On Stevens

Last night, in my disjointed way, I read a few poems of Wallace Stevens' (my first). I did not read many, but instead read those few through several times, trying to wrap my mind around them. Those that I've read remind me a bit of Rilke.

From "The Motive for Metaphor:"

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world
Of things that would never be quite expressed,
Where you yourself were never quite yourself
And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being

I love those lines. The more I read them, the more they remind me of reading, of writing. Things never quite expressed -- and never quite grasped. The writer partially expressing, the reader partially understanding, and yet both finding something there. Finding something here.

Scary Movie

Halloween is almost here -- how did that happen? The turning leaves should have been a clue, but it really didn't hit me until yesterday. I passed by a house with extensive decorations and commented that it was a bit early to be preparing for Halloween. Then I realized that that was a stupid thing to say. The weather is also shocking. It's in the 30s and 40s during the day -- I have to start adapting. And wearing gloves.

I love autumn. When I was younger, I loved Halloween because, in addition to dressing up, it was an excuse to watch scary movies. My dad didn't especially want me to because he worried that they'd give me nightmares (he was generally right, too). As a compromise, he let me rent the original versions of the classic horror movies -- Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein. I still haven't seen most of the famous ones -- Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Exorcist, Texas Chainsaw Massacre. But neither group strikes me as particularly frightening. The latter (in their modern incarnations, at least) are based on the grotesque, on shock value. Gore correctly synched with the appropriate soundtrack. You jump in your seat at the loud music. But is that the same thing as being scared? Surpirsed, sure. But scared?

I have a tendency to overanalyze scary movies. I think it stems from that early tendency for nightmares. I'd always ask myself, Is this scary? and try to figure out why a movie (or story) bothered me; it was a way of disarming the film, of removing its power. I still wonder -- what is it that terrifies? I still am not sure. But terror is not synonymous with the grotesque, or with shock.

The one film that I remember being genuinely terrified by is not a horror movie. It has a happy ending. It's a musical. What's this strange exception? The Wizard of Oz. That's right. Near the end, Dorothy has been captured by the Wicked Witch and is locked up in her castle. The Witch places an hourglass on the table and says, This is how long you have left to live. When this runs out, you die. I took that literarlly. It's not just that you're going to die -- it's that you know exactly how much time is left. And you have to watch as time runs out. All you can do is wait.

Of course, Dorothy gets her deus ex machina, the Witch her comeuppance. (My brother had to reassure me of this before I would come out of the bathroom and watch the rest). But that still remains one of the only truly horrific scenarios I can imagine: knowing that death is coming, and being powerless do anything but wait.

Which isn't a problem, unless you're human.

How's My Studying?

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. More than ever
the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for
what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.
---Rilke, Ninth Elegy

I've been reading the Duino Elegies most nights before going to sleep. I worked my way through them slowly. It might has well have been for the first time -- except for a few lines, I didn't remember much. My edition is bilingual, and every so often I'd flick my eyes to the left-hand side and scan for familiar words. Not many of them, but some.

I am in a strange place with my reading. I find myself reluctant to start anything new, particularly anything long. I've been reading through books I've read before, opening at random and just following a few lines. Or looking for marked passages. I've been meaning to start Independence Day for a week now, and I can never do it. Instead, I page through Rilke, Franzen, Kafka, Bernhard, Roubaud, Proust.

And I am in a strange place with my academic work. I feel I don't study enough, don't work hard enough. It's strange to have so many free hours. I probably shouldn't. According to my wall calendar, I am supposed to have a working thesis/hypothesis for one paper and a topic for another by tonight. I told myself that in order to compensate for the .... well, slowness of campus life that I'd throw myself into academics, but so far that hasn't happened. I'm not a hard worker.

I need a book with a tone to match my current state. Starting something new carries the prospect of failure, of wasted time, but really there's nothing to lose. And at the same time, I can't understand what's stopping me from finding solace in the books I already love

Anyway, that research topic....

Ae, well.

At the start of Art Matters, Peter de Bolla acknowledges the trickiness of defining the word “aesthetic.” He tries to spell out his meaning of the word from the outset:

What distinguishes affective or aesthetic experiences from others is the fact that they are occasioned by encounters with artworks. This proposes a mutual definition, so that what elicits aesthetic experience is an artwork and an artwork is defined as an object that produces aesthetic experience.

I consented to this definition as necessary to the rest of the book and moved on. Later, though, I felt forced to withdraw that consent.

De Bolla discusses artworks—painting, music, poetry—in such a variety of terms and interpretations that I could no longer figure out what the word “aesthetic” meant. He talks about enlightenment and knowing with Wordsworth, interpretation and intellectualism with Gould, and a plethora of other things, which began to render the a-word meaningless.

In the conclusion de Bolla returns to the theoretical underpinnings of the Introduction:

An aesthetic experience is made out of its own singularity. [….] Once again the paradox of the aesthetic raises its head. The aesthetic is both grounded and not grounded in the conceptual, both singular and universal, evaluative and descriptive. But I do not regard these difficulties and paradoxes as anything other than attempts to delimit the distinctiveness of the category of the aesthetic. It is precisely these paradoxes and difficulties that need further exploration and elaboration.

