Gabriel Lyra

Does Art Have Meaning Without Its Creator?

Before we begin this testimony, I ask you an extremely important question: is there meaning in art without its artist?

 It may be an odd question at first, but for a young writer like myself, answering this question is necessary to understand why and for whom I write. So, please, reflect upon it and think carefully. It is important that you have an answer before reading what I have to say, so please pause for a few seconds and think.

Well, now that you have an answer – or perhaps a line of thought – it is crucial to state that art does not belong to anyone, not even its artist. When you read a book, your first thought is never that it is a particular vision of an author, that all of that story is merely a testimony of an artist. Your first thought, your intuition, is always that in some way that story belongs to you – it tells you something that burns in your own blood. 

What I mean is: good art belongs to everyone, not to its artist or audience, not to its country or culture, but to all.

How Knowing the Artist Changes the Art

On the other hand, knowing the story of the author is necessary to understand where lies his inspiration, and this somehow changes the whole book. An interesting example is my favorite writer, J. R. R. Tolkien – yes, I like medieval battles and green orcs. If you are a lover of his work, you know that he is a Christian and that his fictional world is based on such a perspective.

However, did you know that Tolkien was also inspired by pagan Norse mythology? That Gandalf the Grey is inspired by the figure of Odin? I ask you, does this piece of information change your perspective on his work, even by a little?

Whether it’s Tolkien’s writings or Michelangelo’s sculptures, every artwork that survives the shackles of time has the mark of its artist, but it belongs to everyone. 

Can We Find the Hand of a Creator in Everything?

What would become of The Lord of the Rings if the book stayed on a shelf, never in bookstores? What would become of Pieta or David if these statues were in a basement, never in museums? Valuable art belongs to us all; however, art still bears the mark of an artist who only sought to express himself. 

What is the answer to this big question? 

Let’s observe, for example, artists who died thinking that their works were merely some waste of time, such as the famous writer Franz Kafka. After his death, his books such as Letter to his Father and Metamorphosis became a hit around the world, some of the finest pieces of literature ever produced. Would it be that the success of these works is attributed to our research about Kafka’s life? Or are these books simply great by themselves? What I am trying to say is – would these works be famous if we did not know who Kafka was?

Let’s put this question on a pause for a second. 

Let’s instead look at the art that surrounds us all. Can you find art in everything? Clearly, you look at a clock and do not think it simply “fell out of the sky”, as a clock has several complex and precise parts that work together so that the object serves its specific purpose: to mark the time. The clock is a fine piece of art due to its complexity, and I believe that we can all agree with this statement.

 On the other hand, you probably look at a stone and think that it is just a stone – after all, it is abundant and simple.

However, if you were to pay closer attention to the molecular structure of a stone, how it has probably been here on this earth for thousands of years, how it can have hundreds of thousands of different uses… if you were to analyze a stone from the perspective of its artist, as something extremely complex, you would realize that everything around you is extremely complex, and that everything has the mark of its artist. If you understood for one second how everything around you is an art precisely calculated with hundreds of millions of variables that need to come together simultaneously for that stone to be in front of you in that same place and at that same moment, you would probably be amazed by its artist. 

However, since you do not care about a stone, you probably do not care by its artist – and why should you?

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Now, coming back to that question: 

is there meaning in art without its artist? 

There are two possible practical answers in my view. 

• The first, you can experience art as if it belongs to you, live a lifetime without even asking what was the artist’s purpose, or who the artist even is.

Basically, you can limit the artist to your own inability to understand him, or your unwillingness to appreciate his art. 

• The second, the one that seems more coherent to me: simply wanting to understand the artist. What is the purpose of his magnificent work? What was his inspiration?

Why did he share his art with us? Are we part of his art, or just an accident in the middle of his artistic process?

A Personal Testimony: From Rio de Janeiro to Faith

 I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived 18 years of my life there. Yes, I like football – I do not shy away from the stereotype.

No, it is called football, not soccer. Yes, it is always hot there and the beaches are wonderful – if you want to visit, just be careful where you go.

 I was born to a Jewish mother and an atheist father, and at the age of 4 my parents got a divorce. I am the older brother of three, all male. If you are or want to be a parent of a large family, please make sure you raise children of different sexes – four men is not easy for any parent or sibling.

