“Walking Into the Mystery” — Javen Tanner Speaks
An interview conducted by Doug Talley

Editor’s note: This is the conclusion of a two-part interview with poet-actor-director Javen Tanner. Read part 1 here.

MERIDIAN: If you’ll bear with me, I want to refer to a series of quotations from the American fiction writer, Flannery O’Connor, and hear your responses. She once stated, “I have heard it said that belief in Christian dogma is a hindrance to the writer, but I myself have found nothing further from the truth. Actually, it frees the storyteller to observe. It is not a set of rules which fixes what he sees in the world. It affects his writing primarily by guaranteeing his respect for mystery.” (For reference to this and the following quotes, see, Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, The Library of America, New York, 1988, pp. 801-864).

Do you agree with this statement? And do you have any response to this idea of the mystery of art?

TANNER: I run a theatre department, and this idea of a “respect for mystery” is fundamental to what I teach. It’s not that I have any need for the students to believe what I believe; it’s just that mystery is at the core of all great art, and so students of art must learn to tap into it. Without the mystery, it’s just craft. It can be excellent craft, but it’s just craft.

The term “mystery” has come to me by way of Keats and Wordsworth. Wordsworth spoke of “the burden of the mystery.” But Keats’ thoughts on Wordsworth’s phrase are what come to mind. I did my Master’s thesis on Keats, and, as far as I can tell, he was not a believer — at least not in the way we generally think of a believer.

But he believed in the mystery, something larger, something other, something that was directly related to what he was doing as a poet. It was both what shrouded the truth and the truth itself. It was both beauty and suffering. And Keats respected it. Deeply. He had his moments of serious doubt and despair, but he was no cynic. He seemed to understand that if anyone was going to delve into the mystery it would be a poet. It was the poet’s responsibility. And this is the moment: Keats stands in his “chamber of maiden thought” and sees the dark passages. In spite of his fear, he lets go of security and ego (the ultimate negative capability), and walks into the dark.

Coleridge spoke of “The Imagination” in a similar way. He wasn’t talking about daydreaming. For him, the Imagination didn’t happen in the artist’s head. It was outside of the artist, larger than the artist, and it was the essential ingredient to art. Coleridge uses the Latin phrase “laxis effertur habenis,” meaning “carried on with slackened reins.”

The idea is that when the artist has trained and prepared and put in the time, he then lets go and allows the imagination to take the reins. Being prepared is essential, but it is not enough. If the artist can’t let go of his knowledge, training, and rehearsal, and then give himself over to something larger in the moment of performance or composition, his work will remain craft.

Letting something else take over is difficult. Most people are unable to do it, and they never become artists at all. Instead, they remain craftists. There are craftists everywhere, but only a few artists. No wonder Keats thought of it as a burden.

As I see it, Keats and Coleridge were talking about different parts of the process of opening oneself to creative inspiration. You have to walk into the mystery, and you have to let the mystery take over.

MERIDIAN: Ms. O’Connor also stated: “The poet is traditionally a blind man. But the Christian poet, and the story-teller as well, is like the blind man Christ touched, who looked and then saw men as if they were trees — but walking. Christ touched him again, and he saw clearly. We will not see clearly until Christ touches us in death, but this first touch is the beginning of vision, and it is an invitation to deeper and stranger visions that we shall have to accept if we want to realize a Catholic literature.” Do you feel this statement applies as well to the development of a Mormon literature? Does a Mormon literature require strange visions and a readership willing to accept such visions? Why or why not?

TANNER: Yes, certainly. This is where we came from. The Restoration began with what people regarded as a strange vision. We should always be open to such things. But I fear we (myself included) have in many ways bought into the culture of cynicism and unbelief. We are just like everyone else: easily enamored by the prevailing empiricism.

Empiricists — the Structuralists, for example — are famous for taking strange visions and myths and explaining them away as inferior attempts at describing the natural world. And we love it. We love seeing the connection between the myth of Persephone and the spring and autumn equinoxes.

We love it that the autochthonous man, who grew out of the ground like a plant, is simply a primitive sexist culture’s way to avoid the dreaded circumstance of a woman existing first so she can give birth to the first man. But is that really all there is to these stories? Then why do they show up in so many different places? Could there be something more to them?

Let’s take the autochthonous man. One of his feet remains stuck in the ground, attached to his roots. He breaks his foot, flesh and bone, from that root, and limps the rest of his life. The limping man then becomes an origin figure. He surfaces in many stories. Laius, the father of Oedipus, limped. Oedipus also limped, and his name means “club foot.” Achilles’ heel was his one vulnerability.

In the Judeo-Christian world, the autochthonous man shows up in the Garden of Eden as Adam (created from the dust). But when God says the serpent will have power to bruise the heel of the seed of the woman, he’s talking about Christ. And Christ being the seed of the woman (Mary) creates all kinds of problems for people who think the story of the autochthonous man is just about not coming from a woman.

And then there’s Jacob, the origin figure of the tribes of Israel. We see his wrestle with the angel as figurative, but there is a tradition that says he actually had a wrestler’s injury that kept him from touching one heel to the ground. (One explanation of kings wearing high heels is that they were emulating Jacob.) It seems to me that there is something larger here than the vain fantasies of ancient cultures.

