Before getting into this month's entry for Ampersand, check out yesterday's entry, which I have now fixed so it's readable.
Ampersand: When art comes alive
Somewhere in Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis tells about the thrill that went
through him as a boy when he read the Norse myths and came upon the phrase,
"Baldur the brave is dead, is dead!" He mentions other times when he felt that
shock of joy; I was expecting him to write that he'd found a more potent joy in
his religion later in life, but somehow nothing he writes about the faith for
which he was famous ever matches the profundity of those moments of wild apostate
joy in his youth. Emily of New Moon and Anne of Green Gables get the same sort of
thrill ("the flash" and "the queer ache", respectively) from the unearthly beauty
of a moonlit landscape, which leads me to believe their mutual creator did
too.
Maybe that's just my subjective identification, because while I
have never found deep joy in a religion, I have felt -- haven't you? -- the wild
thrill of a few words that somehow strike just right, right at the heart of
things, that seem to hold the answers to secrets in their syllables. That nearly
physical sparkle down your spine. I've quoted several of them here before:
Kipling's "Something hidden. Go and find it." and Service's "Hear the challenge.
Learn the lesson. Pay the cost." There are many others: E.E. Cumming's "then
laugh, leaning back in my arms, for life's not a sentence / and death i think is
no parenthesis." Gordon Bok's "The stars are swinging slow / and the seas are
rolling easy, as they did so long ago." A couple of miscellaneous unknown quotes
stored in an old book of hand-copied poems somewhere in my library. I rarely get
stirred to the same depths by visual art -- but photos or images of the Moon, or
of Earth from space have been known to do it.
I'm not entirely sure
what does it for me, but moons and waters, unknown landscapes and most of all
wildness seem to play a big part. I think it must be different for others; I
imagine the perfect balance of a phrase or curve of a line, or an evocation of
untouched delicacy, or a portrait of deep love could be triggers for other people.
I wonder if this is the core of what art is supposed to do. I can appreciate
works, both verbal and visual, that don't give me that thrill, but not at the same
level. Maybe for a specific piece of art to really come alive for a specific
viewer there has to be that kick in the viscera. Maybe it can only be alive in
that sort of one-to-one relationship. Maybe that's what art is, but I doubt it.
Maybe that's what great art is: pieces that resound for a lot of people. Or maybe
not, but maybe it's more important for art to be alive than to be great in a more
conventional sense.