This, Too, Is Worth Remembering

On Art, Beauty, and the Practice of Paying Attention

My favorite poet is Ryōkan, the wonderfully eccentric Japanese Zen monk and poet who lived from 1758 to 1831. He was born in the seaside village of Izumozaki in Echigo Province, in what is now Niigata Prefecture, along the Sea of Japan. After years of monastic training and wandering, he eventually returned to the snowy country of his birth and spent much of the remainder of his life in simple hermitages around Mount Kugami.

Ryōkan never became the abbot of an important temple. He accumulated almost nothing. He begged for his food, sat in meditation, wandered through the mountains, played games with village children, drank sake with friends, practiced calligraphy, and wrote poems. He published no collection during his lifetime and seems to have shown remarkably little concern about whether his words would survive him. Poems and pieces of calligraphy were given away. Others were remembered and preserved by those who loved him. After his death, his friend and poetic companion Teishin helped gather his work so that these small traces of his life would not disappear.  There is something about that which I find deeply moving.

Snow falling outside his hut. Children playing in the village. Moonlight slipping through a window. A friend arriving with sake. Autumn leaves scattering across a mountain path. Loneliness. Old age. The astonishing, fleeting fact of being alive. Ryōkan noticed these things—the small, easily missed moments that make up a human life—and he made a mark. A few strokes of ink. A handful of words. Something rescued, however briefly, from the great river of passing things. Perhaps that is what artists have always done. They pay attention to what the rest of us are in danger of walking past, and then gently turn us around and say, Look. This, too, is worth noticing. This, too, is worth remembering.

Long before there were museums and galleries, publishing houses and concert halls, human beings were making marks. We pressed our hands against cave walls and surrounded them with pigment. We carved animals into bone and stone. We shaped clay into vessels and covered them with patterns. We sang before anyone thought to write music down. We danced around fires. We told stories beneath stars. We buried our dead with objects of beauty.  Again and again, our ancestors seem to have been saying: Pay attention to this. This matters. Remember.

There’s a curious old story about the origin of painting, first told by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder and depicted by artists countless times since. As the story goes, a young woman was deeply in love with a young man who was about to leave her. On the evening before his departure, she noticed the shadow of his face cast against a wall. So she took a piece of charcoal and traced his silhouette. She could not keep him from leaving, but she could keep the trace of his presence.  And thus, according to the old story, painting was born.  Not from decoration. Not from ambition. Not because somebody looked at a bare wall and decided the room needed a little something.  Art was born from love.  And from the fear of forgetting.

Whether Pliny’s story is historically true hardly matters. There is something profoundly human about it. Someone we love is leaving. We know the world is always changing. We know nothing stays. And so we make a mark and say, in effect: Let me remember. Perhaps this has always been one of art’s deepest purposes.

Across thousands of years, art has been one of the ways human beings have lifted certain things from the rushing river of time and said: Do not let this disappear. Remember this face. Remember this story. Remember this suffering. Remember this joy. Remember the dead. Remember the beauty of the earth. Remember what happened here. Remember what it felt like to be alive.

What we have chosen to paint and carve and sing and write tells us something about what human beings have considered worthy of remembering. Art has carried births and deaths, harvests and wars, migrations and homecomings, injustice and liberation, courtship and heartbreak. It has preserved the faces of kings, queens, and the hands of laborers. It has given us grieving mothers, dancing children, wounded bodies, bowls of fruit, sunflowers, wheat fields, mountains, rivers, kitchen tables and stars.  Art has this peculiar ability to take something ordinary and lift it into our attention.

Look here.  Look at this face.  Listen to this grief.  Notice this body.  Stand beneath these stars.  Do not forget what happened to these people.  Do not overlook this beauty.  Pay attention to this life.

A bowl of fruit becomes worthy of contemplation. An old woman’s face becomes a landscape. A field beneath changing light becomes something we cannot quite explain but cannot stop looking at. A few notes played on a banjo can carry generations of longing.

And perhaps this is why faith communities have so often recognized creativity as a close relative of the sacred. Human beings have rarely been satisfied simply to say what is holy. We have needed to sing it, carve it, paint it, dance it, weave it, build it, and surround it with light. We built temples and cathedrals. We painted icons and mandalas. We illuminated manuscripts. We carved stories into stone. We filled sanctuaries with stained glass and incense and bells. We chanted scripture because sometimes words need melody before they can reach the deepest places within us.

