We stick to the wrong thing quite often, not because it will come to fruition by further effort, but because we cannot let go of the way we have decided to tell the story and we become further enmeshed even by trying to make sense of what entraps us, when what is needed is a simple, clean breaking away.
David Whyte, Consolations
Stories can rescue us and return our lives to us. We need them to develop a sense of continuity and to make sense of tragedy. Human beings are storytellers who tell stories about humanity. What this means is that we were born to be artists and art.
The closest we get to the notion that life is art is in the idea that each of us should be the author of our lives. Liberty and self-ownership require that we write our lives and not have them written for us. So that whatever happens to us and wherever we end up is the result of our decisions and a deserved reward for our efforts.
But this is not the only one way to interpret this instruction. If stories make things become our own, then we don’t need to have written ours from the beginning. In order to be the author of our lives, we need only find a way of re-telling our story. Storytelling grants us belonging through recovery and not only determination.
The great thing about this is that, until our dying day, we always have the ability to reclaim lost time and our freedom. The downside is that we must struggle to equip ourselves with the sensitivity and skill that all good storytellers possess.
A face speaks a thousand words. That is, it tells a story. Stories are are the only way we can see each other.
One thing is needful. - To 'give style' to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses that their nature has to offer and then fit them into an artistic plan until each appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Retelling the story is part of what Nietzsche meant by giving style to one’s character. Weaknesses become bearable only with effort and imagination, and only when they are placed within a larger piece that has a charm and attractiveness that renders them redundant. Only art can save ugliness.
For Nietzsche, eternity, not ephemerality, is the ultimate measure. He claimed that “only as an aesthetic phenomenon are our existence and the world justified to eternity.” Walter Kaufmann describes giving style as an affirmative act that justifies not only our existence but existence itself:
The man...who has organised the chaos of his passions and integrated every feature of his character, redeeming even the ugly by giving it a meaning in a beautiful totality - this übermensch would also realise how inextricably his own being was involved in the totality of the cosmos: and in affirming his own being, he would also affirm all that is, has been, or will be.
Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
Art points beyond itself towards eternity. Not only because it’s beautiful, but because it captures an aliveness that overcomes death. Nietzsche wrote that “[w]hile we are living in each phase of our lives we rarely recognise its true pathos”(he goes on to say that in the end we see it as an “ethos” rather than a pathos, which I think is more accurate).
Artists teach us the “art of 'putting oneself on stage' before oneself.” Putting oneself on stage not only implies exposure and vulnerability, it situates us. Composing our lives places them in time and ties everything together. Life is momentary and constituted by moments. When we become a composition, the smallest details keep their importance, but they are no longer all-important.
What one should learn from artists. - How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not? Here we could learn something...we want to be the poets of our life - first of all in the smallest, most common place details.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
Life consists of rare single moments of the greatest importance, and of countless intervals during which, at best, the phantoms of those moments hover around us. Love, the Spring, every fine melody, the mountains, the moon, the sea - all speak but once fully to the heart, if, indeed, they ever do quite attain speech. For many people have not those moments at all, and are themselves intervals and pauses in the symphony of actual life.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All-Too-Human
Our obsession with the transient isn’t unusual. Moments are significant because they are the only place where intensity can reside and consequently, the only thing that can make memories:
Beyond the veils of language and the noise of activity, the most profound events of our lives take place in those fleeting moments where something else shines through, something that can never be fixed in language, something given as quietly as the gift of your next breath. Days and nights unfold in the confidence and continuity of sequence. Most days take no notice of us; but then every so often there is a moment when time seems to crystallise. A voice changes tone and a deeper music becomes audible. A gaze holds and a hidden presence is glimpsed.
John O'Donohue, Divine Beauty
In Divine Beauty, John O’Donohue describes beauty as a “rare delight” and claims that it “alone decides when to come”:
True beauty cannot be invented or manufactured. We 'cannot bear very much reality'. Neither, it seems, can we bear very much beauty. The glimpse, the touch of beauty is enough to sicken our hearts with the longing for the divine. Beauty never finally satisfies though she intensifies our longing and refines it. Were the human person simply soul, beauty would be an absolute embrace. We are, however, threshold creatures of deep ambivalence and when beauty touches the matrix of human selfhood, it can only just that: a touch.
John O'Donohue, Divine Beauty
Moments can sing the song of a lifetime. A song that replays itself in longing and regret, but also in joy and peace. It’s as if the gravity and richness of being can only be communicated and handled in short bursts. Alongside these moments, are the much longer periods in between. Here, life is giving us a breather to recognise and to understand the time that just passed. Just as old age prepares us for death, life gives us time to accept it in between the moments that define it.
