Further Punditry on the Nature of #@+*^!
as it Relates to the #@+*^!
of Art.
(here’s the link to
the first one:
As is almost always with the case with my little
manifestos, this part 2 of the part 1 of my musing about the wellsprings of Art
emerged from a two-way email confab with Reed Woodhouse, whose very fine mind always
prods mine (or so I fancy) to be a least little finer than it would otherwise be. But/and the
impulse in all this burrowing not so much into ‘what art is’ as where it comes
from in me very much feels native to me. As I fall more regularly into what W.H.
Auden I believe called “the habit of art” – which became the title of a play I
saw some years ago in London which detailed an encounter between him and Benjamin
Britten – a phrase by which I mean, as I regularly find myself doing my version
of what my mother did throughout her life – sit down daily at her drawing table
to paint – I more and more experience not as the product of discipline or even exactly
intention, but as something the animal of me insists upon, as biological as sex
or eating. It’s out of my wonder at and curiosity about this that I keep massaging
the skin of this animal to see what reactions I can get from it about what’s
going on in it. Odd to attempt to watch an act of creation you’re doing
yourself. But sort of riveting in a Jamesian way. (It’s what the James brothers
William and Henry did every day.)
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I have to keep the doors and windows wide
open on this all the way. The exciting thing for me has been to recognize more
fully than ever these days that the processes of attraction and selection and
applying whatever tools or skills I have to give them expression probably
characterize every moment of my thinking and feeling and expressive life. They
seem to me now in no way different (except in degree) from what I bring to bear
on a drawing or poem or email or musical effusion on the fiddle or singing a
song than they are when I open my eyes and look out the window in the morning:
all are acts at least of proto-creation, the looking-out-the-window part only
proto- because it hasn’t yet found expression.
.
To me this doesn’t level all perception and
apprehension of the world into some meaningless undifferentiated mass of plasma
nor does it suggest that there aren’t different degrees of noticing, liking or
disliking what we apprehend, nor is something we’ve good reason to call
intention uninvolved in what we may decide to do, say, write, perform or talk
on the phone about it (though ‘intention’ to me remains loaded with the
imponderable), and certainly it doesn’t address the realms of achieving
excellence in that expression, indeed discerning for ourselves what excellence
even means, or the specificity of what skills are needed to achieve it: that
is, it doesn’t explore critical thinking: it’s really just about what accounts
for art happening at all - but not only art. We exercise a majority of these
discernments any time we take in anything.
.
That’s the excitement for me, which
seems simple and profound: to recognize that human sentience in the very nature
of how it understand things and expresses them employs a heterogeneity of often
exquisitely honed responsive abilities the achievement of art depends on. We’re
hardwired for it. I can see how this might seem fatuously self-evident (I hear
echoes of HG Wells excoriating the late Henry James’ grandiose smallnesses),
but it’s rich stuff to me.
.
I even think it’s fun! - although I
probably haven’t made it sound very fun. In fact I may well have created the
horrible jolly bunny you see here that would make a child cry.
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