The Right Frame of Mind: Finding Revelation in Creativity
[This article was originally published in The Crossing in 1999.]
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A few years ago "Magic Eye" art became an abrupt phenomenon from galleries to gift shops. People stood staring at posters comprised of little more than spatterings of colored pixels. They’d wait… wait… wait for something to happen. Suddenly, they’d cry "Oh! I see it!" Grinning smugly at each other, they would go on to the next display. I refused to subject myself to this embarrassing hoax. In public, anyway. But in private, when the opportunity presented itself, I stared into an ocean of dots to find out what it all meant. Nothing happened. "You have to relax," a friend later advised me. "Concentrate. Stare through the picture." Next time I did, a strange blur of motion caught my eyes. A 3-D image—a scenic mountain lake—emerged. "Oh," I happily exclaimed, "I see it!" Concentration. Patience. And then the miracle.
Whether you’ve been a whale-watcher on a boat or a child with a hidden-picture puzzle, you know the thrill of seeing shape and form mysteriously emerge from seeming chaos. There’s something there, in the fog. Constellations in the cosmos. Method in the madness. For some, it is enough to observe beauty unfolding from a choreography of disparate elements. My own artistic endeavors are a process of observation, of contemplating elements that grab my attention, anticipating discovery there, and preserving the context in which things are being revealed.
THE ELEMENTS OF AMAZEMENT
Poet Lucy Shaw says, "Usually my compulsion to write comes from my amazement at a striking image." The things that can inspire us to amazement are everywhere, often hidden in plain view, waiting to suddenly capture our attention. From age seven, I’ve wanted to write about just about everything, to find the stories waiting there.
The imaginations of great artists sometimes awake while concentrating on their circumstances and surroundings. John Donne found revelation—and probably comfort as well—as he contemplated his own suffering while bedridden, and his poems carry us with him through those trials. For the Psalmist, there were God’s mountains, valleys, wars and wounds. For Georgia O’Keefe—skies, flowers, mesas, bones.
Artists—poets especially—are frequently compulsive collectors of souvenirs from everyday life. They clutter their apartments with "ordinary" objects—fragments, puzzle pieces—that stir their imaginations to amazement when they are in the right frame of mind. Autumn leaves. Scribbled lines from overheard conversations. Colorful stones. Postcards. My "toybox" of such stuff holds film soundtracks, newspaper clippings, photographs, poems.
I keep photographs from a 1995 hike through Montana’s Glacier Park. On that adventure, my wife Anne and I discussed how our lives were changing post-college. Anne spoke some unintentionally magical words: "Most people seem to reach an age where they fold up their childlike imagination and put it in the closet." That statement—there, in those woods—intrigued me. Something mysterious snagged my interest. The other hikers followed my gaze into the trees––had I seen a bear? But what I began to see was a fairy-tale-to-be, where a woods-dwelling community (in a woods quite like this one) fold up their imaginations and bury them out of reach. Why would they do this? What would happen to them? What could it mean? I was hooked by those magic words. It was Anne’s fault. I started writing about it. It wasn’t until after I had preserved the ideas on paper that I began to see clearly. The story wanted to be told. It had been waiting.
A VOICE IN THE WORK
Almost every artist has at some time exclaimed, "And then the work took on a life of its own!" There’s a will in the work. This is the experience that draws me back to writing fairy tales over and over again. Those things we choose at the work’s outset develop relationships we do not expect, like two cats learning to share a space, like chemicals mixing, like a solar system coming into gravitational balance. I live for the moment when characters run off and do their own thing; I can hardly write fast enough to keep up. Perhaps it is God I am sensing through the story darkly"…reminding me that all art is collaboration.
But for a long time I was uncomfortable with letting the story lead me. The right frame of mind––open, receptive, explorative––seemed irresponsible.
Having been schooled and raised to be a Christian "witness", for years I struggled with a preoccupation to communicate rather than create something. This concern made me self-conscious and nearly robbed me of the joy of storytelling. As an adolescent, I worried about whether my stories would instill "morals" or "share Jesus" with my readers. I shifted from a delight in imagination to a desire for results.
In the 1980’s, singer/songwriter Leslie Phillips became popular communicating the gospel through pop music to an enthusiastic Christian audience. When she suddenly began exploring difficult questions, and her own doubts, many of the faithful disapproved. Fans walked out on her shows. Disillusioned, Phillips disappeared. But there was honesty, beauty, and resonance in this complicated new poetry. Later, when Leslie resurfaced in front of mainstream audiences (using her childhood nickname "Sam"), preaching was no longer the focus; exploration became prevalent. Her recent works reflect her faith and echo her Creator through balance, beauty, bravery, and originality. This decision to be an artist rather than a spokesperson had a great impact on me as I struggled to regain the state of wonder in artmaking. Certainly, artists who set out to preach or teach sometimes achieve incredible things and their work is alive. But like Jesus, the best storytellers leave room for their audiences to discover the truths of the work. I still wrestle with this, but I am finding the courage again to explore, to play, and thus—to discover.
