Letter #83: A Matter of Life and Art

One Night at the Theater

Splunk.

Man, I love that song. “Finishing the Hat,” has got to be the single best description of what it’s like to make art ever written. What I love most about it — aside from Stephen Sondheim’s insanely brilliant lyrics — is its triviality, or maybe I should say its lack of grandiosity. Artists love to yammer on about their mission of truth and revelation. But, as I once heard an author admit during a British television interview: “Mostly what I do is move commas around.”

In Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George, Mandy Patinkin as Georges Seurat sings about letting life pass him by while he performs the essentially meaningless task of painting an article of clothing: “You watch the rest of the world from a window while you finish the hat.”

I was thirty when Sunday in the Park opened on Broadway. I was just beginning to emerge from the darkest period of my life. I had tickets to the show one night, but I was volunteering at a suicide hotline then. I arranged to meet your mother at the theater after my shift.

But that evening, I received the one and only emergency call I ever got. A guy phoned and said he had taken a fatal dose of pills and just wanted to talk to me while he died. Working desperately against the clock, I managed to wangle his address out of him and sent an ambulance to fetch him.

By then, though, I was running late for the theater. I went tearing out of the office and headed downtown. Unfortunately, during the emergency, I had sweat through my shirt. I plunked down into the seat next to mom just as the curtain went up — and I smelled like a men’s locker room. Trying to protect my fellow theatergoers from the noxious fumes, I jammed my hands into my armpits, and sat hugging myself for the duration of the play.

My heart broke when I heard that song. I had been suicidal myself not so long before. Now I was committed to life, but it was a life so often spent alone in a room, letting the world pass me by — while I was doing what?  Moving commas around. Finishing the hat.

That has been my life, and an extraordinarily joyful one. But like every artist, whether Shakespeare or Mike Shayne, I have no real idea whether I’ve accomplished anything worthwhile, anything that will last beyond my lifetime.

You and Barfield are exactly right, though. Acts of creation leap the gap between matter and meaning. They are inherently worthwhile.

Evil is the absence of love. Creation, the telos of love, is the opposite of evil. A child, a work of art, an act of charity, a job well done, even a truly lived moment creates that beauty that hints at a design beyond the tragedy of existence. It’s the only answer we have to the sadness of the world.

xxx