D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• False idea: when we have the word we have the thing. • The meaning of a thing is implicit in its being. • Poetry in languages we don’t understand. Sound patterns as “hieroglyphs of spiritual experience.” • Our vulnerability to the word-trap, and our mental chitchat.• Making art out of words. How is it done? • The unsayable, and the monkey mind. • Epiphanies, and James Joyce’s “Eucharistic metaphor.” • Great art and the sanctity of the everyday world. • Shelley and “the film of our familiarity.” The web of our preconceptions, categorizations and prejudices. • The “mist and veil of words.” • The search for “what the work is saying.” James Elkins and “the persistent, senseless silence of images.” • Non-verbal thinking. Artists as “mentally androgynous.” • The idea that interpretation is “transfigurative.” Duchamp and his aporia. The love of riddles. • Words taken from theology into art theory. • "Artists’ talks.” Remedy for this: back to mimesis? • Insistence that talk about art must refer to the flood of earlier academic art talk.

[The poet's] is a labor which undertakes to ‘know’ the world not by exegesis

or demonstration or proofs, but directly, like apple in the mouth.

[Archibald MacLeish, quoted in Rollo May, The Courage to Create p 89]

If you try to name the sensations that stories deliver, you find yourself with the sort of terms that (if you were a college teacher) you would write “vague” or “ugh” next to when you saw them in a paper: a pang, a shiver, a mental click, or what you might call, (if you were a college student) a general sense of “Whoa”.…You know it when you feel it.…

The difficulty of putting into words what a story produces is part of the point. The story is words; the effect is wordless, or, at best, Whoa.

[Luis Menand, The New Yorker, 12/1/03 p 105]

Student: “The line of hills across the valley, and the clouds above—are not these also a part of the Great Buddha?”

Master: “Yes, of course. But it is a shame to say so.”

[Traditional Buddhist story]

A language is clearly a device of astonishing precision and flexibility, and all languages, in their broad variety, have fundamental characteristics in common, as we have seen. It is more difficult to name precisely what languages can do, beyond saying that languages are tools for communication. Words are sound-symbols (which we can transpose to written symbols) for things and actions, ideas and feelings, and for the characteristics of things, ideas, actions, and feelings. But in combination—in all the infinite ways possible in a great language—words can make magic. We can imply, and refer indirectly; we can give nuances and resonances, not only to the things we can name but to connections and memories, and to sensory, emotional, and imaginative experiences that have no name in our language. They may have names in other languages: my favorite instance of this is the Japanese word for the particular quality of the silence when the disappearing boom of a great bell can no longer be heard. (I don’t know the word, but its very existence is reassuring. It means other people care.) Each word occurs in a kind of aura of possible reference and connection, and its combination with other words produces harmonies and dissonances of meaning as well as of sound.[1]

The analogy to sounds in music or to colors in paint is obvious. Yet words can be defined, we can know what they indicate; it is this which makes them useful, but we are constantly tempted to believe that when we have the word (or in another symbol system, the number) we have the thing, the reality, the “meaning.” We don’t. Words point to; they are not. And yet, paradoxically, they also are—they have shape, sound, character; they are themselves.

Musical sounds are also themselves, as paint is itself, and the moving human body or the river or the tree is itself. The meanings of things are implicit in their being, and vary according to their context within relationship, as do the meanings of words. When we see a red paint sample we don’t feel endangered, although to us red “means” danger (while to the Chinese it “means” good luck). The word “tiger” doesn’t usually frighten us, but in tiger country it might. The fabulous complexity of all this being and meaning, and the ability of good writing to express some of it, is apparent in this paragraph describing the Chopin Preludes:

Many of the Preludes are very short—just one page of music. A few are even shorter. But their landscape is marked with the euphoria and horror of the sublime. Prelude #7, andantino, in E Major, for example, is only sixteen measures long. It is of surpassing sweetness and gentleness, without a trace of false sentiment. Prelude #2, hardly longer at twenty-three bars, is almost lunar. For twenty measures, every note sounds bleakly wrong, the rhythms decay and stumble. Only then does the sole pedal marking blur the pain of aural vertigo. Officially, we’re in A Minor, but in fact only the final chord takes us there. Where are we? Chopin has fallen through dissonance into the abyss—only to curve upward in the third Prelude to a world of unostentatious grace.