When I try to guess or predetermine how a story will turn out, the work resists me. Once as I followed my story’s hero to an old-fashioned showdown with his worst enemy, I found myself less and less satisfied with the story. Unanswered questions disrupted my efforts. I ignored my discomfort. For goodness sake, I was going to make sure good triumphed over evil! But nothing worked; the story was failing. It was not time to resolve the conflict yet. It was the villain himself who beckoned to me…he wanted me to understand him before I annihilated him.
Considering this villain’s fall, I found he had transgressed, in the beginning, quite simply, with sins as unspectacular as my own frequent failings. This transformed my perspective of him. I felt like Tolkien’s humble hero Frodo when he finally looks on the miserable monster Gollum and exclaims, "Now that I see him, I do pity him." I could no longer revel in a conventional finale where justice demands the bad guy’s swift execution. Such crowd-pleasing would express a self-righteous "Ha! So There!" rather than an honest contemplation of what was really happening. An engaging story emerged on its own, unexpected, and I learned a thing or two about patience and compassion.
THE DANGERS OF DISTRACTION
The trick to a Magic Eye picture, I learned, is to train your eyes and your mind to concentrate. Don’t let anything distract you when you start to find the image in the chaos. Likewise, distractions can ruin the right frame of mind for the artist at work.
Distractions hail from all corners of my room. A stack of unpaid bills. A hungry cat. Chores.A leaky faucet. Migraines. But there are internal distractions as well.
If I am happy with a reader’s response to my writing (or to some other writer’s work, for that matter,) I can be distracted by a desire for similar successes in new projects. If I attempt to follow a formula and focus on recreating that effect, I fall into the trap of focusing on the audience instead of the work. Consideration of audience might be appropriate during the second draft, but creation is a private, intimate matter between the artist and the emerging work.
And that charged experience of beholding mysteries can itself become a distraction. Too eager for "the rush" of imagination, I have abandoned promising first drafts because I prefer to work on newer, more immediately exciting ideas. My energy becomes thinly spread over too many projects. Creative friends can be a threat in themselves; it’s easy to get caught up in their endeavors while my own passion remains perpetually postponed due to a stall or an obstacle. I have a lot to learn about patience. Good things come to those who wait. Sometimes a watched pot does boil.
And waiting can be an activity; it doesn’t have to be just sitting and hoping an idea comes along. When a work gets difficult, sometimes it’s because I’ve stepped too close to it. When I can’t figure out how to end a scene, or where to begin, something as simple as a walk around the block can help. Breaking a routine can produce surprising new ideas. I try to write in all sorts of unconventional places, to unusual music. Writing without puncutation, with a different color of ink, on a different paper or surface, using ten words randomly chosen from a dictionary in an experimental paragraph. There’s no end of tricks for learning more about the work. Like children turned loose with paper and crayons, artists can be at their most inspired when they’re not distracted, when they’re free of pressure, self-inflicted or otherwise, when they’re attentive.
Perhaps this doesn’t sound like "work." But "play" is the best way to learn, the best way to discover. It teaches us to focus. It opens us up. Milton writes: "Thousands at his bidding speed/ And post oe’r land and ocean without rest;/ They also serve who only stand and wait…". The artist is a servant that stands and waits, and then—disciplined, focused—captures in some form whatever he beholds.
PRESERVING EXPERIENCE
The right frame of mind, ultimately, serves the artists’ audience.
Photographer Alfred Stieglitz wanted viewer sto have an experience equivalent to his as he watched clouds. He titled some of his cloud photographs "equivalents."
Poet Jane Hirschfield, in her book Nine Gates: Opening the Minds of Poetry, shows us how the reader enters with the author into the experience of the work. "Saying a poem aloud, or reading it silently... we breathe as the author breathed, we move our own tongue and teeth and throat in the ways they moved in the poem’s first making. There is a startling intimacy to this. Some echo of the writer’s physical experience comes into us...."
When an artist’s skill and an audience’s discernment meet, the artist has the pleasure of saying, "You’ll see something here if you look carefully." "Oh!" they say. "I see it!"
Concentration. Patience. And then, the miracle.
And the Slater Award goes to...
On Christianity Today's "Feedback" page, you'll see a wide range of responses to Peter T. Chattaway's review of the film Save Me.
Then read the responses.
Quite a variety of responses there. Some show evidence that the writers actually read Chattaway's review. (And you can bet that there were plenty of other letters CT found unfit to print.)
