Thinking About Art

I am listening to Lincoln in the Bardo, a fantastic (fiction) book about the death of Willie Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War and its impact on Abraham Lincoln. I am almost finished with it and was talking about it with my therapist this morning. I have read literally thousands of pages about President Lincoln (Thank you, Doris Kearns Goodwin!) from non-fiction sources. Though Lincoln in the Bardo is a work of fiction and what the President must have been thinking is largely speculative, it shed more light on and opened my mind to the impact of that particular event in Lincoln's life more than any non-fiction book has.

It's as if one were comparing a single Albert Bierstadt painting of Yosemite compared to a 12-hour documentary series about Yosemite. You are sure to learn a lot about Yosemite from a 12-hour documentary, but from which will you get a better idea of the beauty and splendor of Yosemite? Lincoln in the Bardo has made me think a lot about art and literature as art.

Allow me to sidetrack for a moment here. I am also reading Tibetan Peach Pie by Tom Robbins. Robbins states that he didn't intend for Tibetan Peach Pie to be a memoir, but rather a collection of stories in his life that he has related multiple times to friends and family and wished to share them with a public audience. One of those stories is about an LSD trip he took in 1963 (Maybe 1964; I don't remember.) at a time when LSD was still legal and was being experimented with at universities. Robbins calls the experience life changing and a huge impact on his work since. The story doesn't focus so much on the trip itself, though, but rather on his experience afterwards. 

Robbins laments that he had this life-changing experience, but now there is no one he can really talk to about it without sounding completely crazy. Of course, at the time very few people in the United States had tried any sort of psychedelic substance. It made him feel incredibly lonely. Here is someone who is a magician with the English language, someone who has studied the craft of putting the human experience into words, someone who was working as an art critic at the time, who simply couldn't find the words to describe the experience.

And here's where I bring it back to art and literature. For those of us who have never done LSD (and I will state for the record here that I never have), we can't even imagine what such a mind-bending experience would be like. We can watch documentaries on LSD or read about its effects but we can't get from those the "feeling" of LSD. If you've read any of Tom Robbins's novels, though, you can get a glimpse of that "feeling". You won't come anywhere near understanding the entire experience, just like you can't get your own experience of visiting Yosemite from a Bierstadt painting, but somehow art conveys a glimpse into the artist's own feeling about the subject for us to appreciate. It shines a very focused spotlight on just a dot of the human experience.

Georgia O'Keeffe is another example I like to think of in how art illuminates the human experience. O'Keeffe didn't paint an orchid as we would see it if the plant were placed before us. She captured the essence of the orchid. She captured the feeling of what it is like if we were intensely focused on the flower. O'Keeffe did at least twenty paintings of the doorway to her New Mexico home and still felt she never quite got it right.

I know that Robbins in his writing is doing much more than trying to describe one acid trip he took in 1963, but it is almost as if he is repainting that doorway over and over at slightly different times of day and from slightly different angles with each novel he writes and each story he tells. I think about Mark Twain's giving us a glimpse through his writings on how it must have felt to be American in the late 1880s as the industry of the east met the frontier of the west along the Mississippi River. Dickens gives us a glimpse of Victorian London, the gothic horrors give us a sense of what it must have been like as a layperson witnessing how scientific breakthroughs were transforming the industrial world, and Hemingway and Fitzgerald help us feel that post-Great War disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

I'd be remiss if I wrote something on art and LSD and didn't mention the work of Ralph Steadman, another artist who asserts he only dropped acid once but it influenced all his work from that point (rather heavily, I would add). I also haven't mentioned the musicians and sculptors whose works shine light on the times and places in which their pieces were composed. I'm sure I could go on with this subject for a good long time and i know a number of books have already been written about it. I would like to hear your thoughts, dear reader, on how art trains a spotlight on tiny aspects of the human experience.

Post-script: The cast of the Lincoln in the Bardo audio book is phenomenal. Nick Offerman and David Sedaris have significant roles along with a number of other voices you will recognize. Offerman is a natural fit for an audio book. If you've ever heard David Sedaris speak you'll agree that he seems an unusual choice to cast in a major role for an audio book, but he is really outstanding.