But why should we care? Well, because one of our great strengths as a culture is our mythology. I don’t mean the common modern definition of mythology, meaning stories that are untrue. When I say mythology, I mean stories that explain and give meaning to the purpose of existence itself. We should cultivate and celebrate our deep and strange visions. We should be a believing people.

Does the autochthonous man have anything to do with us? I don’t know. Even if he does, is it pertinent to our salvation? I can’t think of how. Nevertheless, it is thrilling to consider that when Joseph, the origin figure of the Restoration, stepped out of the Sacred Grove, he wasn’t running like we see in the church films. He was limping.

MERIDIAN: Another quote from Ms. O’Connor — she once stated, “It is interesting that as belief in the divinity of Christ decreases, there seems to be a preoccupation with Christ-figures in our fiction. What is pushed to the back of the mind makes its way forward somehow. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature, for it is the business of the artist to reveal what haunts us.” Do you believe the idea that the business of the artist is to reveal what haunts us? Why or why not?

TANNER: That’s a great way to say it. Yes, I agree; and I think that what haunts us is death, or mortality. I don’t mean to be at all morbid, but I have long said that death is the central concern of great art. It is what looms over the entire human experience. It is the deepest conflict. No wonder the purpose of the Atonement is to overcome physical and spiritual death.

The artist stands in awe at the relentless movement of time, and in that movement, the continuous story: birth, growth, decay, and death. And in that story: love, suffering, toil, laughter and loss — always loss. Mark Strand suggests that even a simple poem about a flower is an attempt to capture what is, or will soon be, gone. (“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may…”) Keats calls death the great divorcer. He also writes:

Shakespeare writes:

Nearly all of Shakespeare’s best-known love sonnets are actually about loss, decay, and death. It really is the subject of great art. Craftists will always give us works about politics and current affairs, but artists focus on what concerns all humans everywhere, what haunts all humans everywhere.

MERIDIAN: My final quote, I promise — Ms. O’Connor also stated, “Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but a revelation nonetheless.” To what extent, do you believe, should we allow art to provide us with revelation?

TANNER: I believe that true art is revelation. O’Connor’s mystery, Keats’ mystery, Coleridge’s imagination — It’s all about something bigger than the artist. The key word is vulnerability. With Keats we let go of ego and the need to qualify, quantify or explain (again, negative capability); with O’Connor we acknowledge something larger (the mystery); back with Keats now, we let go of fear and walk into the mystery; and then with Coleridge we let the mystery or imagination take over.

The artist must learn to become vulnerable, just as the seeker of truth must learn to become humble. It is vulnerability and humility that open the individual up to inspiration. The machineries of creative inspiration and spiritual inspiration are strikingly similar. In my classes I call the mystery “creative energy.”

But what is creative energy? Well, as I see it, it is the Light of Christ — the creative power that quickens all things. It inspires creation. And since artists are in the business of creation, it is the essential element. It turns craft into art. I believe it is what rested upon Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Keats, Chekhov, Eliot, Beckett and many others. It is a little ironic that I call the darkness into which Keats walks light, but he said it himself: “Aye on the shores of darkness there is light.”

MERIDIAN: What in your upbringing directed you toward poetry in the first place? Were there defining moments?

TANNER: My dad loved poetry. He’d read Kipling and Frost, and he’d recite Service’s The Cremation of Sam McGee to the delight of all in earshot. So poetry was seen as a good thing in my house. But the first real defining moment came when I was in sixth grade. I came across Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, and I was stunned. I got it. I was eleven years old and the weight of that poem fell on me with all its silence. I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life.

In high school I got into Whitman, Cummings, Eliot, and Sandburg. I continued with Eliot and more Modernists after my mission, and then once I was settled into college it was all Shakespeare, Keats, and the contemporary Americans. I love contemporary American poetry. Philip Levine and Li-Young Lee are my favorites.

MERIDIAN: What have been your principal literary influences? What authors do you return to and why?

TANNER: It is impossible for me to escape Shakespeare. I know that will sound like a too obvious choice for some. But as a theatre person, I am always either reading, talking about, writing about, thinking about, or performing Shakespeare. It is frustrating that after four hundred years nobody has topped him, but it is also true.

Eliot was whistling in the dark when he said the world is divided between Shakespeare and Dante. Dante was a genius — a true artist through and through — but he didn’t even come close to doing what Shakespeare did.

I have spoken Shakespeare’s words night after night, and then I have exited the stage and listened to others speak his words night after night. And each night, not just the words, but the very sounds unfold new meaning, new mysteries, new revelations. And the more I speak or read his words, the less possible it seems that any human being could have done it. It’s so vast and messy and perfect and beautiful and human and godlike.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that he wasn’t university educated. What surprises me is that he somehow learned to become that vulnerable, to open himself to that kind of inspiration. And so the goal, then, is not to replicate Shakespeare’s work with a contemporary spin, but to learn to open myself the way he must have opened, the way his words continue to open.

MERIDIAN: What advice do you have for the aspiring writer?

TANNER: Avoid the wearing of berets at all costs.

Return to Top of Article