By SethThere have been a lot of discussions about art. Is art a reflection of society, or does it influence society? In other words, “Is a Metallica song about suicide and hopelessness just a reflection of the society we live in, or did it really influence a kid to commit suicide while he was listening to it on repeat for days?” I’m not going to tackle that one today. There are plenty of people who have over the years from Aristotle to Tipper Gore.
When the Industrial Revolution came, and it appeared as though mankind could cure all of its ills with science and industry, the modern discussion of art became “Does it have a function? Can a person break it down to its factors, study them with a microscope, and then figure out how to reproduce it in mass quantities?” kind of like a measles vaccine. We sort of answered that one with technology. Now we can get a variety of 18-minute stories jam-packed next to each other all across the world through the old television set. The obvious next question posed by that answer would be, “Is that really art?” Yeah, I’m not going to tackle that one either.
More recently, these types of discussions have become more and more abstract and as numerous as there are persons who want to sit around a coffee shop and discuss them. The rule, so it seems, is that each person’s idea of art, from the Goth kid with the composition book full of angry missives to the secretary with the Thomas Kinkaid desk calendar, is equally as valid as the next person’s idea of art, and equally as valid as the old schools of thought that took generations of brilliant thinkers to establish. I’d like to take the discussion back a ways to re-establish something that I think people have begun missing in art: The first thing art should accomplish is to provide an experience.
There are several types of experience that art can provide. We’ll lay those out, and then move on with the discussion. If you want to discuss these four basic ones, then please leave a reply. The four basic ones are:
- Literal – You have a friend. He tells you a story about going to the grocery store to buy a half-gallon of milk. Perhaps he’s a funny person with exaggerated expressions, and he tells the story very humorously. Or perhaps he’s very observant and he tells you all of the details about the store, like Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” was playing over the speakers, and an old lady was wiping down a countertop humming along to the music, but overlooking her responsibilities to her customers. You had a literal experience. You went from Point A to Point B in the narrative, you even had tangible details of the setting. Also, the way he told the story was entertaining. Entertainment can be included in the literal experience.
- Allegorical – This takes it a step further adding one-to-one correlations between seeming literal objects in the story and abstract ideas. For example, your friend went to the store to buy milk, but really he was going on an heroic journey, leaving the lifestyle he was accustomed to in order to find milk, or fortifying truth. On his journey he had to find the truth amid so many tempting options, like candy bars and gossip magazines, or non-truths. In the end, he triumphed.
- Moral – Your friend went to the store on his way to class for which he was late. The lady wiping the counter wasn’t paying attention so he had to wait longer. The possibility of walking out of the store without paying the $1.50 for milk was real and easy. Your friend weighed the possibilities in his mind, and made his decision. Hopefully, you as the listener gain some truth from his conflict. Either he walked out and was arrested and had to pay a $1000 fine, or he dealt with guilt, or otherwise he simply gained the old lady’s attention and paid for the milk.
- Anagogical – This one is more complicated. According to Merriam-Webster’s, you could interpret a fourth type of experience from your friend’s story, an ultimate spiritual or mystical experience. For our purposes, spiritual experiences are beyond capacities of reason and really beyond your own ability to conjure, but perhaps your friend’s story set off a trigger that prepared you or made you vulnerable to such an experience.
Why are these experiences important? Well, think about it in these terms: Experience is the best teacher. (This is for the most part true, unless you feel like you need to experience methamphetimines to learn that you should say “no” to drugs. More than likely that experience will kill you before you learn your lesson.) Experience can give you a perspective on life, a tower from which you can view circumstances in a clearer fashion than if you were down right in the muck of life. Life is life and it keeps on moving so at some point you will have to be in the muck of it, I’m not asking you to hide from it, but it’s much easier if you had the benefit of seeing it from up high for a little bit to know that there’s going to be a clearing just ahead if you keep going straight.
Let’s take that picture and apply it in a real life scenario to see how it might benefit us, how will reading the poetry of a guy who lived in England in the 1930s benefit me?
The specific example I have in mind is T.S. Eliot. (The following is much abridged) He started off as an American, but through a series of events, he moved to England to pursue a career. Much of his work, including poetry and drama, dealt with disillusionment in the popular modes of what many of his contemporaries called salvation. Science was supposed to bring about mankind’s salvation with its resulting technologies we could cure diseases and produce enough food for everyone, and by teaching people how to think logically we could enter peace. Newer more civilized forms of government were going to provide for everybody. Then World War I happened, the biggest war history had ever seen at that point, and everyone realized that man’s little modes of salvation weren’t going to work. At that point, Eliot was a hero of the academic mode of salvation, and even of the mode that art could save people (it could be something to hope in, to extend your legacy beyond your own life, be a passion so thoroughly encompassing that you could spend your whole life pursuing it without exhausting it, and be a central point that all of humanity could rally around to live peaceably). Eliot’s career peaked with the publication of the long poem The Waste Land. His poem The Hollow Men ends “this is the way the world ends/ not with a bang but a whimper.” In 1939, he converted to Christianity. This was a betrayal to many of his contemporaries. It was seen as a copout, that his reasoning capabilities and his talents had failed him, and when his first poem post-conversion (Ash Wednesday) was published many derided it, although it’s a wonderful, and well-accomplished poem.
This essay is not intended to defend Eliot’s conversion; I’m now at the point of explaining why the experience that art provides is important: because very little of all that biography I just wrote holds any bearing on the experience the poem will provide you.
Sure biographies can be interesting, that’s why memoirs are so popular these days, but honestly you don’t need all of that history to have the experience intended by the artist (the poet in this case). You really don’t even need your own feelings to be satiated to have that experience (in fact, Allen Tate writes of Ash Wednesday that you need “to detach your own needs from the experience set forth in the poem,” and if you don’t then you will “try to deduce a history of the poet’s case, to which you will attach yourself if your own case resembles it; if it doesn’t, you’ll look for another one" and totally miss the importance of this one). You don’t have to bring anything to the table other than your ability to read, some faculty of reason, and an ability to recognize the images (like 3 white leopards) in the poem. If you can follow along with the narrative of the poem, then you can have the experience of a person who has championed a cause all of his life to have it come crashing down around him, and then pick up the pieces from the ashes, meditate and reflect, and come through the bitterness with a newfound wisdom and a fresh and innocent hope in his heart. You can have the wisdom that he has attained without having had to spend your life in his experiment, and without having anything historically in common with the artist.
So much of our society today can be identified with the overwhelming sense of cynicism because we all have seen so much that was purported as good come to a crashing end, or even as Eliot wrote, a whimpering end with its tail tucked between its legs. All things have been exploited for commercial gain, even charity, powerful men of God have incredible moral failings, marriages don’t work out, parents turn out to be as clueless as you, and every possible mode of salvation that we try to manufacture fails us in the end.
Art will not save you, but it does have the ability to provide an experience from which wisdom can be gleaned and truth can be wrestled.
