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A person will mature with time, after all, but what of their soul? A soul is not necessarily more ready in old age than it is in youth.

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Although maybe no life is ever foreshortened, but contains in its length, even when abbreviated, the shape and purpose of the trials that are meant to belong to it.

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Which itself is a reflection of what might be described as the egalitarianism of God. Insofar as the heroism that is most true and most enduring, in the sphere of human life, is open as a potentiality not only to a few who happen to have been born with certain aptitudes or gifts (though it is open to them as well), but to every single person who is cognizant of the seat of their own will, and whose life is not foreshortened before whatever trials that would belong to them can be set forth for them to expend themselves upon.

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For a will, or a volition, is common to everyone, and, except in those situations where the person is so injured that they are no longer conscious, or aware of their surroundings, and thus would seem to have lost the freedom and responsibility that are the birthright of humankind (in which case they become the charge of their community, or those who would care for them, and are no less valuable as a creature, whether they are to survive in that condition for a while, or to perish right away), is not susceptible to the effects of aging, the way our bodies are, and in fact is so ethereal a thing that it would seem merely conceptual, or abstract, were it not evidenced in our every thought and deed and intention, so that we cannot deny its presence, or avoid its reality, even if we would like to.

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A person can seem, to the eye that is conventional and vain, afflicted or unfortunate in their circumstance, appearance, or aptitudes, and in fact, because of it, might know themself to be the object of scorn, or sentimentality, or a pity that is baseless in its exaggeration, and yet be possessed of such a will, and power of discernment, that their life becomes holy, and is more useful to providence than those of the most celebrated personalities and historical figures.

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The reason that saints are the heroes and heroines of the Catholic Church, for example, at least as far as the natural order is concerned, is because they reveal how it is possible for a human person to take possession of that endlessness, with regard to one’s will, or one’s volition, and to direct it with constancy toward the regeneration of charity, or courage, or any other virtue, in all of their actions, throughout their conscious life.

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For there is a sort of endlessness to that of which humans are capable. Not in the sense that each of us does not have specific and real limitations, for certainly we do, as our influence has bounds, and our spheres of activity have been scripted, so to speak, by what we’ve inherited through our bodies, and by the variety of our talents; but in the sense that we have been endowed with a spirit that can move us by inspiration, and a will that has been designed for the sort of endurance that is evinced by those personalities we describe as determined, persistent, or stubborn.

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When someone like Roger Penrose talks about quantum theory, for example, or the mathematical properties of the universe, I may not be able to fathom everything he is saying, and that he himself is capable of comprehending, but I can recognize that he understands what he is saying, and that he is trying to communicate it to anyone who is willing to listen. And in so doing, in paying attention to such a person, I would seem to myself to undergo an expansion of spirit and of mind, as if out of the very substance of myself, more can be discovered; as if one’s very willingness to understand creates a capacity to understand, or at least a sympathy that can be put to use in the direction of one’s own abilities.

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For perhaps in all endeavors that lay themselves open to human achievement, be they arts or science, or some other field of study or activity, there are always some practitioners whose works obtain to such heights that they are to be understood by a few, and not the many, which isn’t to say that these works are any less significant or valuable, but perhaps are even more so, for how far they push what till then had been recognized as the limits of expression and of mastery.

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Although maybe even Finnegans Wake can be said to open itself up to a trusting reader, one who, while not up to the task of pressuring each sentence or page to deliver unto them a specific or concrete meaning, is willing to surrender themself to the rhythms of the prose, and to whatever melody is in it, so that they might be carried or swept along (playfully, yes, though not without gravitas), until finally some subtle but definite emotion is imparted to them, and whatever details of plot that have been accumulating, and that the reader might anyway remain unaware of, begin to take shape in some shadowy region of their consciousness, as the author, James Joyce, would’ve hoped they would, even if what that reader now imagines isn’t what Joyce himself imagined, though it is close enough or vibrant enough to matter; for the prescience and omniscience that would’ve belonged to Joyce, as that work’s creator, would’ve been broad enough to fulfill his desire to predict how any attentive reader, or merely any reader who approached his work sincerely, or with an intelligent vulnerability, might’ve responded, imaginatively, to what he was doing with language, which isn’t to say that his predictions need to have been exact.

