Art and Life

The back and forth dialogue between works of art and the art of life is something that I treasure.  It's fascinating, unpredictable, and occasionally awe-inspiring. Here's how it played it out the weekend before last (and yes, this will be a little more serious in tone than my last few posts).

After a crazy extended late-night conversation about life, love, and sexuality, where I found myself getting much more honest and vulnerable than I have been in a while, a song came to mind the next morning.  It was "England," by the National.  After looping it on my iPod and in my head for a few hours, I was inspired to do two things.

First, I checked their tour schedule.  They're coming here in December.  I'll be there.  Yes, the show's during the first week of finals week, but after the first exam, a night lost in reverie could be the very thing that keeps me going through the three remaining tests.

Second, the lines about angels led me to think about Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire.  I had known about the Nic Cage vehicle it inspired (City of Angels) for quite some time, but I didn't know about Wings until last summer, when I read Jeffrey Overstreet's Through A Screen Darkly as part of my preparation for a course on film that I had been asked to teach.  After reading the text, I had to find the DVD, which arrived just in time (literally, the day before I got on the plane to go).  Once I saw it, I knew that I would be working it into the course, as a devotional before a session on image, sound, and the use of color.  When I was reminded of it last week, I knew that I would be working a viewing into the weekend ahead.

It's a beautiful film, very much a meditative piece on life, love, relationships, being human, and the city of Berlin, circa 1987.  The angels in this film aren't your typical cinematic angels, adorned in haloes and white wings.  Clad in dark overcoats,  Bruno Ganz and Otto Sander move through Berlin, watching, listening, and hearing the hearts of the people of the city.  As they hear the voices of the Ganz' Damiel in particular longs to engage in a way that his current role does not permit, and the director allows us to observe the observer as he begins to consider what would happen if he entered the picture.

The film invites dialogue with Christian theology, everyday life, and with our conceptions of life on earth and the afterlife.  Rather than assuming that life in the heavens is to be preferred, and that the spiritual is different from, and preferable to, the physical, Wenders turns those ideas on their heads.  What if the angels actually envied us?  What is it about being human that is so fascinating?  Why not treasure, rather than shy away from, sensory experience? What is it about life on this earth that can't wait for heaven?  And what would it be like to be like a child again?  To recognize specific colors, taste your own blood, and hold a hot cup of coffee in your hands, all for the first time. Those are some of the enduring images that I take from the film, matched by the look of joy on the face of someone for whom all these things are new.  The biblical texts that lingered in my mind are Psalm 8 and Hebrews 2, which place humans a little lower than the angels, yet crown them with glory and honor.  The film brought those texts to life for me, and it reminded me that this life is one to be treasured.

Worthy of my time and yours.