But the Ted Slater award* goes to Ron F. Wagley, who says:
Your review of Save Me leaves me saddened that you endorse this movie and its presentation of homosexuality as okay...
Read Chattaway's review again. Note the 2 1/2 stars. Note Chattaway's careful attention to the film's strengths and weaknesses. A review is not an endorsement, and especially not this review. Do you see him endorsing the movie, or "endorsing its presentation of homosexuality as okay"?
Of course not. Wagley's contempt blinds him to what is written on the page in front of him. I hope he recovers from this fever and sees more clearly.
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*What's the Ted Slater award?
This award goes to anyone who publicly accuses a Christian of something that all available evidence directly contradicts. It's named for Ted Slater, editor of Focus on the Family's Boundless.org. When Christianity Today ran a mixed review of Sex and the City and criticized the explicit sex scenes, Slater published an "open letter to Christianity Today" in which he accused Christianity Today of "relishing sexual perversion" and "enjoying" "pornography." This in spite of the reviewer's clear criticism of the film's sexually explicit material, the reviewer's careful distinction that she appreciated some storytelling aspects of the film while disliking others, and the reviewer's insistence that the substance of Sex and the City elevates it above pornography. Sigh.
So far, Slater has not, to my knowledge, retracted his words or published any kind of apology for calling those of us at CTMovies being porn-loving perverts.
Body of Lies (2008)
[This review was originally published at Christianity Today.]
Sir Ridley Scott is not only one of the world's most popular filmmakers—he's also a visionary. Best known for directing Alien and Blade Runner, two of the most influential sci-fi films ever made, he also delivered such classics as Thelma and Louise, Black Hawk Down, and Gladiator. Sumptuous cinematography and strong performances distinguish his grand epics about power, corruption, and conscience.
Ridley's brother Tony is known for flashy commercial thrillers and action pics—solid genre movies like Déjà Vu, Man on Fire, Spy Games, Enemy of the State, and Top Gun. He's more of a stylist than a storyteller. If you see helicopters, explosions, and a lot of high-tech gadgetry, chances are you're watching Tony's work.
On first glance, Body of Lies looks like a Tony Scott film, with its the super-slick style, ubiquitous cutting-edge technology, and spy-game conventions. But it's actually the bigger brother at the controls. And in this contemporary context, Ridley demonstrates the same delicacy in portraying culture clashes that he showed in 2006's Kingdom of Heaven.
It feels as if half of Body of Lies is viewed through the lenses of high-tech surveillance equipment. That's because the film is divided between a C.I.A. agent in the homeland, who organizes covert operations halfway around the world via cell phone, and the crackerjack field agent he commands and monitors.
The commanding officer is Ed Hoffman (Russell Crowe). Like Christof in Peter Weir's The Truman Show, Hoffman is a grand manipulator who thinks that he can "save civilization" by monitoring the Middle East through the cameras of high-flying drones and using his hands-free cell phone to order agents on the ground into action. Hoffman's ego is frightful, but his resourcefulness is impressive.
Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the moral center in this tale that explores the very grey territory of international espionage ethics. Ferris is a battle-scarred soldier who's up for any challenge, accepting wild assignments so fast you wonder if he has a taste for adventure or a death wish. Ferris uses wits, charm, speed, and smooth language skills (he's one of those few American agents who actually speaks Arabic) to gain allies, challenge foes, and even flirt with a pretty Iranian woman. Played by DiCaprio with the same intensity he brought to The Departed and Blood Diamond, Ferris could almost be Frank Abagnale Jr. of Catch Me If You Can, grown up and applying his powers of adaptation for a good cause.
Ferris spends the first half of the film risking his life to gather information on the egomaniacal jihadist Al-Saleem (Alon Aboutboul). In doing so, he establishes a tense alliance with Hani Salaam (Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian Intelligence. Hani is a key ally for the U.S., but he has one rule: Don't lie to him, or you'll face serious consequences. This places Ferris in serious jeopardy when he decides to invent a fictitious terrorist cadre that will wound Al-Saleem's ego and lure him into a mistake.
But who is Ferris? And how did he get into this mess? DiCaprio's got the stuff to be a great action hero, and Ferris could be the focus of a great franchise—but he'd need more character development. Here's he's just an action hero, an Energizer Bunny—Jason Bourne without the identity crisis.