My father taught me to love art since I was little, and so I have always been very connected to books and movies. My mother taught me to love my family, and despite all the fights with my siblings, we all developed an extremely special feeling for each other. 

Encountering Christianity Through Literature

Despite all the family and cultural upbringing, all the character and personality mold, I had never had any contact with spirituality or religiosity. I had my Bar Mitzvah like any Jewish male at the age of 13, and I also occasionally participated in the Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, among other festivities. However, I had never had a truly religious education at home or at school – Judaism for me was reduced to cultural rather than spiritual practices. 

Until I was 22 years old, I had never prayed or set foot in a church or synagogue in order to truly worship God.

I came to the United States with a dream of becoming a writer. I told myself that I wanted to tell people about the “truth of things”, to teach them through inspiring stories how to become better people. Well, I soon understood that not only did I not know the “truth of things” but also that I was just a boy who simply wanted to be heard and respected for his opinions – the reason for my writing was never to help the world, only myself. 

These moments of reality shock are crucial to shaping humility, and so I seek to continue to learn that I will never know much, and that the little I know does not make me superior to those who know as little as I do.

Humility! Such a simple word, but very, very complex. As you will see, I never had much humility. 

Finding the Artist Behind Life

Anyway, as the writing and literature classes at the university went by, I came across questions like the one that started this testimony – questions that have no ultimate answer, just personal answers. I came across spectacular books that simply showed me the soul of an author who, regardless of age, was as simple as me: someone who had no answer to anything, just views. This simplicity brought me closer to artists, and so I tried to follow in their footsteps – that was the worst choice of my life, I came to understand.

 Looking back now, I understand it was necessary, but definitely I could have learned my lesson in a simpler way if I merely spontaneously learned how to be humble. Well, that never happened.

To become a successful writer, I thought, I had to follow two simple steps. 

First, I needed to isolate myself from the world and focus on those questions that no one knew how to answer.Thus, I almost did not see or talk to anyone for years. I truly did not worry about my physical or mental health – these were all obstacles in my way. All I did was read and write, philosophize and seek understanding. 

Secondly, I needed to become extremely observant, a narrator rather than a character. Thus, I did not seek to have experiences, but to observe others in order to try to better understand how other people behave and feel – their motivations, passions, and pains.

After a few years of living this way, I was faced with the following reality. I no longer enjoyed spending my time with others. I did not want to meet new people nor seek much from my friends and family. Everything and everyone became so, so distant from my reality that I could not understand them anymore, and I did not want to understand them anymore. Humanity seemed lost to me – everything indicated that there was no purpose to our mediocre existence.

This is the most logical conclusion one can reach once one truly distances oneself from people – nothing makes sense, and nothing should make sense. I simply could not understand how people were not like me, and if they were not, that meant they were somehow intellectually dishonest with themselves – and there was nothing that raged me as much as intellectual dishonesty.

Well, I learned a few “truths” once I came out of this experience, and one of them is that the path to hopelessness is extremely comfortable. Once your eyes see what you want to see, and people become mere accidents and feelings mere obstacles, you do not hurt as much anymore. It is a constant process of distancing oneself from the pain that, although painful, is comfortable.

Those who loved me were constantly worried about me, but I was worried about them for still living in an extremely cruel and corrupt world. My world could forever be to read and write, and that would be a perfect world, even if no one liked my art. After all, I no longer wanted people to like anything I wrote, because I did not like them anymore. I felt sorry for them for being so blind.

Gabriel Asks: What is the Value of Life?

About a year ago, I took a class on literature in the medieval age, and I needed to read a

100-page “poem” called Pearl. There is no reason to summarize the work, but the following question appeared in my mind once I was finished with it: what is the value of life? 

The book is according to the Christian perspective, and through these lenses children go to Heaven. If a child dies, he goes directly to Heaven. However, if a child lives and becomes an adult, regardless of that individual’s life, Heaven is no longer a guarantee. Such a person, after all, will not be perfect, and so will not go to heaven without believing in Jesus Christ. A child, on the other hand, is still perfect in his or her purity, and so go to Heaven. Therefore, I asked myself: why live?

Why live if you could have died at the age of 2 and gone directly to eternal life alongside your creator? It did not make any sense. Life was reduced to a “test” or “trial” rather than being a gift.