Our ancestors in faith seemed to understand something we occasionally forget: beauty is not an ornament attached to the spiritual life.  Beauty can be a way of knowing.  Creativity can be a spiritual practice.  And attention may be one of the purest forms of reverence.

At its best, religion has understood what artists have always known: the sacred is not encountered only through ideas. Sometimes it arrives through color. Through music. Through the movement of a body. Through bread placed into an open hand. Through water poured into a basin. Through silence. Through a story. Through light falling across a wooden floor.

Creativity, in this sense, is not an extracurricular activity of the human spirit. It is one of the ways we participate in the sacredness of life itself. We receive a world we did not make—the astonishing raw material of existence—and then, in our own small way, we respond by making something in return. A song. A garden. A photograph. A loaf of bread. A poem. A quilt. A table around which strangers become friends.

Perhaps every genuine act of creation contains a faint echo of gratitude: Look what I was given. Look what I noticed. Look what I have made from it.  The artist and the contemplative therefore share a peculiar vocation. Both are asked to stop long enough to notice what everyone else is walking past. A shadow on a wall. Moonlight through a window. The face of someone we love. A fallen leaf. An old hand. A weathered doorway. The way late-afternoon light suddenly transforms an otherwise ordinary room.  The world is forever revealing itself.  The question is whether we are paying attention.

When my partner, Heidi, leaves for a weekend writing retreat, I have yet to feel compelled to trace the outline of her face onto the living-room wall with a charred stick. I miss her terribly, but even love should have boundaries. I suspect she would return home, look at the wall, look at me, and begin reconsidering the wisdom of leaving me unsupervised for entire weekends.

But I understand the impulse.  Perhaps especially now.  We are living in a time when many of the structures we once assumed would hold seem less dependable than they once did. Institutions wobble. Communities fracture. Certainties evaporate. We carry little glowing rectangles in our pockets capable of delivering the anxieties of the entire planet before breakfast. After an hour of CNN or the PBS NewsHour, there are evenings when crawling into bed and pulling the covers over my head begins to feel less like avoidance and more like a legitimate contemplative practice.

And then art quietly interrupts.  Art says: Yes. But look.  There is still morning light on the kitchen table. There is still the sound of rain. There is still a child drawing without wondering whether the drawing is any good. There are still old friends playing music together. There are still hands shaping clay. There are still poems being written. There are still people gathering around tables. There are still mountains keeping their ancient silence. There are still faces worth studying. There are still things growing from the earth. There is still beauty hiding everywhere, apparently unconcerned with whether we are paying attention.

Art reminds us that the terrible things are real, but they are not the whole of reality.  I have been thinking about this because I now spend several days each week in a tiny mountain town that, somewhat improbably, has become a haven for artists. There is an arts district that is home to the county arts council, a performance venue, studio space, a gallery and gift shop, and a café. For a town small enough that you can nearly drive through it before realizing you have arrived, this feels wonderfully extravagant.

And then there are the people themselves: roots musicians and music teachers, weavers and potters, photographers and poets and painters. People who make things because something within them insists upon being made. People who notice the curve of a bowl, the grain of wood, the quality of afternoon light, the peculiar music of a sentence. People who have cultivated the increasingly radical practice of paying attention.  Maybe that is why the arts matter so much to the life of a community.  They are not simply entertainment.  They are a form of remembering.

In a culture that tells us to hurry, art asks us to linger. In a culture that measures almost everything by usefulness, art makes room for wonder. In a culture of consumption, art invites us to create. In a noisy world, art teaches us to listen. In a lonely world, art reminds us that another human being has stood where we stand and felt something remarkably similar.  And in a frightened world, art keeps pointing toward what fear would have us overlook: beauty, tenderness, grief, wonder, community, mystery, the natural world, and the stubborn sacredness of ordinary life.

Maybe Ryōkan knew this as he sat alone in his little hermitage while snow gathered outside. Maybe the young woman in Pliny’s story knew it as she traced the shadow of the person she loved. And maybe the musicians and potters and poets and painters in this little mountain town know it too.  What we love can disappear.  Faces change. People leave. Buildings fall. Communities scatter. Memories fade. Data centers exhaust resources.  Nothing we cherish is entirely ours to keep.

And so we make marks.  We paint and sing and photograph and carve and weave and dance and write.  We make marks against forgetting.  Marks that say: This mattered.  This person mattered.  This place mattered.  This moment mattered.  This life mattered.  And perhaps that is one of the oldest and holiest things art has ever asked of us: to stop long enough to notice what is here, to love it while it is here, and, whenever we can, to help one another remember.