Sleep into the Afternoon:
Why the artist must guard against being overtaken by events
By Alan D. Flurry

It was in a lea, between an old growth stand of oaks and the rather untended remains of a walnut orchard, that Oscar Wilde inquired about the subject, quite by chance and much-heralded need to converse, of Zola's political emersion and where lays one snapshot onto the artist's worldly dilemma. Earlier tentative steps into this matter notwithstanding, in the search for the only-partially vicarious surface of the exemplary playing field, that lea will satisfy as well as any cobbled lane trodden by an adolescent Rimbaud or lonely Dostoevskian cart path. As much as Wilde's insincere curiosity slipped through a crack in the sturdy wall of a meddlesome muse, that perhaps inadvertent longing to know the heart of the writer's predicament particularly resulting from his voluntary insertion into a scandal is a small fact of the larger matter: whither tread the artist if even lightly outside his or her long-sought domain? Should he, decisively and for the greater good of his creation, turn his back on contemporaneous goings-on and remain unto himself a self-same Chateau d'If and, thereby, a creative fortress so preoccupied?

The recently closed century offered much, fodder for cannons as well as edifications, and its wake is deep with the rumblings of its first days, its prow, as is the case with most unwieldy tankers. Just as the passengers were ready to board the famous new steamer, clamorings of division were already visible on deck, waving to those chosen to remain on the nineteenth century shore. The Dreyfus Affair, as polarizing in its reach as any political election or war without being moreso, perhaps crossed the divide more poignantly in the way that it affected Wilde, just out of a two-year prison stint and destined not to see the new century. And this is exactly what makes it a case in point. In a chilly, detached sense, to stick one's head in the sand about this scandal would be an ignoble act given to perhaps more general apathy. It would contribute to rather than countermand the general malaise it would signify. And yet, such an act of remoteness is exactly what may be demanded of the artist not by his times or his contemporaries who find themselves, like Zola, similarly enmeshed, but by time itself. It is the passage of time which holds the keys to unlock the artist's virtue. Tenacity for causes can shake the world if it is a snow globe; but the messiness of contravening simple truths lives on. This unfailingly dichotomy has demonstrated the power to put artwork on view for the edification or elucidation of successive generations or locked it away with a particular moment and creator, his passionate activism forever subdued by his own suffering definitions of it.

Several cases illustrate the point; none more providential than the patriot's paradigm, invested in the admonition to "choose a side." For the artist within earshot, to even listen to such nonsense serves a dual purpose and, sadly, one marked by the deprivation implicit in the chaos and cannibalism that is inseparable from the participant's league with any side in any conflict. Where these partisans trod in the shadow of their convictions is the ditch well shorn of the dispatched tools of the creative soul, devices underfoot in such an inventory, insuperable and useless. The far-reaching consequences of worldwide conflict notwithstanding, the interest large and small of general humanity is supremely disserved by such coercion of the painter, the writer, the sculptor, the dancer.

Consider the connections from the recently closed century alone of great artists to some of the great causes. In a positive sense there are few, and in most cases there would be discovered a proper sense of the artist merely caught up, like Beckett or Camus, in the swirl of events. And yet in the negative sense they are no doubt varied and disastrous in number.

And to be quite clear from the outset, no balance exists; to even suggest one is to preclude by necessity the relegation of art to someplace below the ultimate worth we carelessly imbue to most other human preoccupations. And this is unnecessary. Is it a matter of what preoccupies a man or woman? Those events of the day, or those matters and duties some may ascertain and be compelled to believe as more weighty? Surely this basic rationale avows the mass of humanity to hear the charge and choose a side, and in so doing employ all of one's energy and resources to empower that side; but it does not release the artist. To the contrary, it solidifies the artist's position indelibly.

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
- Oscar Wilde
The Portrait of Mr. W.H.

In a further sense, but much closer to the explicit point of, say, the second World War or the War in Vietnam, the role of the artist at the sight of battle is negligible, outfitted as he might be in a helmet and boots. Reduced to a foot soldier he no more than sacrificial and however he may distinguish himself with good aim and a steady hand, these are much less at our service than they would be before the typewriter or the easel. As regards the latter conflict, perhaps a clue to the under-representation of the artist from that time is the fact that of those men who refused to enter the fray were not artists but athletes. Muhammad Ali, ne' Cassius Clay, perhaps recognized the significance of his role as a prize fighter and saw a decision already made for him, to which he spoke through his religious beliefs.

