No wonder Nietzsche went mad. If his answer to the problem of existence was to look upon it as a continuum of moments among which might be found at least one moment that would affirm all the others, that would, through the happiness that single moment brought him, compensate for the rest, however tedious or painful they might be (so that he’d even allow that his life should recur eternally, and that he must live it over and over, as if on repeat), how would he know that he’d experienced a moment where the happiness was adequately profound? That he’d gone far enough in pursuing that moment, in ‘saying yes’ to it, in participating in its creation, its substantiation? And that, instead, he hadn’t somehow let it go, or watched it pass; that he had been there with it in the realm of space and time, but hadn’t responded to it in a way that produced the fullest amount of joy? How could such a life lead to anything less than a wild and mind-bending regret?
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There is no break from the insistence of reality. I could walk over to the window, and stand looking out, and try, for a few minutes, to do nothing, but one can never really do nothing, for even if one exerts no voluntary muscles, one can’t shut off one’s consciousness, one can only try to channel it, or redirect it, or observe it through the practice of meditation or prayer. Except, I suppose, during sleep. But even then one is often working through feelings and dilemmas, by way of dreams. So that it becomes difficult to view one’s self as anything more than a collection of highly excitable cells, some of which retain memories and desires that produce, through whatever mechanisms allow for self-awareness, a constant stream of psychic activity.
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I am thinking of consumerism, and of many of the social patterns that exist today in America and in the West (and not only in the West, but across much of the globe), which are shaped both tacitly and explicitly by those engines of business and government that are built on models of profit, regulation, and authority that may not be intrinsically ‘bad,’ but that are fated to become impersonal and despotic once they reach a certain scope. But I am thinking, as well, about our willingness to react to those things, when we observe their failings, and deem them unsustainable, with systems or theories that are equally inadequate in their conception of the human person, and of our existential condition.
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For if art can be said to have a purpose, it isn’t to make us smarter, but more conscious of the fact that we are alive. Which may not sound like much, but which, in an age that has been lost, in many respects, to the inertia of industries and paradigms that depend on our willingness to believe that they are necessary and vital, and that our life is found in them, when really it is not, is something I don’t think we can do without.
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None of which is to say, I don’t think, that exegesis is a futile endeavor, for it is the basis of much academic work, at least in the humanities, and anyone who engages in it with a sincere desire to know, or to understand, will likely come away from it elucidated, not only with regard to the subject at hand, but also to some aspect of their own identity, or existence. But it is to say, I think, that art does not require intellectualization in order to be felt.
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And, to the same effect, the British painter Francis Bacon: “It’s always hopeless to talk about painting — one never does anything but talk around it. If you can talk about it, why paint it?”
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This same reluctance, with regard to interpretation, is expressed by the filmmaker David Lynch, whenever he’s asked to speak about the meaning of the films he has made: “As soon as you finish a film, people want you to talk about it. And the film is the talking. The film is the thing. So you go see the film. That’s the thing.”
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Sontag’s disenchantment with interpretation reminds me of something that the American author Flannery O’Connor once said, in relation to literature: “A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is. You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate. When anybody asks what a story is about, the only proper thing is to tell him to read the story.”
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I should say that I mean “interpret” in its most basic and narrow sense. Like how, when you see a traffic sign, your vision allows your mind to make a connection between the image and the concept. So that you understand what you are seeing, can act accordingly, and then move on and forget about it, almost within an instant. If you are in a museum, looking at a painting, you might move slower, bringing to bear the apparatus of your mind that makes moral and aesthetic judgments. (For paintings are more complex than traffic signs, their meanings more elusive, their moods palpable). But that is separate, I think, from what can happen next (or maybe before, it isn’t clear to me), which is that you are affected emotionally, or even feel as though some spiritual part of yourself has been roused. Which is analogous, I think, to what Susan Sontag was trying to impress on us in her essay from 1966, Against Interpretation, where she called for a criticism based in “an erotics of art” rather than “a hermeneutics.”
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No, you cannot ask of abstract paintings the same sort of questions you might ask of representational paintings, for they are a different class of object, though perhaps it is better to say that they are the same class of object, but that they postulate themselves differently, in that the former wants to be encountered, and the latter wants to be interpreted. For all of them, in a material sense, are the same: nothing more than canvas or board on which a viscous, pigmented liquid has been applied in a cogent and purposeful way.
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The second way abstraction does this (avoids the rules of mimesis) is related to the first, in that the first (the removal of linear time as a basis for the subject of the painting) is often a function of the second, which is this: the omission of human figures from the canvas. For not only are human figures absent in abstract painting, but also the very idea of a human perspective is done away with. Or, anyway, the notion that such a perspective is a necessary component of a painting’s internal order disintegrates. So that a viewer will come to understand, if they consider such a painting’s implications, that, although the painting has been created for humans, so to speak, its concerns are so removed from what might be described as ordinary human experience, or things ‘of this world,’ that they (the viewer) cannot bring to it the sort of questions they would bring to a figurative or representational painting, without finding themselves at a loss.
