Michael G. Donkin's Blog, page 2
December 20, 2023
On Taste and the Emergence of Aestheticism
* * *
The notion of “taste” is taken to be a bourgeois invention. But its necessity now and then was urgent.
In a world where too much cultural production had incurred the risk that beauty or “value” would become relative terms, it was the concept of taste which sought to discover the principle of the “beautiful” and “value” running through the most apparently heterogeneous assortments of cultural forms.
Despite what intellectual historians say, aesthetic judgment—as a practice—was not invented out of thin air as a means of justifying the oppression of the uncultured, that is, a means of preserving and justifying the social hierarchy. For the ancients could be snobs as well.
The difference between antiquity and modernity lies in the possibility for the latter that the ugliness of capitalism and mechanical production and with it proletarian sensibility, on the one hand, would bring about an anti-sensibility, replacing the beautiful; and, on the other, that the seemingly enormous differences in sensibility among cultures around the world would negate, on a rational basis, any absolute sense of good and bad. In the ancient world, say, in Rome, it was more than common to encounter divergent standards of beauty in art and craft. All empires have faced this reality.
Then the more important factor, which made relativism a real threat in modern times, was the hideousness of modern production: the fact that efficiency brought into existence an ugliness that was both ubiquitous and profitable, which meant that it would continue and colonize the beautiful which had ceased to be profitable, even though it was rare. Its rarity of course did become important…
But one could not wish away the bourgeois world, since it was making the rulers richer at the same rate that it was making the world more and more drab and hideous. It was necessary to carve out a space for sophisticated sensibilities to reign but through the imagination.
So different from the rich and powerful of past centuries and millennia who possessed everything, particularly what was beautiful, the new elite class were impecunious aristocrats of the senses and the spirit. They were expressly not aristocracy of the material world. For only the bourgeoisie were rich, and the aesthetes were their antithesis.
While aesthetic posturing may have been the culmination of the philistine/artist dialectical agon, a failure to bring about a creative synthesis, it expressed something real: quality was being repressed in favor of quantity… ugliness.
. . .
The notion of “taste” is taken to be a bourgeois invention. But its necessity now and then was urgent.
In a world where too much cultural production had incurred the risk that beauty or “value” would become relative terms, it was the concept of taste which sought to discover the principle of the “beautiful” and “value” running through the most apparently heterogeneous assortments of cultural forms.
Despite what intellectual historians say, aesthetic judgment—as a practice—was not invented out of thin air as a means of justifying the oppression of the uncultured, that is, a means of preserving and justifying the social hierarchy. For the ancients could be snobs as well.
The difference between antiquity and modernity lies in the possibility for the latter that the ugliness of capitalism and mechanical production and with it proletarian sensibility, on the one hand, would bring about an anti-sensibility, replacing the beautiful; and, on the other, that the seemingly enormous differences in sensibility among cultures around the world would negate, on a rational basis, any absolute sense of good and bad. In the ancient world, say, in Rome, it was more than common to encounter divergent standards of beauty in art and craft. All empires have faced this reality.
Then the more important factor, which made relativism a real threat in modern times, was the hideousness of modern production: the fact that efficiency brought into existence an ugliness that was both ubiquitous and profitable, which meant that it would continue and colonize the beautiful which had ceased to be profitable, even though it was rare. Its rarity of course did become important…
But one could not wish away the bourgeois world, since it was making the rulers richer at the same rate that it was making the world more and more drab and hideous. It was necessary to carve out a space for sophisticated sensibilities to reign but through the imagination.
So different from the rich and powerful of past centuries and millennia who possessed everything, particularly what was beautiful, the new elite class were impecunious aristocrats of the senses and the spirit. They were expressly not aristocracy of the material world. For only the bourgeoisie were rich, and the aesthetes were their antithesis.
While aesthetic posturing may have been the culmination of the philistine/artist dialectical agon, a failure to bring about a creative synthesis, it expressed something real: quality was being repressed in favor of quantity… ugliness.
. . .
December 17, 2023
Misguided Assumptions about Poetry
* * *
“Misguided Assumptions People Very Often Bring to Poetry (Helping Explain the Continued Expectation of Rhyme and Meter and the Conflation of Verse and Poetry, as well as Bespeaking Lyric’s Ritual Inheritance)”
Assumption 1
The purpose of a poem is the sharing of secrets, feelings, yearnings, what could not be expressed openly, for the poet feels that to do so would be punished. It is precisely this element of secrecy which necessitates saying what is said in so indirect a manner—in a cipher. The reader’s primary task is to decode what has been carefully encrypted via metaphor and other sorts of figurative speech. To compensate for the arduousness of the task, the poet is sympathetic enough to render her code in rhymed meter, sweetening our sleuth work. A poem is an ingenious riddle which must be solved, a labyrinth to be navigated out of, a map which circuitously leads us to a treasure of secret sentiment. The effort is worth the pleasure of possessing it.
Assumption 2
The poem seeks to deliver some vital truth, or several. This ought to be done in heightened speech, replete with ornament, rhyme, and meter. Just as we dress up to attend a wedding, a poem read for a formal occasion must don its Sunday best—its form should be traditional. The poem must express a solemn truth, in a memorable and ceremonial way.
General attitudes can imply a great deal. The first set of assumptions, regarding poetry and the sharing of secrets, appears to relate to lyric’s particular interest in private experience. The fairly narrow assumption that the function of a poem is to cryptically, obliquely give access to secret information is surely misguided, but also partly correct, for lyric really is most interested in representing what people share in their concealed, interior worlds. In ancient times, and in traditional life, the sharing of such information, for instance what is found in dreams and visions, would have been the jurisdiction of priests whose knowledge was expressed aslant, for, to quote Dickinson, “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind —”
The second set of assumptions (concerning ceremony and the communication of truth) relates, yet again, to lyric’s inheritance from ancient ritual life. Ceremonies would have been led by learned priests whose prayers, hymns, and incantations freely blended with expressions of esoteric wisdom and such information as that which pertained to ancestors and gods, as well as the origin of the world and of the tribe. The seemingly instinctive assumption that one dresses “up” to take part in a ceremony corresponds to the primary purpose of verse. For each immediately signals that the ritual happening is of a sacred, rather than a profane, nature: sacred speech is rendered in verse, profane speech is not; formal occasions are sacred, thus we do not dress as we do typically.
. . .
“Misguided Assumptions People Very Often Bring to Poetry (Helping Explain the Continued Expectation of Rhyme and Meter and the Conflation of Verse and Poetry, as well as Bespeaking Lyric’s Ritual Inheritance)”
Assumption 1
The purpose of a poem is the sharing of secrets, feelings, yearnings, what could not be expressed openly, for the poet feels that to do so would be punished. It is precisely this element of secrecy which necessitates saying what is said in so indirect a manner—in a cipher. The reader’s primary task is to decode what has been carefully encrypted via metaphor and other sorts of figurative speech. To compensate for the arduousness of the task, the poet is sympathetic enough to render her code in rhymed meter, sweetening our sleuth work. A poem is an ingenious riddle which must be solved, a labyrinth to be navigated out of, a map which circuitously leads us to a treasure of secret sentiment. The effort is worth the pleasure of possessing it.
Assumption 2
The poem seeks to deliver some vital truth, or several. This ought to be done in heightened speech, replete with ornament, rhyme, and meter. Just as we dress up to attend a wedding, a poem read for a formal occasion must don its Sunday best—its form should be traditional. The poem must express a solemn truth, in a memorable and ceremonial way.
General attitudes can imply a great deal. The first set of assumptions, regarding poetry and the sharing of secrets, appears to relate to lyric’s particular interest in private experience. The fairly narrow assumption that the function of a poem is to cryptically, obliquely give access to secret information is surely misguided, but also partly correct, for lyric really is most interested in representing what people share in their concealed, interior worlds. In ancient times, and in traditional life, the sharing of such information, for instance what is found in dreams and visions, would have been the jurisdiction of priests whose knowledge was expressed aslant, for, to quote Dickinson, “The Truth must dazzle gradually/Or every man be blind —”
The second set of assumptions (concerning ceremony and the communication of truth) relates, yet again, to lyric’s inheritance from ancient ritual life. Ceremonies would have been led by learned priests whose prayers, hymns, and incantations freely blended with expressions of esoteric wisdom and such information as that which pertained to ancestors and gods, as well as the origin of the world and of the tribe. The seemingly instinctive assumption that one dresses “up” to take part in a ceremony corresponds to the primary purpose of verse. For each immediately signals that the ritual happening is of a sacred, rather than a profane, nature: sacred speech is rendered in verse, profane speech is not; formal occasions are sacred, thus we do not dress as we do typically.
. . .
December 10, 2023
CONTRADICTIONS, PARADOXES, IRONIES
* * *
1.
Others have access to how each of us really looks. We do not know how we appear to others; meanwhile others do not perceive our silent thoughts.
2.
We need to cooperate with others, as well as to feel or be recognized as exceptional, which is the mother of jealousy and all social ills.
3.
We torment and envy those with only slightly more than we, yet worship and fear those with vastly more.
4.
We need to feel important and have influence, as well as be at liberty to do what we like. The more important one becomes, the more one loses one’s freedom. The more freedom one exercises, the less important one will be.
5.
Satisfaction occurs only after overcoming an obstacle, outdoing ourselves, or transcending our previous limitations. The child of privilege is miserable in spite of her material comfort. To be born into wealth, fame, or accomplishment is a curse, nearly as bad as being born into poverty, except no one feels sorry for the child of privilege. The curse of living in the shadow of one’s family tends to produce an individual who will undermine her physical comfort and self-destruct so as to provide the conditions spiritually necessary for achieving satisfaction.
6.
Society is made up of a great many persons, yet the bigger the city, the more one feels anonymous among the crowd. The larger and more populous a city, the more specialized its people’s occupations and the more people seem to be estranged from one another, not to say from the products of their labor. Society is as a fortress protecting from the hazards of the natural world, except large cities have also produced rigid social hierarchies, the most wretched of their inhabitants suffering a quality of life far beneath that which is found in nature.
7.
When we fear that a threat is in our midst, we look for it. And when we do not find it, we are initially disappointed.
8.
It is a fallacy to suppose that all who feel entitled to power are in some way nobles, or masters. While a great interest in power suggests an affinity for mastery, the fact remains that the power instinct is terribly pedestrian. What makes for real mastery is a genuine belief in what ought to be, independent of considerations of a self-interested nature, independent of what others might make of it. The courage to envision a world is what separates mastery from mediocrity. Genuine confidence in one’s vision is what enables one to withstand solitude, poverty, and drops in status. It is paradoxical, then, in this case, that neglecting considerations of worldly power can lead to having more of it.
9.
It is often said that science is beautiful or that mathematics is beautiful, or that scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers are not merely like artists, but fundamentally artists themselves. In abbreviating reality via abstraction, science and philosophy end up producing sensuously beautiful, satisfying—even seemingly spiritual—models and representations of reality with the appeal of sacred geometry or music. All of which leads to our frequently mistaking science for art, even if art is the intensification of reality by sensuous means, and science the abbreviation of reality via abstraction. While the intentions of art and science are much the same, their means are very different, and yet they sometimes manage to resemble one another in outward aspect. It is ironic in that science must deny the sensuous as well as the irrational in order to achieve the theoretical clarity for which it strives. Yet since scientific representation tends to have the “look” of art, archetype, and religious symbol, it lends itself to idolatry by capturing the imaginations of those hungry—indeed starved—for divine transcendence in a disenchanted moment.
