An artist’s private life is on display in his work. The work is for public consumption. The work is usually filtered by technique, taste, selection. Like the glimmers on a lake surface, the work dazzles. Lurking beneath the surface are all the feelings–fears, animosities, regrets, joys, pains–of lives deeply felt. It is feeling, then, that gives art its weight and worth, for art without feeling is quickly discarded as the work of mathematicians posing as artists whose clever algorithms reveal a world unconnected to the tragedies and ecstacies of ordinary life. I am thinking of the disparity in art, between say, Thomas Pynchon and James Agee, or to put it in a contemporary context, Mark Z. Danieleswki whose brilliant, complex novels, like House of Leaves conceals even as it reveals, and Alice McDermott or Alice Munro or Marilyne Robinson, whose small, private stories –Someone, The Love of a Good Woman, Gilead–feel intensely intimate, unsparingly human, real: One plays to intellectualism, wrapping its emotion in complexity, the other to feeling. Both types of writers are seen as Gods to us mortals, the mere scribblers.

I prefer the latter to the former, but deeply respect the former. What both types of author (I’ll call them the Platonist or Hegelian author vs. the Aristotelian or Kantian author) share in common is the intense desire to reveal the private self, its interests, troubles, and phobias (real or imagined) about the world in which we live and navigate. Both types of author seek to stem the tide of loneliness and connect with others. However, isn’t it always a grand bargain when creating art; for an artist cannot reveal everything. The first rule of creation is selection. He must select, and so the picture he creates always forces the question, What else? What else is there that’s not on the page, or canvas, or music, or inherent in the marble? What else is there?

Hermeneutics aside, what stands outside the artwork, what exists in the margins, are the deeply private thoughts and feelings of the artist that never make it into his work. Like Hemingway’s iceberg theory, these things sexist beneath the surface. All those collected journals, notebooks, photos, videos, the recordings of the artist’s voice as it struggles to complete a thought or phrase, a melody, are at once revealing and deeply upsetting. The artist is human after all, not a God! A demigod, perhaps, one who sinks into himself to swim in the deepest parts of that lake, dredging up from the silty floor worms and dead fish and a few stubborn blooms. All that private stuff matters. For what? Not for us. To uncover, discover, reveal for himself what stirs in his soul, and that has ultimate value for the world.