On Holding a New-born Infant in One's Arms
If life has meaning and human experience has depth, then one has the right to ask if art can give voice to that meaning and that depth. With Isaiah Berlin, I believe that “art is not a set of garments one can don and doff at will: it is the expression of an undivided nature, or it is nothing.” What matters is the vision of life such works of art carry.
Throughout the years I've tried to approach my work with as much seriousness as one would when holding a new-born infant in one’s arms, a seriousness that carries with it an undeniable demand and, at the same time, calls forth a flood of nameable and unnamable emotions connecting us to 'we know not what.'
Simone Weil remarked that "if there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if your efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul." For more than two decades, this thought and this sense of attention has sustained me through many dark hours. She argued that "no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result, either direct or indirect.” By attention she meant the suspension of thought, "leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object."
When thunder sounds
In the vast sky of emptiness
All numbers and disappointments
Collapse into dust.
Rick Visser - 01/08/11