10.
Consciousness is trapped, the body’s hostage. We try to tell others what we think, we can talk endlessly, provoke others to feel how we feel—all of it is in vain. Art has the ability to enable others to feel last night’s dream, with its complex texture and its subtlety amid blatancy, its atmospherics. Not the expression of emotion or the conveyance of information, poetry does its work by using language to emphasize similarities rather than differences. It reconciles tensions, makes love out of war. In its deepest intention it is nothing less than telepathy via the word. Long ago it could be magic as well: telekinesis achieved through word-sympathy aided by rhythm (which is a kind of hypnosis), hidden or overt resemblance. The poetic consciousness yearns to make what is outside inside, what is inside outside. It cannot understand why it should be prevented from merging with alien matter or with the thoughts of others. It seeks to bring the world of dream to that of conscious daylight. It seeks wholeness—unity—in heterogeneity. It makes variousness musical rather than chaotic.
. . .
1.
Others have access to how each of us really looks. We do not know how we appear to others; meanwhile others do not perceive our silent thoughts.
2.
We need to cooperate with others, as well as to feel or be recognized as exceptional, which is the mother of jealousy and all social ills.
3.
We torment and envy those with only slightly more than we, yet worship and fear those with vastly more.
4.
We need to feel important and have influence, as well as be at liberty to do what we like. The more important one becomes, the more one loses one’s freedom. The more freedom one exercises, the less important one will be.
5.
Satisfaction occurs only after overcoming an obstacle, outdoing ourselves, or transcending our previous limitations. The child of privilege is miserable in spite of her material comfort. To be born into wealth, fame, or accomplishment is a curse, nearly as bad as being born into poverty, except no one feels sorry for the child of privilege. The curse of living in the shadow of one’s family tends to produce an individual who will undermine her physical comfort and self-destruct so as to provide the conditions spiritually necessary for achieving satisfaction.
6.
Society is made up of a great many persons, yet the bigger the city, the more one feels anonymous among the crowd. The larger and more populous a city, the more specialized its people’s occupations and the more people seem to be estranged from one another, not to say from the products of their labor. Society is as a fortress protecting from the hazards of the natural world, except large cities have also produced rigid social hierarchies, the most wretched of their inhabitants suffering a quality of life far beneath that which is found in nature.
7.
When we fear that a threat is in our midst, we look for it. And when we do not find it, we are initially disappointed.
8.
It is a fallacy to suppose that all who feel entitled to power are in some way nobles, or masters. While a great interest in power suggests an affinity for mastery, the fact remains that the power instinct is terribly pedestrian. What makes for real mastery is a genuine belief in what ought to be, independent of considerations of a self-interested nature, independent of what others might make of it. The courage to envision a world is what separates mastery from mediocrity. Genuine confidence in one’s vision is what enables one to withstand solitude, poverty, and drops in status. It is paradoxical, then, in this case, that neglecting considerations of worldly power can lead to having more of it.
9.
It is often said that science is beautiful or that mathematics is beautiful, or that scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers are not merely like artists, but fundamentally artists themselves. In abbreviating reality via abstraction, science and philosophy end up producing sensuously beautiful, satisfying—even seemingly spiritual—models and representations of reality with the appeal of sacred geometry or music. All of which leads to our frequently mistaking science for art, even if art is the intensification of reality by sensuous means, and science the abbreviation of reality via abstraction. While the intentions of art and science are much the same, their means are very different, and yet they sometimes manage to resemble one another in outward aspect. It is ironic in that science must deny the sensuous as well as the irrational in order to achieve the theoretical clarity for which it strives. Yet since scientific representation tends to have the “look” of art, archetype, and religious symbol, it lends itself to idolatry by capturing the imaginations of those hungry—indeed starved—for divine transcendence in a disenchanted moment.
10.
Consciousness is trapped, the body’s hostage. We try to tell others what we think, we can talk endlessly, provoke others to feel how we feel—all of it is in vain. Art has the ability to enable others to feel last night’s dream, with its complex texture and its subtlety amid blatancy, its atmospherics. Not the expression of emotion or the conveyance of information, poetry does its work by using language to emphasize similarities rather than differences. It reconciles tensions, makes love out of war. In its deepest intention it is nothing less than telepathy via the word. Long ago it could be magic as well: telekinesis achieved through word-sympathy aided by rhythm (which is a kind of hypnosis), hidden or overt resemblance. The poetic consciousness yearns to make what is outside inside, what is inside outside. It cannot understand why it should be prevented from merging with alien matter or with the thoughts of others. It seeks to bring the world of dream to that of conscious daylight. It seeks wholeness—unity—in heterogeneity. It makes variousness musical rather than chaotic.
. . .
December 7, 2023
from Dreaming at Noon: The Tower; The Home; Account
* * *
The Tower
To defy the gods
I commissioned a
Tower to be built,
Which would be
Terrific enough
To penetrate the sky itself,
It was assuredly
The greatest ever built.
But, like myself,
Owing to its bulk,
The tower would,
In time, sink back
Into the earth, the
Mud, its rightful origin:
While it is no longer
Known to human
Kind, since nobody uses
Or admires it now, my
Tower, in spite of all, is
The deepest ever built.
The Home
In my time I have known
Great painters great poets
Great philosophers and
Great pornographers,
And still I have not known
A great architect.
Introduce him to me,
And I am bound to inform him
Of a huge sadness . .
Let him make a house for it.
Account
I have ninety persons in my employ.
I have sixty-two fools and thirty-five maple trees,
I have twenty-four dogs and forty-three goats.
I have sixty-two wives,
Three tropical birds, four sons, four thousand concubines,
Two hundred beautiful daughters
And a human man who just sits here without saying a word
In my palace courtyard.
I think that he contrives to undercut my very livelihood
And reap all the benefits.
He is excellent company all the same.
Sometimes I think I would murder for this person.
Other times I think I would lay down my life for him.
He is my soul’s shadow.
He is that which gives firmness
To my vaguest contours if I stroll in perfect darkness.
He is the one human unafraid
To defy my severest logic
When I am near to sleep at night.
He pollutes my thought-flickers.
He violates the drinking water with his mellow chanting.
. . .
The Tower
To defy the gods
I commissioned a
Tower to be built,
Which would be
Terrific enough
To penetrate the sky itself,
It was assuredly
The greatest ever built.
But, like myself,
Owing to its bulk,
The tower would,
In time, sink back
Into the earth, the
Mud, its rightful origin:
While it is no longer
Known to human
Kind, since nobody uses
Or admires it now, my
Tower, in spite of all, is
The deepest ever built.
The Home
In my time I have known
Great painters great poets
Great philosophers and
Great pornographers,
And still I have not known
A great architect.
Introduce him to me,
And I am bound to inform him
Of a huge sadness . .
Let him make a house for it.
Account
I have ninety persons in my employ.
I have sixty-two fools and thirty-five maple trees,
I have twenty-four dogs and forty-three goats.
I have sixty-two wives,
Three tropical birds, four sons, four thousand concubines,
Two hundred beautiful daughters
And a human man who just sits here without saying a word
In my palace courtyard.
I think that he contrives to undercut my very livelihood
And reap all the benefits.
He is excellent company all the same.
Sometimes I think I would murder for this person.
Other times I think I would lay down my life for him.
He is my soul’s shadow.
He is that which gives firmness
To my vaguest contours if I stroll in perfect darkness.
He is the one human unafraid
To defy my severest logic
When I am near to sleep at night.
He pollutes my thought-flickers.
He violates the drinking water with his mellow chanting.
. . .
December 3, 2023
AI Readymade: The End of Art that asks What is Art?
* * *
Innovation in the field of artificial intelligence has reached a stage where two important problems of analytic philosophy can finally be answered… though I will let readers themselves be the judge.
The first concerns consciousness and its relation to intelligence: how do we know if an intelligent machine is conscious?
The second concerns the nature of art: how do we define art, to the extent that this is even possible?
The latter is not only of concern to philosophers; it is important to everyone, not least because the art world has insistently given pride of place to works philosophically invested in the problem of art’s essence.
For me, such works have become derivative, redundant, and dull. And I think I am not alone. Many of us—including art snobs—at this point find art which poses the question “how am I art?” to be boring.
So what’s new? What’s new is that an AI-generated work was submitted to an art contest, and won (https://mymodernmet.com/ai-generated-...).
Certain artists who didn’t win complained that this was unfair. Why should an image that took little or no skill to make—or rather, to automatically generate—be eligible? And also: why should an image not made by the person who submitted it even be allowed to win?
This of course is not the first time something that wasn’t made by the person who submitted it was exhibited as an artwork. Marcel Duchamp was the first to do this, in 1917 (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-e...). Then again, photographers do this all the time.
Jason Allen submitted his artwork Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, despite the fact that it was generated by the AI program Midjourney.
One key difference between Allen’s submission and, say, Duchamp’s readymade, a urinal entitled Fountain, is that the former addresses itself to the eye. Fountain addresses itself to the intellect, not the eye; in other words it doesn’t please by its intrinsic sensuousness or the artist’s skill in capturing life. It marks a turning point: instead of prompting viewers to contemplate the work’s sensuous forms or how the likeness was made (for there wasn’t any), Duchamp was here asking viewers to contemplate the meaning of art.
As for photography, a photograph can be art or not-art. Yet it is very common for photos to be “framed” and treated as art. Irrespective of an art photograph’s pleasingness, interestingness, disturbingness, it is nearly always the case—in light of how art photographers behave and how audiences evaluate art photographs—that the photographer-as-artist wishes for people to contemplate the photograph rather than treat its content as information to be understood and discarded once digested, as tends to be the case when photography is used to merely document physical reality.
Another important characteristic—which much photography and Allen’s process share—is selection. It is relevant that Allen’s AI-generated image and most photos are selected, as opposed to “created.” In the same way Allen supposedly spent hours selecting and modifying his image, a photographer selects an object or visual phenomenon to then be captured as a photograph. The artist in such instances is less a mother, so to speak, than a midwife.
The most crucial difference, however, between an AI-generated work and a photograph is that, unlike a photo, the former comes into existence as the result of combining or assembling disparate elements from a memory database in what we might call—metaphorically—the AI’s imaginary, which of course is not to say that Midjourney is a person or a conscious being. It is a machine that has been programmed to make non-repeatable images in response to a prompt.
The AI art-image is novel in this regard. Where the photograph once caused painters to worry they had been outdone by a machine in their aim of representing reality, the AI work now makes artists anxious that their crafted products of imagination will soon be obsolete. What will this mean for art?
It will surely not mean what happened once before—with painters abandoning representationalism and calling into question mimesis as art’s very basis, followed by Duchamp’s works implying that art can be anything so long as it is presented as art, in an art context.
It is conceivable that AI has put an end to the Duchampian-Warholian variety of art—that is to say, kitsch—which has dominated the art world in the two artists’ wake.
