Last Friday, I attended the play Our Town, by Thornton Wilder, at the Looking Glass Theatre at the Water Tower. It's been a long time since I saw this play, but what a wonderful performance! This is a spare and touching story of the life of a community in New Hampshire, Grovers Corners, in the early 1900's. It shows the beauty of ordinary life, focusing on timeless themes of family life, of raising children, falling in love, marrying, and dying. I highly recommend it. (David Schwimmer plays one of the leads.) Our Town won the Pullitzer Prize in 1938.
Two particular moments were touching to me. In Act III, the narrator, in the town graveyard, overlooking the mountains, windswept, and beautiful, observes: "Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars. . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being."
Emily Gibbs, who has just died in childbirth, and hasn't adjusted to the grave, wants to go back to see life on earth. She chooses her birthday 14 years before (when she is 12). She witnesses the family's life on that day, and from her perspective beyond the grave, is astonished that they can't see how life really is. She entreats her mother (who can't hear her): "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I'm dead. You're a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally's [her brother] dead too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don't you remember? But, just for a moment now we're all together. Mama, just for a moment we're happy. Let's look at one another."
A few moments later, she asks the narrator, "Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? -every, every minute?" The narrator answers, "No." Then after a pause, he says, "The saints and poets, maybe - they do some."
The saints and poets sometimes see the eternal in the timebound. The rest of us need their "eyes" to see.
It is the function of art to help us see sacramentally, to see the practical and ordinary embedded in the eternal, the eternal shining through the ordinary. Man needs art, for the overriding concern of man is not with securing instrumental ends (technology, economy, polity), but with the dramatic meaning of their lives, with the delight and suffering, laughter and tears, joy and sorrow, aspiration and frustration, achievement and failure, wit and humor that stand, not within practicality, but above it. Hughes, Transcendence and History, 109.
Art's "intended effect is to transport us beyond the 'ready made world' of practicality and domesticated culture in order to renew our sense of life's possibilities, to give us new ways to imagine and interpret ourselves, to quicken and explore our deepest longings and apprehensions, and, in doing all these, to reveal the mystery present at the heart of all things." Ibid, p 116. "Art places an interrogative pressure on the status quo: implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, it questions the way things are and way things are done." Ibid.
Art's focus on the mystery of living, the eternal over the practical, in fact uncovers a meaning common to all humans. Individual cultural and personal narratives find meaning in the common narrative, a narrative embedded in mystery, of all mankind. And this focus especially includes artistic images depicting religious insights into the poverty of living "only for the world," into universal personal dignity, into the common divine ground of our joy and suffering. Jesus healing the sick, suffering on the cross: These images, and the artistic re-creation of them, invite us to recognize our common humanity and destiny, in and through Him. Ibid, p.120.
Hughes cautions that art can be compromised by intellectual fashions that deny transcendence, and by our mass marketing culture that turns images to task for titillation and profit. "And the principal defining characteristics of all these images is their triviality and dispensability: few of them mean anything beyond the stimulation of a few moments. They constitute, as filmmaker Wim Wenders has said, 'an invasion of and inflation of meaningless images' that numb the capacity for reflection on artistic images of any high order, artistic images that in their stilled concentration of references and purposes require us to slow down and focus and reflect, images that demand and reward sustained attention and contemplation." Ibid, pp.122-23.
I had an opportunity to make a comparison recently between art and kitsch in watching Bagger Vance, directed by Robert Redford. There the female lead is written to be the strong, independent female, able to stand up to the patriarchical ruling class of her town, Savannah. Far from Emily Gibbs who dies in childbirth! In Bagger Vance the female lead is ready in a heart beat to go to bed to advance her interests (and titilate the audience in the process in this PG13 film). Marriage plays no part of the story. In Our Town the mystery of living "two as one" is dwelt on, contemplated. Well, no need to continue. Suffice it to say the film is a hodgepodge of gimmicks, stereotypes, and superficial characters. As we waste our time watching kitsch like this, is it any wonder that we lose our sensitivity for real art?
Robert Sokolowski cautions us to be careful of the images we allow into our consciousness. Images are potent, the currency of our understanding of things. We have a moral duty to dwell on images of value, that help us to live freely, beyond the confines of the mundane practical, and its techniques of manipulation. (Think of pornography. I read a statistic that said 25% of men have viewed pornography in the past month. Aren't manipulation and addiction joined as two sides of the same coin?)
Seeing Our Town reminded me that art does exist, and that art makes all the difference in seeing the truth about things. The play reminds us that we live "in-between" the finite world and transcendent mystery. This is a common truth, shareable by all, a "meta-narrative" gathering all narratives into a common meaning, a "culture."
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