Art is love

There is something quite wrong with my undertaking to write this essay. For imagine yourself, dear reader, standing at a bus-stop and casually awaiting for the bus to take you home. You notice the bus approaching and stopping – so far everything quite as usual – and with due confidence, resulting from having performed this action an immeasurable number of times, you mount the bus while already estimating in your head the time it will take you to get home. Now a rather unforeseen catastrophe (as is normally the case with catastrophes) befalls you – the driver seems bent on not closing the door, and for some reason he begins to sing. Even though the situation is imaginary, I believe the reader feels indignant at the impertinence of this fairy-driver. The passengers become quite irritated and one of them finally loses her temper and chooses to continue her journey afoot. I pray the reader imagines that the driver sings all the time the above takes place. Finally the words he utters become comprehensible, and the reader clearly perceives that they are the names of all the bus-stops the bus is supposed to reach before reaching its destination. Very curious indeed. Losing temper, the reader approaches the feckless driver and asks him what is the reason for his acting in such a strange manner. To the reader’s sure amusement, the driver asks him whether he wishes to get off at the next stop, which is, according to his song, only a mile or so away.

And so is the matter with any writing on analysis of art – an attempt comparable with taking the reader to his bus-stop by singing a song about driving the bus and stopping in due moment to inform the reader that we have arrived.

Why thus, should I bother with such an impossible subject at all? I think that, as C.S. Lewis said, when the civilisation has progressed down the wrong path, the real progress consists of tracing our steps as quickly as possible, and as doing so is a process spanned in time and space, it cannot really be represented in any art proper, therefore I had to resort to such means of communicating my thoughts as possible – that is without expressing them artistically. This does not, however, entail, that the only permissible format of this essay would be the one of a philosophical analysis, far from that. I shall venture to convince the reader of my point in an impressionistic manner, by suggesting outlines of ideas rather than vi-visecting them before his eyes. Let me then proceed to my main, and only point – not to bore the reader any further with this already long, and surely tiresome – but in my estimation necessary, introduction.

I will do best to follow in the footsteps of all the luminaries of our age, and present the reader with the entire content of my work, employing words of an infinitely more skilled communicator, and the continue to explain what these words mean, as one explains, in a two hundred page-long dissertation a meaning of an one-line joke.

So we can shout joyfully after Leibniz, “Calculamus!”. The point I wish to expound on, speaking crudely, as one must when one comments on Shakespeare, Art is love. It will certainly not escape the reader’s attention that there exists a Christian adage that “God is Love”. The first distinction we have to make is, therefore, the one between love and Love, as I am rather certain that we would like to avoid equating God with Art. Allow me then to suggest that, despite our using the same word to denote the phenomena in question, they differ to a degree which actually makes mistaking them an impossibility. For notice that Love equated with God is understood (or better, intuited as, because it would be nonsense to posit an understanding of something which equals God) best as a choice of metaphysical quality, disregarding vicissitudes thrown at lovers by fate, choice best described as willing the good of the other, as other. Meanwhile, love (I use lowercase purposefully) is an ephemeral, though no less valuable or human for that reason, embodiment of our highest enchantment with someone or something, as it reveals itself to the senses, in other words as it is perceived aesthetically. Thus, the former can be thought of only after the exclusion of the immediate senses, and the latter only when the sensuous is given primacy. This is not quite right, as I will argue that there exists a proper love which by its very nature gets transformed into metaphysical, but let us use the above distinction for now.

Having cleared the question of equating God with Art out of the way, we can actually proceed to adducing evidence for the statement that Art is love being true. That is in any case what the reader in all probability expects us to do. I hope it will not prove too much of a disappointment when I write that I have no such evidence to offer to the reader, only intuition to convey as if through the smoke-screen of words.

