Before going to bed, I look over my novel in progress. Just a few edits, a few places where edits should be, and other notes to myself and I can go to sleep. That’s what I need. Then, when the clock strikes three and the world is dark, I wake up and check it again. What was I thinking? I can’t do this, I’m not anywhere near good enough.

That’s the nature of art to me, or at least people cursed with being like me. This all came to mind not just because I’m progressing in my novel (I’m on Chapter 4, BTW) but because this came to me via twitter this morning:

http://www.videolicio.us/2008/07/ode-to-joy—pe.html

The Ninth Symphony by van Beethoven is introduced as “the greatest work of art ever created”, and then � well, trashed. It’s funny as Hell, especially with the inside van Beethoven jokes like tympani and the metronome. But I can tell you right here and now that van Beethoven would have HATED this. Why?

The Ninth Symphony is, like most art of the day, not so much about a thing as the idea of a thing. In this case, it’s the idea of happiness, something that eluded van Beethoven for many reasons – including deafness, betrayal, and just being an asshole. He wanted to be happy, but he didn’t know what that really meant. The poem “Ode to Joy” by Friedrich von Schiller was as close as he was going to get, so it was set to music.

Are you listening, everyone?
This embraces the entire world!
Happiness, the daughter of Paradise,
Your magic reunites those divided.
All men are brothers
Under your spreading wings.

(re-arranged by van Beethoven, translated by me)

Dense, Romantic era stuff, I realize. But it has a lot of cache today when you can see it being parodied so lovingly – and knowing that it’s been officially adopted as the Anthem of Europe. When the Berlin Wall fell, Leonard Bernstein led a multi-national performance where they substituted freiheit (freedom) for freude (happiness), which brings a tear to my eye just remembering it.

Is that what “art” really is? The idea of something, embedded so deep into a culture that small changes take on great meaning?

I’m writing a novel about the idea of reality. Reality itself is a major character, or at least the representation of it. Does this mean that, like van Beethoven’s search for happiness I’m never going to find reality but will have to settle for the idea of it? Perhaps. But I think that, in the end, it becomes something like art – assuming it’s artfully done.

The idea of being happy became something like reunification in the hands of a person who simply wasn’t happy, but everyone got past that. The music still touched the spirit of man in a way that still works – even if Beaker does it.

If you’ve ever seen a manuscript page by van Beethoven, you’ll know that he scribbled and crossed off most of what he wrote, possibly at three in the morning. There is hope for me after all. I’ll keep at it.