Oct 15 2009
The Great Work Begins…Where?
I heard Tuvian throat-singers a few hours ago at the Rubin Museum of Art and I’m still shaking a bit.
You should hear a decent throat-singer perform before you die.
The museum was celebrating Jung’s “Red Book,” his recently released private journal.
I flipped through a few pages until I came upon a conversation he had with his soul.
His soul said, “the great work begins.” The context was murky, so I can’t explain much there.
Kushner reads German (he translated Mother Courage and Her Children for the Delacorte) – maybe he was inspired by Jung.
We spoke today about Kushner’s democratic values as what he believes is his “great work.”
Jung probably meant something else. What is your “great work?”
And what is it about the end that often brings about great works? Desperation?
I agree with your reservation about the singularity and over-importance of a “great work,” especially if used in a narcissistic way. But I also want to say some things do seem great to me. I think of the kinds of changes that were at one point not only impossible, but incomprehensible–the changes in South Africa from apartheid to the current government with the ANC as the ruling party. That is a great work to my mind and it happened in my lifetime–and to underscore your point, it happened through many, many bite-size pieces of determination for justice.
I have trouble with the idea of “great work(s).” Daniel knows my general preference for bite-size pieces over the big picture, irksome as I’m sure he sometimes finds it.
I’m uncomfortable declaring a great work because I don’t want to be tied down/limited to one goal or philosphy, however noble it is. “The great work begins” has a finality that makes me antsy, as if nothing else has any importance in the face of such a large undertaking.
Does that make me sound too wishy washy? Immature? Afraid of commitment? Maybe I just haven’t discovered my raison d’etre yet. But I’d like to think there can be a happy medium between never dedicating myself to anything and single-mindedly following one path for the rest of my life. Or is success only measured by how far you get working towards your cause?
Interesting this connection between Jung’s Red Book and Kushner’s play. I’m not sure Kushner is claiming “great work” for himself, though, but I suspect Jung was. In Angels, this appears as the last line and seems to me to gesture toward a collective effort, certainly on the part of all the characters at the fountain but more so for all who would try to heal humanity’s wounds, both physical and metaphorical.
I would tie the line from Angels in with what I was saying in the other comment about self and societal creativity. You asked what I meant by that, so I will say briefly what actually took me a whole book to say. The idea that these writers that I was looking at all put forward was that the “self” is not a fixed or given entity, Neither is society. Jefferson, of course, was actively creating a whole new society through the Revolution and the Declaration of Independence and in his book Notes on the State of Virginia. Each, in his or her own time period, advocated some form of art as a way of thinking about how one acts within the world. This pursuit of freedom for self and others and for society in the process of becoming more democratic (gradually and only with the effort of American citizens to make it so) was what I called an aesthetics of liberty, an ethics that is based on the idea that one can become a work of art, so that a person is both artist and artwork–and for all of them, this carries over to one’s efforts in creating an artful society. The foundation of this ethics comes from Michel Foucault’s work on the ancient Greeks who held to an “aesthetics of existence.” I drew on his arguments to indicate that a similar line of thought was operative in the US, with Jefferson as a founding father of it. It has always remained a view of dissenters, rather than a widespread one–and has been co-opted in language by commodity capitalism, which it actually critiques. But these appropriations can work both ways, so that is part of the power dynamic of our day.
Perhaps you could think of this in terms familiar to your own art projects–as a lifelong film in process, what would you want you life to look like? What would you want your audience to know and see and what would your life film contribute to others?