“…it is most profound, most provocative, at…the level at which the author comes fully to realize, to face squarely, the dismaying fact that against life’s worst onslaughts, nothing avails, not even art; especially art.”

John Banville, in a review of Blue Nights, by Joan Didion, New York Times Book Review, November 6, 2011.

After my father’s death, Paul Mueller (a friend of my brother’s, and great admirer of Dad’s), wrote a poem, The Burial of Henry Sams, that summoned the full weight and wonder of that occasion for me. This was “art”, and I suppose it did “avail” against that awful onslaught, in much the same way as did the huge song of frogs and insects that drowned out conversation as we sat by the River the night after Dad’s funeral. But what does it mean to “avail”? And does the croaking of frogs constitute “art?” I remember reading somewhere in a Norman Maclean story, “I felt my life turning into a story,” a quotation I have not been able to locate since, so it may be apocryphal, especially since I know exactly where, in A River Runs Through It, Maclean wrote “But life is not art.”

The author James Agee describes how he lived with families of North Alabama sharecroppers as he collaborated (with photographer Walker Evans) on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In the book Agee agonizes over his self-perceived role as voyeur, as parasite, and provocateur, invading the privacy and presuming upon the hospitality of poverty-stricken hosts, while hijacking their hard-won dignity and pride in the name of “art”. To the extent that a writer, or photographer, or preacher, swoops down onto human events like a buzzard onto road kill, it is parasitical, like any other exploitive enterprise. Perhaps it is this kind of self-scrutiny that John Banville perceived in his review of Joan Didion’s book, the awareness of a moral priority, even a majesty that “life’s worst onslaughts” bring out in human beings overshadowing any attempt to use or exploit it, artistic or otherwise.

In The Gospel of John, Jesus says, “this man was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” (John 9:3) Does the revelation of God’s healing power “avail” against the enormity and randomness of human suffering? Again, it depends on what is meant by “avail”.

Neither miraculous healing nor artistic commentary can remove the contingency of the world and the helplessness of the human condition. In his poem, Paul Mueller wrote of my mother, “her consolations broke my heart,” but he also knew that her eleven-year widowhood was a time of inconsolable loneliness, a loneliness that prompted her to write as follows…

AFTER DEATH

“I shall but love thee better?

Yes, I do. But must despise the term.

Better is blacker than our ancient car.

Better is sadder than our old dog’s death.

Better is saltier than all my tears.

Better is longer than the longest day,

The longest week, month, year.

Better is wakeful in the nightingale hours.

Better is dreaming of you as you were.

Ah yes I love thee better, bitter, better, now.”

Such words do nothing to remove suffering. For me, the effect is more the opposite: they invite me deep into my mother’s inconsolability, and into her transcendence of it, while it yet abides. Jesus did not heal the Man Born Blind as a stunt, to demonstrate divine power over adversity. Indeed, to do so could serve to deepen alienation and despair, since the obvious question is, “why did God wait so long to act?” Or, even more obvious to me, “What about all the other blind beggars?” Jesus’ healings, in addition to being expressions of compassion, were expressions of solidarity with all those scapegoated and cast out as “sinners” by the pious. In doing so he, symbolically, gouged out his own eyes, forged a bond with every blind beggar and forlorn widow, and foreshadowed his own rejection and scapegoat’s death upon the cross.

So the artist is not a Savior, whose work “avails” to insulate us against life’s worst onslaughts. Not even The Savior is a “Savior” in that sense. The best writing, and preaching, and praying, lifts, expands, and deepens our experience of the world, so that we do feel “our lives turn into stories”, and our hearts swell and break and disappear and resume their beat again, and the night-song of frogs and bugs becomes a choir, and the works of God are revealed in us.