Year Eleven

Aesthetic Exercises to Accept the Soul and Mirror the Soul of the World

Eleventh Year:  Compassion

Humans are born from a void, invisible and restless, to a void, visible and bored, and return to a void, forgetful, grave.  This is their centre, gravity, the moor of their souls.  Each human has the opportunity in his lifetime to walk toward the void, with his brief body of light, and peer over the edge.  Few accept this quiet risky call.  What does one risk?  Death in the walking or peering.  What is one guaranteed?

Transformation through the sight of what surrounds one’s life.  No one can be an artist, though, unless she risks this walk, survives the peering, and is transformed.

What does one see after that arduous reeking walk? What does one see beyond that beckoning precipice?  God?  No, one sees God’s absence.  Does one hear music?  No, one hears only silence.  Does one taste?  If one does, the taste is in the taster’s mouth, not down the chasm¾ no food or substance there.  Indifference and caprice are sensed, but not by any of the body’s senses¾only senses of the soul.

One may be tempted, standing at the edge, drawn to jump and stupidly test one’s powers, to sense compassion; if one does sense such an attribute, it does not arise from the welcoming pit but from within, in response.  So art and compassion are the only two human attributes, drawn in response to the seeing of the void; everything else humans do is done simply aping apes, in excess.

So this eleventh year is devoted to this sight and its response of compassion.  For the initiate must learn compassion before she can create art of any worth.  There are artists who exist, who are talked about in the gabby marketplace, who create with minimal compassion.  But the artists of whom we speak are reflections of the world, and the world¾the human world¾includes tenderness and mercy for our chains.

The initiate should this year walk toward the void, peer into it, survive, be transformed by that sight, or else that sight was not a valid peering, and actively show compassion for the human condition by caring for the dispossessed, the weak, the losers, the mad, the trampled, the retarded¾it must be these, for one cannot feel compassion for the rich and famous, only envy, and the initiate has long since evolved from that adolescent stage.

She should help out in shelters, gutters, food banks¾wherever there is a need, and need is everywhere.  She should know this need and its response as tethers to the void, and the music of this active empathy and silence as an art¾the only other art of any worth.  If she should not complete the Exercises and be waylaid in a year, this would be the place where she should stay.  Yet the reader should note, for both the one waylaid in this year and the one who completes these Exercises know, that there is no hierarchy, although we cannot avoid it in these Exercises.  We are attempting to develop a certain kind of artist, and all our words and methods are constrained by this attempt, even as all attempts must be subject to their particular captivity.