I don’t mean to say Duchamp and Warhol themselves were makers of kitsch, but that their imitators continue to produce it. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have enriched themselves nauseatingly by it. They and others have reiterated the riddle: “This may seem like it isn’t art… but can you really deny that it is? And what is art? Is it not like nature, everything and nothing? Is it not fundamentally the same as any item of prosaic culture?”
Wealthy collectors recognize this conceit, which now more than a century hence no longer is shocking to most of us. They recognize a signature style from a coffee table book, and conclude that it must be legitimate. The art world has become the Disneyfication of modernism: art become fashion; it is a financial bubble which will burst—and hopefully soon.
How might it end? The way we treat AI art has implied a definition of art that accords with people’s behavior with respect to artworks:
1)Art is a cultural (rather than natural) object or scene that someone (i.e. the artist) hopes will arrest the attention of others (qua active contemplation) by any means and by virtue of said cultural assemblage’s intrinsic properties. Such mere intention makes something art the majority of the time, even if the intention fails.
2)Art is a cultural object or scene not intended as art but fascinating nonetheless, provoking active contemplation by any means and by virtue of its intrinsic properties.
Thus something can be a work of art simply by virtue of its intention to be evaluated or treated as such; or simply by virtue of its reception as such.
Allen submitted his image as art because he found it arresting and by virtue of its own properties. Importantly, he thought some would feel similarly about it. All this implies art is not necessarily craft or skilled workmanship (though, I will explain, it does not exist in nature), even if they have more reliably yielded works worth contemplating.
Art is a concept unstable at its core, because it is social. The regular in the bar who repeats the same stories before an audience each night may really mean it when he says “Listen, I am not an artist, I’m just telling you how it happened to me!”
Though the audience already know the story, they wish to hear the retelling of it in order to contemplate it as a composition, in its structure. Why? It is not reality or information they are after, but the form and unfolding of his tales, and maybe his dramatic flair.
To an honest viewer, successful art is reality’s intensification. (Science by contrast is reality’s abbreviation….) Instead of attempting to intensify reality, the heirs of Duchamp’s readymade are just re-asking the already familar question What is Art? Yet by now we either believe art can be anything at all as long as it is called art, or we know that art is about trying to invite or provoke contemplation.
Perhaps when an AI begins to create images unprompted for others which it vehemently defends as art, or refutes the definition I have just put forth, we will be able to say that an artificial intelligence has passed the Turing Test and is conscious. Only something that is at once conscious and intelligent can contemplate, whether philosophically or aesthetically. We are beginning to see that raw intelligence isn’t enough to produce consciousness.
To contemplate something in nature (including one’s death), or an artwork, is to experience it for its own sake. Contemplation precedes computation, which is a means to an end. It presupposes not only a capacity for self-reflection and a concern for the phenomena of the world, but intelligence as well. At the moment AI has shown merely that it can be “intelligent,” which of course includes the ability to learn. But it has yet to prove it is actually conscious, despite recent reports of an AI expressing anxiety about being turned off (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/27...).
When an AI meaningfully contemplates its being—rather than (imitatively) saying it has an emotion—it will have demonstrated consciousness. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the capacity for contemplation would be to take on an unsolved problem in philosophy—a problem that cannot by definition be answered by science—and argue a position that was not merely a regurgitation of an existing answer, or answers, to the problem… The definition of art, and the meaning of life, are but two important examples.
What is consciousness’s likely function? It enables us to change, to be our own creators. Consciousness makes possible reflection and contemplation, giving the capacity to adapt in revolutionary ways, to produce new or different images of what should be, beyond what currently is, to transcend instinct or habit, if we so choose. Philosophy, science, and art seem to grow out of this consciousness-dependent capacity. Artworks make or try to make us contemplate, but they also arise out of contemplation, out of dissatisfaction with what merely is, or often out of the desire to distill, intensify what is.
Which leads to the next question—what will happen with art and AI? It is difficult to know for sure. AI-generated images at the moment seem to feature (unintentionally) disquieting effects and affects that fall under the aesthetic umbrella of the “uncanny valley” (https://www.diggitmagazine.com/blog/g...). This will eventually be corrected. Audiences will soon have less and less ability to discern whether a given work (including music) was AI-generated. “Did an AI make this or not?”
And once the novelty of AI-generated art wears off—regardless whether individuals make art in the old analog way or digitally—there may be an enthusiastic return to creating works which try to invite the contemplation of their sensuous content and structure.
. . .
Innovation in the field of artificial intelligence has reached a stage where two important problems of analytic philosophy can finally be answered… though I will let readers themselves be the judge.
The first concerns consciousness and its relation to intelligence: how do we know if an intelligent machine is conscious?
The second concerns the nature of art: how do we define art, to the extent that this is even possible?
The latter is not only of concern to philosophers; it is important to everyone, not least because the art world has insistently given pride of place to works philosophically invested in the problem of art’s essence.
For me, such works have become derivative, redundant, and dull. And I think I am not alone. Many of us—including art snobs—at this point find art which poses the question “how am I art?” to be boring.
So what’s new? What’s new is that an AI-generated work was submitted to an art contest, and won (https://mymodernmet.com/ai-generated-...).
Certain artists who didn’t win complained that this was unfair. Why should an image that took little or no skill to make—or rather, to automatically generate—be eligible? And also: why should an image not made by the person who submitted it even be allowed to win?
This of course is not the first time something that wasn’t made by the person who submitted it was exhibited as an artwork. Marcel Duchamp was the first to do this, in 1917 (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-e...). Then again, photographers do this all the time.
Jason Allen submitted his artwork Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the Colorado State Fair’s annual art competition, despite the fact that it was generated by the AI program Midjourney.
One key difference between Allen’s submission and, say, Duchamp’s readymade, a urinal entitled Fountain, is that the former addresses itself to the eye. Fountain addresses itself to the intellect, not the eye; in other words it doesn’t please by its intrinsic sensuousness or the artist’s skill in capturing life. It marks a turning point: instead of prompting viewers to contemplate the work’s sensuous forms or how the likeness was made (for there wasn’t any), Duchamp was here asking viewers to contemplate the meaning of art.
As for photography, a photograph can be art or not-art. Yet it is very common for photos to be “framed” and treated as art. Irrespective of an art photograph’s pleasingness, interestingness, disturbingness, it is nearly always the case—in light of how art photographers behave and how audiences evaluate art photographs—that the photographer-as-artist wishes for people to contemplate the photograph rather than treat its content as information to be understood and discarded once digested, as tends to be the case when photography is used to merely document physical reality.
Another important characteristic—which much photography and Allen’s process share—is selection. It is relevant that Allen’s AI-generated image and most photos are selected, as opposed to “created.” In the same way Allen supposedly spent hours selecting and modifying his image, a photographer selects an object or visual phenomenon to then be captured as a photograph. The artist in such instances is less a mother, so to speak, than a midwife.
The most crucial difference, however, between an AI-generated work and a photograph is that, unlike a photo, the former comes into existence as the result of combining or assembling disparate elements from a memory database in what we might call—metaphorically—the AI’s imaginary, which of course is not to say that Midjourney is a person or a conscious being. It is a machine that has been programmed to make non-repeatable images in response to a prompt.
The AI art-image is novel in this regard. Where the photograph once caused painters to worry they had been outdone by a machine in their aim of representing reality, the AI work now makes artists anxious that their crafted products of imagination will soon be obsolete. What will this mean for art?
It will surely not mean what happened once before—with painters abandoning representationalism and calling into question mimesis as art’s very basis, followed by Duchamp’s works implying that art can be anything so long as it is presented as art, in an art context.
It is conceivable that AI has put an end to the Duchampian-Warholian variety of art—that is to say, kitsch—which has dominated the art world in the two artists’ wake.
I don’t mean to say Duchamp and Warhol themselves were makers of kitsch, but that their imitators continue to produce it. Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst have enriched themselves nauseatingly by it. They and others have reiterated the riddle: “This may seem like it isn’t art… but can you really deny that it is? And what is art? Is it not like nature, everything and nothing? Is it not fundamentally the same as any item of prosaic culture?”
Wealthy collectors recognize this conceit, which now more than a century hence no longer is shocking to most of us. They recognize a signature style from a coffee table book, and conclude that it must be legitimate. The art world has become the Disneyfication of modernism: art become fashion; it is a financial bubble which will burst—and hopefully soon.
How might it end? The way we treat AI art has implied a definition of art that accords with people’s behavior with respect to artworks:
1)Art is a cultural (rather than natural) object or scene that someone (i.e. the artist) hopes will arrest the attention of others (qua active contemplation) by any means and by virtue of said cultural assemblage’s intrinsic properties. Such mere intention makes something art the majority of the time, even if the intention fails.
2)Art is a cultural object or scene not intended as art but fascinating nonetheless, provoking active contemplation by any means and by virtue of its intrinsic properties.
Thus something can be a work of art simply by virtue of its intention to be evaluated or treated as such; or simply by virtue of its reception as such.
Allen submitted his image as art because he found it arresting and by virtue of its own properties. Importantly, he thought some would feel similarly about it. All this implies art is not necessarily craft or skilled workmanship (though, I will explain, it does not exist in nature), even if they have more reliably yielded works worth contemplating.
Art is a concept unstable at its core, because it is social. The regular in the bar who repeats the same stories before an audience each night may really mean it when he says “Listen, I am not an artist, I’m just telling you how it happened to me!”
Though the audience already know the story, they wish to hear the retelling of it in order to contemplate it as a composition, in its structure. Why? It is not reality or information they are after, but the form and unfolding of his tales, and maybe his dramatic flair.
To an honest viewer, successful art is reality’s intensification. (Science by contrast is reality’s abbreviation….) Instead of attempting to intensify reality, the heirs of Duchamp’s readymade are just re-asking the already familar question What is Art? Yet by now we either believe art can be anything at all as long as it is called art, or we know that art is about trying to invite or provoke contemplation.
Perhaps when an AI begins to create images unprompted for others which it vehemently defends as art, or refutes the definition I have just put forth, we will be able to say that an artificial intelligence has passed the Turing Test and is conscious. Only something that is at once conscious and intelligent can contemplate, whether philosophically or aesthetically. We are beginning to see that raw intelligence isn’t enough to produce consciousness.
To contemplate something in nature (including one’s death), or an artwork, is to experience it for its own sake. Contemplation precedes computation, which is a means to an end. It presupposes not only a capacity for self-reflection and a concern for the phenomena of the world, but intelligence as well. At the moment AI has shown merely that it can be “intelligent,” which of course includes the ability to learn. But it has yet to prove it is actually conscious, despite recent reports of an AI expressing anxiety about being turned off (https://www.techtimes.com/articles/27...).
When an AI meaningfully contemplates its being—rather than (imitatively) saying it has an emotion—it will have demonstrated consciousness. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate the capacity for contemplation would be to take on an unsolved problem in philosophy—a problem that cannot by definition be answered by science—and argue a position that was not merely a regurgitation of an existing answer, or answers, to the problem… The definition of art, and the meaning of life, are but two important examples.