[Alexandra Mullen, “In Search of Chopin,” The Hudson Review Vol. LVI #4, Winter 2004]

Words are sounds, but they exist in specific and agreed-upon reference to things, ideas and actions in the physical world.[2] In connecting directly to the real world, standing in lieu of it—as it is their primary function to do—words can provide instant access to the vast web of connections within the mind, between the thing named, its context, and all its potential as metaphor. At the same time, we experience the sounds and shapes of words, individually and in combination; that is, the music of language, words simply as sounds.

Poetry in a language we do not understand, where the words “mean” (as we say) nothing to us, can nevertheless affect us profoundly in their intonation and combination.[3] We can experience literary art in spoken words without knowing the significance of those words. The famous Nõ theatre of Japan is performed using a medieval Japanese now understood only by serious Nõ scholars; the audience is there for, and attends to, something beyond the words. We know that words can produce smiles, tears, war. The abstract sounds of words contribute meanings of their own; many have expressive and even imitative sounds. British director Peter Brook has written,

We found that the sound fabric of a language is a code. An emotional code that bears witness to the passions that forged it. For instance, it is because the ancient Greeks had the capacity to experience certain emotions intensely that their language grew into the vehicle it was. If they had had other feelings, they would have evolved other syllables. The arrangement of vowels in Greek produced sounds that vibrate more intensely than in modern English—and it is sufficient for an actor to speak these syllables to be lifted out of the emotional constriction of twentieth-century city life into a fullness of passion which he never knew he possessed.

With Avesta, the two-thousand-year-old language of Zoroaster, we encountered sound patterns that are hieroglyphs of spiritual experience. Zoroaster’s poems, which on the printed page in English seem vague and pious platitudes, turn into tremendous statements when certain movements of larynx and breath become an inseparable part of their sense. [emphasis mine]

[Peter Brook, quoted in Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy ]

When we read, the words are not themselves the point, communication is the point—except that of course words are the point. We take them in, with full attention, and in a masterful story we experience something else, which is not separate from the words, but constitutes their pattern, their relationships to one another and to the whole. Two kinds of magic are occurring here: the words are giving us the world of the story, and those same words, at the same time, give us < >´. We, living isolated in our individual selfhood, are thereby reconciled to the world outside us and to other human beings, however distant from us in space or time.

We forget the fact that such gifts are magic, and we are thus tempted to slide into life lived in relation to words rather than to reality—to make, automatically, an instant and unconscious sideways shift from the real into a world understood in verbal terms. We do this all the time, instantly and automatically identifying something according to a pre-existent mental group of words, a formula…and lo, it fits that formula!

Erich Fromm observed that it is rare for us to be aware of an experience for which our language has no word.[4] Even more constricting, he wrote, is the fact that “as soon as I have expressed something in a word, an alienation takes place, and the full experience has already been substituted for by the word. The full experience only exists up to the moment when it is expressed in language.” [emphasis mine] [5] Wendell Berry’s poem The Silence, used here to bridge the two parts of this chapter, sets forth this deeply human dilemma: the avid desire for expression of the inexpressible, for that song whose lines measure the depths of silence “like a root.”

The discovery of exactly the right word for an experience is a worthy human goal, but the more habituated we are to seeking after that word, the more vulnerable we are to the word-trap, where word is god—and to seeing our entrapment there as a legitimate source of intellectual pride. Good writers are aware of the danger. Virginia Woolf observed that the way to write well, which is to use language well, is to hold the subject, the reality, vividly in mind. Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote of our verbal model of reality, “…[W]e can avoid ineptness in our assertions only by presenting the model as what it is, as an object for comparison—as, so to speak, a measuring rod; not as a preconceived idea to which reality must correspond.”[6] We have already noted Samuel Johnson’s observation that “words are the daughters of earth, and things are the sons of heaven.” Spiritual practices, for instance those of Zen Buddhism, are designed to train the mind to avoid, for ever-longer fragments of time, the distorting seduction of our mental chitchat, the constant and ego-centered commentary of the left cerebral hemisphere.

