January 27, 2007
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Art Wars continued...
Art and the
Holy SpiritMadeleine L'Engle in The Irrational Season (1977), beginning of Chapter 9 (on Pentecost):
"The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, is the easiest of
this not-at-all-easy concept for me to understand. Any artist,
great or small, knows moments when something more than he takes over,
and he moves into a kind of 'overdrive,' where he works as ordinarily
he cannot work. When he is through, there is a sense of
exhilaration, exhaustion, and joy. All our best work comes in
this fashion, and it is humbling and exciting.After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out
to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called 'It'
because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which
involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind. That acronym had
never occurred to me. I chose the name It intuitively, because an
IT does not have a heart or soul. And I did not understand
consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not
informed by the heart, is evil."
