I would write rather like Nietzsche than Jaspers; I would leap from peak to peak. Writing or art that explains does not speak, does not teach.
In the mountains of the east coast I found myself crouching beneath a trimmed boxwood bush that served as ornamentation in my grandmother’s front yard. Along a short row of wondrously healthy apple trees the bumblebees drifted randomly about as I hid behind the boxwood bush. They had said that I was six years old and it was on this summer day of my sixth year that I first recall posing the existential question to myself. Looking into the brambles of that bush and looking up into the sky I said these words in english,” Why am I?” I have never ceased asking that question.
Is it the artist who must be an existentialist or the existentialist who must be an artist? And also,” could it be that at least some part of what the existentialists attempt to do is best done in art and not philosophy?”1
Yes, and I would rather be the painter. I am a painter because I cannot hide from these questions. That is, I cannot hide from life. Life is creation; creation is life and life without creation is life unlived. Creation is a constant confrontation of the nothing and creation is death’s death. The artist embraces the plight of life and creates, efflorescing with the beauty of ever unfolding creation.
So the existentialist is a poet, a painter, for what is philosophy compared to Painting? A picture is worth an infinity of words. Words are a ghastly, crude grunting, malleable by every deceit known to man. Language is the slave of rhetoric and cunning. Fiction is true while nonfiction, purporting to be true, is invariably false. That fiction is art corroborates the point. Compare these ugly black runes to the masterpieces of Painting and see for yourself which is the more moving. Conversely, compare the insincerity of allegorical or propagandist painting to the masterpieces of Literature. In the service of philosophy, law, and rhetoric, words are tortured, blackened minions, while in the service of poetry and literature they are willing and respected attendants. The strength of the philosopher Nietzsche is in the poetic quality of his word.
And what else can the painter do that the philosopher cannot? The universality of the human condition notwithstanding, existentialism is a journey traveled, in the end, individually. A philosophy professed in an essay delivers answers and thus delimits the degree to which any individual can take the ideas into his heart. With art, poetry, the ideas are created within, personally, instead of from without. This is what the painter can do that the philosopher cannot.
My art is observation, suggestion, and reflection. In a reality that precludes knowledge, answers are impossible. The most dangerous kind of person is the person who thinks he knows something. Or equates belief with knowledge. Or who can judge mere opinion as right or wrong. Plato was reduced to saying that we are correct, in the face of the absence of knowledge, to harbor ”right opinion”. This shows the depravity of philosophy even at its height. Indeed, the primary function of Socrates and Plato is to show us the absurdity of words and the vastness of the unknown. Kafka, using art and not philosophy, illustrates this seeming predicament the most beautifully, in a manner that strikes the heart and soul of any sentient human.
Perhaps it is useful to draw a line here between known and unknown. We can rule out anything perceived. All that is left is emotion, desire, pleasure, pain, hope, and fear. These are all that we know for certain. And ultimately, this is all we have to go on. And so...
...The most malleable substance known to man is reality. We can manipulate it far better than iron or clay. Witness:
“...Einstein’s space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh’s sky. The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation in itself. The scientist’s discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer’s frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrandt nude differs from a nude by Manet.”2
The terrifying aspect our sordid history is that this is understood by virtually no one.
But the artist understands. The artist is the excellent observer and when a painter observes how easily experience is altered, how fragile it is, he understands that reality is not perceived, but fabricated. Who better than the artist understands the infinite aspects that the same day can take? Who else understands that a tree, at the same moment, always in the same place, is never the same tree? It is at once small, large, green, yellow, and purple. The universe is at once hostile and loving. We were the center of the universe, now we are not. Today light is a particle, tomorrow a wave. With Einstein it bends. With others it does not. This used to be taken as a misunderstanding of light. Now we see that there is no light and that the thing that we misunderstand is ourselves. When Einstein says that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, I wonder what it would mean for a fabricator to be unable to comprehend its own fabrication. A mind that constructs a matrix should be able to deconstruct that matrix.
Now, the man and the art are not, as has been said, a dualism or a two –faced monster. Regardless of the man’s presentation of himself in public, the questions of the art and the questions of the man are the same. And if you find fault with the discrepancy between art and self, understand that first, the art exceeds the man and second, that if he closed the gap, the public would kill him. In fiction we can reference Raskolnikov, in history, Jesus, Napoleon. The questions that trouble the man form his body, mind and art. When he questions the validity of his art, he questions the validity of his being. When he asks, “ Is this worth painting?” he is asking, “ Is life worth living?” He looks up at the stars and he feels something in his throat. He understands the gulf that separates him from other men. How is it that something inanimate can make him cry? When he sees the glory of these stars, he quakes and has to ask, “Why, Van Gogh, did you bother?” He realizes that whatever the stars may be, they are infinitely beyond the craft of the painter. He doubts his motives; he doubts his reasons. He doubts his reason. And then he sees that while the stars have outdone Van Gogh, Van Gogh has outdone the stars. He has carried their glory one step further. He has established the relationship between that part of the universe which sees and that part which does not. He has opened the eyes of other, blinder humans so that they, for the first time, can see the stars.
He becomes that segment of the universe that possesses vision. The artist is the universe peering into itself.
With this comes his plight: he must continuously confront and engage in battle the most essential and terrifying questions of existence: “ ...I am frightened, and astonished at being here rather than there; for there is no reason why here rather than there, why now rather than then...The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” 3 He is one man who cannot avert his eyes and hide from the wolves of the cosmos. He must turn and fight, armorless, but not unarmed. His weapons of choice are proliferation and beauty, which are the very elements of nature herself. The greater the proliferation, the farther the artist escapes from death and nothing. And Beauty is the neutralization and conversion of the terror and despair. It is this incessant confrontation of the nothing that is the plight of the artist. But it is a joyful plight. It is a plight that the artist accepts gratefully and uses in the service of triumph. The best illustration of this plight and joy is found in the Myth of Sisyphus, by Camus:
“...His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing...The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory...All Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him...Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols...Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
And Sisyphus is happy. Every morning, every day, every night, he rises again and again, renews his volition and strikes out into the empty cosmos and finds delight. He thoroughly enjoys the fight. When licking his wounds, he relishes the taste; he marvels at his defeat and he is ecstatic in victory, for life yields her bounty only to those who live.