Dreams of Reality - A Dialogue about Art
Catherine
http://samvak.tripod.com/culture.html
This letter constitutes a permission to reprint or mirror any and all of the
materials mentioned or linked to herein subject to appropriate credit and
linkback.
AUTHOR BIO:
Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and
After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is a columnist for Central
Europe Review, United Press International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor
of mental health and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory,
Suite101 and searcheurope.com.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government of
Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com
Contact Info: pa...@unet.com.mk; vak...@link.com.mk
Dreams of Reality - The View, and the Point of View
A Dialogue about Art - Excerpts
Between: Roberto Calvo Macias and Dr. Sam Vaknin
Roberto:
What's the meaning of it? Its sense? Why did that Altamira Cave man paint
those animals, Why? For magical purposes? as a religious act? What was his
proposition? To communicate his personal views? Was he mad, as Vincent, did
he see something different, that others didn't? Did he see animals in the
abstract? was he the first person to think in the abstract, was he the first
man? Was it a kind of pastime, a diversion, a game? Moreover, can we measure
it? are there good and bad artists? What defines a great work of art? The
recognition of the public? In which way, its quantity or its quality?
I have always been a bit of a dreamer, with a facility to imagine in the
abstract, but years ago, when I began to read some poets, and other writers
like Borges, Jünger, Neil Gaiman, something strange changed my view. What
happened to my eyes? Why did my sight get so clear? Was it something
mystical, the beginning of madness? What is the dividing line?
I don't know if it is schizophrenia, god's gift or some other matter.
Probably I am mad, but what does it matter with ART? Where is the
relationship between order, hard work, etc. and the Quality of ART? Was
Vincent a calvinist man?
Sam: Absolutely. Read his letters to Theo. Also study the last two years -
especially the last two months of his life. The "madder" he got - the more
diligent, industrious, hard working and disciplined he became.
Roberto: Which ones of this list, all of them manifestly anarchs, unstable
and inconsistent, do you consider not to be great artists?
Thomas de Quincey, Baudelaire, Theophile Gautier, Byron, Orson Welles,
Ernest Hemingway, Ken Kesey, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Mozart, Isaac
Albeniz, Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, John Lenon, Camarin, Michaelangelo,
Rimbaud, Gaudi, Dali, Jimi Hendrix, Federico Garcia Lorca, Holderlin, Woody
Allen.
Sam: This is quite a list. Still I think that it misses the point. Art, by
definition, is the surrender of the anarchical spirit to the dictatorship of
the format. A painter is limited to his rectangular piece of cloth or
cardboard, to his paints, to the maxims of his language, however private.
Art is the sad documentation of the capitulation of form to matter, of the
subordination of the ethereal to the material. It is a white flag in the
ever raging war between the eye of the spirit and the eye of the flesh. Even
the most prodigious and insane of writers must sit down, face the sharply
limited piece of paper, write in reasonably straight lines and succumb to
the most basic rules of grammar, of syntax, of meaning, of alliterative or
other resonance. Even the most deranged and non-calvinistic composer can
use, as a maximum, the dodecaphonic scale. This is what I meant by order and
discipline. They are imposed, inherently, in the very choice to engage in a
work of art. Working habits are a natural extension of these spatial and
temporal constraints.
Roberto: What about the work of art? for example, what about Dr. Jekill and
Mrs. Hide? Is it a masterpiece, though it was written in just one weekend
under the influence of great amounts of cocaine? Are the images of E. A.
Poe, mercurial, abysmal, mathematical as they are, unfit to describe the
century? Doesn't his Maelström mean anything to you, apart from a horrific
picture?
Is it that my satanic images are just that? Were Michelangelo's later
sculptures worse than his first ones, unfinished as they are? Mention to me,
if you please, great works of art from the Calvinistic land: Le
Confederation Helvetique. I love this country, my aunt is Swiss, but what
great art works have come from Switzerland?
Sam: Art is the picture of the spirit shackled, furiously battling, striving
to unchain itself, rebelling against the form imposed on it, mutinously
attempting to reflect the world - no, to BE the world - with all its chaotic
pain, convulsive features, horrific beauty. It is the spirit of God floating
above the abyss, an act of creation, as detailed in Genesis. It is precisely
this unnerving, unsettling, terrifying, melancholy, raging contrast that a
great work of art makes. Order and discipline applied to order and
discipline yield government regulations and other gobbledegook. Order and
discipline applied to tumult, chaos, havoc, disorder, anarchy, decadence
(ultimately to death) - yield art. You must not confuse the method with the
content, the reagent with the substrate. For where do we find greater order
and discipline than in the martial arts (they earned their title - "arts" -
not in vain)? And where do we find more devastation, maelstrom, turbulence
and disintegration of form than in war, their subject matter?