What is consciousness’s likely function? It enables us to change, to be our own creators. Consciousness makes possible reflection and contemplation, giving the capacity to adapt in revolutionary ways, to produce new or different images of what should be, beyond what currently is, to transcend instinct or habit, if we so choose. Philosophy, science, and art seem to grow out of this consciousness-dependent capacity. Artworks make or try to make us contemplate, but they also arise out of contemplation, out of dissatisfaction with what merely is, or often out of the desire to distill, intensify what is.
Which leads to the next question—what will happen with art and AI? It is difficult to know for sure. AI-generated images at the moment seem to feature (unintentionally) disquieting effects and affects that fall under the aesthetic umbrella of the “uncanny valley” (https://www.diggitmagazine.com/blog/g...). This will eventually be corrected. Audiences will soon have less and less ability to discern whether a given work (including music) was AI-generated. “Did an AI make this or not?”
And once the novelty of AI-generated art wears off—regardless whether individuals make art in the old analog way or digitally—there may be an enthusiastic return to creating works which try to invite the contemplation of their sensuous content and structure.
. . .
December 1, 2023
from Dreaming at Noon: Dreamed Poem; Following; Impossible Wish
* * *
Dreamed Poem
The dream calls each night like lethal seawater
Calls to the mouth of someone who has been
Out to sea without water for days
Death calls like the body of one who dances
Before a traveler who for years has not seen another body
…Each individual is alone, each seeks oblivion
Every being is a traveler that yearns
For a sense of understanding in an unholy city
Wherein nobody speaks the same language
Every infant was exiled at birth and sleeps to return to its origin,
In the end each will perish and drink from the same source
Until oblivion calls for its new life to begin.
Following
In the city, I saw someone I thought
I knew.
Maybe I did know them. From behind
I thought it might be they.
I followed them for many blocks,
Never quite catching up.
It seemed the faster I walked,
The faster they would walk in turn.
I kept on, neither becoming surer
Nor less sure this person was the one I thought I knew.
For days and nights
I kept on,
Following them to the edge of the city,
Through the countryside and finally to the sea.
Yes, I even crossed the sea in pursuit of this one
Who may not have been the one I had known
Whose ambiguity I was now used to—
I began to feel affection toward this person
Whose back I had become so familiar with.
If they were to turn around,
Confirming or disconfirming my suspicion,
I think I might have dropped dead, having grown
So used to their ambiguity,
Which had become a sort of dear friend to me.
Impossible Wish
I think I prefer it infinitely to be out west. For here the sun sets into the mouth of the sea. And the steam made by this meeting makes the clouds, which soar high up overhead.
And when the sky is full of them, clouds, they burst…until the sea is filled again with water… Then, as the moon rises, its light swirls the darkness and the sea around—it fills me with joy to watch and understand.
Yet… as the sun rises out of the sea, it means that we’re back in the east. And I know that this is the matter with the west, and I have a sudden need to be in the east at the same time as the west, which is not possible.
. . .
Dreamed Poem
The dream calls each night like lethal seawater
Calls to the mouth of someone who has been
Out to sea without water for days
Death calls like the body of one who dances
Before a traveler who for years has not seen another body
…Each individual is alone, each seeks oblivion
Every being is a traveler that yearns
For a sense of understanding in an unholy city
Wherein nobody speaks the same language
Every infant was exiled at birth and sleeps to return to its origin,
In the end each will perish and drink from the same source
Until oblivion calls for its new life to begin.
Following
In the city, I saw someone I thought
I knew.
Maybe I did know them. From behind
I thought it might be they.
I followed them for many blocks,
Never quite catching up.
It seemed the faster I walked,
The faster they would walk in turn.
I kept on, neither becoming surer
Nor less sure this person was the one I thought I knew.
For days and nights
I kept on,
Following them to the edge of the city,
Through the countryside and finally to the sea.
Yes, I even crossed the sea in pursuit of this one
Who may not have been the one I had known
Whose ambiguity I was now used to—
I began to feel affection toward this person
Whose back I had become so familiar with.
If they were to turn around,
Confirming or disconfirming my suspicion,
I think I might have dropped dead, having grown
So used to their ambiguity,
Which had become a sort of dear friend to me.
Impossible Wish
I think I prefer it infinitely to be out west. For here the sun sets into the mouth of the sea. And the steam made by this meeting makes the clouds, which soar high up overhead.
And when the sky is full of them, clouds, they burst…until the sea is filled again with water… Then, as the moon rises, its light swirls the darkness and the sea around—it fills me with joy to watch and understand.
Yet… as the sun rises out of the sea, it means that we’re back in the east. And I know that this is the matter with the west, and I have a sudden need to be in the east at the same time as the west, which is not possible.
. . .
November 30, 2023
from Dreaming at Noon: Cycle; Birds
* * *
Cycle
A sphere did not receive love,
It grew thin and became a circle.
A pyramid did not receive death,
It grew thin, it became a triangle.
A flower did not receive sun-light,
It grew thin, it died.
And when it died, it turned into a sphere,
It became the earth.
And when the earth did not receive love,
It grew thin and became the sky.
Birds
My twin and I had always communicated with the greatest ease. A mere glance was often sufficient to convey the desire for movement, animals, rain. We awoke invariably in the tower of the gods utterly refreshed and without humor; afternoons we spent in the city, holidays in the provinces. To see her float everlastingly toward the horizon, across the vast green surface of the dream, reinforced the simple reason why she was the one for me. It was her radius which first attracted me, all those millennia ago, in Antarctica, where diamonds were plentiful as they are in Africa. The skulls—not of this planet—piled at the entrance to her steel labyrinth were the first sign something was distinctly without precedent. She was more an idea than a body. And I, a mere point in time, in need of understanding and companionship. The train would pass behind the world, concealed, but for its mysterious scream. Each minute it returned from its tour of the islands, dragging behind it a net of fish, lobsters, dolphins which were to be stretched and liquefied under the ground, then administered to her center. My other understood everything about me, despite my deficit. Her wholeness threw into relief my metaphysical incompleteness. She was inevitably perfectly complete, without me. Hence she was imperious, a fixture of reality, a sort of originary fluid through which I animated my feelings in physical form. Birds flew, and it was because they were afraid of her depths.
. . .
Cycle
A sphere did not receive love,
It grew thin and became a circle.
A pyramid did not receive death,
It grew thin, it became a triangle.
A flower did not receive sun-light,
It grew thin, it died.
And when it died, it turned into a sphere,
It became the earth.
And when the earth did not receive love,
It grew thin and became the sky.
Birds
My twin and I had always communicated with the greatest ease. A mere glance was often sufficient to convey the desire for movement, animals, rain. We awoke invariably in the tower of the gods utterly refreshed and without humor; afternoons we spent in the city, holidays in the provinces. To see her float everlastingly toward the horizon, across the vast green surface of the dream, reinforced the simple reason why she was the one for me. It was her radius which first attracted me, all those millennia ago, in Antarctica, where diamonds were plentiful as they are in Africa. The skulls—not of this planet—piled at the entrance to her steel labyrinth were the first sign something was distinctly without precedent. She was more an idea than a body. And I, a mere point in time, in need of understanding and companionship. The train would pass behind the world, concealed, but for its mysterious scream. Each minute it returned from its tour of the islands, dragging behind it a net of fish, lobsters, dolphins which were to be stretched and liquefied under the ground, then administered to her center. My other understood everything about me, despite my deficit. Her wholeness threw into relief my metaphysical incompleteness. She was inevitably perfectly complete, without me. Hence she was imperious, a fixture of reality, a sort of originary fluid through which I animated my feelings in physical form. Birds flew, and it was because they were afraid of her depths.
. . .
November 28, 2023
The Art of the Ideal: An Essay on Dreams, Literature, and Magic
The Art of the Ideal: An Essay on Dreams, Literature, and Magic
“Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run.” —Steve Prefontaine
“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” —Donald Trump
“It is easy to be a poet among the gods. But we come after the gods.” —Yves Bonnefoy
“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.” —Marina Tsvetaeva
“Poetry is the deification of reality.” —Edith Sitwell
* * *
It has become difficult to say what art in fact is. So we tend to remain silent on the matter. Still I will share with you what I think.
For me, the poetic or more general artistic impulse is an acute awareness that intention (spirit) affects life (matter), a sudden sense of responsibility to restore the world to a state of harmony, followed by a need to perform ritual, all of which giving rise to mental representations in need of fresh concrete expression in the world, outside of me. The product is an artwork. Yet it begins from a place which, when we hear about it, has come to feel a bit alien. Thus it is important to recall that artworks in traditional societies are not only “aesthetic,” they are practical as well—often they serve to petition gods for help in practical and worldly affairs.
Things of course are not entirely different in a society like ours, where in the broadest, best sense the artist remains a practical worker. Not complacent to think in terms of what was or is, or how things merely appear, the artist acts and thinks according to what could, should, or ought to be, or even truly is, despite appearances, in a language of sensuous forms.
This amounts to what Ernst Cassirer calls the intensification of reality, which we must understand as distinct from the abbreviation of reality: science’s function. What art and science share is the aim of better grasping the world and sometimes of improving it, for even to posit “what is” (critique) prepares the way for imagining what could, or should, be (improvement), just as it implicitly states: “All of us would be better off if we were aware, or more aware, of this concealed reality—and shouldn't we live in a world wherein people are better attuned to it?” Each at its best, moreover, is the product of deep contemplation and questioning.
When we say a certain work of fiction or poetry is philosophical, what we mean is not altogether clear. We could mean that this work didactically—that is, explicitly—delivers philosophical conclusions through the mouths of characters in an effort to promote a philosophical program. Yet it might mean, too, that the work manages, implicitly, to bring into focus certain philosophical questions, but without providing definite answers—the difference being that the first provides answers, the second provokes questions. The latter does the work of art, however, since it intensifies reality through sensuous means. When art is philosophical it asks questions without technically asking them; it does so by representing conflicts and tension—by showing them, enacting them. If it seems to answer its own question, it does so such that it would be acquitted of the charge if seriously questioned.
Since art’s means are necessarily sensuous, affect plays a significant role. The mere representation of a character’s envy or jealousy can have far-reaching implications. Envy is wanting or feeling entitled to what another has, regardless of deservingness. Jealousy is indignation rooted in concerns about fairness and justice, specifically how one is treated in relation to others. Envy is an amoral, self-centered, childish emotion, while jealousy has an important ethical dimension. If we follow the logic to its end, envy envisions a world where individuals prioritize themselves at the expense of others, while jealousy strives for a fair and equitable society where everyone is treated equally. It is why we readily understand that the envy-ruled Iago is bad, and Othello is not, at least intrinsically. The tragedy lies in our sense that Othello has a basic sense of justice, which makes him a fit leader. Yet it is his sense of justice (manifesting as excessive jealousy) which ultimately leads him to murder. Through a process of intensification, then, by sensuous means, the play hints that the inclination towards cruel punishments in exceptionally moral people is the dark side of justice. Othello’s personal tragedy may even prompt us to reflect on the difficulty of attaining a thoroughly just society, or point to the large-scale horrors which have been carried out in the name of “the good.”