However, war aside - its scale and drama no doubt make this difficult - regard the manner in which many 20th century artists, from D.H. Lawrence to Picasso, did this on an everyday scale, and the significance of the duty to ignore is all the greater. The fact is, there is no civic duty for the artist; there is no such differentiating element among his duties that might lift any one up or bring any others down. When, by distraction, an artist's attention is seized away from his own life, that is, art, it is no longer - in the service of man - beholden to that great impulse to create that comes from above, that is not by man, but for him. Am I indicting the artist as divine? Hardly. But he or she, as a man in the service of what we call God, relies on the unseen, is inspired by the unmade, sees for us the unpossessable, and as such walks the streets in a suit ill-fitting for many and unappealing to most. The artist is the only ally of our idea of God; he has chosen a side: he is an enemy of catastrophe.

Before the proper authorities are alerted, consider James Baldwin. Baldwin's second book, Giovanni's Room, is an enormous novel, long in the making for its twentieth century arrival. All that had to happen and come before in the birth of the eloquent voice that was Baldwin's should be the story of America, its promise and its refuge for all the righteous ideas of being a chosen nation she harbors about herself. It offered the self-examination, hidden as it was and is by more temporal concerns, that a country so defined by its own largesse and anointing requires. But wholly aside from Baldwin's numerous and brilliant polemics that would follow, Giovanni's Room is a great accomplishment. The question is, where are its sequels? Was it a shot in the dark, and if so, how did it happen? To the extent that these questions, particularly about Baldwin, may be answered, do we know what happened afterward? Some facts about the circumstances speak loudly.

Living in Paris in the early 50's, keeping tabs on the burgeoning struggle that would spill over into civil unrest that was just beginning to bait the establishment back in America - Baldwin's Harlem - along with other ex-pat artists and musicians, Baldwin grew weary of the scent of second-hand smoke. The distant fire of his own city led him to believe he belonged back there, either stoking it or, less likely, putting it out; one might say as an artist, this was his first mistake. His desire for self-expression had led him away - sensing the need to live like a human being first - and this is the first instinct of artistic creativity. Secure the means, however meager, for self-absorption. Reading the newspaper accounts of what was going on back home was important for him and made it possible for him to distill his own feelings in relation to the events just beginning to play out in American streets. But he wasn't ready, wasn't mature enough to go back; had he been, he may have face the more strained and difficult reality that would have lead to other work.

Arguably, the rest of his peak writing life - that fluid period when one must work constantly, diligently, just to make life bearable - was consumed by the injustice he came back home to confront. Intellectual America came undone over his The Fire Next Time when it was published in essay form in the New Yorker and later as a book in 1962, the way this young man's discomforting observations and prerdictions could so poignantly slice to the heart of the rage of being a black man in America. And on its merits, Baldwin's passion against the humiliation of inequality did give these sentiments a powerful, authoritative voice on an urgently grand scale. And yet it is imperative that we inquire as to what was lost by his involvement with the movement. There is a loser when an artist's work is interrupted, and it is ultimately his audience. What might he have accomplished as a man, as a writer, that would have overwhelmed and continued to overwhelm the general population he held in such abject suspicion, indeed for the greater guilt, of the multifarious crimes of racism? The job, after all, has been left rather half done. Simply, did he have an effect? If we believe what we do about what has come to be known as 'political art', we must ask that question. I posit what the most astute smart asses, from Da Vinci to Duchamp, have always known: political art is an oxymoron. It's not that Baldwin's other work was propaganda, but it was informed with that most impotent of constructs: trying to get people to do things. Could he have, as a great artist, had a greater, more enduring body of work that would have had an effect of greater breadth and stamina than what he left? This is not Rimbaud we're talking about, after all, this man was enraged; it is important to ask this question of any artist who implores us with such talent to provide our attention. Yet it is only answerable on the basis of supposition.

