A Selfless Art

One reason for starting a new site, and one where words take first place, is to allow my thinking to breathe, expand and explore. I don’t know where it will take me – that is the point – but I believe that the journey will be worthwhile. That’s also what I tell people about co-creation, at least in my hands: our destination is unknown, even if we set out with an dream of it, but getting there is an adventure that, if we live it well, might transform us. This site is the journey I choose to make now, through darkening lands, and with good companions.

One consequence is that, if you read this or subscribe to the journey, there will be unexpected stops along the way, including those when I share some of what nourishes my thinking. Today is one of those because I want to recommend the writing of Philip Pullman. It’s not his fiction I want to talk about, much as I admire His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust: it’s his writing about writing, stories and art that you can find in a book of essays called Daemon Voices. The book is wise, insightful and a joy to read because, even when he is dealing with complex ideas, Pullman always writes with grace and clarity. He is very good company as he guides you through subtle questions of narrative, language and the democratic nature of reading. Not all he says is applicable to artists who work in co-creation, but much is and his ideas about art are always thought-provoking.

I particularly like the opening essay, ‘Magic Carpets’ in which he asks ‘whether or not our profession, our art or craft, has anything to contribute to the continual struggle to make the world a better place; or whether what we do is, in the last analysis, trivial and irrelevant.’ I’ve thought about that my whole life – it’s central to the idea of co-creation – and Pullman has convincing things to say, even if the writer’s role is different to the artist who works with people.

He begins with a refreshing honesty by saying that the artist’s first responsibility is to those who depend on them, and that he therefore has not the slightest shame in wanting to be paid as much as he can for his work. He goes on to talk about the writer’s responsibility to language, which might be taken by other artists to mean art itself, and then the responsibility to honesty – emotional honesty, the truth that is essential to real art. He has interesting things to say about the author’s invisibility (it is the story that matters) and their responsibility to the audience, including where it responsibility ends. But the essay concludes by putting all that into context:

I don’t want anyone to think that responsibility is all there is to it. It would be a burdensome life, if the only relation we had with our work was one of duty and care. The fact is that I love my work. There is no joy comparable to the thrill that accompanies a new idea, one that we know is full of promise and possibility […]. And there is a joy too in responsibility itself – in the knowledge that what were doing on earth, while we live, is being done to the best of our ability, and in the light of everything we know about what is good and true. Art, whatever kind of art it is, is like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all, the ‘sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.’ To bear the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not is one of the greatest privileges a human being can have, and I ask nothing more than the chance to go on being responsible for it till the end of my days.

Philip Pullman, Daemon Voices, (2017), p.21

What a beautiful affirmation that what we do matters, can be good and true, and is a source of joy in a world sorely in need of it. Like Philip Pullman, I can think of nothing I would rather do than carry the responsibility of giving delight and hurting not to the end of my days.