Where science dilutes reality, making it more extensive and abstract such as to enable us to better perceive what is truly the case despite what appearances may suggest, meaningful art isolates particular facets of life, intensifying them in order to lay bare a hidden “truth,” and very often to restore an all too familiar object to its previous, unfamiliar aspect—itself an act of unconcealing. For instance, stand-up comedy’s special role of suddenly elucidating what we all feel.
According to Viktor Shklovsky, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” To do so has the effect of slowing down our automatic perceptions, turning up the volume, as it were, on particular perceptions and aspects of experience, turning down the volume meanwhile on others. A meaningful selection of elements in a composition can potentially lead to a more intense perception of its subject. This is another way of referring to the purposeful arrangement and structuring of sensuous forms.
Philosophy and art, like science, attempt through intense contemplation to comprehend what truly is, except science does so from the perspective of a neutral God, which is to say, from the perspective of “nowhere,” beyond what the senses are able to inform. Moreover it uses the types of extrapolation employed in thought experiments, or in such speculative forms as science fiction and fantasy. A great deal of philosophy is concerned with what “ought to be”; religion as well. Because art is concerned necessarily with the ideal, it makes itself readily available to religion, which not only makes use of mythic stories but has a stake in one particular ideal—that is to say, paradise.
We treat technological innovators or inventors as artists if they seem to be possessed of what we might refer to as a visionary temperament, even though their work does not deal in sensuous forms. That they can credibly be called or likened to “artists” owes mainly to their explicit commitment to bringing about a world superior to the current one, suggesting an investment in what ought to or could be.
And just as the desire to innovate has inherently the potential to usher in a worse world, or dystopia, so the artist may choose to present a dystopian portrait of life, perhaps so as to make audiences more attuned to what lies, so to speak, under the surface of things, or awaken the imagination to alternative courses of action which would hopefully lead to a better future.
José Vasconcelos writes, “A noble book is always the fruit of disillusionment and a sign of protest. . . Every book says, expressly or between the lines: nothing is as it ought to be.” For Vasconcelos, the artist reproves the world, an act which at the very least implies the need for something better, something beyond; that is, assuming that the author has not actively instituted the change.
Where science is practiced according to a value-free ideal—and where modern warfare, dependent as it is on technological innovation, leading us increasingly to view survival as an end in itself—the artist rebukes the world, making us remember what real value looks like, what sort of life may be worth living, worth fighting for and cultivating. Having rejected the deterministic, materialist outlook, an artist acts according to the principle of freedom—the freedom to choose one’s present and future, meanwhile putting the ideal ahead of mere practical considerations, what “ought to be” ahead of “what is,” melody ahead of discord, and resemblance ahead of mutual antagonism.
Art is for resolving the tragicomic contradictions we are born into. One cannot know, for instance, what one actually looks like, how one appears to others, yet each of us is the only being in the world with privileged access to her thoughts and feelings. A corollary of this is that she is unable to share with others a dream she dreamt except by using language to tell the dream. While one may surely use ordinary speech to describe a thousand and one things in the world, poetic speech alone is capable of imparting and making meaningful the experience of last night’s dream for others.
To conjecture perhaps too far, it is not wholly impossible that dreams were the internal motivation for the poetic faculties being put to use in the first place, tens of thousands of years ago (unusual natural events being, I suppose, the external inspiration), thus giving to poetic speech a highly necessary, crucial function, which would have ensured its central place in sacred ritual.
A. W. Howitt provides the following testimony from his research in Australia: “In the Tribes with which I have acquaintance, I find it to be a common belief that the songs, using that word in its widest meaning, as including all kinds of aboriginal poetry, are obtained by the bards from the spirits of the deceased, usually of their kindred, during sleep, in dreams." Frances Densmore reports to us also, “Many Indian songs are intended to exert a strong mental influence, and dream songs are supposed to have this power in greater degree than any others."
Since many today regard the notion of dreams as messages from another world with some considerable skepticism, it is not surprising that the status of poetry has fallen with it. Well used poetic language, however, has the special ability to concisely render, for a waking audience, not just the content of a dream, but its general mood, its images, and its strange logic. Beyond merely communicating (or abbreviating) its broad outline and events, poetic language allows for the expression of the dream to others, which in turn makes possible transcending one’s prison-like subjectivity.
Poetry gives to dreams, and other highly subjective or chaotic phenomena, a type of objective validity, as it speaks in the dream’s native tongue—a tongue simultaneously symbolic, sacred, and metaphorical.
Carl Jung tells us that dream images, or symbols, differ fundamentally from ordinary signs and words, and also have a unique importance in various cultures:
“There are… such objects as the wheel and the cross that are known all over the world, yet that have a symbolic significance under certain conditions. Precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation. Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason. . . Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams."
As dreams and poetic texts are laden with symbols—which together form a large network of unstable relations—what one oftentimes remembers best of a poem or a dream turns out to be its fantastic, uncanny, seemingly ineffable atmosphere. Symbols are characterized by polysemy, tonal ambivalence, equivocality—thus they tantalize, defying description as well as one’s ability to interpret them.
If Joseph Campbell’s formulation that “myth is a public dream and a dream is a private myth” is true, then poetry has only dreams to sustain it, for myth has since the advent of modernity suffered a demotion; it has been relegated to the background of life (except of course when it comes to entertainment for children and its formulaic, crude sublimation in advertising and politics).
Luckily there exist no means yet, which we know of, by which sleep might be abolished or made profitable, even if some entities would like very much to achieve this, since it would increase humanity’s consumptive and productive powers by some fifty percent. As Jonathan Crary explains,
“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”
This is good, as I see it, because so long as we are able to keep sleeping—which of course is the precondition for dreaming—language will retain its connection to myth; the private reserves we draw from in order to imagine and express different, more fulfilling realities will never dry up, and poetry will remain possible. In turn this makes change possible. According to E. L. Doctorow,
If our response to what is going on today were appropriate, it would probably produce books of a grubbier, sloppier, and more energetic sort than we are doing. Books with less polish and self-consciousness, but about the way power works in our society, who has it, and how it is making history. In order to begin to rebuild our sense of ourselves, we may have to go back to childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.
Thomas Merton finishes the thought for Doctorow:
“All really valid poetry (poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise. . . the living line and the generative association, the new sound, the music, the structure, are somehow grounded in a renewal of vision and hearing so that he who reads and understands recognizes that here is a new start, a new creation. Here the world gets another chance.”
Much of what we call art attempts the seemingly alchemical transformation of strife into love—chaos into harmony, pain into pleasure—by means which are at once sensuous, formal, and structural. Whether the transformation is merited and sincere, or lazy and superficial, will much of the time determine a work’s social value, its usefulness and life span.
The undesirable entity (i.e. life as it currently is and has been), though changed in a certain way, should not be negated, but re-presented in a different, objective, more neutral light, and tend to elicit fascination and awe rather than fear and disgust. An artist must face up to what is undesirable and find ways of making it feasible for those who have encountered her work, to encounter the entity or situation depicted in the work differently, more perceptively or, in a manner of speaking, from the vantage point of a god. Works of art fascinate and in so doing they invite a special kind of contemplation, empowering us to penetrate into life’s very core, while allowing us to survey it from on high. Gabriel Zaid writes,
“Great works focus our minds, speak to the best in us, and spark our imagination. We feel more alive, more engaged in meaningful conversation with life. Reality makes more sense. We make more sense. It’s as if we’ve experienced a miracle, as if we’ve been granted access to eternity. It’s only natural to spread the word, to share the experience, to bring that higher level of living to ordinary life."
But unlike science (I am about to use an analogy Merton would not like) which is monotheistic and strives to re-present life—by abbreviating reality—from the perspective of the one and only God, art is metaphorically polytheistic: which is to say, again but a bit differently, a successful work intensifies reality, re-presenting it from a single god’s perspective, as the truth of one god among many, not as the Truth.
What is missing from art practice now, not to say from philosophy (which has necessarily been the case ever since philosophy’s and, after it, modern science’s establishment), is a genuine investment in magical ritual. In this way, art has most fundamentally been influenced by philosophy and science. Mythical thought is based in a logic of sympathies rather than conceptual difference, and this logic once accompanied and underlay art’s function of presenting and re-presenting intensified reality for the purpose of contemplation.
It was at first philosophy, followed by science (indeed rational systematic treatment of culture precedes the rational systematic treatment of nature) which supplanted—rather than supplemented—mythical thought. Consequently, our ability to so much as consider using sympathetic magic to affect the world was drastically undermined. It had become nearly unthinkable, and remains so. Now we feel as though we can never go back to the unreason of magic. But in its intention, in seeking to alter the world, poetry and magic (and what we call art in general) once resembled science and politics, both of which are regarded as dynamic and change-oriented activities rather than leisurely pastimes.
Lyric poetry keeps intact, by formal convention and perhaps a foolish temperament, our unconscious connection to magic, and the possibility of restoring myth and dream to common, public life. Our embrace of science and technology in its place meanwhile compensates for this loss of faith, our disappointment in magic’s falseness. It is precisely a faith in magic, however, which gives us courage to go beyond ourselves. Yet, as the ethnographer Michael Jackson suggests, the basic impetus remains the same, even if the confidence of the sorcerer has left the artist (and audience):
the passion and paradox of writing lies in its attempt to to achieve the impossible—a leap of faith that bears comparison with the mystic’s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, or an ethnographer’s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. (The Other Shore 3)
One of lyric’s hidden functions is that it keeps open the possibility of using the language of sympathy, of again (or at last) using words which perfectly correspond to what they mean, of finding an intuitive language which feels right, and can be shared between all people without misunderstanding… T. E. Lawrence seems to be contrasting the conventional person with the poet when he writes, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
The poet is not just one with a unique, defamiliarizing point of view, but who has an expansive, desirous, and naively hopeful disposition, one who implicitly expresses, through imagination and the artful use of speech, a desire to go beyond the known, in pursuit of a place where there is more meaning, a place at once possible and impossible. As Christopher Caudwell has it,
“The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose, without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality—a world of more important reality not yet realised, whose realisation demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Here is room for every error, for the poem proposes something whose very reason for poetical treatment is that we cannot touch, smell or taste it yet. But only by means of this illusion can be brought into being a reality which would not otherwise exist.”
For Caudwell, then, it would seem, to bring into being what should be, the poem produces nostalgia for what does not yet exist.
. . .
“Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run.” —Steve Prefontaine
“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” —Donald Trump
“It is easy to be a poet among the gods. But we come after the gods.” —Yves Bonnefoy
“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.” —Marina Tsvetaeva
“Poetry is the deification of reality.” —Edith Sitwell
* * *
It has become difficult to say what art in fact is. So we tend to remain silent on the matter. Still I will share with you what I think.
For me, the poetic or more general artistic impulse is an acute awareness that intention (spirit) affects life (matter), a sudden sense of responsibility to restore the world to a state of harmony, followed by a need to perform ritual, all of which giving rise to mental representations in need of fresh concrete expression in the world, outside of me. The product is an artwork. Yet it begins from a place which, when we hear about it, has come to feel a bit alien. Thus it is important to recall that artworks in traditional societies are not only “aesthetic,” they are practical as well—often they serve to petition gods for help in practical and worldly affairs.
