Anam Cara

The Artist as Permanent Pilgrim

For most roles in life, there are structures of study and apprenticeship to acquire the skill to function, be it as teacher, mechanic, or surgeon. Though certain structures exist for training in the arts, the artist is different. The artist trains himself; it can be no other way. Each artist is animated by a unique longing. There are no outer ready-made maps for what the artist wants to create. Each is haunted by some inner voice that will not permit any contentment until what is demanded is created. The artist cannot settle into the consensus of normal belonging. His heart pushes him out to the edge where other imperatives hold sway. There is great lonesomeness in becoming implicated in the creation of something original. The French poet Arthur Rimbaud said, “I have no ancestors.” In a sense, the artist is called not so much from outside as from the unknown depths within.

The invitation to create comes from elsewhere. Artists are the priestesses and priests of culture. They coax the invisible towards a form where it becomes faintly visible, silence towards voice, and the unknown towards intimacy. Artists help us to see what is secretly there. No artist stands alone in a clear space. Every artist works from the huge belonging to the tradition, but yet does not repeat anything. The artist belongs in a strange way. He inhabits the tradition to such depth that he can feel it beat in his heart, but his tradition also makes him feel like a total stranger who can find for his longing no echo there. Out of the flow of this intimate foreignness something new begins to emerge.

The artist is fiercely called to truth. Despite all the personal limitation and uncertainty, he has to express what he finds. Sometimes the findings are glorious. Rilke’s poetry gladdens the heart and makes you aware of the secret eternity of everything around you. The music of Beethoven gives huge voice to the dense cadences of creation. At other times, the artist has to name and portray the crippling and poisonous forms of belonging for which we settle: Kafka’s meticulous articulation of the surrealism of bureaucracy; Beckett’s portrayal of the famine of absence that can never be warmed or filled. In this way the artist calls us to freedom and promise. In art, we see where the lines of our belonging have become tight and toxic.

The artist is always faithful to longing, first. This willingness to follow the longing “wherever it leads” demands and enables all kinds of new possibilities of belonging. Hölderlin says: “Was bleibt aber stiften die Dichter,” i.e., What endures, / the poets create.

The creation of such permanence is the result of following longing to the outposts, beyond every cosy or settled shelter, until some echo of the eternal belonging is sounded.

A large number of our brothers and sisters are also at the outposts we never visit.