Unfinished Works: What if we don't get done in time?
Thursday Theses: Leonardo, Orson Welles, and Chretien De Troyes
Have you ever opened up that old Word Doc that’s been sitting in the depths of your folder to find an old story you haven’t seen in four or five years?
You scroll to the bottom.
You never finished it.
Fortunately, this newsletter is something I’ve managed to build a routine around to the point I’ve built content to release months in advance.
This post, if I’m figuring correctly, would have been written in July.
That being said, it’s been amended since then, seeing as how I recently had to cancel yet another creative project.
For some reason, I don’t believe I’ve managed to ever regain the productivity of college.
Since graduating college, I’ve certainly written quite a bit.
But the screenplays, the fragments of audio dramas, the pieces that are slowly adding up to a novel…
They don’t mean much, lying in their assorted piles.
With short films falling through and other ambitions to be moved down the line when you’ve got the 40-hour work week and a side hustle building a newsletter.
Social stuff at times.
Hobbies — true hobbies that aren’t revolving around grander projects per se — at other times.
And then, I’m told, you do have to just have downtime. Supposedly.
My interests often move from one object to another frequently enough.
The feeling may be illustrated as the nine muses getting into a scuffle over which one is going to drive me towards the next big shiny idea.
Though it happens that most recently a project fell through for lack of time and resources, the distractibility seems to play a key role.
Do I have Attention Deficit Disorder?
… I guess?
It would certainly explain a lot but that whole matter has been fairly nebulous even after consulting a doctor.
I’m also not sure if ADD would affect these overarching projects as much as it has to do with me misplacing my phone charger and getting distracted checking my finances when I should be writing.
But let’s go to an example I aspire towards.
I have a friend who has been working for two years on a stop-motion project.
I cannot help but admire Nathaniel Henley’s single-mindedness — and for a passion as grueling as stop-motion!
(So long as I’m doing a shoutout, his project is going up on YouTube soon.)
With regards to being swept up in a turbulent succession ideas, I guess we’d have to say nothing “overtaken you except such as is common to man.”
It’s not just us in the digital age, with our portable distractions that draw us away from writing that bestseller.
Life gets away from us.
Still, I have to ask myself: isn’t it terrible to think I might not get the chance to get back to that short film I had to shelve?
And to go ahead and get morbid real quick — so long as we’re looking back at the examples of other creatives — what about art left unfinished because the artist has died?
Whether it was the chronically distracted Leonardo and his vast volume of incomplete crafts, or it’s Orson Welles and his numerous retired productions, it’s easy to allow projects fall by the wayside.
It can happen to any creative.
And that’s a saddening fact, one that I may spend too much time dwelling on lately.
We may use our “memento mori” and “carpe diem” tokens to reiterate our mortality, but it’s a part of life that certain things begin to take precedent over others and we inevitably let certain projects slide.
If I wanted to, I’d sure have enough ideas jotted down to keep me busy the rest of my life.
But in the grand course of things, I'll be creating better ideas that deserve more attention.
In the meantime, some ideas fold together.
Others diverge.
In turn, there is a flux that passes through and over our work.
Chretien De Troyes’ story of Perceval, the knight who retrieved the Holy Grail, remained unfinished and prompted a few other writers to come up with stories of their own to round out this hero’s tale.
Ahh yes.
These authors who finished the story were writing the fan fiction on their favorite internet forums after their favorite show got canceled.
(Wolfram Von Eschenbach would come along years later with the reboot.)
De Troyes left something for the next generation to complete.
You might think the same thing about Brandon Sanderson, who received the task of finishing the Wheel of Time series when the author Robert Jordan passed away before he could complete it.
In the scheme of things, when a work of art remains unfinished, it shows a level of humanity.
It’s like receiving a partial fingerprint.
It’s like getting a partial picture of what happened at the crime scene.
Maybe you can reconstruct it and imagine what the “perpetrator” was doing.
Maybe you can lay out the scheme in real time.
Ultimately, the partaker of the work gets a shallow look at what was going on in the mind of the artist.
The unfinished artwork is raw and real.
We see the potentialities that lay within it; we see the seed that could become an oak tree.
It’s as Michelangelo put it in two different ways:
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.
I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.
We discover David in stone.
We find the so-called “Atlas Slave” there too, which Michelangelo was trying to free that he might adorn the tomb of Pope Julius II, but he didn’t manage to flesh him out entirely.