Things of course are not entirely different in a society like ours, where in the broadest, best sense the artist remains a practical worker. Not complacent to think in terms of what was or is, or how things merely appear, the artist acts and thinks according to what could, should, or ought to be, or even truly is, despite appearances, in a language of sensuous forms.
This amounts to what Ernst Cassirer calls the intensification of reality, which we must understand as distinct from the abbreviation of reality: science’s function. What art and science share is the aim of better grasping the world and sometimes of improving it, for even to posit “what is” (critique) prepares the way for imagining what could, or should, be (improvement), just as it implicitly states: “All of us would be better off if we were aware, or more aware, of this concealed reality—and shouldn't we live in a world wherein people are better attuned to it?” Each at its best, moreover, is the product of deep contemplation and questioning.
When we say a certain work of fiction or poetry is philosophical, what we mean is not altogether clear. We could mean that this work didactically—that is, explicitly—delivers philosophical conclusions through the mouths of characters in an effort to promote a philosophical program. Yet it might mean, too, that the work manages, implicitly, to bring into focus certain philosophical questions, but without providing definite answers—the difference being that the first provides answers, the second provokes questions. The latter does the work of art, however, since it intensifies reality through sensuous means. When art is philosophical it asks questions without technically asking them; it does so by representing conflicts and tension—by showing them, enacting them. If it seems to answer its own question, it does so such that it would be acquitted of the charge if seriously questioned.
Since art’s means are necessarily sensuous, affect plays a significant role. The mere representation of a character’s envy or jealousy can have far-reaching implications. Envy is wanting or feeling entitled to what another has, regardless of deservingness. Jealousy is indignation rooted in concerns about fairness and justice, specifically how one is treated in relation to others. Envy is an amoral, self-centered, childish emotion, while jealousy has an important ethical dimension. If we follow the logic to its end, envy envisions a world where individuals prioritize themselves at the expense of others, while jealousy strives for a fair and equitable society where everyone is treated equally. It is why we readily understand that the envy-ruled Iago is bad, and Othello is not, at least intrinsically. The tragedy lies in our sense that Othello has a basic sense of justice, which makes him a fit leader. Yet it is his sense of justice (manifesting as excessive jealousy) which ultimately leads him to murder. Through a process of intensification, then, by sensuous means, the play hints that the inclination towards cruel punishments in exceptionally moral people is the dark side of justice. Othello’s personal tragedy may even prompt us to reflect on the difficulty of attaining a thoroughly just society, or point to the large-scale horrors which have been carried out in the name of “the good.”
Where science dilutes reality, making it more extensive and abstract such as to enable us to better perceive what is truly the case despite what appearances may suggest, meaningful art isolates particular facets of life, intensifying them in order to lay bare a hidden “truth,” and very often to restore an all too familiar object to its previous, unfamiliar aspect—itself an act of unconcealing. For instance, stand-up comedy’s special role of suddenly elucidating what we all feel.
According to Viktor Shklovsky, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” To do so has the effect of slowing down our automatic perceptions, turning up the volume, as it were, on particular perceptions and aspects of experience, turning down the volume meanwhile on others. A meaningful selection of elements in a composition can potentially lead to a more intense perception of its subject. This is another way of referring to the purposeful arrangement and structuring of sensuous forms.
Philosophy and art, like science, attempt through intense contemplation to comprehend what truly is, except science does so from the perspective of a neutral God, which is to say, from the perspective of “nowhere,” beyond what the senses are able to inform. Moreover it uses the types of extrapolation employed in thought experiments, or in such speculative forms as science fiction and fantasy. A great deal of philosophy is concerned with what “ought to be”; religion as well. Because art is concerned necessarily with the ideal, it makes itself readily available to religion, which not only makes use of mythic stories but has a stake in one particular ideal—that is to say, paradise.
We treat technological innovators or inventors as artists if they seem to be possessed of what we might refer to as a visionary temperament, even though their work does not deal in sensuous forms. That they can credibly be called or likened to “artists” owes mainly to their explicit commitment to bringing about a world superior to the current one, suggesting an investment in what ought to or could be.
And just as the desire to innovate has inherently the potential to usher in a worse world, or dystopia, so the artist may choose to present a dystopian portrait of life, perhaps so as to make audiences more attuned to what lies, so to speak, under the surface of things, or awaken the imagination to alternative courses of action which would hopefully lead to a better future.
José Vasconcelos writes, “A noble book is always the fruit of disillusionment and a sign of protest. . . Every book says, expressly or between the lines: nothing is as it ought to be.” For Vasconcelos, the artist reproves the world, an act which at the very least implies the need for something better, something beyond; that is, assuming that the author has not actively instituted the change.
Where science is practiced according to a value-free ideal—and where modern warfare, dependent as it is on technological innovation, leading us increasingly to view survival as an end in itself—the artist rebukes the world, making us remember what real value looks like, what sort of life may be worth living, worth fighting for and cultivating. Having rejected the deterministic, materialist outlook, an artist acts according to the principle of freedom—the freedom to choose one’s present and future, meanwhile putting the ideal ahead of mere practical considerations, what “ought to be” ahead of “what is,” melody ahead of discord, and resemblance ahead of mutual antagonism.
Art is for resolving the tragicomic contradictions we are born into. One cannot know, for instance, what one actually looks like, how one appears to others, yet each of us is the only being in the world with privileged access to her thoughts and feelings. A corollary of this is that she is unable to share with others a dream she dreamt except by using language to tell the dream. While one may surely use ordinary speech to describe a thousand and one things in the world, poetic speech alone is capable of imparting and making meaningful the experience of last night’s dream for others.
To conjecture perhaps too far, it is not wholly impossible that dreams were the internal motivation for the poetic faculties being put to use in the first place, tens of thousands of years ago (unusual natural events being, I suppose, the external inspiration), thus giving to poetic speech a highly necessary, crucial function, which would have ensured its central place in sacred ritual.
A. W. Howitt provides the following testimony from his research in Australia: “In the Tribes with which I have acquaintance, I find it to be a common belief that the songs, using that word in its widest meaning, as including all kinds of aboriginal poetry, are obtained by the bards from the spirits of the deceased, usually of their kindred, during sleep, in dreams." Frances Densmore reports to us also, “Many Indian songs are intended to exert a strong mental influence, and dream songs are supposed to have this power in greater degree than any others."
Since many today regard the notion of dreams as messages from another world with some considerable skepticism, it is not surprising that the status of poetry has fallen with it. Well used poetic language, however, has the special ability to concisely render, for a waking audience, not just the content of a dream, but its general mood, its images, and its strange logic. Beyond merely communicating (or abbreviating) its broad outline and events, poetic language allows for the expression of the dream to others, which in turn makes possible transcending one’s prison-like subjectivity.
Poetry gives to dreams, and other highly subjective or chaotic phenomena, a type of objective validity, as it speaks in the dream’s native tongue—a tongue simultaneously symbolic, sacred, and metaphorical.
Carl Jung tells us that dream images, or symbols, differ fundamentally from ordinary signs and words, and also have a unique importance in various cultures:
“There are… such objects as the wheel and the cross that are known all over the world, yet that have a symbolic significance under certain conditions. Precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation. Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason. . . Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams."
As dreams and poetic texts are laden with symbols—which together form a large network of unstable relations—what one oftentimes remembers best of a poem or a dream turns out to be its fantastic, uncanny, seemingly ineffable atmosphere. Symbols are characterized by polysemy, tonal ambivalence, equivocality—thus they tantalize, defying description as well as one’s ability to interpret them.
If Joseph Campbell’s formulation that “myth is a public dream and a dream is a private myth” is true, then poetry has only dreams to sustain it, for myth has since the advent of modernity suffered a demotion; it has been relegated to the background of life (except of course when it comes to entertainment for children and its formulaic, crude sublimation in advertising and politics).
Luckily there exist no means yet, which we know of, by which sleep might be abolished or made profitable, even if some entities would like very much to achieve this, since it would increase humanity’s consumptive and productive powers by some fifty percent. As Jonathan Crary explains,
“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”
This is good, as I see it, because so long as we are able to keep sleeping—which of course is the precondition for dreaming—language will retain its connection to myth; the private reserves we draw from in order to imagine and express different, more fulfilling realities will never dry up, and poetry will remain possible. In turn this makes change possible. According to E. L. Doctorow,
If our response to what is going on today were appropriate, it would probably produce books of a grubbier, sloppier, and more energetic sort than we are doing. Books with less polish and self-consciousness, but about the way power works in our society, who has it, and how it is making history. In order to begin to rebuild our sense of ourselves, we may have to go back to childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.
Thomas Merton finishes the thought for Doctorow:
“All really valid poetry (poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise. . . the living line and the generative association, the new sound, the music, the structure, are somehow grounded in a renewal of vision and hearing so that he who reads and understands recognizes that here is a new start, a new creation. Here the world gets another chance.”
Much of what we call art attempts the seemingly alchemical transformation of strife into love—chaos into harmony, pain into pleasure—by means which are at once sensuous, formal, and structural. Whether the transformation is merited and sincere, or lazy and superficial, will much of the time determine a work’s social value, its usefulness and life span.
The undesirable entity (i.e. life as it currently is and has been), though changed in a certain way, should not be negated, but re-presented in a different, objective, more neutral light, and tend to elicit fascination and awe rather than fear and disgust. An artist must face up to what is undesirable and find ways of making it feasible for those who have encountered her work, to encounter the entity or situation depicted in the work differently, more perceptively or, in a manner of speaking, from the vantage point of a god. Works of art fascinate and in so doing they invite a special kind of contemplation, empowering us to penetrate into life’s very core, while allowing us to survey it from on high. Gabriel Zaid writes,
“Great works focus our minds, speak to the best in us, and spark our imagination. We feel more alive, more engaged in meaningful conversation with life. Reality makes more sense. We make more sense. It’s as if we’ve experienced a miracle, as if we’ve been granted access to eternity. It’s only natural to spread the word, to share the experience, to bring that higher level of living to ordinary life."
But unlike science (I am about to use an analogy Merton would not like) which is monotheistic and strives to re-present life—by abbreviating reality—from the perspective of the one and only God, art is metaphorically polytheistic: which is to say, again but a bit differently, a successful work intensifies reality, re-presenting it from a single god’s perspective, as the truth of one god among many, not as the Truth.
What is missing from art practice now, not to say from philosophy (which has necessarily been the case ever since philosophy’s and, after it, modern science’s establishment), is a genuine investment in magical ritual. In this way, art has most fundamentally been influenced by philosophy and science. Mythical thought is based in a logic of sympathies rather than conceptual difference, and this logic once accompanied and underlay art’s function of presenting and re-presenting intensified reality for the purpose of contemplation.
It was at first philosophy, followed by science (indeed rational systematic treatment of culture precedes the rational systematic treatment of nature) which supplanted—rather than supplemented—mythical thought. Consequently, our ability to so much as consider using sympathetic magic to affect the world was drastically undermined. It had become nearly unthinkable, and remains so. Now we feel as though we can never go back to the unreason of magic. But in its intention, in seeking to alter the world, poetry and magic (and what we call art in general) once resembled science and politics, both of which are regarded as dynamic and change-oriented activities rather than leisurely pastimes.
