composer like Olivier Messiaen listens so attentively to birds that he can incorporate their voices into his music. It happens only when a novelist like Marilynne Robinson is so disciplined of spirit that she can wait twenty-four years after publishing a highly regarded first novel to release a second. It happens only when Dorothea Lange wills herself past exhaustion to retrace twenty miles of road on the suspicion that she should have turned off at an inconspicuous sign, one that eventually led her to a migrant mother and her children, homeless on the edge of a pea field.
Art is not just anything.
Author Wendell Berry has spoken accurately about what art is: “The best art,” he told an interviewer, “involves a complex giving of honor. It gives honor to the materials that are being used in the work, therefore giving honor to God; it gives honor to the people for whom the art is made; and it gives honor to the maker, the responsible worker. In that desire to give honor, the artist takes on the obligation to be responsibly connected both to the human community and to nature.”
These concepts: paying attention, remaining attuned to mystery, working to give honor to what we encounter, to others, and to ourselves—how much better would we be if we organized our lives around them? How much better would the world be?
In this way, like Adams, I think art can help.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.