Drawing From Reality

Sometimes expressing myself is frustrating. Nothing seems adequate for capturing the images that live inside me. It's like a drawing of a landscape: it isn't close enough to the actual landscape to really do it justice. As my skills improve, the drawing becomes more and more accurate, but it will still never reach a full likeness. C.S. Lewis said: "How far the life of the risen man will be sensory, we do not know. But I surmise that it will differ from the sensory life we know here, not as emptiness differs from water or water from wine but as a flower differs from a bulb or a cathedral from an architect's drawing." I get discouraged because I want to show the cathedral and I'm forced to be satisfied with an architect's drawing. I guess that is just the reality we live in, though I'm still pretty young. Maybe someday I will be able to use film and music to express myself. But no matter the medium, the point is we can never really achieve the one thing that all artists strive for: for that picture to come alive outside of ourselves in exactly the way that we intended. In this world it can't be done.

Here's more C.S. Lewis =)

"For though we shall be 'as the angels' and made 'like unto' our Master, I think this means 'like with the likeness proper to men': as different instruments that play the same air but each in its own fashion. How far the life of the risen man will be sensory, we do not know. But I surmise that it will differ from the sensory life we know here, not as emptiness differs from water or water from wine but as a flower differs from a bulb or a cathedral from an architect's drawing."

"Let us picture a woman thrown into a dungeon. There she bears and rears a son. He grows up seeing nothing but the dungeon...This unfortunate woman was an artist...With her pencil she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities and waves on a beach are like. He is a dutiful boy and he does his best to believe her when she tells him that that outer world is far more interesting and glorious than anything in the dungeon...one day, he says something that gives his mother pause. Finally it dawns on her that he has, all these years, lived under a misconception. 'But,' she gasps, 'You didn't think the real world was full of lines drawn in lead pencil?' 'What?' says the boy. 'No pencil marks there?' And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank. For the lines, by which alone he has imagined it, have now been denied of it. He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition -- ...the coloured three-dimensional realities which are not enclosed in lines but define their own shapes [in a way] no drawing could ever achieve. The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother's pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.

So with us. ... Our natural experiences...are only like the drawing....if they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape; not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun." -- C.S. Lewis