I re-read a 2009 Harper’s article by Jamaica Kincaid that asked why we need art and artists. Basically, she said, art is not for its own sake but to help us deal with human mystery–to access a sense of a greater mystery, a secret order to the world. It’s a secret, maybe, because one’s mind is a mystery most of the time; it’s full of stamps from childhood and forgotten infancy. As Jamaica Kincaid says, sometimes she doubts that she ever acts independently of her mother–that every act is a reaction, a response, or a reflection.
In Islam, it’s believed that when we die an angel must pull our soul free from where it is lodged in our throat. I wonder if art tries to do the same thing–to snag something secret and intimate to us, and pull it out into plain view. As I drive my errands around San Antonio, expending more gasoline in a few months than I’ve done in the last 10 years of my life, passing yet another crop of strip malls and filling stations and nail salons and chain restaurants, it occurs to me that Art–in the capital letter sense of the word–is like those angels. It reaches for what’s inside of us and pulls it out to remind us that we are not the landscape. It keeps us from choking on the banal.
