Life is Long, Art is Short (and Sweet)

“The older I become, the more the landscape resembles me.”
Charles Wright – Sestets (2009). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The title for this blog segment is an obvious flip on the traditional expression of Ars longa, vita brevis that serves as a nugget of wisdom from Hippocrates (and Seneca)

Life is short,
[the] art long,
opportunity fleeting,
experiment dangerous,
judgment difficult.

but has since expanded to perhaps indicate that in our “short” lives (our temporal limits) can gain some degree of immortality via the creative arts that can be produced (or genetic reproduction). Think of Shakespeare’s sonnets which have outlived Shakespeare and yet Shakespeare still “lives on.”

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

But the title for this segment turns the expression on its head – life is long and art is short (and sweet) so that I propose the paradigm shift in our lives as the aging experience is much more “longer” than Seneca or Hippocrates were thinking of…and that the role of art is of course still long (Ars longa), but perhaps the impact and the role of art can help to create the reflection, the silence, the pause, the moment – that becomes momentous (instead of momentary).

While the researchers and the media revel in the marvels of increasing life expectancy and the potential “breaking” of the limits of the human life span (see Aubrey de Grey), I think – no make that – I feel, that we will need MORE (not less) of the arts to create and provide the necessary anchors-points along the journey that is long (vita longa).

    

I envision this as the metaphor and the visual and the heuristic:

I am drifting on a boat down the Mississippi River, being pulled along the current and I notice to my right, along the shore, an old wooden dock with another smaller boat tied with a tattered rope to a rusted cleat. As I drift along the river in one boat, I am now suddenly – on the dock – watching me go by on the boat down the river. I stand on the uneven dock sensing the flow of the river, a relentless flow southbound. I see me go by – we both wave at each other and as I stand I take in the moment that flows by me as I watch me on the dock reflecting on how I am moving forward and yet standing still for the moment – as the moments unfold on the dock. I see you write something on paper as I take the photograph of you writing about me taking a photograph. The great blue heron lifts from the naked branch – upward and into the glare of the afternoon sun. The sun that marks the days – that drift by and as my boat slips into the great open waters of the gulf and I think back to the moment of that person on the dock – who seemed so content on just standing there – observing/reflecting – and perhaps wanting to be on the boat that drifted by – going southward and into the vast horizon.

    

If life is to be long – if aging is to be more than an industry, a market, a burden, an unknown, then we need art more than ever. The art is short and sweet so that there are moments – and not just a ceaseless flow onward. For what difference does it make? If life to be 50 years or 150? Or 300 years? It is still one long journey onward – year after year.

But the opportunity to pull over to the side. To drop anchor. To tie up on the dock cleat. To step out onto the dock and stand and observe. Write. Sing. Touch. Smell. Sit. Breath – and let the river run on.

Life is both the flow and the back eddy. Entropic and non-entropic.
Life as Newtonian and Taoistic.

And so that is why (when asked) – why do we need art?

Answer: Art is our shortness that creates the momentous out of the momentary. And that is a sweet experience to counter the boredom, the ennui, melancholy, and the atrophy of experience.

Heidegger believed that poets renew our history, which act as the guardians of being (physis), which, under pressure of the applied science (Techne) becomes rigid and inflexible. Neal Oxenhandler (2009) noted how Rimbaud anticipated Heidegger – as Heidegger would later propose that, “Poems are not about things themselves but how they are masked, revealed, transformed, and recreated by consciousness.”

That can be haiku with Basho:

By the old temple,
            Peach blossoms,
A man hulling rice.

That can be a love sonnet by Pablo Neruda:

I love the handful of the earth you are.
Because of the meadows, vast as a planet,
I have not other star. You are my replica
Of the multiplying universe.

That can be the surrealistic gaze of Andre Breton:

I see the fishbones of the sun
Through the hawthorn of the rain
I hear the human linen being torn like a great leaf.

That can be the somatic and psychic connection of Laurie Sheck:

If I could see into a human genome I’d see long spaces much like this,
Vast stretches of empty surfaces, then clusters of information teeming,
Then still empty spaces…

Ms. Sheck’s verse (in “Captivity”, 2007) is like no other – visceral and it flows like the blood in capillaries; her verse on the “retreating figure” is mystical and organic – her skin is “a tapestry of doubts, a tablet evanescing.”

That could be the earthy space of Ted Kooser’s “Delights and Shadows” (2004) who found the back eddy in this verse,

All night, this soft rain from the distant past.
No wonder I sometimes waken as a child.

And now I end with the final example, from a fine publication by Charles Wright (2009) and it captures the essence of why we need the art in our lives so long ~

The metaphysics of the quotidian was what he was after:
A little dew on the sunrise grass,
A drop of blood in the evening trees,
a drop of fire.
If you don’t shine you are darkness.
The future is merciless,
Everyone’s name inscribed
On the flyleaf of the Book of Snow.

Old rule: Ars longa, vita brevis
New rule: Life is Long, Art is Short (and Sweet)

Thanks, Scott D. Wright