Years ago, after the wedding of a friend who now has nearly half a dozen babies, I was wandering Chicago with a bunch of my closest college buddies. The nerdiest of us spent the afternoon debating just war theory, baby names, and whether or not Harry Potter is evil [update: it’s evil].
At some point on this sunny, beautiful, Chicago summer day of the early 2010s, walking down a longish and uneventful stretch of sidewalk, in a lull in our heated discussion, I noticed a group of strangers behind us was getting close. I don’t remember what I caught of their convo, but it was interesting and kind of odd, so I turned to put faces to the voices and weird ideas and HOLY CRAP THAT’S TOTALLY 100% GEORGE LUCAS.
“Guys, guys, George flipping Lucas is right behind us.”
“..who..? Who’s George Lucas..?”
“George Lucas. When I was twelve I was a subscriber to Star Wars Insider I know what he looks like and that is totally him in all his short, chubby, grey-superman-curl-hair-thing-going-on glory.”
“George who?”
Miraculously, I am somehow still friends with these philistines.
Among the greatest regrets of my life (I have a pretty boring life) is that I didn’t say anything to Mr. Lucas, who was a giant influence on my childhood and into my today– my niece and nephews have the original trilogy memorized, pretty sure, and I heard they built a Death Star in the living room just the other day.
Whyyyy didn’t I say something??
Oh, that’s right, because 1) I could definitely tell he was on an awkward early-starting-to-get-serious date, and I couldn’t bring myself to awkward that up even more. Although if I had been creative, I could have been memorable enough to get invited to the wedding… [I looked into it and they def got married the following year] BUT STILL 2) he’s a human who probably just wants to walk down the street without some chump kid gushing about all the Star Wars related joys he brought into their life.
Because, while he seems like a cool, decent guy, George Lucas doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know my parents or my siblings or nephews who love his movies. He might appreciate that he has had a positive impact on three generations, he might have a vague idea of American families more or less like mine and he’s happy to have contributed to their wholesome family entertainment for 40+ years. BUT he doesn’t know me and even if I had said something, I would have quickly faded into the mass of fans over the years and he wouldn’t know me any better than he had. (Again, he was on a date so I would have faded quicker than usual, most likely.)
He wasn’t thinking of me when he was making the films that have so impacted my American life and imagination. The connection between the maker and the enjoyer of the work is very indirect and several degrees removed. Plus, who knows, maybe we would be mortal enemies if we did know each other- it’s not like there’s a definitive anything I can recognize about him in his work.
Then, there’s God. He does know me and was thinking about me, and my parents and my siblings and every single person to ever be conceived, as He was working on His creation. And when a fan gushes to Him about how great His work is, he doesn’t just sign an autograph say thanks and move on, He rejoices that that particular person is noticing Him, since that person is who He created it all for.
AND there is something – lots of somethings- I can know of Him through knowing his work, especially in the context of His revealed Word, of course.
So I’ve been thinking about what other helpful giant differences and sorta similarities there might be between God the Creator and puny, pathetic lil human technicians and artists…
All that to say, hey! sorta related: I’m reading Jacques Maritain’s 1920 Art & Scholasticism, which is about, well, art, of course, and artists, and also scholasticism. I’m getting a lot out of it so far.
Baaaasically, it’s a thorough rejection of the silliness of subjectivism and the romanticist interpretation of art- the ridiculous idea that art is just or even primarily “self-expression”. In fact, the less self getting in the way, the better- Flannery makes this point a lot, and she gets it from this book. Art– making– is objective; it’s not making a weird thing just because you can make a weird thing, it’s making it right and doing it well and beautifully.
Beauty obviously figures into the discussion a lot, which I think I will try to tackle in the next post, which will be a legit philosophy post, I promise, on something somewhere in Chapters I-IV of Art & Scholasticism…
This post brought to you by:
Fertile Crescent Blues, my favorite album about Adam and Eve and other OT figures (what’s yours? ha)
and
Eastertide homebrew
Samwise the Gρεεκ. 