Ever since Kelly and I were at the Whitney Museum in New York a few weeks ago, I’ve been mulling over the question of what art is. I am beginning to feel that all contemporary art thinks its job is to teach me a lesson. This annoys me.
I felt this change coming on when I was teaching a class for future teachers at the University of Delaware. My students didn’t know how to talk about a poem, or a story, except as an illustration of some moral truth. I had to teach them how to look at the poem as a work of art, to study how and why it affects us.
There’s an article, “The Painted Protest: How Politics Destroyed Contemporary Art, by Dean Kissick in a recent Harpers. He says: “I don't particularly care to have my awareness raised; I'd rather view art that tears open my consciousness, that opens portals into the mysterious. I like art the most when it doesn't mean a thing, or otherwise when its beauty or strangeness transcends its subject. . . It is, along with music, the purest expression of the human spirit.”
“Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”
There is so much going on in the world that makes me want to scream. So much WRONG. I can write a hundred letters to my congresspeople, but when it comes to art, I need to listen to Mozart. Go for a hike in the snow. Read Yeats. The French poet Paul Éluard supposedly said, “There is another world, and it is in this one.”
If I’m pointed like a birddog toward the poor dead grouse called meaning, I am going to miss my life and the poem. If my nose is to the ground, sniffing out the moral, I miss everything else. If my purpose in writing is to try to fix the world, same.
[Geez, I try to write this little piece and find that my computer has placed a symbol by my writing that wants to know if I want a “copilot.” Where did that come from? Do I now need AI to hold my hand?]
It’s the same issue. Where can I go that is open, new, discovered only by me at this moment? You may draw a moral from it at some point, but it isn’t the point. The point is, as Kissick says, “We are irrational, incoherent beings, and artists and writers should embrace this once more. If you believe that artworks cast spells, you should use that magic for greater causes than propagating a polite, liberal American sensibility or evading the effects of modern technology.”
I think we have substituted morality for God in our work. In our yearning for a missing sense of transcendence, we’ve started shaking our finger at what’s wrong in the world. A poor substitute, I’d say. Where is our imagination?
What’s left to imagine? We’re mapping the stars already. We’ve “discovered” quarks.
If I knew what there is left to imagine, I would have done it already. In my own poems, it looks like the only place I find transcendence is in the small details. feet on the ground.
It’s tricky. We do need to stay attached to the earth. We have to use the words we have. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, with its made-up words, was a noble experiment, but who except a few scholars wants to read it? For that matter, who wants to sit through John Cage’s 4’33” of silence?
I’d defend them both, as experiments, though. They may stretch my mind, but I won’t care to go back to them.
Once in a while I write something and maybe you write something that takes your breath away. Transcendence is hard. It takes a lot of prayer. By that I mean a lot of writing. When it comes, it’s a gift from the gods. It opens a window. Everything is forever different when we sense, when we catch a glimpse, of what’s out there.
The P.S.
Doctor of the World is coming out in late March. I’m setting up readings now. If you want me to come visit, and it’s close enough so I can drive there, get in touch with me now. bfleda@gmail.com .
ORDER BOOK here.