Chapter 2: The Problem of Art

The four fundamental forces in our universe are, as every schoolboy knows, electromagnetism, gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force. You may, due to being a mere human, recognize them as blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm (sanguine, melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic). These four forces may be superunified, of course. When this happens in string theory, physicists tell us that the strings can “sing”. Kepler knew this back in the seventeenth century (Harmony of the Spheres) and he was merely building on Pythagoras a thousand years before (Armonia).

I am content to call this superunification by these four letters: YHWH. You can call it Yahweh, or you can call it Jehovah, or it can (if you are an observant Jew) remain unspoken. I happen to know, due to my brief jaunt in a Sulpician seminary, that this tetragrammaton is the verb “to be” in ancient Hebrew. Studying Hebrew was the second most difficult course I ever took. The first was calculus. I never did understand how to “do” the calculus, but I love its inherent beauty.

That’s why it’s amazing that physicists – and not biologists! – seem to be able to unify all creation. For them there is no pesky division of science and religion, spirituality and measurement, or those hateful Hegelian dialectics. Have you ever met a melancholy physicist? No. They are all happy. The universe is their playground, and they are profoundly delighted to be here. All of my preschoolers are physicists. I watch them run and fall and climb and invent and laugh. When they do cry, a hug restores all order to the cosmos.

The problem with all of this, obviously, is art. Paula Hovey, an art major at The University of the South, had a nervous breakdown the night before her comprehensive exam. This school, usually called Sewanee, requires a four-year final exam of its majors. If you flunk it, you have six months to study and re-take it. If you flunk it a second time, well, there are plenty of good jobs out there in real estate I suppose.

Paula, the night before her comprehensive, realized that she didn’t know what art is. She could not define it. She began to cry and to repeat the question, “what is art?” several hundred times. I was more than a bit nervous. She spelled it slowly: A-R-T. She shouted it. She rearranged the letters to spell “tar” and “rat”. Much of this histrionic display helped me to achieve a similar mental state before my own English exam the following year. Paula passed the test, by the way.

English majors are artists of a sort. Some are critics, some are historians, some curators, and some practice the craft and actually produce it. I never rearranged the letters of “English” the night before my exam (“hgnesli?”), but I was indeed frightened. It took a week before I received my passing grade, during which time I briefly considered suicide. Jean Paul Sartre maintained that the only real question is that of suicide.

David Breslin, a young man I hired to be a coach while I was headmaster of Chesapeake Academy once observed that “suicide is not an option.” I like this statement. I have often repeated it to others. It is simple, concise, and rings true. Like physics equations that explain a universal theory of relativity, it has a faith dimension. Physicists like to look at their equations as faith statements. The expressions on their faces are very similar to visitors at the gallery studying a Gauguin.

Good doctors are artists, too. We used to refer to the medical arts instead of medical science. David Breslin is not a doctor; rather, he captained Ohio State’s lacrosse team to a national championship the year before I hired him. The creation of an interdependent group of athletes who form into a new thing seems to look like art, doesn’t it? It’s really not so very different from extemporaneous speaking or improvisational acting.

I have read the creation accounts of Genesis hundreds of times. So have you. But when Miss Stiles, my mean English teacher at Tates Creek Senior High showed me these lines, it changed everything:


Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

James Weldon Johnson wrote these lines. It’s the latter half of a poem called “The Creation” that he wrote around 1927. He was a school principal. He also wrote “Lift Every Voice and Sing” that you can find in The Hymnal 1982. I can’t read the poem aloud because I start crying. Poetry does this to me. It’s my mother’s fault.