We find melodies in keyboards — press any key and you’ve started to release a stream that you need only follow up with a worthy successor.
There’s endless potential.
We need to section off pieces of the infinite in order to create.
But we don’t always get to draw the borders.
We don’t always get all the borders right on the Etch-A-Sketch.
There’s the concept of non finito, which is intentionally leaving a work unfinished.
But that’s not the intention most of the time.
Schubert wasn’t thinking that about Symphony No. 8.
Orson Welles wasn’t thinking this about Don Quixote or The Other Side of the Wind.
The sculptors of Mount Rushmore weren’t thinking that — yep, apparently this presidential quartet wasn’t supposed to just be a bunch of floating heads.
They were supposed to have bodies.
For Leonardo, juggling myriad ideas in his Renaissance brain, he was drawn to new project after new project.
Peter Burke, in his far-reaching, deep-diving work-of-wonder called The Polymath, he names the problem of bouncing from project to project the “Leonardo Syndrome.”
It’s a familiar part of the writing community and something we frequently meme — we understand what it is to have too many Works-In-Progress underway.
Inevitably, we’re forced to narrow our focus and to buckle down.
Here, notice, the preacher is sermonizing on his pet sin: if attempting to balance too many things at once is a transgression, I am the chief of sinners!
To try and do it all at once is like the subtle art of learning to ride a unicycle while juggling flaming bowling pins.
Can I add sword-swallowing to this death-defying act?
No.
No, I can’t.
But I often try.
This art form should only be left to the people who are willing to risk clothes-lining on a low-hanging tree limb and winding up in the ER.
I’ve hyper-extended my metaphor but I believe you gather what I mean.
Still, there’s something to this unfinished art idea.
Orson Welles’ legacy is scattered with unfinished films (and might I add extremely experimental films that prod the boundaries of coherence), not the least of which was The Other Side of the Wind, which was finished posthumously in 2018.
Being an uncompromising visionary can certainly, at times, lead you down dead end roads.
As we hear frequently in the productivity community, “perfect is the enemy of good.”
George Lucas might as well have indicted Star Wars as an unfinished film series, simply based on how many revisions he’s made with his re-releases.
I hear tell that Franz Kafka wanted his unfinished writings to be burned, but we see how that worked out.
To go through a few unfinished works:
Plato’s Critias
Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica
Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi
But we are not left to wonder what might have been for ever.
One day, our AI craftsman will become the perfect pasticheurs (or perhaps more accurately, art forgers) who will be able to finish the works of Leonardo.
Everything that these individuals attempted to create will be realized in full measure through the work of artificial intelligences who have learned the rules these artists lived by.
It is the inevitable conclusion of our software, which already generates images with DALL-E and finishes classical works with Beethoven’s 10th symphony.
AI sparks worry about the broad manufacturing of soulless art.
Look no further than the generation of innumerable NFTs — made on a large scale just hoping to strike gold somewhere.
But what if it could create soulful art? What if the AI became a spiritual medium, and its work functioned as though it were performing a technological seance?
Can artificial intelligence find the secret sauce that gives an artwork its humanity?
Still, sometimes when I look at how brutally we’ve designed our own world (look at shipping container houses) I wonder if we humans can find the secret sauce to give humanity back to art again.
I suspect what we’ll see — if I were to make bets on a Hegelian antithesis arising - a cosmic answer that will mellow out our present problems — is a new Romanticism or Transcendentalism.
If it leans more Romantic, we may find our art world obsessed with the sublimeness of the natural world.
If it leans more Transcendentalist, we may find the art world focusing on our human capacity for greatness.
These movements might be happening already, and we don’t even know it.
But more to the point.
Today, we look at the bits and pieces of art that were left behind by the masters who have gone on before us.
They have left us so much — so much to stop and wonder about what might have been.
It’s a piece of our life, just as it was a part of their life.
It’s an organic outcome of applying yourself to work and to tenaciously pursuing creativity — it’s a deeply human outcome.
Maybe, just maybe, our successors will look back at the half-done manuscripts and the half-sketched subjects dumped out of our desk drawers and wonder, admiringly, about what might have been.
And maybe that’s simply true of all creative work.
A quote attributed to Leonardo — but we all know the perils and misfires of attribution — sums it up fairly well.
Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Now, if you can forgive the preacher for being caught up in a whirlwind sermon about his own pet sin, maybe the preacher can accept the moral of his own story.
It’s okay when works don’t see the light of day.
It happens.