Lyric poetry keeps intact, by formal convention and perhaps a foolish temperament, our unconscious connection to magic, and the possibility of restoring myth and dream to common, public life. Our embrace of science and technology in its place meanwhile compensates for this loss of faith, our disappointment in magic’s falseness. It is precisely a faith in magic, however, which gives us courage to go beyond ourselves. Yet, as the ethnographer Michael Jackson suggests, the basic impetus remains the same, even if the confidence of the sorcerer has left the artist (and audience):
the passion and paradox of writing lies in its attempt to to achieve the impossible—a leap of faith that bears comparison with the mystic’s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, or an ethnographer’s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. (The Other Shore 3)
One of lyric’s hidden functions is that it keeps open the possibility of using the language of sympathy, of again (or at last) using words which perfectly correspond to what they mean, of finding an intuitive language which feels right, and can be shared between all people without misunderstanding… T. E. Lawrence seems to be contrasting the conventional person with the poet when he writes, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”
The poet is not just one with a unique, defamiliarizing point of view, but who has an expansive, desirous, and naively hopeful disposition, one who implicitly expresses, through imagination and the artful use of speech, a desire to go beyond the known, in pursuit of a place where there is more meaning, a place at once possible and impossible. As Christopher Caudwell has it,
“The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose, without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality—a world of more important reality not yet realised, whose realisation demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Here is room for every error, for the poem proposes something whose very reason for poetical treatment is that we cannot touch, smell or taste it yet. But only by means of this illusion can be brought into being a reality which would not otherwise exist.”
For Caudwell, then, it would seem, to bring into being what should be, the poem produces nostalgia for what does not yet exist.
. . .
November 27, 2023
“Imitation and Sincerity”
* * *
What advice to give writers?
It all depends.
For the sake of simplicity, there are three kinds of writing. There is the writing one has to do because someone asked them to do it, there is the writing one BELIEVES they would like to do, and then finally the writing one simply does because they must—for reasons which are personal and mysterious.
The second and third types would be special cases. Most of the essays on writing out there are for those who fall into the second and third. But unfortunately, people who desire to BE writers cannot be helped, at least as I see it, by the formulae of writers who have already figured out how to write their stuff. Every aspiring writer has to figure out for herself how to get the job done, but what I say here will perhaps help the aspiring writers know how to avoid certain traps, while helping people who have been asked to produce writing to do so without pain and too much “friction,” as the tech gurus say.
For whatever reason, some people have fallen in love with the idea of BEING a writer. Such a person will think a great deal about a future in which her pages are printed, bound and made available in stores in already finished form. This is a very exotic sort of self-imposed torture, I think—it’s one I would not wish on many people.
Yet I know how it feels, from experience. Though I am fundamentally not a novelist, I have briefly in the past believed I would like to be. Of course no one was asking me to produce a novel. The much bigger problem was that I did not have a strong desire to write novels. I was acting like someone who desired to have climbed Mount Everest yet hates hiking and climbing, let alone camping. I was someone who felt the need to write poetry (as well as cerebral essays), and therefore was probably more like a skateboarder, a gymnast, or even a ballet dancer—none of which are primarily about getting from Point A to Point Z. What I love to do involves compressing experience, feelings, and ideas into short moments and relatively small spaces—a kind of reduction alien to the novel. That is why the very notion of describing characters and places, objects in the world—trivial facts, as far as I was concerned—would make me shudder a bit, even if I admired certain novels.
While there are some who need to write novels, I was not one of them, and this naturally should have been a signal, but I also knew that I was young and could not be sure that my inclinations should be trusted. Instead of listening to my gut, I pushed myself a bit—which is not a bad thing.
Yet I was also deceiving myself by telling myself “this isn’t a novel, I am merely writing creatively”—which is a common technique among people of a particular temperament who have a NEED to write but wish to act on this need in a way that is more socially acceptable. “Novels are more legitimate than poems, so I should write them instead.” But I did not yet realize that this wasn’t possible. I should have known, because when I was entertaining the idea of writing a novel I actually felt like Paul Valéry, a French poet, who had a certain disdain for the type of sentences one has to make thousands of in order to produce a novel, or even a single chapter of a novel. I do not remember the particular, very banal example he used, but it was funny and vindicating, since it was so very typical of the sort of novelistic description that I was not interested in writing. I also hadn’t read Valéry’s views on the novel back then, but my gut was expressing its contempt, which is not the same as not loving mountain climbing. Indeed I had a little contempt for mountain climbing, so the desire to have climbed Everest was more likely a sublimated desire to have done something else. Climbing Everest was a metaphor which I mistook for reality.
Novels are also interesting because to do one one must be quite practical and down-to-earth—and, more importantly, very at home with the particulars of the world (something I, in certain ways, am not)—even if there is almost nothing practical about painstakingly crafting a hundred and fifty or more pages of realistic make-believe which no one even asked for. The novelist, it would seem, is a funny paradox—a sort of enigma.
On the other hand, I had a good reason for thinking I should write novels. Like an actor, I enjoyed doing voices that were different from my own, and was capable of saying things which I may not have thought or said in my own voice or character. In fact, this piece I am writing right now is itself a kind of imitation of the voice of numerous “how-to-write” essays I have read and recently come across while searching the internet for a piece to assign which would help you draft and revise your own first essays. I thought to myself, I can do this kind of thing, even if it comes off as a little self-indulgent.
In fact I can’t help but imitate styles and the type of writing I am reading, even if I don’t care for it. Even back in the day, when I really liked what I had just read, I had this need to see if I could do it almost as well. I had been misled by Nabokov, who had written a totally unique book with a highly charged, poetic prose which really amazed me. And it tricked me into believing I wished to create novels. The issue, again, was that I didn’t want to write novels—but I did sort of want to be Nabokov and to write like him. The problem was that there can only be one Nabokov, and rather than lightheartedly imitating something, I was in danger of forming an identity that would shackle me to this cruel master and prevent me from developing as I would have developed under a master who granted me a healthy sense of space and independence, while also serving as a practical model.
So what I learned was that I had felt the call to write poems in response to very colorful, artful books like Nabokov’s as well as experimental poems and other uncategorizable types of writing. It turned out that I was compelled to write pretty abstractly too, that is, philosophically. Indeed even before I wanted to write novels I was highly impressed by my reading Plato’s Republic and began imitating Plato, doing pastiches of the Socratic dialogue, which I remember a friend at the time found very embarrassing. In the end it seemed the two poles of philosophical speculation and lyric poetry were to become a reciprocally reinforcing mechanism. The novel would have little place in that mechanism, and was a means to an end which almost ended me as it would end a lot of other friends who tried to write in college and their early twenties.
There is an annoying assumption built into our shared morality that we ought always to be ourselves. The notion of finding “one’s voice” has a metaphysical assumption behind it. The assumption is that each of us possesses something deep down which wishes to be free. This thing often gets called our true or “authentic” voice. It means that each of us has a certain style, a certain emotional range, a unique poetics buried down inside, and we just have to be brave enough to exercise it. This for me is untrue and very misleading, not just for me but for most people for whom writing has become a lifelong habit. On the contrary I have found that I need to get away from who I am and to heed the words of Arthur Rimbaud who said “The ‘I’ is someone else.” It is one thing to write AS THOUGH you have a voice all your own, it is another to act on the belief that your voice is the product of who you ALREADY ARE.
It’s my view that what is essential about each of us is something we ourselves create—“essence after existence,” as some philosopher (I believe Sartre) said. Therefore if you’re a young writer—even perhaps a student who doesn’t want to be a writer—and happen to have a particular accent or cadence that you happen to speak with because of how you were brought up and where, it’s not your moral or artistic responsibility to make your writing on the page have that inherited set of characteristics—as the voice ideologists believe—at least not while you are still young and inexperienced as a writer. The gift of being a young writer is the freedom to explore and experience the world, and leave your past, imposed ways of communicating behind you for the moment. Inheritance is not essence, though it is of course very important because it’s our foundation, from which there is ultimately no escape. One must reckon with their inheritance, which is like a great tradition, because all real writing comes from the deepest part of us, as Rilke states. It is our responsibility, then, to reckon with it, but also to turn it into something else, into art. To transform and alchemize, one must be very skilled and experienced and have experimented a great deal.
The tyrannical moral injunction to find your already existent voice—to be who you already are—is very likely the product of a larger macro-inheritance. The Calvinism which is our cultural inheritance whether we like it or not is something each of us must reckon with. All of us must find ways of transforming it, making it work for us, and ultimately surpassing it. It all began with a lie, a trap. It was the Calvinists who actually believed that in order to find out if one was predestined for Salvation, one would need to work as hard as possible and for as many hours each day as possible, and when finally dead would find out if he had been saved. And if he was saved it was because he was predestined to be saved. Max Weber tells us that it is this religious assumption based in a lie which enabled capitalism to come into being.
So for the Calvinist, believing that the truth about each individual was already out there didn’t lead to Salvation most likely, but to something else, a life individually unlived and a future that turned out to be a hell on earth for the many forced to labor in factories to make commodities to buy and sell and destroy the environment and make their bosses rich. The moral of the story: don’t act like the truth about you is already decided, already written. When you were born you didn’t talk like anyone at all: when you started to talk you imitated your caretakers, and then your community, and finally what you heard in movies and on TV.
Write yourself into existence. It is likely the case that after experimenting with idioms somewhat different or vastly different from your own that one day you’ll return home, to where you came from, except it will be different, and it will be better, the voice will be more true and more charismatic. Right now you have the gift of being like Odysseus who sailed the Aegean, moving from one adventure to the next, and finally returning home to his family. The idiom you arrive at or return to will be better than authentic, it will FEEL authentic to others. It will feel honest and solid. The best, most individual modes of literary expression were artificially created. It was Baltasar Gracián, I think, who said successful art conceals its artifice.
Long ago, when people were hotly debating whether free verse or traditional meter was better, the partisans of meter argued that the old-fashioned constraint of having to write a certain number of syllables per line with a certain rhyme in a particular place enabled the full release of one’s creative and imaginative potential. I believe experimenting with voice and style, perhaps as someone else, is analogous to what they meant. It helped me at least figure out how to write without a great deal of anxiety of influence because I was trying to imitate, not to BE anything, not even who I was imitating. I simply wanted to SEEM. In place of anxiety about whether any idol would approve, I now have a system of values which are my own because I arrived at them organically, out of my own experience writing and reflecting. Just as the meter a poet is forced to write in allows the poet to leave herself in order to become herself as a poet, so trying out other voices, like a child trying on costumes, helps me to figure out how to say what I need to. This has helped me in my poetry and in my scholarship, in the philosophical essays I write because I just need to, and even in this.
What else has worked for me?
On the topic of revision. As someone who immediately revises after turning out a draft—even after producing a single paragraph, or a single sentence—it can be nice after a couple of hours of toil, of tweaking, tinkering and generally ruining the nervous system—and more and more my sense of where I am in this great forest full of highly detailed trees which produced the paper I am writing on—to drink a little red wine (never drink too much, unless you happen to be very stout—and at least 21 years of age—and can keep your head after a full glass). For me, having a little wine helps me sometimes to regain my perspective. It lifts me out of the dark confusing forest with its many hallucinations and terrors, and brings me high into the air until I am like a falcon surveying a great country. This is one way of saying my perspective becomes objective again. You can also skip the wine, sleep, and revise the next day. I love to take a walk too.
