To Suffer the Beautiful
Part One: Exploring Artistic Suffering within the Union of Pain and Beauty
“A stunning sunset wanes and the singing, summer sun completes its slow dive into the dark waters of the horizon, and you’re left in the wake of wonder, the slipstream of serendipity.” I wrote these words about a year ago for a piece I wrote on beauty, titled “Beauty Save and Beauty Kills.” I want to pick up from here, though, and focus on this certain state of life found in “the wake of wonder” and “the slipstream of serendipity.” It is a state I would like to introduce as ‘suffering the beautiful’.
I don’t believe it is presumptuous of me to hold that all of us, or most of us at least, have been in this state. However, while it is a wonderful state to be in—that is, this state of suffering the beautiful—it also carries a depth of pain, a bittersweet after-taste, and a longing ache that you don’t know how to soothe, nor can you fully soothe. Presupposing, then, the inextricable unity of pain and beauty on this side of life, I would like to further explore this unity as it pertains more precisely to the sphere of art and to the life of the artist. And what I ultimately hope to communicate is the notion that creating beauty, that is, art, or the attempt to do so, entails a sort of suffering.
What exactly do I mean here by suffering? At a physical level, yes, there is a pain that comes from ‘art-making’, insofar as painting for five hours straight can lead to aches in one’s wrist, or that one’s eyes become fatigued after long hours of straining the details. These are byproducts of physical human limits. I mean, however, that there is a suffering in art-making that goes deeper and higher than the physical level; art-making involves a suffering that is metaphysical, or ontological, yet it is certainly not the same suffering we feel from sin, even if related by a similar cause of separation. When we review the physical suffering of art-making, as alluded to in the examples just above, its causes are evident to us, which then begs the question: what is the invisible cause of this seemingly invisible, metaphysical suffering found in art-making?
My belief is that this pain is caused, in part, by the inability to truly capture beauty in one form or another (e.g., painting, music, novels, poetry, film), or to communicate the infinite by finite measures. Our thimble-like grasp cannot hold within it the vast ocean of beauty. We wrestle beauty like an angel and are bested by it every time and are, meanwhile, left with a wrenched hip (Gen 32:24-26). However, as I quoted Chesterton in my recent anniversary article, “One Year Out at Sea,” in any good thing there is, “a perpetual desire for expression and concrete embodiment; and though the attempt to embody it is always inadequate, the attempt is always made.” The pain of the artist, then, in one sense, is ultimately the inadequacy to fully express the infinitude of the beauty he or she sees and feels, while also having, nonetheless, an insatiable desire to express it.
Within beautiful art, within beauty more generally, there is a tension that seems alien to this world. The Manichean sense in us feels this tension and cries out “enough—give me only the spirit!” but the sacramental character of art—i.e., material things signifying and married to divine realities—sings in defiance “it is only by death that I shall be separated!” Again, Chesterton writes, “The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual” (Saint Thomas Aquinas). It is the artist, then, who becomes the instrumental minister, in a way, of this defiant marriage between the material and the divine, and it is this tension between these two in which art finds its cogency and force. Related to this idea, Larry Shiner states in his book The Invention of Art that “Art is not human in the end which it pursues. It is human, essentially human, in its method of working. It involves the making of man's work, stamped with the character of man.” It would seem, then, that this crossroad of art —this intersection between the human character and the divine end—is the crucible in which the artist is formed and by which the artist brings forth beauty.
I say this all to set the stage for further points, but, in conclusion, it is my hope that I have introduced in a compelling way the foundational points from which to build: that to truly apprehend beauty entails suffering it, and that the artist suffers beauty in a manifest way, that is, by manifesting the suffering of beauty through artwork. I have already mentioned above that there is a relationship between the suffering of beauty and the suffering of sin. As such, my next article shall focus on just that—I will explore the similarities between the suffering of beauty and the suffering of sin. From there, I hope to write a third part reflecting on the suffering of beauty and the sacrificing of beauty, a distinction found in all suffering. Lastly, in a fourth and final article, I hope to touch upon the passing of beauty, another aspect of beauty that pains us, and the necessity of creating art.