Feeding the Lake: Madeleine L'Engle on Art as Service

"Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death."

---

BY REBECCA SANDBERG

Pablo Picasso said that an artist paints not to ask a question but because he has found something that he wants to share – he cannot help it – what he has found. A decade after his death, Madeleine L’Engle (November 29, 1918 – September 6, 2007) compiled Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art a stunning book of anecdotes and tidbits on art and faith and how artists serve the work of creating.

L'Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, completed in 1960, though rejected by twenty-six publishers, went on to win the prestigious Newbery Medal just three years later. On the nature of participating in art, L’Engle states:

In art, either as creators or as participators, we are helped to remember some of the glorious things we have forgotten, and some of the terrible things we are asked to endure.

Art as dying to self

Among L’Engle’s most profound, excavated truths, she speaks of art and dying to self as synonymous – symbiotic – that one is in tandem with the other – that to be alive is to be vulnerable. She writes:

To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die to self. If the artist is to be able to listen to the work, he must get out of the way; or, more correctly, since getting out of the way is not a do-it-yourself activity, he must be willing to be got out of the way…in order to become the servant of the work.

(…)

If the work comes to the artist and says, “Here I am, serve me,” then the job of the artists, great or small, is to serve.

Feed the Lake

From an interview from the Paris Review, L'Engle offers the mesmerizing metaphor of how artists must “feed the lake”. She writes:

The amount of the artist’s talent is not what it is about. Jean Rhys said to an interviewer in the Paris Review, “Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles like jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.”

Similar to the sentiment of Fairfield Porter several decades earlier that to make art is to make things more beautiful, L'Engle refers to the general sentiment that art carries with it an underlying commitment to the common good when she states:

To feed the lake is to serve, to be a servant. When the artist is truly the servant of the work, the work is better than the artist. When the work takes over, then the artist listens. But before he can listen, paradoxically, he must work.

What is important is that we all feed the lake. It is a "corporate act” in so far as being alive is a shared togetherness of creating – feeding the lake – serving the glorious weight of being human.