Roberto: If Art came from childhood, why must it require order,
discipline... Is it not that every child is a little anarchist? Is that not
true, that a child is like a terra incognita, plenty of anarchy, great views
of the upper lands? Why should wild horses be less beautiful than domestic
ones? Are we not talking about Beauty?
Sam: I am evidently less a romantic than you, Roberto, for I see no art in
children as I see no art in primitive people (in the psychological sense,
not in the historical or anthropological meanings of the word "primitive").
I see none in childhood but fear and anxiety, egotism and the curiosity to
serve it, cruelty and malignancy. Indeed, we grow out of it the same as we
pull ourselves out of quicksands. Children are incapable of being artists.
They are manipulative Narcissists. Forever in the throes of the Big Bang of
their personalities, embroiled in searing heat, unable to see a thing for
the brightness of their own formation. To be an artist, one needs to die a
little, to experience entropy, to be as barren as those rocks of our moon.
One needs to combine that primordial fire with the cold formalisms of death.
After all, our works of art are dead: letters are dead on dead, acidifying
paper, paints decay, cloth frays and the greatest sculptures turn back to
stone. The mystical tradition of the Jews (the Cabbala) says that the first,
most comprehensive and hitherto best, act of creation involved divine light
which was poured into vessels (again, the incoherent into the orderly).
These vessels - owing to a cosmic accident - broke.
The light dispersed, attached to the splinters of the shattered vessels.
These are our souls: a measure light, a measure the mundane, a piece of
broken vessel. No, beauty has nothing to do with it. Anyhow it is in the eye
of the beholder, a matter of judgement, of epoch, of cultural context, of
tastes, too relative for art. We are not talking about beauty - but about
the law. Creation is the law - art one of its manifestations. In its cold
indifference lies the beauty that you are seeking. This is the maddening
thing, this apathy towards our individual fates, as though we were its
slaves, not its creators. This is what makes us children once more, awed by
omnipotence and omniscience. This awe lasts until we overcome this
sensation, dare to be Gods again and to create, dare to engage in art. Read
Kafka, the most sublime and perfect of all writers.
Roberto: Admittedly, if we mix that powerful imagination, anarchy, with a
superior order, then we surely will encounter the superior works of art:
Shakespeare, Cervantes, Velazquez, Goya, Beethoven, Ernst Junger, Borges,
Goethe, Leonardo, Brunelleschi. But it is not a necessary condition.
Art does not depend on anything. It has nothing to do with order or anarchy,
with politics, with technical conditions, with perfection... with nothing.
None of all this affects Art. It deals with the deepest reality. With the
sense that is hidden beyond the Wall of Time. With the secret of human
beings, their inextricable condition of being in the middle between matter
and energy. That is what touches our heart like a knife when we see a
superior work of Art: it's a promise, a shared secret. It is the View of
Something, that artist, going up the Wall of Time , sharing this with us. It
doesn't have to do with the "mundane", it's just its opposite, the other
side of the coin. It's the view which transcends "materia".
You said that feeling is incommunicable, but there is a kind of collective
memory- aka Jungian archetypes. This seems quite correct. And, of course, it
's a plastic land, with degrees. But there are leaps - for instance, the
genius. There exist some basic points: the mystical, the religious, the
feeling of art. This is the reason for all the persecutions: Christians,
Albigenese, Eleusians, Jews, Buddhists, Palestinians, Macedonians, etc...
Here, sadly, cold alienated facts contravene you. Mystic questions are very
near the line that separates human beings and causes massacres.
When you talk about drugs, you talk from the mundane side of things. You can
talk about drug-addicts, their problems, you can talk about the effects of
drugs on humans but you should never talk about drugs. The Shu´ar men,
commonly known as Jibaros, or the head-shrinkers, experience time completely
differently from Western people. It is impossible to explain it in brief, it
has to do with a change in the direction of the flow of time, with dreams
and future-past. But, one of the consequences is that they don't know the
meaning of luck. And, if we believe anthropologists, it seems to be
impossible for them to understand its meaning. Same goes for drugs, or the
mystical experience.
Art can make possible this miracle, to search deeper inside us to meet these
unknown feelings provoked by the artist. To look below our surface, to take
stock of childhood and its innocent anarchy, to access collective memories
and dreams, where the material is already indivisible.