Firstly, let me say that I believe that love, as an act of admiration, is also an act of experiencing gratitude for the existence of the object of our admiration. Though some may object that gratitude is a metaphysical category, hence incompatible with my previous ‘definition’ of love, I will assure the reader that it can exist perfectly well in a purely aesthetic habitat, but still keeping its sensuous character. To convince himself of this being true, I suggest the reader tries acknowledging the fact that he has a roof over his head and a bed in which he can rest, and notices that the first thought springing to his mind is his contentment with that being the case, which instantaneously seeks an object to which it can be grateful for this state of affairs. When the contentment does not find an object for gratitude, and it does not when the thing one is grateful for does not depend fully an an effort of some human being – which, when one thinks of it, never does) – then it undergoes a metamorphosis through which it gets positioned at the intersection of the aesthetic and the metaphysical.

Having established that, we will proceed as a mathematician does when he wishes to prove that x equals y, but does not know how to compare x and y directly. In such a situation he comes up with some z which is in a more convenient relation to both x and y, and thus admits comparison with them. Then showing that x equals z and z equals y finishes the proof.

How is then the claim that Art is gratitude to be understood? Let me offer the following explanation. All good Art has the property, as Arthur Rubinstein noted in the case of music, that it possesses certain necessity about it, so that once an individual perceives it, he cannot imagine the World in which it would not exist. He cannot un-behold it if I may express it so. But what is this necessity if not – just as in the case of an scientific discoveries, which upon grasping we feel to be very natural, quite straightforwardly implied by the evidence indeed, and yet a genius is required to establish them – certainty that the true origin of the piece of art of an idea is not external to us, but rather very much internal – that we imagined it well before we have behold it in its physical form? The reader will of course duly note that it is therefore an illusion – for if the piece of art had been imagined by us prior to encountering it in the ‘real’ world, why had we not created it ourselves if we had found it so pleasing? I believe the crux of the matter to be the fact that it is indeed an illusion on the part of the beholder to claim that the piece, in its entirety, resided in his mind all along – it is not however an illusion that its aesthetic essence had. An analytically-minded reader might obviously  force me to provide the definition of an aesthetic essence, but I necessarily have to disappoint him gravely, for I do not possess one, and for that matter I actually believe one cannot even exist. The closest metaphor I can offer is the Kirkegaardian idea of how the overture of Don Giovanni is its aesthetic essence, yet is not a medley or a compression of its later music. Thus, I believe every human being to unconsciously compose an overture to a perceived piece of art and claim that this had been residing in his imagination long before the act of perception has taken place. Perhaps this feeling of a long period of time passing between the ‘overture’s’ creation and sensuous experience is once more just an illusion – it might be so, but it is of no great importance for now, and in some sense refers to Jung’s idea of art representing the collective unconscious. What matters is that the beholder becomes – through this process – an artist himself (although painting with his soul’s mind rather than with a brush) and instead of a single, physical piece of art we obtain two – the icon, physical, and the Overture – stored in the imagination. I would like to stress that for the beholder one cannot exist without the other. 

And now a very interesting process follows. Due to the relationship described above, where the Overture cannot live on its own without the icon, and the icon is unintelligible without an Overture, they form a bond which cannot be described on the part of the beholder in any other way than infinite gratitude, yet a gratitude which is grounded in the knowledge of one’s own part in the forming of this relationship. Thus the person falls in love with the piece of art as an act of gratitude for giving birth to his Overture. Notice however that this love is no base enchantment with the skill of the artist, or the amount of novelty included by him – quite the contrary. 

