Guest Post:
When I was a kid I crawled under the fence
at the Orange Show in San Bernardino, California. I had no money, so I walked around the
carnival with a casual air, doing my best imitation of someone who belonged
there. One thing I saw was a long line of women waiting to have their portraits
drawn by a blind artist.
Before
he drew them, his fingers moth-winged over their foreheads, their hair, down
the slope of their nose, over their lips, their chin and neck. After a while
he’d look up and smile as if he’d seen a holy vision. Then he’d draw.
And
when he finished he’d hold up his drawing, and the women would ooh and ah, clasp their hands to their hearts, and tell him what a amazing
artist he was. The thing was, his drawings didn’t look anything like the women.
Some were downright grotesque. I couldn’t figure out why on earth those women
would spend good money on this fraud.
Years
later in my continuing struggle to be a writer, I think of that blind artist,
how he drew his portraits with supreme confidence, how joyfully he worked, the
genuine happiness of those women whose portraits he drew.
And
I see now that from his perspective he got it right every time. He was never compelled to erase or redo or apologize. I’m
betting that he must have lived his life warmed by the creative glow of knowing
that he had really “seen” his subjects. I betting also that women who stood in
line were waiting, no, craving to be seen.
Isn’t
being seen, I mean being really seen
from the inside out, the most
precious gift an artist can give a viewer, a listener, a reader. Don’t the
greatest works of art awaken us to our own aliveness because we know we have
been seen at a deep level? I can’t imagine a gift more precious. I would stand
in a line for a long time to receive it.
Being
seen by anyone—a lover, a friend, an artist—somehow completes us. Rodin said
that when he finally put his hammer and chisel down, stood back, and circled
around his work, he heard the sculpture say, I am complete now. You have finished me. Have a glass of wine now and
rejoice in my completion. And today, when I see his sculptures they seem to
glow with an inner eye of recognition. As Rilke says in his poem Archaic Torso
of Apollo: “. . . for there is no place at all that isn’t looking at you. You
must change your life.” And that is
what art does. It changes your life.
When
Rilke was a young man, he worked for Rodin as his secretary. Rodin’s advice to
him was simply, “SEE!” And so Rilke spent six months at the
Paris zoo watching a caged animal before he wrote his famous twelve line poem, The Panther. Rilke saw into
more deeply than any other poet. And I think in his way, the blind artist
was doing the same kind of seeing.
On
those occasions when an artist or writer or musician open my caged heart, I
feel completed, grateful that I’ve been allowed to exist in three dimensions if
only to myself. Great art fills me with gratitude for being seen. That, I
believe, is the purpose of all art. Failing that, it is mere curiosity and
escapist entertainment.
I
wonder also if the women who were drawn to the blind artist knew in some way that
he would see them, that he would touch their own inner-rightness, their deeper
beauty, their lonely souls. And I am almost certain their husbands laughed when
they saw the blind artist’s portraits with a nose protruding from a forehead or
an ear attached to a cheek. But, so what? I watched this blind artist all day,
and I can assure you that the line grew longer and longer.
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