The Art Part

In Browning’s “Fra Lippo Lippi,” the artist who narrates the poem asks us to consider a painting filled to the margins with brilliantly illuminated images of men and women, every one of them as singularly alive as it’s possible for a human creator to make. Among all of those, one will bear a caption: Iste perfecit opus, “This man made the work.”

Browning read those words as the credo of the kind of artist who mines his way through the material of any world that comes to his hand. The credo’s key word is the one that guides Fra Lippo’s kind of art-labor: the adverb intensely.

This world’s no blot for us,

Nor blank; it means intensely, and means good:

To find its meaning is my meat and drink.

—

Intensely through the course of his career, Donald Trump has often made it known that he’d like to see a new colossus blasted into the granite of Mount Rushmore, in addition to or instead of the existing four. This would be, obviously, the one depicting himself. However, the analysis of John Branch and Jeremy White concludes that that desire won’t be fulfilled. Geology prohibits it.

To an ordinary artist, that would count as a rejection. But an artist possessed by intensity will resculpt rejection into a constructive consolation. Properly, a labor that is intense will be powered by nothing but biology. It will transcend human tools, even the power drills and dynamite that Gutzon Borglum used when he subjugated the granite of Mount Rushmore to fame. After all, even that fame was a limited one, incomprehensible beyond the limits of a single nation’s history. Its scope was physically ambitious but deficient in desire. But the moment when desire understands that what it desires is only desire itself – desire unfulfillable because unending and unending because illimitable – the limiting specifics of its implements will cease to matter.

—

After all, the implements might be a mere chisel, a mere paintbrush, a mere pen. How much work has been done with those!

Or, for another mere instance: