Creativity is a Messianic Dialogue

From the Sketches in Messianism series...

My partner recently introduced me to Albert Camus’ essay Create Dangerously, in which he explores the tensions of being an artist in the middle of the 20th century. To keep their souls they would have to avoid that economic temptation: to create escapist entertainment for privileged consumers in despoiling economies. On the other hand those with revolutionary leanings might easily find themselves drafted into making propaganda for authoritarian regimes who maintained power by projecting utopian images of a future they wished to force into existence. The artist, says Camus, can neither accept the present as it is, nor should they fall into a hubris of certainties about the future:

“Art is neither complete rejection nor complete acceptance of what is. It is simultaneously rejection and acceptance, and this is why it must be a perpetually renewed wrenching apart. The artist constantly lives in such a state of ambiguity, incapable of negating the real and yet eternally bound to question its eternally unfinished aspects.”

This is a deeply messianic dynamic. It lives without an easy resting place between the Now and the Not Yet. Camus reads like an echo of that well known rabbinic saying: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

The work — the messianic praxis, if you will — happens in an in-between space. Living and creating with creaturely integrity involves a running dialogue between two worlds. It takes shape between two refusals: a refusal to fully accept a violently unjust present, and a refusal to claim and enclose the future by presuming to fully envisage it or bring it about by force.

This dialogue accounts for a rather restless quality that might be said to characterise the messianic imagination. It stays with the trouble. This might easily become exhausting and unsustainable, and so it is something which must be lived with care and savvy, with a sense of humour and a peaceable relation to defeat. But this dialogue is not merely a tiresome but necessary dissonance; it is also a deeply and prayerfully generative realm between worlds, pulsing with awe and gratuity, as Camus goes on to describe:

“The loftiest work will always be… the work that maintains an equilibrium between reality and man's rejection of that reality, each forcing the other upwards in a ceaseless overflowing, characteristic of life itself at its most joyous and heart-rending extremes. Then, every once in a while, a new world appears, different from the everyday world and yet the same, particular but universal, full of innocent insecurity… this is the contradictory and tireless cry of every true artist, the cry that keeps him on his feet with eyes ever open and that, every once in a while, awakens for all in this world asleep the fleeting and insistent image of a reality we recognize without ever having known it.”

To dream like this is not, I think, the sole province of art, or indeed religion, but of life. Messianic dreaming is not drawn to other worlds, but to sensibilities that seem to be somehow hidden in our memories, made of things we know — and yet transfigured; present on entirely and mysteriously different terms. To accept the world as it is is to leave it as it is. To bring about some utopia by force to reproduce the present world exactly as it is. Between these is a realm of dialogue and creaturely unknowing, where other things happen, apart from our own design: where the world appears before us, transfigured, familiar and strange, and here of its own volition.