Christian Aesthetics
The following is a post from my previous destroyed blog that I’ve resurrected so that my friend Taylor’s post that links to it will no longer link to a 404 error. I’m also still proud of these thoughts and still endorse them, so here they are:
I should be packing now, but I’d much rather respond to a post my friend Taylor Williams put up on his personal blog today, so interesting did I find it. It’s a short post full of things to mull over, and here are my mullings:
I guess the primary thing that struck me is just how different Taylor’s sensibilities are towards creativity than mine. He says he chose photography because it was a fundamentally humble art form – rather than creativity, you simply “reflect” the beauty of things you discover. This is akin to the Christian life, in that we are to humbly reflect the glory of God to those around us.
Some things about this strike me as true, and others not as much. The division of photography from other art forms on this basis is a bit oversimplified. First off, there IS a good deal of creativity involved in photography, from what I am able to tell – finding new ways to look at things, using devices and personal skill – there is a lot of you in the pictures you take. I suppose on the higher level it’s less evident, as the immediate focus of a camera is something the photographer is not personally responsible for – but the photographer, by simply taking the photograph, is making a judgement on the subject, and inviting others to either share or reject that judgement – most likely hoping that people will enjoy it for the same reasons he or she did. The photo is full of the photographer.
The interesting thing is, other forms of art are pretty much exactly the same in this regard. Take lyric writing. On one level, there’s “creation” – once there was no lyric on this page, now there is. But on a deeper level I think it’s closer to photography than people might realize. For example, I find it intensely affecting when the long “I” vowel is held on a long note. I didn’t really come up with that, it’s just there, and it affected me, in the same way that that beautiful scene was there and it affected the photographer. So the lyricist puts that “I” on the long note because it sounds cool, and the photographer captures the scene because it looks cool – both actions full of the creator, in the sense of, “I found this neat – don’t you?” A lot of art, it seems to me, is essentially finding things that we’re not responsible for and arranging them and displaying them in ways to call attention to the things about them we like. I suppose there’s more evident arrangement and technical skill involved in lyric writing than photography, but I imagine some photographers out there would happily disagree. Nor is it true that personal skill always shines through lyrics while great photographs minimize the role of the photographer. The truly great songs are the ones that are so natural, so perfectly affecting, that they don’t seem written at all. It floors us that great songs were “written” because they seem to us to have been “discovered.” I suspect, in a very deep sense, they were.
So the distinction is less important here. I suspect Taylor enjoys photography not because it’s not creative, but because it allows him to share what affects him in a way that allows him to use his talents, which is what creativity mostly is, anyway.
After all, none of us are really “creating” anything. That’s God’s realm alone. But we get a thrill over mixing ourselves into this thing that we like, by “making” (arranging and manipulating) something or “capturing” or “reflecting” it, and gets us close enough to creativity to give us the thrill. That thrill, I believe, is a wonderful gift from God that we shouldn’t beat down. After all, he made us in his own image for a reason. Bible major syndrome (”I don’t want to glorify me, I want to glorify God“) can get too extreme in creative people, incapacitating themselves out of fear of becoming prideful. I’d like to think that it’s not pride to recognize when something is good, to recognize when you have a talent for sharing that with people in artful ways, and to take joy in what you’ve done. That’s a gift and we ought to treasure it. We are told to think on whatever is right, noble, pure, lovely, virtuous, etc. and so it seems like a good idea to me to be pumping out as much lovely, noble, pure stuff as we can, so we have more to think on.
Now moving on to Taylor’s idea of “humbly reflecting the glory of God to those around us.” I’m sure he does not actually have in mind by this what immediately popped into my mind, but then, I am a lot more cynical about this kind of thing (I bet). And that’s the idea of passivity, embodied in that wretched movie Joshua, in which Jesus returns to 20th century Alabama in the form of a really nice guy who changes a town into a utopia without ever being confrontational, aggressive, or offensive in the slightest way – a modernized Jean Valjean. But not terribly close to Jesus of Nazareth, it seems to me. Jesus did not simply lead a perfect life and expect other people to notice and fall down at his feet – he taught, he preached, he cajoled, he pronounced “woe,” he engaged, to use Steve Holt’s word that I find so appropriate. We, of course, should be reflecting the glory of God to those around us, and it should be so wrapped up in our identities that it shines from us, and we should be humble. But we have to make sure that humble doesn’t mean “not bold” and “not powerful” and “not willing to confront or offend when necessary.”
But that’s really a side point, I think.