Write, revise, write again—that is the main thing. And make your writing appear to have not been over-edited. The finished product ought to feel as spontaneous and natural as an inspired first draft, albeit without many of the structural issues that a first draft is likely to have.
And always read before writing, as the ancient Roman, Petronius, liked to do. It is for me reading a great deal before writing, even the night before, that fills up the dam with rain so it is nearly to the point of brimming over and I can’t help but start writing. Read at least ten pages of something which absorbs you before you write. It will activate the language center—the Logos which governs all language and logic in the universe. You’ll find the sentences begin to write themselves.
* * *
What advice to give writers?
It all depends.
For the sake of simplicity, there are three kinds of writing. There is the writing one has to do because someone asked them to do it, there is the writing one BELIEVES they would like to do, and then finally the writing one simply does because they must—for reasons which are personal and mysterious.
The second and third types would be special cases. Most of the essays on writing out there are for those who fall into the second and third. But unfortunately, people who desire to BE writers cannot be helped, at least as I see it, by the formulae of writers who have already figured out how to write their stuff. Every aspiring writer has to figure out for herself how to get the job done, but what I say here will perhaps help the aspiring writers know how to avoid certain traps, while helping people who have been asked to produce writing to do so without pain and too much “friction,” as the tech gurus say.
For whatever reason, some people have fallen in love with the idea of BEING a writer. Such a person will think a great deal about a future in which her pages are printed, bound and made available in stores in already finished form. This is a very exotic sort of self-imposed torture, I think—it’s one I would not wish on many people.
Yet I know how it feels, from experience. Though I am fundamentally not a novelist, I have briefly in the past believed I would like to be. Of course no one was asking me to produce a novel. The much bigger problem was that I did not have a strong desire to write novels. I was acting like someone who desired to have climbed Mount Everest yet hates hiking and climbing, let alone camping. I was someone who felt the need to write poetry (as well as cerebral essays), and therefore was probably more like a skateboarder, a gymnast, or even a ballet dancer—none of which are primarily about getting from Point A to Point Z. What I love to do involves compressing experience, feelings, and ideas into short moments and relatively small spaces—a kind of reduction alien to the novel. That is why the very notion of describing characters and places, objects in the world—trivial facts, as far as I was concerned—would make me shudder a bit, even if I admired certain novels.
While there are some who need to write novels, I was not one of them, and this naturally should have been a signal, but I also knew that I was young and could not be sure that my inclinations should be trusted. Instead of listening to my gut, I pushed myself a bit—which is not a bad thing.
Yet I was also deceiving myself by telling myself “this isn’t a novel, I am merely writing creatively”—which is a common technique among people of a particular temperament who have a NEED to write but wish to act on this need in a way that is more socially acceptable. “Novels are more legitimate than poems, so I should write them instead.” But I did not yet realize that this wasn’t possible. I should have known, because when I was entertaining the idea of writing a novel I actually felt like Paul Valéry, a French poet, who had a certain disdain for the type of sentences one has to make thousands of in order to produce a novel, or even a single chapter of a novel. I do not remember the particular, very banal example he used, but it was funny and vindicating, since it was so very typical of the sort of novelistic description that I was not interested in writing. I also hadn’t read Valéry’s views on the novel back then, but my gut was expressing its contempt, which is not the same as not loving mountain climbing. Indeed I had a little contempt for mountain climbing, so the desire to have climbed Everest was more likely a sublimated desire to have done something else. Climbing Everest was a metaphor which I mistook for reality.
Novels are also interesting because to do one one must be quite practical and down-to-earth—and, more importantly, very at home with the particulars of the world (something I, in certain ways, am not)—even if there is almost nothing practical about painstakingly crafting a hundred and fifty or more pages of realistic make-believe which no one even asked for. The novelist, it would seem, is a funny paradox—a sort of enigma.
On the other hand, I had a good reason for thinking I should write novels. Like an actor, I enjoyed doing voices that were different from my own, and was capable of saying things which I may not have thought or said in my own voice or character. In fact, this piece I am writing right now is itself a kind of imitation of the voice of numerous “how-to-write” essays I have read and recently come across while searching the internet for a piece to assign which would help you draft and revise your own first essays. I thought to myself, I can do this kind of thing, even if it comes off as a little self-indulgent.
In fact I can’t help but imitate styles and the type of writing I am reading, even if I don’t care for it. Even back in the day, when I really liked what I had just read, I had this need to see if I could do it almost as well. I had been misled by Nabokov, who had written a totally unique book with a highly charged, poetic prose which really amazed me. And it tricked me into believing I wished to create novels. The issue, again, was that I didn’t want to write novels—but I did sort of want to be Nabokov and to write like him. The problem was that there can only be one Nabokov, and rather than lightheartedly imitating something, I was in danger of forming an identity that would shackle me to this cruel master and prevent me from developing as I would have developed under a master who granted me a healthy sense of space and independence, while also serving as a practical model.
So what I learned was that I had felt the call to write poems in response to very colorful, artful books like Nabokov’s as well as experimental poems and other uncategorizable types of writing. It turned out that I was compelled to write pretty abstractly too, that is, philosophically. Indeed even before I wanted to write novels I was highly impressed by my reading Plato’s Republic and began imitating Plato, doing pastiches of the Socratic dialogue, which I remember a friend at the time found very embarrassing. In the end it seemed the two poles of philosophical speculation and lyric poetry were to become a reciprocally reinforcing mechanism. The novel would have little place in that mechanism, and was a means to an end which almost ended me as it would end a lot of other friends who tried to write in college and their early twenties.
There is an annoying assumption built into our shared morality that we ought always to be ourselves. The notion of finding “one’s voice” has a metaphysical assumption behind it. The assumption is that each of us possesses something deep down which wishes to be free. This thing often gets called our true or “authentic” voice. It means that each of us has a certain style, a certain emotional range, a unique poetics buried down inside, and we just have to be brave enough to exercise it. This for me is untrue and very misleading, not just for me but for most people for whom writing has become a lifelong habit. On the contrary I have found that I need to get away from who I am and to heed the words of Arthur Rimbaud who said “The ‘I’ is someone else.” It is one thing to write AS THOUGH you have a voice all your own, it is another to act on the belief that your voice is the product of who you ALREADY ARE.
It’s my view that what is essential about each of us is something we ourselves create—“essence after existence,” as some philosopher (I believe Sartre) said. Therefore if you’re a young writer—even perhaps a student who doesn’t want to be a writer—and happen to have a particular accent or cadence that you happen to speak with because of how you were brought up and where, it’s not your moral or artistic responsibility to make your writing on the page have that inherited set of characteristics—as the voice ideologists believe—at least not while you are still young and inexperienced as a writer. The gift of being a young writer is the freedom to explore and experience the world, and leave your past, imposed ways of communicating behind you for the moment. Inheritance is not essence, though it is of course very important because it’s our foundation, from which there is ultimately no escape. One must reckon with their inheritance, which is like a great tradition, because all real writing comes from the deepest part of us, as Rilke states. It is our responsibility, then, to reckon with it, but also to turn it into something else, into art. To transform and alchemize, one must be very skilled and experienced and have experimented a great deal.
The tyrannical moral injunction to find your already existent voice—to be who you already are—is very likely the product of a larger macro-inheritance. The Calvinism which is our cultural inheritance whether we like it or not is something each of us must reckon with. All of us must find ways of transforming it, making it work for us, and ultimately surpassing it. It all began with a lie, a trap. It was the Calvinists who actually believed that in order to find out if one was predestined for Salvation, one would need to work as hard as possible and for as many hours each day as possible, and when finally dead would find out if he had been saved. And if he was saved it was because he was predestined to be saved. Max Weber tells us that it is this religious assumption based in a lie which enabled capitalism to come into being.
So for the Calvinist, believing that the truth about each individual was already out there didn’t lead to Salvation most likely, but to something else, a life individually unlived and a future that turned out to be a hell on earth for the many forced to labor in factories to make commodities to buy and sell and destroy the environment and make their bosses rich. The moral of the story: don’t act like the truth about you is already decided, already written. When you were born you didn’t talk like anyone at all: when you started to talk you imitated your caretakers, and then your community, and finally what you heard in movies and on TV.
Write yourself into existence. It is likely the case that after experimenting with idioms somewhat different or vastly different from your own that one day you’ll return home, to where you came from, except it will be different, and it will be better, the voice will be more true and more charismatic. Right now you have the gift of being like Odysseus who sailed the Aegean, moving from one adventure to the next, and finally returning home to his family. The idiom you arrive at or return to will be better than authentic, it will FEEL authentic to others. It will feel honest and solid. The best, most individual modes of literary expression were artificially created. It was Baltasar Gracián, I think, who said successful art conceals its artifice.
Long ago, when people were hotly debating whether free verse or traditional meter was better, the partisans of meter argued that the old-fashioned constraint of having to write a certain number of syllables per line with a certain rhyme in a particular place enabled the full release of one’s creative and imaginative potential. I believe experimenting with voice and style, perhaps as someone else, is analogous to what they meant. It helped me at least figure out how to write without a great deal of anxiety of influence because I was trying to imitate, not to BE anything, not even who I was imitating. I simply wanted to SEEM. In place of anxiety about whether any idol would approve, I now have a system of values which are my own because I arrived at them organically, out of my own experience writing and reflecting. Just as the meter a poet is forced to write in allows the poet to leave herself in order to become herself as a poet, so trying out other voices, like a child trying on costumes, helps me to figure out how to say what I need to. This has helped me in my poetry and in my scholarship, in the philosophical essays I write because I just need to, and even in this.
What else has worked for me?
On the topic of revision. As someone who immediately revises after turning out a draft—even after producing a single paragraph, or a single sentence—it can be nice after a couple of hours of toil, of tweaking, tinkering and generally ruining the nervous system—and more and more my sense of where I am in this great forest full of highly detailed trees which produced the paper I am writing on—to drink a little red wine (never drink too much, unless you happen to be very stout—and at least 21 years of age—and can keep your head after a full glass). For me, having a little wine helps me sometimes to regain my perspective. It lifts me out of the dark confusing forest with its many hallucinations and terrors, and brings me high into the air until I am like a falcon surveying a great country. This is one way of saying my perspective becomes objective again. You can also skip the wine, sleep, and revise the next day. I love to take a walk too.
Write, revise, write again—that is the main thing. And make your writing appear to have not been over-edited. The finished product ought to feel as spontaneous and natural as an inspired first draft, albeit without many of the structural issues that a first draft is likely to have.
And always read before writing, as the ancient Roman, Petronius, liked to do. It is for me reading a great deal before writing, even the night before, that fills up the dam with rain so it is nearly to the point of brimming over and I can’t help but start writing. Read at least ten pages of something which absorbs you before you write. It will activate the language center—the Logos which governs all language and logic in the universe. You’ll find the sentences begin to write themselves.
* * *
