Walking in the dark outside a party one summer night sometime in college, I fell suddenly under the spell of some song they were playing inside, not even a good song I think. There was the smell of dirt and magnolia, the thought of reading to be done, the feeling of my feet on the cement walkway, but nothing was as compelling, nothing was as much the center of things as the song. And then just as suddenly I remember feeling sad and angry that nothing that could happen inside the party could be as good as the feeling of the song, the not very good song. It was during a time when almost nothing presented itself to me as a given, almost everything provoked me to wonder what was necessarily so, what might be different if I were born into different circumstances or if I had the will to change myself, to expand myself. I didn't go in. And I will feel a bit suspicious of my reader if she does not mentally chide me or at least roll her eyes at my preciousness and fatalism. A different person might have made no connection between the music and the party, or might have understood the music as the promise of something wonderful waiting inside. I walked away. I was raised to keep watch at the boundaries between art and life.
Which has not served me entirely well.
But often, and maybe this is reason to be suspicious of people like me, I'm just talking to hear how things sound. Or to hear what sounds it's possible to make. So there is this other way that art works that has become as important to me as how art makes claims about the world. Art teaches you how to use your senses and how to frame things, how to see completely particular things among the infinite field of things. Or maybe it's just one thing and it's just hard to see that from the midst of it?
My eldest daughter is a junior is high school and so our mailbox is littered each day with fantastical glossy pamphlets from colleges. They're really good fun to leaf through, fold out, spin around, search for stickers and graphs and typographical sleight-of-hand. And we're right to be suspicious of them, even though they have the courtesy to show up explicitly as propaganda, unlike so much propaganda. Many of the shots in these pamphlets of kids discussing French feminism under a beech tree were taken right after other kids walked by with "Beavers" written on the butts of their sweatpants. Dumpsters just out of the frame to the right and a bank of deafening heat pumps just out of the frame to the left. Ah, well.
But so the other day I was driving to a dental checkup up a highway built over Jones Falls River, the main waterway through Baltimore. Past new apartment construction made of imaginary materials and an enormous, perfectly rectangular cinder block storage facility that can't be more than thirty feet from the highway. And the wind was whistling in the driver's side window that doesn't quite roll up. But it was foggy and near-Spring, the new grass at the shoulders and median shading into the darker green of the trees and vines I was driving past, and I had the sense of gradually ascending a land mass that slopes up from the Chesapeake Bay, Pennsylvania hanging green and misty above me as I climbed. And a highway sign tipped into view, and as I mounted a long, arcing corner the sign, which is suspended over the highway, focused the vague glare of what sun there was into a third completely distinct green--that highway sign green--and it was beautiful. And I don't know if this is a good thing but I think I found it beautiful only because watching movies has taught me to accept the world in frames. Only because of the way Michelangelo Antonioni's lens, in the midst of all the deliberately self-distracting day trips, and all the sad and irritating characters who populate L'Avventura, is transfixed only by the Mediterranean breeze in Monica Vitti's hair.
Dear Kirk,
ReplyDeleteMy first thought is that Art is the drug that empowers. Vonnegut once talked about how his friends in the sixties snorted cocaine and imbibed jugs of alcohol because it worked. They were able to see differently, access feelings, excellerate the brain's synapses. "The only problem," he said, "Is eventually you lost your ability to write without it. The drug became the writer and you a dead thing." And, of course, sometimes you became literally dead.
It seems to me you're writing about art's power to bend the mind, heighten the senses, give us technicolor, sensual language, new eyes and ears without cutting us from our own powers.
Which brings me to this...why do we need new ways of seeing? Why the cocaine, why do we need (or appreciate) Michelangelo's perspective? I seem to crave a hit of beauty. I want to be disoriented by beauty. I guess because there is something in me, an inertia toward "sameness." To make all green road signs a highway green. Something in me pulls toward death, toward flatlining--flat colors, flight thoughts, flat feelings. My life always curves toward sleep...but my heart wants to be awakened, stimulated. Art is a kind of disorientation (or re-orientation. When it "works" its like electric shock therapy and it's the post shock alertness we want--our capacities open, firing. It's the post art living we seek...to keep from reducing ourselves to a brochure. What's interesting is that the art needn't be brilliant (i.e. the song outside the dorm room)...just stimulating. Maybe you're writing about a kind of rescue, an experience, a way of survival.
--Mark