Can Careful Art Deliver Beingness?

Opera—the music, lyrics, art, raw emotion, and delivery of life’s honed-to-golden revelations, its hard-won, shocking, profound truths sung out, the plot fallen away to reveal the tragedy or supreme triumph of the soul, all surrounding and lifting a strong, vibrant female singer who grew into a powerful voice despite limited artistic expression around her—provided a way for Willa Cather to show the emergence of the feminine from the limitations of frontier America or small town life that would ‘hold her’ to conditioned expectations of the female, to giving opening to that broader, more vibrant spirit its “release into the wider world” (as David McKay Powell writes of Clara Vavrika’s “adventurous personality” in “The Bohemian Girl” in his book Cather and Opera). Over time Willa’s theory changed as in for Thea in The Song of the Lark. Willa refined this emergence from growth into a career into the emergence itself, the expression that was deeper and needed to expand into a differently internally structured feminine. Opera continued to be a deepening of her art. But that feminine she wanted in full, not just back into society as it was. In her “Coming, Aphrodite!” singer Eden Bower in the very pulse of culture of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village misses the moment that is what the art itself points to: the thing itself, the very real, herself and the artist himself, and that was published just five years after The Song of the Lark. Within another five years Willa had shown the loss of the path of the females in The Professor’s House from their young beginning wild adventurous imaginations, and had written F. Scott Fitzgerald that no one had expressed it yet.

Willa moved to the forms of art that would get to the actual transference and the true desire of art without those cultural or artistic boundaries—and in that the Being itself and the vitalness of the art would be the cultural structure, not by-passed in missed direction. Seeded in the strongest, most vital, individualistic earth, and grow her beyond the boundaries into Beingness was the ancient and the newly-realized complete strength and freedom of life itself.