Ferris dominates the film. But Hoffman is a far more interesting character in spite of that unflattering crew cut that makes his head look like a thumb. He's quite the multi-tasker, shuttling his kids from school to activities while directing covert ops on his cell. He twitches like someone constantly surfing the net in his head. His wife is just a figure in the background, almost irrelevant and surely neglected
Crowe continues to impress with his capacity for transformation. Fifty pounds heavier and full of swagger, he disappears into Hoffman's character, though his mannerisms almost overwhelm the character—like whenever Hoffman tucks his chin and fires that supercilious glare over the brim of his glasses. But even though Crowe has very few chances to show onscreen chemistry with DiCaprio, he still lives up to his reputation as one of our most resourceful screen actors. It's hard to believe this is the same guy we recently saw as a lean, mean outlaw in 3:10 to Yuma.
But Strong almost steals the movie as the suave, imperious Hani Salaam. His eagle-eyed intensity gives him a formidable, menacing screen presence, so it catches us by surprise when he proves to have a sharp wit that relieves some of the film's relentless tension.
Strong is just one of many utterly convincing actors Scott has drawn together to portray the Middle Eastern players. There's Oscar Isaac, The Nativity Story's Joseph, making yet another strong impression. And Munich's Simon McBurney as the implausible computer genius who has the world at his fingertips.
The script was adapted by William Monahan from a novel by David Ignatius, a Washington Post journalist who analyzes CIA operations in the Middle East. And just as he did in his Academy Award-winning screenplay for The Departed, Monahan deftly juggles a large cast of tough-guy characters without ever confusing us about who's who.
Even better, he demonstrates discernment in his refusal to turn this into a story of the Good Guys versus the Bad Guys. He sees a mix of honor and wickedness in Americans, Jordanians, and Iraqis, in freedom fighters and in warlords. In that sense, Body of Lies resembles Kingdom of Heaven, continuing Ridley Scott's trend of seeing wars through the eyes of compassion, rather than through nationalistic bias.
The film's magnificent production design and sumptuous cinematography make Morocco a convincing stand-in for other Middle-East locations. The filmmakers seem driven to demonstrate the complexity of these present quagmires and conundrums. Moreover, they seem set on bursting the balloon of American ego, raising questions about the ethics of presumptuous U.S. interventionists, and at the same time impressing upon us the severity of the jihadist threat to homeland security.
Like Blade Runner, Body of Lies reminds us of the corrupting nature of power, and how those who look down on the rest of the world often fail to understand the consequences of their actions or the suffering they unleash. Meanwhile, Ferris, who like Deckard does the dirty work on the ground, experiences an awakening, and begins questioning the ethics of those who give him orders. Is he a plotter, or a pawn? A savior, or a tool?
Hoffman's brash and obnoxious behavior are off-putting, but we can't just dismiss him as an American jackass because he sees so many things so clearly. He's right when he describes the advantages of an old-world foe, a foe that doesn't carry a cell phone. And when he describes the fragility of Western civilization in a world of powerful jihadists, his aggressive tactics make a whole lot of sense.
Alas, the film's serious investigations of ethics and foreign policy are undercut by the film's obvious eagerness to entertain. It stumbles into bewildering implausibility when Ferris survives bombing after gunfight after bombing. His romance with an Iranian nurse (Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani) is preposterous. And the closing scene brings a complicated relationship to a disappointingly simplistic resolution.
But we should be glad that Ridley Scott is joining the growing list of filmmakers educating Americans on the complexity of Middle Eastern conflict. The War on Terror is becoming a genre. The Kingdom, Rendition, Traitor, and an acclaimed, as-yet-unreleased Katheryn Bigelow actioner The Hurt Locker are inspiring a lot of discussion. And we should hope to see directors who will be bold enough to examine more closely the religious convictions that set extremists apart from other Muslims.
Viewers are likely to walk away from Body of Lies admiring its conscientious hero, but they're also likely to believe Hoffman when he says that the War on Terror is not likely to be "won." Instead, it's going to be ongoing, a conflict that requires constant vigilance—with no end in sight.
Iowa you an explanation.
I'm in Orange City, Iowa.
It's like... 20 degrees here, and there's snow on the ground.
I'm preparing for my third presentation of the day at Northwestern College. It'll be a public lecture about Christian discernment in the arts. So I'm busy, I'm tired (jet lag and stress), and I'm having a fantastic time with gracious hosts.
Normal blogging will resume when I get back and catch up on my sleep.
Stay tuned...
Wanted: A web designer to work with me (at SPU).
Seattle Pacific University is seeking an experienced Web Designer.
I am so grateful...
...
that I live in a democratic country;
and that my HOPE is placed in the right man:
a leader with no term limits;
who loves everyone equally (red, blue, rich, poor, white, black, born, unborn);
who even loves his enemies... so much that he forbids mocking them or laughing at their folly;
who will prove himself faithful and true on every single promise;
who shows me grace in spite of my blindspots and pride;
and who will
never
ever
make a concession speech.
And now, let's get back to doing justice, to loving mercy, and to walking humbly with our God.
God bless America.