permit me to do my best

In this household, on Saturday nights, Paul's 80s Festival rolls on. We've made it up to 1988. Last Saturday we watched, for the third time, Babette's Feast, a Danish gem based on a story by Karen Blixen.

If you haven't seen the movie (or read the story), it takes place in a windswept Danish fishing village of the 19th century. Two beautiful sisters are daughters of the local Protestant minister, and devote themselves wholeheartedly to his program of piety and good works among the tiny congregation. Chance events in the outer world bring two young men to the village, one a dissipated and conflicted soldier, the other a successful Parisian tenor. Each falls in love with a different one of the daughters, and each is eventually, but gently, driven off by the strength of the girls' attachment to their father and his mission.

Seventeen years later, a Frenchwoman, Babette, appears at their doorstep, a refugee from the violence rocking Paris in 1871, sent to their care by the tenor, Achille Papin, whose heart still aches for the Danish girl whose singing voice had enchanted him long ago. Although they are poor, they take Babette in as their servant. One day Babette discovers that she's won a French lottery, and insists on celebrating her mistresses' late father's birthday with a feast.

I'll say no more about the story, which remains a quiet, unpretentious, one-of-a-kind masterpiece. What struck me most about it on this viewing, though, was the scene in which the older and world-weary Achille Papin composes his letter of introduction for Babette. He reflects ruefully on the fleetingness of fame and fortune, and writes (to the best of my memory): "The artist, the world over, has a single cry: 'Let me be permitted to do my very best!'"

Even as I typed those words now, I found that tears came to my eyes. In this one scene, this one line, an experienced artist has expressed the soul of artistic integrity. (This theme lies close to the heart of the story, for it turns out that Babette too is an artist.) This theme of the artist and his integrity touches me deeply. It forms part of the core of some of my very favorite works, such as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Sunset Boulevard.

Last night, after Kimmie and I watched a couple of episodes of Fawlty Towers on a DVD from the library, I played the interview with John Cleese that comes as a special feature with the show. In the interview a much older John Cleese reminisced about creating the show (it first aired in 1975) with his then-wife Connie Booth. (Basil Fawlty was based on a real hotelier in Torquay, England, who had accommodated Cleese, Booth, and members of the Monty Python troupe.)

According to Cleese, everyone at the BBC who heard the show concept or read the first script thought it was a dud. They variously regarded it as boring, cliched, and unfunny. It presumably got made because of Cleese's track record and recognition value with Monty Python. When the first season of six episodes ran, it got poor reviews.

But after six more episodes, an audience had found the show and loved it. It became a major worldwide success, and is often regarded as a high point of the sitcom format.

Cleese narrated the early difficulties of the show cheerfully and without rancor, but I felt for him. It's painful to be told by supposedly knowledgeable people that your work is no good. At that point you're driven back on yourself, on your faith in the material itself--on the tenacity of your own convictions about what constitutes quality. When they wrote the show, they thought it was funny. The world agreed with them. The only people offside were the "professionals" in charge of allowing the created work to be produced.

The reason I bring it up is because of one quote from Cleese. He said that he had once asked a film distributor what was the toughest kind of show to sell. The distributor replied: "Anything original."

There you have it. Originality, toxic to the salesman, is the life's blood of the true artist. The true artist wants to do his very best, to be permitted to do his very best. His heart will never be happy with mere familiarity and imitation.

the lion's roar

According to Joseph Campbell, religion begins with art. Before there is any such thing as a church, or a priest, or a prophet, there is the poet: the sensitive soul to whom comes inspiration, a vision, an experience, and the capacity to give it expression.

If the poet's words evoke a similar inspiration in others, then there is the possibility of the spread of a spiritual idea. Depending on how powerful and infectious this original idea is, there is the possibility of institutionalization: the development of a social structure based on the idea. A sect is born, which may possibly, depending on many factors, grow into a religion.

One of the points that Campbell makes in his Masks of God tetralogy is that in our modern age the traditional institutional religions have lost their inspiring force. In the Christian West this loss of inspiration was already happening in the 12th century, just when the cities of Europe were throwing up cathedrals to exalt the God that everyone said they believed in. But the most sensitive souls of the time, the poets, recognized in their own hearts that the forms of Christianity, then more than 1,000 years old, had ceased to inspire educated people. The rites had become a mere routine, and the pulse of genuine life and meaning had to be sought elsewhere.

Where? God was dead. Where was the living water of spiritual value to be found?

This sought-for spiritual life, according to Campbell, became symbolized as the Holy Grail, and the new spiritual story that could excite modern imaginations and rouse modern hearts was the quest. This vision was articulated not by priests, schooled in an already institutionalized faith, and not by prophets, proclaiming the words of a god already known, but by poets, sensitive to their own experience and their own genuine perception of value. They were not professing a creed, not repeating words given them by others; they wrote about what they truly thought and felt. They looked into their own hearts and reported back.

In this way a work of art can turn into a rite: a structured experience that leads one to particular feelings and insights. The architecture and services of a church are intended to have this effect. Originally it certainly does (or the church could not survive), but over time it becomes stale. Endless repetition of the same experience loses its living force, and boredom sets in. It becomes mere duty, habit.

Speaking for myself, I can say that certain works of art--especially novels--have acted as rites for me. The single most powerful instance was reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce when I was 18. I did not understand conceptually what I was going through while reading it, but it was emotionally powerful and undeniable. I experienced the power of language, of poetry, to reconfigure my soul. As with any effective rite, it changed me; I was a changed person, a deeper person, on finishing that book. It initiated me into the sensibility of a poet, and passed to me some of the mental and emotional tools I would need if I were to take up that calling. It showed me how to open to the creative life, how to be an artist.

In Vajrayana Buddhism there is an expression: "The lion's roar is fearless". The lion's roar is the truth. A tyrant can kill 10 million people but cannot scratch the truth. Each of us can die and will, but the truth cannot be killed. Fear of death, though, has us cringing from the truth--hiding, concealing, denying, avoiding. The artist, when he or she is true to his or her vocation, embraces the truth as he or she finds it--and proclaims it, whatever the consequences. That is the lion's roar, sending a shock and a shiver of alertness through all the other creatures within earshot.

This vocation is supremely worth following, wherever it leads. Like any sacred thing, it must be kept pure. It is a desecration to use it for petty motives of social or financial gain. That is the artist's equivalent of simony.

Right. On with it.