This, and no other thing is, if we may say so, what defines Art. The
capability of getting trough matter to show us what is behind it. Here,
there is no possible agreement. Not to see Art that way is not to see Art,
period. It's like music, if you don't dig what it is about, that
inextricable thing: "the real thing", then, it's like eating only the skin
of a banana, letting go of its flesh. Here lies my fanaticism, inasmuch as
we all are fanatics: I do believe in Art.
Sam: This was a long dissertation in favour of the possibility to
communicate from the vantage points of private languages. On the one hand,
you admit that we are all trapped in our private hells, unable to
communicate with each other except through massacres motivated by atavistic
collective archetypes. You say that some experiences (drugs, for one) can
not be communicated to the uninitiated. Than, in a magnificent reversal, you
say that Art is the communicative bridge. It is through it that we, poor,
isolated, humans can march to meeting points where a deeper sort of
information is provoked by the artist in the art consumer. Moreover, you
seem to claim that Art contains both a functional sample of the world and
the rules of language (of connecting objects to its idiom). In other words,
you seem to be saying that art is monovalent, it will provoke the same
emotional reactions in its consumers regardless of their identity. This is
to say that Art is a universal language. Wittgenstein said as much about
natural languages. He denied the possibility that private languages with
privileged access exist. He wrote that even the speaker of a private
language will not be able to understand it. Your version is softer: we all
do have semi-private languages and a modicum of privileged access. But Art
is the great dictionary which contains the vocabulary of the human
condition. Trapped as we are between the spirit and the flesh, between
energy and matter, angels and demons, heaven and the hell which is our
lives - Art comes to our help. It bandages our wounds, it talks to us in the
ancient, unintelligible sounds of our
collective archetypes, it soothes us as our mothers did. It then continues
to offer to us the possibility to communicate with each other through its
objects, really through the person (or shall I say, persona?) of the artist.
Art, therefore, to you, is a liberating act. It breaks through the glass
containers of our very private existence which otherwise cannot be
communicated benignly. I must say that I share your views with one
modification, introduced by the "scientist" in me: there is no way of
ascertaining that Art works.
That Art provokes emotions is undeniable. That it, therefore, must be
connected to our private languages (=largely, our emotions) follows. To
interact with our private languages it must gain access to what hitherto has
been a shrine accessed by a priesthood order of one, ourselves. Art
demolishes the privileged access maxim. Still, can we be sure that it MEANS
the same to all its worshippers? Of course not. Rather it would be safer to
assume that an object of art would mean different things to different
people. Art resonates with our private languages precisely because it is a
private language (of the artist). The affinity provokes empathy and the
latter is misinterpreted as understanding. Art is as unintelligible as any
other private language. Its relationship to the emotions that it evokes in
its beholder - is equal to the relationship between a trigger pulled and a
wounded, aching soldier. It resounds, it reverberates through us, in the
process wounding us because it reminds us how IMPOSSIBLE it is to
communicate, how absurd our existence is, how LONELY we are, how privileged
our access is to a language which even we do not fully grasp or understand.
Yes, we are sealed off from ourselves as well. This is what we discover
through Art. The echoes of our very own languages perishing in the caverns
of our minds.
**********************************************************
150 articles and essays on current issues in philosophy by the same author -
available!
http://samvak.tripod.com/culture.html
This letter constitutes a permission to reprint or mirror any and all of the
materials mentioned or linked to herein subject to appropriate credit and
linkback.
MSRogala
Catherine
news:20011230014350...@mb-ba.aol.com...
> uh. aren't you on the WRONG newsgroup??
I didn't realize I was forcing you to read my posts - I thought that
EVERYONE had me killfiled - I guess not.
Since you asked, there are MANY points and values discussed in Dr. Vaknin's
articles that directly relate to RAMD and drum corps discussions. I
certainly can see where well-intentioned people might disagree with that -
because it is the REFUSAL of well-intentioned people to see these very
things that are disabling much of today's activity.
But here's one specific instance - Ken Mazur's points about art and
personality are discussed BY AN EXPERT in all these pieces - from a
narcisstic perspective, and the effects on groups and individuals. Further,
there are discussions ALL THE TIME about whether or not today's drum corps
is art. Is it art because a political faction and certain big names TELL us
that it is? Or can we go to some experts and learn to think and reason for
ourselves and judge the criteria? I argue for the latter.
I'm quite certain that there are more than enough intentionally aware people
who know very well why these articles are DEAD ON to this activity - because
they continue to back themselves into their corners.
Keep reading - or not - MSRogala. Your choice.
-- Catherine