September 2017
It’s completed,
or is it? by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Every month I
am faced with the problem of how to complete these articles, and it is
something that I grapple with in unsureness.
Beethoven
was famously unable to finish his symphonies, and you can certainly hear that.
The same closing bars are played over and over again, until, maybe in his exasperation,
the piece is ended.
Then
there are writers who somehow cannot write the final paragraph, cannot finish
the book and so the project gets hidden away somewhere, half remembered, half
forgotten. Less dramatically, there are those whose final paragraph hangs uneasily,
without proper resolution, or the words, …to be continued – which is all very
well, except for those readers who don’t read any more of this author.
Leonardo
Da Vinci famously said, “A work is never finished, just abandoned.” Maybe,
maybe not. Somehow I’m not quite convinced. I think a lot of projects are
certainly abandoned and left unfinished and presented as such, but then there
are those where final touches really do complete the work.
I am
wondering if the completion is somehow tied to its context, or to something in
the object’s inherent form. This is an entirely intuitive idea and one in which
I really do not know its veracity. I think to my practice of painting little
birds on the seed pods of the Illawarra Flame Tree. I start with the back and
wings and tail and then around the face, and then finally its eyes. It’s the
eyes that set the little birds free. The glint in the eyes is the finishing act
of the painting. (I swear I am somewhat of an animist.) The form of the pod
defines the design character of the bird in the making, and the painting of the
eyes is the final act. Bird is already bird and painting merely reveals it.
Bird is
already bird, but a written piece can only ascribe itself to the work, and the
genre, as it unfolds. There is
something in the final act that gives it life, or not.
How,
though, to know that the final touches gives life and not just adds to the
burden of colour? Again, I intuit this, and of course I could be wrong. If
life, then something of a death of
the old and the luxuriant newness of something else.
In
trying to connect my idea to something tangible, I keep coming back to the words of the old man, Simeon on holding
the infant Jesus in his arms, described in a Bach cantata of the same name: Ich habe genug (German). It sums up for
me what I’m trying to get at. Ich habe genug is variously translated as “now I
have enough,” or “now I have everything,” or even interpreted as “now it is
finished because it is complete”. Symbolically, the Christ birth can be seen as
the ending of the old way and beginning of the new – which throws a whole
different light on completion and finishing. There is a richness and a
vulnerability here.
Perhaps
knowing the end is just part of the beginning. A work of art needs to be alive
at the start, even as it is a departure from previous works. This means that
the artist/writer has to feel connected to it, and not merely attempting to
churn out something that might appeal to others but which feels uninteresting
to himself. It is very wearing to make
something that doesn’t link with
the artists inner integrity: sort of akin to being part of a production line.
How lovely it is, instead, to create from beginning to end something of
meaningful delight.
To begin
something of a creation means slipping into the dark lake of the mind, bounded
by the banks that shape it, and allowing a certain degree of chaos, confusion
and doubt to be present, but to stay with it, and nurture it along, separating
out the useful from the non, guided by the moon’s reflection, knowing somehow
that here is a life that needs to be revealed, and fearlessly making it so.
