Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Art or Guessing Game?

I have no time for the so-called “poetry” that is nothing more than a guessing game, i.e., “here’s an incoherent pile of words, now you try to guess what I mean”.

It’s astonishing how many people buy hook-line-and-sinker into the tripe that goes: “You should never ASK what a work of art MEANS, because that just shows you have no powers of appreciation and want somebody to hand you the meaning on a silver platter.” Thus, so-called artists get away with foisting no-talent rubbish on the public… a blank canvas except for a red spot in the middle… a “sculpture” consisting of, say, a thousand wads of chewed bubble gum smushed together in a blob… or a poem that goes, say:

l IF e it
IS
4398279468
it?

And we’re supposed to “ooh” and “ah” at the iconoclastic genius… yawn….

It’s really amazing how MUCH can be produced when none of it has to mean anything or requires any true “art” (effort, finesse, creative tension) AND the public is too chicken to stand up and recognize that the emperor has no clothes on.

Genuine art can STAND UP to explanation. That’s precisely what MAKES art more than a guessing game. If the only thing that’s meaningful about a work of art is “What was the artist THINKING of?”, it implies that, if indeed you could get said artist to TELL you, the work itself would have ipso facto exhausted its raison d’etre. That hardly speaks well of the work, does it! But if you research, for example, any number of the great orchestral works of the 19th century, you will find that the composers weren’t shy in the least about explaining in great detail what their works meant to them, what concepts and feelings provoked and generated their creations—never, apparently, considering that they were somehow ruining their own art by doing so, or catering to “philistines”. Indeed, I imagine that, had anyone responded with, “Well, now that you told us, you’ve RUINED it!”, that’s the person who’d have richly earned the epithet “philistine.”

I remember a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon from years back, where Calvin invites Hobbes to play a guessing game. Hobbes agrees. Calvin says, “Okay, I’m thinking of a number. You guess what it is.” Hobbes looks slightly ferhoodled at this notion, but gives it the old college try: “Uh… two?” “Nope! Guess again!” “Er… 849?” “Nope! Guess again! Isn’t this fun?!” Hobbes gives the audience that Oliver Hardy stare of exasperation and walks away. Calvin stares after him in perplexity and concludes that Hobbes just doesn’t like to play games.

The analogy to my topic here is obvious!

Now, if the game had been, “Guess the number I’m thinking of between 1 and 5, and if you guess right on the first try, you get a Snickers bar,” well, then, there’s some form and definition, parameters and also a motivation. But just, “Guess what number I’m thinking of…”, means, “Try to read my mind… simply because I like it when people try to read my mind… because it makes me feel my mind is important….” Sorry, but nobody’s THAT important. And to invite people to do that implies more than subtly that you doubt they themselves have anything more significant to do with their lives than to stand around trying to guess what you’re thinking. In art, that’s called disrespecting an audience (not to mention thinking far more of yourself than is healthy). It’s precisely what’s going on when the painter, asked what his red spot in the middle of a blank canvas means, sneers, “If I need to EXPLAIN it to you… then it’s probably not worth it….” Well, I’d have to agree on the “not worth it” part—indeed, nothing about the spot on the canvas is “worth it”--but I imagine his main reason for not explaining is, there’s nothing there TO explain, and admitting it blows his cover.

Back to poetry…. When the poet isn’t AFRAID to be comprehensible (which means, having something to say and respecting his audience enough to let them hear it), and at the same time is a master of the art form itself, the result can be as shattering as any great piece of music.
The art form is a fascinating one, aimed at transmitting vivid concepts with the most economical and aesthetically effective use of language. Reading an extended work—like, for instance, Paradise Lost—demands real commitment, patience and “two ears”, i.e., an ear for the content and an ear for the form… and perhaps a third ear that synthesizes the two into a single experience.

At the moment, I’m reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso); I’m in the final book now. Dante was, in his own way, an iconoclast (I don’t mind “iconoclasts” if they actually represent SUBSTANCE, and not simply “nothing” in place of “something”), daring to produce his life’s major work in Italian rather than the expected Latin. Moreover, I think I’m accurate in saying he invented the particular poetic form used in the Divine Comedy, i.e., the “terza rima” form, by which the rhyming end-words follow this pattern: A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, etc. Sayers was very ambitious, some might have said crazy, in setting her mind not only to translate the “sense” of Dante but actually to reproduce the “terza rima” form in her English version.

(I remember, by the way, reading a PROSE translation of the Inferno when I was in ninth grade—which strikes me now as utterly bizarre—and that I really liked it—which strikes me as even bizarrer!)

The thing about poetry that requires patience—or, at least, ONE of the things that require patience—is its syntactical freedom (freedom in word-order). The verbs can come in FRONT of the subjects; the adjectives can come AFTER the nouns; the direct object can come in FRONT of the verb, etc. What’s funny is how we accept such “non-English” under the guise of poetry when we’d immediately reject it as “ordinary speech”:

Lilies three gave she me

Here are the opening two triplets from the 10th canto of Dante’s Paradiso in Sayers’s translation. The order of words and concepts defies the “ordinary” pattern of English, though not as radically as “Lilies three gave she me”!

The uncreated Might which passeth speech,
Gazing on His Begotten with the Love
That breathes Itself eternally from each,
All things that turn through mind and space made move
In such great order that without some feel
Of Him none e’er beheld the frame thereof.

In “regular talk”, what this passage is saying is:
The uncreated Power (God, specifically the Father, Whose Being cannot be expressed in human language), as an outgrowth of His contemplating the Son in the love that ceaselessly flows between Them, has launched everything that exists, whether physical or “abstract”, into motion so exquisitely that nothing created can ever truly be perceived without some consciousness of God Himself.

To appreciate poetry means taking the time to think out WHAT is being said, and then go back and enjoy, dive into, the powerfully “aesthetic” WAY in which the poet said it, because his/her “way” of saying it has also, in the process, created new, indeed multiple, levels of meaning.

I think it is this multiplicity of meaning inherent in all genuinely great art, and the fact that no one ELSE can discover all those meanings FOR you, or create YOUR entire experience of the work—I think it is THIS that, on a cringingly nebbish, humbug-ish level, the makers of vapid, uncreative, just-stand-there-and-guess “art” are trying to capitalize on, to use as a kind of weapon to fend off all uncomfortable inquiry: “Art has MANY meanings, so don’t DARE ask me what it means!” Well, dear “artist”… if art, as you say, has “many meanings”, then surely you wouldn’t ruin our experience of your work by suggesting one? At least to give us a start? Particularly when this… thing you’ve made says NOTHING to ANYBODY? To argue that “art has many meanings” is no compelling reason for us to assume that this bit of… well, NOTHING that you’ve slapped together means… SOMETHING! It wasn't the little boy who called the emperor naked who was the “philistine”.