This, six pages from the end of the book. (And yes, he italicizes every “aesthetic” throughout). Delimit something that has only the vaguest of premises to begin with? I guess I just don’t see how this followed from what he had been doing before. It’s probably more due to confusion and lack of education on my part, to be honest, but it made for slow, dense reading. De Bolla’s analyses of his chosen artworks were fascinating, but I am still in the dark when it comes to aesthetics and forging my own responses to my own aesthetic experiences.

Hand in Hand

From Art Matters:

Thus to a greater degree than with the sister activities of listening and looking, reading is an interventionist activity: whether we like it or not, reading necessarily encompasses the making of meaning. Though it might seem logical to read a literary text before attending to an aesthetic response to it, in fact, this is impossible given that the reading and the response are interactive; that is, one develops in the shadow and in step with the other. An exploration of affective experiences of texts, therefore, must go hand in hand with the production or presentation of a "reading" or interpretation.

More Than Feeling: On Art Matters

I’ve just finished the chapter of Art Matters dealing with Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis. (The book has been slow going, as I’ve been occupying myself with other things; I also went away for the weekend and didn’t bring it with me). De Bolla gives a very detailed account of how to approach that work. “Newman’s canvases,” he writes, “required us to learn how to become comfortable with the notion that we must move from an initial blindness in the face of this art toward insight. We must work with out ‘mutism,’ not against it.” (Although becoming “comfortable” with it seems to defeat the purpose). Usually we ask, What does the painting represent? What does it mean? Instead, he tells us, we should be asking, What does this painting know?

De Bolla discusses the qualities of the work, compares it with others, weaves in Newman’s own statements and writings. I was a little puzzled. I couldn’t figure out how this was a specifically aesthetic approach or how it was applicable to anything but Vir Heroicus Sublimis. The discourse seemed to spring not only from experience, but from detailed research and study; odd, given the fact that he writes that knowing such things “is not a prerequisite of an aesthetic encounter. Very often, in fact, knowledge of this kind may block or prevent an affective experience, stifle or stunt the emergence of the art’s low, whispering voice.” How, I kept asking, is this approach any different?

In the end, though, he reveals his motives: this “intellectual” approach is an exercised designed to get one away from putting too much emphasis on feeling. (So often we judge art so much on gut emotional reaction). Feeling is only a “side-effect” of the aesthetic response:

I want to stress that “feeling” is not the only material I encounter there. Indeed, my affective or aesthetic experience is held in a more rarefied atmosphere than feeling, between the emotive sensation and cognition. I ask myself the question of knowing because by doing so I turn attention away from the purely sensate. And that question of knowing appears to me as a quality of the work itself.

Being moved is an entirely valid aspect of an experience, but not the only one. There’s nothing wrong with feeling; we can consider an art on other terms and still be moved. But we have to be prepared to look for more.

Vocabulary Matters

I've just begun a book by Peter de Bolla called Art Matters. It is essentially de Bolla's attempt to create a vocabulary for describing an aesthetic experience that would otherwise strike one dumb. By taking a closer look at three works by Barnett Newman, Glenn Gould, and Wordsworth, he sets out to describe what it is to be moved by a work of art. No small feat!

Hopefully, this will benefit my blogging so that I'm not always writing, "I don't know what to say about X" (a common response dubbed "mutism" in the book).

This is from the Introduction, where de Bolla summarizes various approaches to art:

In the philosopher Morris Weitz's term, art is an "open concept"--it must accomodate the permanent possibility of change, expansion, or novelty. Thus if one gives up the obsession with the need to answer the question "What is art?" -- that is, the insistence that the concept of "art" be a prerequisite for affective experience -- one is able to see that art is allowed extraordinary diversity in form, structure, and representational content. And this includes its own self-interrogation.

Whether or not de Bolla succeeds in what he's trying to do, I'm looking forward to the endeavor.

Eerie Proceedings

I've spent the past week reading more Kafka. Rather than read more short fiction I opted for The Trial, which I'd so far only read partially.

The first third of the novel was littered with marginalia circa 2002. Very embarrassing marginalia. Or maybe it was from my second partial reading of the novel the following year (I only made it a little bit farther that time). Either way, I was clearly influenced by the back copy and other random things I'd heard about Kafka's "prescience" (ie, how The Trial anticipates totalitarianism, the existentialist movement, and so on). Luckily, though, those scribbles were written in pencil, so I read with an eraser at close at hand. I'm trying not to think about what my opinion of myself as a reader in 2006 will be when I'm looking back from, say, 2010.

The Trial has the same disorienting, unsettling feeling as "The Judgment." SLB was kind enough to point out that "The Judgment" is key to Kafka's other works. Many of the same themes are at work, including the same ambiguity regarding guilt and innocence, if those terms are even valid. As the prison chaplain tells Joseph K., "The verdict is not suddenly arrived at; the proceedings only gradually merge into the verdict."

To quote the same character, "The right perception of any matter and a misunderstanding of the same matter do not wholly exclude each other. [....] [I]t is not necessary to accept everything as true, one must only accept it as necessary." I don't mean to imply that "anything goes," but the book seems unusually open, in the sense that it can be read in several ways. And while many of those readings might be "true," that openness is a necessary component of the novel. There is no revelation, no explanation. We are free to read it as we choose—and as with Joseph K., there’s something disturbing in that freedom.