As this point is of utmost importance, let me illustrate it with the following story from Exodus, which – I believe – should be well-known to you. I do not undertake to unearth all the possible meanings which the story can assume (I am obviously not capable of this, and I think that, due to its profundity, the story will yield new meanings for every generation thus remaining impossible to fully comprehend to any one human being) but rather bring to the reader’s attention its particular aspect. Recall then, that in the 32nd chapter of the Book of Exodus, while Moses speaks with God high up the mountain, the Israelites decide to make themselves a golden calf to be worshiped as a god who brought them out of Egypt. It is important that they cast the animal out of the melted earrings of the women of Israel – ie. they invest their wealth into it, and  then Aaron ‘fashions it with a tool’ – ie. invests his artistic skill in it. Through this effort they create their gods, who – they claim – have led them out of Egypt, the only logical conclusion to it being that the descendants of Jacob had ended their slavery through their own actions. Now, they place these idols – abstractions of their own self-love and intoxication with their own power as they perceive it – in an altar in front of which they perform sacrifices and proceed to a feast. The idol becomes the focus of their attention, and certainly possesses a number of interesting aesthetic features which God cannot possess by virtue of not having a shining golden body. The only problem which I hope the reader perceives is the deep self-illusion of the power which the Israelites abstracted from themselves and invested the calf with, and – most importantly – the fact that the calf is, despite its gleaming surface, unquestionably dead, reflecting duly the spiritual death of its ‘creators’. And so is with every art which humans create for their own glory, especially in our times when this glory takes a form of a scorn of the world as the creation of God, and an implication that the mankind, finally freed from the shackles of faith (and more recently, reason) can decide to discard the very notion of beauty and good, and consider art in a godly-like manner, above any ethical considerations, as purely interesting, or entertaining, acts of its ‘creation’. Beware, for if you partake of this, yours will also be the lot of the spiritual death – as we know from the very first chapters of Genesis that the price of the illusion of godliness is unendurable consciousness of lifelessness. 

It is precisely proportional to the degree in which it admits creating an Overture, that is to the degree in which it contains or conveys to the senses this beautiful material from which imagination can weave its perception of the aesthetic essence. This material has to be native to the beholder’s mind, in other words it has to express what the mind can only vaguely imagine. To say it differently, it has to be the Beauty embodied, both ennobled by the effort of the artist, and diminished as a mere approximation of the true Beauty. And this is precisely the reason for my calling the piece of art the icon – its main purpose is to point to something beyond itself.

This process is naturally ennobling to the beholder, as it provides his mind with ingredients necessary for crafting his own experience of appreciation of that to which the icon points to. It also ennobles the piece of art itself insofar as it remains a humble servant of the Beauty it represents.

And so the beholder becomes grateful for the existence of the piece of art which has taught him (or better, intimated to him how to teach himself) to properly cherish that of which the art is an icon. However, should the piece of art be splendid and, which is a necessary though not sufficient condition for its being so, that to which it points be of noblest nature, the beholder will also realise that there exists a certain problem with it. Namely that it is transitive, ephemeral. Its almost infinite beauty is the cause of his despair as he notices that it will someday inevitably perish, that guiding icon of the Beauty. For observe that should the piece be simply ‘realistic’ in that it would contain slightest intimation of ugliness or evil as the fabric of our world, the beholder would not like to stay in its presence forever. However, if it does none of such kind such a wish arises in his soul, and, almost simultaneously, so does the knowledge of the impossibility of such a wish And here a number of things can happen, as the outcome of the whole process depends on the individual’s disposition towards the Worlds, and his spiritual attitude.

Allow me to bring this essay to a conclusion by reminding you of the ending of Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. I warn the reader that what follows will mention parts of the plot which might spoil the reader’s enjoyment of the book if he has not read it yet. However, as I believe that the principal value of the work lies not in its plot par excellence, I encourage the reader, even if not acquainted with this novel, not to skip this last paragraph.

So the sad end of Spandrell is recounted to us, a debauched youth, lost in a search for ever more darker means to entertain himself in a world where he could find no purpose to continue living, when he asks friends of his, Rampion and Mary, both quite against the idea of the existence of the metaphysical, let alone of God as Christians understand it, to accompany him in listening to Beethoven’s Quartet op. 132 (may I suggest that the reader listens to it at his earliest convenience) which Spanderll claims to be the proof of the existence of soul and God. In the end, despite being ‘almost convinced’, Rampion decides against that being the case, as he thinks that would be ‘too good’, ‘Not human. If it lasted, you’d ceased to be a man. You’d die.’ Hopefully the reader notices the parable with Christian claim that while living in this World, no human being can really see God as this would prove too much for him, and necessarily lead to death. And so let me end with this question – in an era where ever more young people decide against their life having any meaning – would it not be desirable to have, instead of currently popular aesthetics of ugliness conveyed under the guise of ‘the interesting’, artists who, like Beethoven, would convey to Spandrells of our age, through their art as a vehicle for gratitude and enjoyment of God’s creation, that the meaning is to be found right before their eyes, should they choose to finally open them properly?