Coming to terms with life is always a negotiation with both our desire to hold on and our desperation to let go. It is always a negotiation with the past as we’re compelled into the future. So, part of the art of being is learning how to relate to time. Viktor Frankl pointed out that we are so preoccupied with new possibilities that we overlook the past when trying to answer the question, “What will be the monument of our existence?”:
Usually, to be sure, man considers only the stubble field of transitoriness and overlooks the full granaries of the past, wherein he had salvaged once and for all his deeds, his joys and also his sufferings. Nothing can be undone, and nothing can be done away with. I should say having been is the surest kind of being.
Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
Life begins with loss. First of all, in the loss of complete comfort and innocence with birth. Loss reveals a fragile and temporary world. It also seems to be the only way we can learn about importance and care. Loss brings a tragic clarity about what we should have done (that is why hindsight is 20/20). If we can learn what loss wants to teach us, it will only ever be “too late” once. True loss, which always implies heartbreak, makes the world fully real because it awakens us:
The world becomes fully real; every detail and the details in their configuration and structure become a meaningful unit. It feels as if a veil that had been in from of our eyes permanently - without our recognising it was there - and had suddenly dropped away
Erich Fromm
In everyday language, losing oneself means to have no grasp of what we are. To have forgotten what we mean. To be constituted only by questions. This normally results from not honouring or knowing ourselves and ends in distraction and destruction. But if we are to live artfully, we must learn to lose ourselves.
We should be careful about how we understand this loss. Fromm believed that a “dominant having orientation” was the main factor operating against the loss of oneself through concentration. What do we have left if we lose ourselves? But there is an important difference here. We lose ourselves in daydreaming and repetitive work because we are dispersed and without self-orientation. But when we lose ourselves in concentration, we become ourselves. We have gathered ourselves together and become an expression. Not fragmented, but interrelated, cohesive, an essence.
Fromm argued that in “contemporary industrial society, the opportunities for doing things wholeheartedly are greatly reduced.” Mechanisation and routinisation had not only caused us to detach ourselves, that is, alienate ourselves, it had made us into half-awake people “whose dulled despair has taken the place of genuine pain.”
The difference between these ways of losing ourselves is the difference between whim and will. Fromm argued that we had misconceived freedom. We tend to imagine freedom as freedom of whim rather than will. This mistake leads to halfheartedness:
Following a whim is, in fact, the result of deep inner passivity blended with a wish to avoid boredom. Will is based on activity, whim on passivity.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
Halfheartedness leads one to prison
Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
Wholehearted action is undistracted. It implies a loss and risk that is much more difficult to bear within insecure societies that have lost their bearings. Fromm observed that machine production had two debilitating consequences for human growth. The first was that:
Machine production, where the object is spewed out by the machine, knows no failures, but it knows no excellence either. Production by machine has led to a peculiar illusion that the road to excellence is straight and pleasant.
Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
The second result was equally unintended and a primary cause of modern malaise. Technical progress has diminished the amount of physical energy required for making things and looking after our lives. But our liberated time and energy is wasted, not utilised:
This liberation from hard work is experienced as the greatest fight of modern "progress." And it is a gift - provided that the human energy thus liberated be applied to other, more elevated and creative tasks. However, this has not been the case. The liberation from the machine has resulted in the ideal of absolute laziness...
Erich Fromm, The Art of Being
Comfort makes any dream of self or societal recovery more difficult given the pain and disorientation that change implies. The journey towards being, as Fromm understood it, one that means cultivating the skills to meditate, to concentrate, and to will one thing towards an awake and aware state, was always going to be hard anyway. But an involved and caring relationship with the world is the way towards it:
The mode of being has as its prerequisite independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason. Its fundamental activity is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of human powers. To be active means to give expression to one's faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which - though in varying degrees - every human being is endowed. It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one's isolated ego, to be interested, to "list," to give. Yet none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words...The words point to an experience they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thoughts and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience.
Erich Fromm, To Have or To Be?
The fern in the rain breathes the silver message.
Stay, lie low. Play your dark reeds.
and relearn the beauty of absorption.
There is nothing beyond the rotten log
covered with leaves and needles.
Forget the light emerging with its golden wick.
Raise your face to the water-laden frond.
A thousand blossoms will fall into your arms.
Anne Corey, The Art of Being
Relearning the beauty of absorption is the art of being. Blossoms fall into our arms, just like love and luck, when we’re still enough and patient enough to wait for them to reach us.
If coming to consciousness is a gradual process that is carefully curated by pain and time, then a lot of our life will never feel like our own or have been autonomous in the way we tend to understand it. Being, as a way of experiencing and relating to the world, which is ultimately about presence and peace, is likely a rare and precious gift, given to us by both grace and hard work.
In the dust jacket on the hardcover of Stephen Grosz’s book of tales about psychotherapy, The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves, it’s suggested that art’s impulse, to be seen, is shared by storytellers, that is, by humans. As it is for art, so it is for humanity:
We are storytellers - we make stories to make sense of our lives. But it is not enough to tell tales. There must be someone to listen.