And what must be supposed is this: if there is a choice for the artist to make in terms how they must best achieve the work they are charged to do, they at least partially abort the mission by choosing anything other than their strongest voice.
In an everyday sense, there are no such things as everydays; they are replaced in the lives of every woman and man with one, each at a time. It is there where we rely on art for that guide to transcendence on many of these tedious, confusing, ordinary days.
Take Wilde's interest in Zola. Emile Zola, an artist who, at the risk of physical duress, achieved the notice of those great and small, whose actions are the subject of this treatise more than one hundred years after J'accuse appeared in L'Aurore on the morning of January 13, 1898. At the expense of life and limb, the writer Zola, using the influence of his pen, assumed the mantle reserved in ancient times for the prophet and put himself on the line to stand up for truth and justice. This is not an exception but the rule of which I speak. Had Baldwin taken Zola's lead, perhaps he could have made a more dramatic difference in the struggle by keeping it out of his art. It was there where, upon singing, he found his greatest voice. And out of its framework was the very context that would make the difference as to whether Baldwin took the struggle on as a burden, or precisely attacked the harm done to justice like Zola. From his position as an onlooker, and this is the crucial thing, Zola was able to bludgeon an injustice with truth. Approaching it as a novelist, in a novelistic retelling of the incidents of the case in an open letter to the President which by all accounts was not a reliable inventory of the facts, Zola succeeded in stirring public distrust and later disgust at the injustice handed down to Dreyfus by the French military. In contrast, Baldwin's proximity to the struggle put every man's outrage beyond his reach. He was one with the struggle for equality and it burned the artistic soul right out of him.

Writer and painters have a brief horizon on which contemporary events may register. That is the whole point of being self-absorbed. There is only a narrow window for everything else and everything else may consume the world if not for our abstract references to the ideas by which we have chosen to live. And the origin of these ideas is none other than the artist. We've always known the propagandist from the painter, the mouthpiece from the guide, and the opportunist from the visionary. We recognize each of the latter of these by our own unease at the transparency of their motivations. Even those upon whom fame has shined may still confound us as the reason why they do what they do. Camus, Zola, Lawrence, they could seize the mantle of a tumultuous event or cause, but only for a moment; then they had to get back to what they were doing. And this is more to the point: what they concern themselves with is most likely more of a harbinger of elucidation on the problems of the day than had they directly engaged the problem. Indeed the problem of direct engagement can be seen in those who practice it: digression into grandstanding and argument, intractable stalemates only inches away from tactics of treachery where their inadequate reason invariably fails them. One must hope that they can rely on the less ephemeral accomplishments of the disengaged to salvage their civilization. Especially when they becomes us.

Stopping at the window to direct engagement then, one stumbles on the way to forward thinking. To whom is left the responsibility of thinking about the future? Absent the painters and playwrights, sculptors and scenarists, conceptualizing the future cannot be adequately performed on the wings of deficit projections and market trends. Those identify not the future, but a compression of multiple replications of last summer's statistics into a neatly baked pie which we may then slice and view in cross-section. And without fail, our slice looks thin and unappetizing, and we pine for a slice of last year's pie or better, one from the fifties. But whatever the year, the future comes across as dark and portentous on the evening news, backlit as it is by the chill of our own numerical suspicions. And startling revelations arrive everyday of no import whatsoever, but of course we tremble at the well of so much meaning.

The outward effects, plus the motivation to withstand them, then, become of primary concern to the artist. It is knowing oneself, recognizing that by which one lives, that one may face every day with the task in mind rather with a mind of tasks. During the four years the Nazis occupied Paris, Pablo Picasso remained at his studio on the Rue des Grands-Augustins. Unable to exhibit, he did manage to sell paintings and live day to day perhaps better than other Parisians of the time, if not to the level to which he had become accustomed. This raises questions about his involvement as a Vichy collaborator or a Resistance sympathizer. As a painter, his work was to a degree affected - and to his sympathies with the Spanish republicans, his Guernica stands as his most explicit testament. He was not naïve to the idea that war would show up in his paintings, but to what extent, he would leave to historians. His motivations lay elsewhere; and of course, the war is notably absent in many of his paintings from this period. Picasso had no intentions of extrapolating overt political agendas onto his paintings which were, ultimately and like everything else in his life, about Picasso.
He was awakened to a different agenda and, as to his decision to remain in Paris when so many other prominent artists had fled just ahead of the invading Nazis, he told Francoise Gilot in 1943: "I'm not looking for risks to take, but in a passive sort of way I don't care to yield to either force or terror. I only want to stay because I am here. The only kind of force that could make me leave is the desire to leave. Staying on really isn't a manifestation of courage; it's just a form of inertia."

For the artist then, ambiguity and the unknown stand out as the brightest road signs on the path linking immortality to smithereens. He must not only possess the capacity for these, he must desire them, wed them to his own need to be. This is why Picasso and the Nazis could hold nearly the same ground: what he had in mind was many times larger in magnitude than them. They could have arrested him, sure, but perhaps they came for him once in the afternoon when he lay asleep several blocks away in his mistress' boudoir. So as we unwittingly ready ourselves to overtake the role of the artist, to invalidate his efforts by the pretenses dispatched by the nature of extraneous events, we must ask ourselves: who will sleep into the afternoon?