The Parable of the Artist’s Eternal Act

One day while teaching, Josh was asked, ”Teacher, is art eternal that is ephemeral?”

Josh spoke thus:

An artist was in search of a medium.

The artist visited Stonehenge.  Stonehenge had lasted for over ten thousand years.  Yet Stonehenge was being weathered away.

The artist visited the Pyramids.  The Pyramids were younger than Stonehenge and they were in worse shape.  The white stone that had once made them almost unbearably bright in the desert sun now glowered with soot below the minarets of Cairo.

The Colossus of Rhodes was extinct, as was Alexandria’s lighthouse.  Babylon’s hanging gardens were recently rumored never to have existed at all.

Altimira and Lascaux had their caves, but they were barely accessible, and the tourists were destroying them.

In Rome and Greece, acid rain had flattened the noses of the gods.  In Afghanistan, the Taliban had flattened the Buddhas.  During World War II the Allies had flattened Dresden.

The artist considered literature.  Yes, books withered and worms burrowed, and libraries burned, but words were in the ether.  The Pentateuch was an oral tradition long before the scribes of Jerusalem, and the Iliad and the Odyssey were performed by firelight before they were committed to papyrus.  Shakespeare’s plays were plays--performances.  They were committed to quartos eventually, but their words were spoken first, recorded later.  And with modern electronics, be it a momentary haiku or a sweeping novel, the word had been reintroduced to the ether: in the Cloud.  

And words were eternal were they not? In the beginning was the Word, Luke said.  And in the end the Alpha would be the Omega.  The word was destined to remain.

But how many people could read Luke in the original Greek?  How many Greeks, even, could read Homer’s words as originally set down?  Even Shakespeare, hundreds of years ago, complained of Cicero in the Greek.  And who could read Shakespeare, even, now?

The word might have been eternal, but its meaning was fleeting.

Music, then, that soothed the savage breast?  Everyone loved a good tune.  Some loved a bad tune or two as well.  Songs, the artist knew, were traveling by radio wave across the universe.  The artist wondered where those songs would go, and who would hear them when they got there.

A tune then, but how to make it last forever?  What was forever?  From the beginning to the end.  The artist had missed the beginning, so what was the point of the end?  How could the artist begin at the beginning and last until the end?

“You want to sing to a Higgs-Boson particle?” the physicist asked the artist, “Why?”

“Because the Higgs-Boson is the beginning and the end, the alpha and omega.  The Higgs-Boson is eternal.”

“The Higgs-Boson lasts about as long as it takes for an electronic device to measure it.  It’s the least eternal particle I know of,” the physicist says.

“And for the entire existence of the Higgs-Boson, my song will be eternal,” the artist said.

“Sing for twenty-four hours, and your song will be eternal for a fruit fly,” the physicist said, “And the fruit fly might actually hear the song.”

And that is why the artist performs daily in the children’s hospice, painting, acting, singing, playing tunes.  Because everyone loves a good tune.  A good tune lasts forever.