You see, I was not a Christian and had never picked up a Bible in my life. For a lover of

unanswered questions, this was something that intrigued me for a long time, and really it appeared to make no logical sense. Sure, I knew about the story of the garden of Eden, about how sin entered into the world, but the question still lingered in my mind: why live? So, again I ask you, before you continue reading, try answering the following question. Why do we live since if we died as children we would go directly to heaven – why grow up and be susceptible to sin? Reflect upon it, think carefully. I will not touch on this subject exactly next, but it is important that you have an answer before you read on.

After some time, that became a question that motivated me to understand the Christian perspective upon life more deeply. 

Finding God in The Bible

With the influence of that question and my lovely girlfriend Katherine – please know that you changed my life, my love, and I am forever grateful – I enrolled in a class called “Bible as Literature”. We had no Christian teachings, nor did we seek to answer any questions about the existence of God. The goal of the class was simply to read the Bible as a story and understand how it influenced literature. So yes, I had to read almost the entire Bible in less than four months.

For every class, we needed to make comments on some topic that we found interesting about the reading for the day (which was usually between 12 and 16 chapters). Despite all the “homework” we had to do, it was extremely interesting to dedicate myself to reading the Bible every day, to seek to better understand its metaphors, its teachings, and its connections, alongside the whole of its beautiful story. I knew it would be fascinating, but I had no idea that I would question whether the Bible was really divine or worldly. For those who have never read the Bible and think that what I just said is absurd, please let me give you some context to my statement.

The Bible has approximately 66 thousand cross-connections throughout its books – these connections are established through prophecies that appear elsewhere in the story, or details that are once mentioned that come to light in the future of the work. 

The second collection of books with as many cross-connections are all of the works of Stephen King combined, which total somewhere between 1 and 1.2 thousand connections. The Bible was written in 3 different languages by more than 40 authors, and for some reason it retains its original content even after 2,000 years. Many of the books that make up the Bible are based on an oral tradition that remained alive for thousands of years before being placed in its first manuscripts, mere pieces of paper that tell us about more than fifteen hundred years of a people’s history. If this information is not enough to make you question whether the Bible is not a miracle in itself, then try to read its contents and answer the thousands of theological questions that to this day are topics of discussion for philosophers, physicists, scientists, and some of the most talented scholars from around the world. Perhaps, try to understand the messages that have shaped the ethics and morals that are still prevalent in the vast majority of the world’s most developed countries. In short, there is no collection of books as frighteningly complex as the Bible, and for some reason its story opens and closes perfectly, without leaving a comma out of place.

I do not need to tell you about the Bible, its impact speaks for itself. All I need to say is that I tried to see how it could simply be the making of men, and failed. 

I was extremely frightened when I did not find any piece of archaeological evidence that proved to me that the events of the Bible were wrong. Obviously, no one can prove whether or not Moses parted the red sea because no one can go back in time to see the sea splitting right in the middle. However, all the pieces of Egyptian chariots, Egyptian armor, and human bones that were found at the bottom of the Red Sea, in addition to the massively large burned area of sand – which has originated from such a potent fire that civilizations at the time did not even dream of ever being able to manipulate – lead me to believe that the Red Sea was really opened and a pillar of fire really fell from the skies. Yes, it is indeed absurd to philosophize whether fiction exists in real life – but it is even more absurd to deny its existence when faced with evidence.

And I tell you, search for the evidence, because it is the way, the truth, and the life.

I have converted to Christianity about 6 months ago.

 I like to tell others that I was converted by my pursuit of knowledge and reason, but the plain truth is that once I read the Bible and sought to understand what it said, I began to see things differently.

 Many say that books change your life – I cannot believe it. I do not think that books change your life unless you want to change your life, allow yourself to see the artist.

 If you read a book and do not get to know its author, that book will not change your life, since you will never truly know that book. Thus, I sought to know the artist behind all, and until the end of my life, I will continue to seek Him.

With a single stone, I was able to hit two birds. With a single sentence, I was able to answer both of my unanswerable questions. 

Is there meaning in art without its artist? 

What is the value of life? 

Life is but a constant quest to know the artist behind life. And that is my testimony.

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