At the beginning of the score of his Valses nobles et sentimentales, composer Maurice Ravel placed a dedication based a quote from Henri de Régnier: “le plaisir délicieux et toujours nouveau d’une occupation inutile” (to the delightful and always novel pleasure of a useless occupation). Ravel’s sly and somewhat dandyish acknowledgment of the apparent uselessness of art epitomizes the question many artists ponder from time to time.

Why make art? Not just generally, but personally. why should I invest so much time in writing music? Shouldn’t I be ministering to orphans or something? Our contemporary fondness for results and bottom line answers doesn’t help, and complicating the question is the fact that there is so much good stuff already…more than we can soak up in several lifetimes. Yet I hope that this is a question that I can never fully answer, because it is such a fruitful one.

This is one of the reasons that I’ve always been fascinated with the Ars Poetica, and more generally, works of art that ponder the meaning and value of art. Film makers are good at this: we have Kieslowski’s Camera Buff, The Red Shoes by Powell and Pressburger, and Carlos Saura’s Carmen, just to name a few. In his “Ars Poetica?” from 1961, poet Czeslaw Milosz gets personal. Allow me to illustrate with a couple of stanzas.

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing its tail

…poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
Under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

Like so much of Milosz’s poetry, this one contains his own surprise and misgivings about himself, his work and the nature of poetry, ending in the reluctant compulsion to create, and a sort of faithful confidence that somehow, it will all work out for good.

The Book of Common Prayer contains a specific prayer for musicians and artists. However, the one I prefer is the prayer “for the right use of God’s gifts.” It doesn’t situate artistic labors on any exalted pedestal or lofty sphere, and it applies equally to the full measure of all that I might do each day.

Almighty God, whose loving hand hath given us all that we possess: Grant us grace that we may honor thee with our substance, and, remembering the account which we must one day give, may be faithful stewards of thy bounty, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

All labor in some fashion is an act of faith. For all of us who labor to make things, there is always the delightful and novel pleasure of our craft—for us even if for no one else. We can also acknowledge that the results of our effort may not always be in our hands. So we pray that we may be faithful to our gifts, be they great or small, and that our efforts will not ultimately be useless for ourselves and others.