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Maybe if he’d been an abstract painter, rather than a narrative poet, Dante might’ve attempted to render the supernatural realms in a less paradoxical way, for abstraction releases an artist from the rules of mimesis to which narrative art is often bound. How it does this can be explained, I think, in at least two ways. First, it liberates both the artist and the audience from the conception of time as linear. Think of a painting by Rothko, or by Agnes Martin. You do not try to follow the ‘story’ that their paintings depict, because there is no story, but rather you see the painting ‘all at once,’ almost as if it is a feeling you are experiencing rather than a sight you are comprehending. In other words, abstraction does not originate from the premise that time is the basis for every kind of experience available to the human person. Not that an abstract painting is so superficial a thing that you need not spend some time with it, or linger in front of it, to experience its effect, for often that is necessary; but my point is that it can introduce you to a ‘condition,’ or a ‘state,’ into which you enter, rather than reveal to you a ‘happening,’ or an ‘occurrence,’ that must be processed chronologically.
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Of course, it isn’t humor alone that is a paradoxical part of Dante’s poem, but the very poem itself. For, except for a few cantos near the beginning, the entire ‘Comedy’ takes place in what we call an ‘afterlife.’ Which, being eternal, as opposed to temporal, would function not so much as a location, but as a state, or a condition. So that, though we might retain our individuality there, or our identity as particular souls, we likely would not experience that condition bodily. At least not in the way that we know our bodies now, as organisms that are subject to entropy, and to the constraints of space and time. Therefore, what Dante is doing is attempting to convey the reality of the afterlife in the only way we can comprehend it. And yet, in doing so, he must distort the very nature of that reality. Which isn’t to say that he misrepresents it.
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Although, I think it’s important to recognize, also, that Dante can use humor in his depiction of the supernatural realms only because he is, in fact, depicting them, and is not delivering them to us as they are, in their reality. Which of course would be impossible. Insofar as the supernatural realms (assuming a reader would give them credence) cannot be experienced the same way that we experience natural phenomena, here in our mortal lives, through the elapsing of time, and with our sense organs. I would even go so far as to say he is obliged to use humor, at least now and then. Otherwise he would alienate his readers, and would not succeed artistically. For there is, in The Divine Comedy, an interesting paradox, that can be described, I think, like this: humor is a relief from monotony, and perhaps even from pain, and so it would be absent from Hell (as well as from Heaven, although for inverse reasons), as Hell is a state of eternal torment. And yet certain genres of art cannot function without humor, at least not when they are representational (as opposed to abstract). For, by setting themselves up as representations of human experience, they take on the mimetic responsibility of including in their expression all that is within the human range. And so Dante, the artist, finds himself in the strange position of attempting to convince us of the reality of a place by a technique whose effect could never be felt in that place.
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And there are instances of humor in The Divine Comedy, anyway, like when Dante and Virgil, crossing the river Acheron in the ferryman’s boat, with a number of doomed souls, glance back and see, on the bank they moments ago departed, another crowd of the recently deceased, already assembling, so that the reader is led to understand that the traffic of newcomers to Hades is never slow, but instead is consistent and reliable.
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For example, the title that Dante gave to that epic poem of his (about Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) was Comedìa, which is Tuscan for “Comedy.” (The adjective “Divine” was added to the title by someone else, the poet Giovanni Boccaccio, after Dante’s death).
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And yet I know it isn’t laughable, civilization. For it is one of our most primal responses to the fact of our own existence. And if that isn’t tragic in itself, then it involves too many instances of the tragic to be regarded without gravitas. Life is a comedy only in the medieval sense of the word, wherein there is much striving and struggle, which sometimes produces happy or humorous results, in the course of much drama and pathos.
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Perhaps such a thought is morbid, and isn’t the mark of a civilized mind. But civilization makes me laugh, the idea of it as well as the fact of it. And I, as part of civilization, am part of the object of my laughter. Although I’m not laughing aloud, for it isn’t that sort of laugh, but I am walking along, laughing inside myself, while doing the things that keep me involved in life.
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There are other reasons to act, not least of which is that we should help those who suffer, or are oppressed. And yet is any action really needed, in a cosmic sense? I mean from a perspective that would view us from some distant point in time? And on a scale that positions us indiscriminately, among all the matter and organisms of creation? Regardless of the fact that we are conscious. What would become of the plan we know as ‘Providence’ (if there is such a thing) if we who are currently living agreed to set aside the impulses of civilization and of our own individual psyches, and to wait, as if keeping vigil, for our mortality to bring us our last breath?
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A Christian would say yes, I am uttering something false, if for no other reason than that the God of the Old Testament willed that humankind, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” In other words, he willed that we do something, which was, if nothing else, to allow the procreative urges by which we have evolved to sustain our presence in creation, at least as the ‘highest’ (or most complex) of the beasts, if not as a civilization. This does not mean, incidentally, that the Judeo-Christian perspective, with regard to nature as a habitat, and to other creatures in their relation to humankind, is anything but reverent. For the phrase “to subdue, and have dominion over,” in this context, means something akin to stewardship, or the care that a custodian would bring to whatever is in his charge. We are to bring order to chaos — lovingly, not tyrannically.