Letter #82: Finishing the Hat

It's the only way to see.

Dad,

There’s a line from a song you and I both love, Stephen Sondheim’s “Finishing the Hat.” The painter George Seurat is putting the final touches on a portrait, and he sings: “stepping back to look at a face / leaves a little space in the way, like a window. / But, to see…it’s the only way to see.”

That line was hanging melancholy in the back of my mind as I read your profound observations about the way our own achievements divide us against ourselves. Our technology “leaves a little space” between our bodies and souls, so that what was once an inseparable union now becomes a matter of choice. Will we continue voluntarily to live out an allegory of God's love that was once written into nature's contours?

If biology guides us to paint by numbers in this matter, technology enables us to draw freehand. So far, we’re making a mess of it, smearing away God’s image like toddlers with a new set of finger paints. But our only option is to learn, because history is always opening up that gap between spirit and flesh. 

In a book we also both love, Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield argues that the history of language is a story of how words get divided from an original unity. A word like ruach in Hebrew means both the “sprit” of God and the “wind” that moves through the Garden in the cool of the day. But it gradually gets separated into the physical concept of “wind” and the abstract concept of “spirit.” Somewhere deep in our psychology and our language we sense a lost unity between body and soul. 

This tragic reality might just be inherent in creation itself. In the Hebrew of Genesis, God is always drawing divisions (badal) to make new things. He divides the heavens from the earth, the water from the land, the flesh of woman from the bones of man. He may even stand back like George from his painting to see it and call it good. In fact the Hebrew word for holiness, qodesh, just means “separateness.” In Kabbalah this is referred to as “zimzum,” God’s “retreat”: to create at all, God must withdraw to a space apart and allow his creation to be other than himself. Because if we aren’t truly separate from him, with distinct wills of our own, how can we ever really love him?

Barfield writes that poetic diction is when an artist restores the unity of a word’s lost meanings. When Shelley calls the west wind the “breath of Autumn’s being,” he senses that “breath” and “spirit” and “wind” were once all one. He places the word so perfectly that art reclaims the unity of all those things, which time had broken down. 

As poetry is to language, so love is to creation, making voluntary union out of what was once natural wholeness. Stepping back—as God did from creation, as we do from nature—leaves an aching space in the way. But it’s only once the space is there that love can leap across it.

Love,
Spencer

PS: If you missed our livestream Q&A, or if you just long to relive its glories, the video is now up for everyone to watch!