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And then there are works like the book Finnegans Wake, which are so elaborate in their design, and seem to require such a commitment on the part of the audience, and perhaps even an intelligence or perspicacity that is equal to that of the artist themself, in order that one might comprehend what the artist was even up to, or intending, when they created or composed the very thing, that they would posit themselves, these works, as an exception to the principle I have just now described.

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For there is nothing to be ashamed of in not grasping what some particular work of art is doing, or what it means, or what the artist might have been intending; and any work of art that would, finally, confuse its audience, or alienate them, or leave them adrift, and that is not, on some level, very simple in what it communicates, so that its deepest purpose can be felt by everyone, emotionally, say, or by affecting their mood (even if in other ways it remains elusive), is not in fact a work of art, but is a work that can be called unrealized or opaque or sophomoric. This is not to say that everything that is simple is a work of art, but that the sophistication of all great art diffuses itself through a simplicity that neither hides nor condescends.

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Which isn’t to say that one will not encounter, in galleries or arthouses, or among the books that one would read, or the music that one would hear, works that attempt to be art but fail, so that one must tolerate them and the fact that they would impose themselves on one’s attention, disguising themselves with gestures or with tricks that one must learn how to recognize, so that one can distinguish them from that which is genuine and original, and that transports you rather than drains you, but that amidst them there are to be found works that do, by way of their very strangeness or inventiveness (provided it is not gratuitous, but is a component of the art), reward the earnest audience with an expansion of the soul.

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That most lazy of criticisms that one hears leveled at a work of art — that it isn’t ‘relatable’ — is lazy not only because it suggests that art should not contain anything unfamiliar, nor challenge an audience in their convictions, and instead present itself to them as a series of reassurances, or a mirror that reflects back at them what they hope or believe to be true of the world, but also because it isn’t really a criticism at all, but merely an admission, from whoever has given voice to it, that they do not wish to be asked to exercise their imagination and their intelligence, nor to ask themselves, or somebody else, if they do not immediately grasp the artist’s intention, ‘What does this mean? What is this thing that I’m seeing and do not understand?’ And to sit with those questions for a while.

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I did, in other words, sense something about the consciousness behind those works, or within them, for the artist had yielded something of it to me, by way of their expression. And, more than that, I’d brought my own consciousness to bear on them, discerning what they suggested about reality, and then comparing that, and integrating it, with what I, as a free and rational being, already believed to be true. Thus I could not help but respond to them, though by ‘respond’ I do not necessarily mean speak, or act, or think, or do anything other than feel.

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I remember wandering into the Rothko Chapel in Houston, when I was a student in that city, and thinking to myself, as I stood in the presence of those enormous canvases, all of which were such a shade of dark purple that one could not help but receive the great sobriety of their mood as an indictment of, or mourning for, the frivolousness and violence that existed in the world, “Who is the person whose mind conceived of these?”

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Either the artist herself will have invested the work with forms, or patterns, or colors that speak to the preoccupations of her own consciousness, or the audience, encountering the work, and seeking meaning in it, will bring to it the preoccupations that belong to the consciousness that is theirs.

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Except, of course, that we cannot know reality but through our consciousness. Meaning, we must experience reality to know it. And so abstraction, in art, can never entirely separate itself from the suggestion of human consciousness.

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Which is to say, I suppose, that reality itself, and not necessarily the human experience of reality, is what is most important in a work of abstract art.

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Although I’m not even certain that the experience of the human person, as I just now referred to it, matters much to the abstract artist, or even to the work of abstract art itself. Insofar as abstraction, as a method or a tradition within the arts, is about as far as an artist can go, in dissolving the importance of any particular human consciousness, without allowing their work to become incoherent, or formless.