9th December 2005
I haven't written anything today. I didn't sleep last night, which was bad, but I didn't go down to the kiosk for cigarettes, either, which is good. Second day without the weed.
Not writing anything leads, though not inevitably, to the question: why write at all? In George Steiner's words, "Why, then, art, why the created realm of fiction?" He goes on to answer, "Compelled to take the guise of a verbal proposition, of an abstract claim, no reply can be adequate to match the force of the obvious. I can only put it this way (and every true poem, piece of music or painting says it better): there is aesthetic creation because there is creation. There is formal construction because we have been made form. Today, mathematical models proclaim access to the origins of the present universe. Molecular biology may have in reach an unravelling of the thread whose beginning is that of life. Nothing in these prodigious conjectures disarms, let alone elucidates, the fact that the world is when it might not have been, the fact we are in it when we might, when we could not have been. The core of our human identity is nothing more or less than the fitful apprehension of the radically inexplicable presence, facticity and perceptible substantiality of the created. It is; we are. This is the rudimentary grammar of the unfathomable." (Steiner, Real Presences, pp201, University of Chicago Press edn., America 1991, Faber and Faber, London, 1989.)
Does Steiner fail to discriminate between insinuating that there is creation because we have, our world, our consciousness, have been created, or because we are capable of creation and so creation exists? Both approaches are theological in tone, which is no coincidence since his book interestingly argues a theological exploration of art, against the deconstructionist fanatics of 1970s America.
I personally believe that art, literature should not be wholly religous or theological in tone, but that it should be combined with the humanistic, the human circumstance. Today, most of what we read is purely human and thus suffers an emotional loss, which an appeal to that which is beyond ourselves, however vain, could enrich the reader beyond measure.
Andrew Timothy
Comments