But how is the making of art out of words, this marvel, performed? How do we recognize such art, and what is it that we recognize? Occasionally a critic will attempt to write about it, usually because his subject compels it. How can you talk about a work that you truly love without the impulse—just this once, caution-be-damned—to try to identify, and thus capture and communicate, what it is you love? We have probably all felt this, when trying to tell someone about the wonders of a person met, a landscape seen, a musical performance heard.

If the painter or poet, the actor or archer, were asked how to express in a word what it is that gives life and breath to all living things, what sustains them in the “undancing dance” of coming-to-be and passing away, he would probably answer, “It.” In all action and non-action, “It” is there by not being there. This is a clumsy but perhaps the closest description of what it is whose form is not this and not that, but whose hidden essence is active in all things that are.[[7]

[Eugen Herrigel, The Method of Zen, p 76]

In a review of a collection of John Updike’s short stories, Luis Menand eases himself (and his readers) into the daunting subject of literary magic by means of an analogy to golf: “It’s all about…getting the ball in the hole with the fewest strokes possible.” (Throughout the piece, Menand is apologetic for the golf analogy, and for his own failure to find a word to express what he’s talking about.) He quotes one Updike story in which the protagonist, while trying to explain to a sympathetic golf partner an intense and personal psychic longing for something he cannot identify, hits an amazing drive, which just keeps going and going down the fairway. “‘That’s it!’ he says. ‘That’s it.’”—and Professor Menand comments: “It is the expected unexpected.”

In his own attempt to indicate the unsayable, Menand employs variously “a pang,” “a shiver,” an “effect,” an “epiphany” (this from James Joyce), “a general sense of ‘Whoa’” (contemporary student-talk), “the tug (ugh, better term!),” “the click,” the “expected unexpected.” [8] James Joyce explained that by an “epiphany” he meant simply “a revelation of the whatness of a thing,” which Menand says is “a sudden revelation of what the world unmediatedly is.”[9] But what is that world, when language, the great mediator between reality and the human mind, is taken away? Menand states that “another way to describe the whatness of a thing is to say that it is the realization of what the world would look like if you were dead.”[10] He writes, “Consciousness is an interminable yakking, a frantic effort to keep up appearances, to make the game always seem to be your game. If the yakking suddenly stopped, if you were, from that point of view, dead, then the world would appear without aura and without affect—a clattering movie projector, a machine for churning out illusions.” If the internal chatter were to stop momentarily, then one would be for that moment absent, erased.

From the viewpoint of Eastern thought, however, this is a limited, though widely-held, Western conception of what human consciousness might be. It mistakes the “monkey mind”—which talks and talks and is never quiet in service of the ego, and is sometimes recognized as the ego talking —for consciousness, as do people who say that they can’t meditate because they “can’t stop thinking.” [11]

To meditate is to withdraw the attention, and thus all power, from that monkey mind, training oneself to be fully conscious—which is to be free of it. [12] By somehow commandeering our full attention, great art can make the yakking stop. In literature, the verbal mind is given a story or theory with which to busy itself, allowing mental space for “the effect,” the “epiphany.” A mantra performs a similar function in meditation.

+

An epiphany is defined as “a usually sudden manifestation or perception of the essential nature or meaning of something,” as well as “an appearance or revelatory manifestation of God, or of a divine being or god,” or “an incarnation of God or a god in earthly form.”[13] James Joyce wrote: “[The object’s] soul, its whatness leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance…the object achieves its epiphany.”[14] Louis Menand calls this “the Eucharistic metaphor:”

[E]verywhere you find the Eucharistic metaphor that was the heart of Joyce’s aesthetics: mimesis as the transubstantiation of dead matter into spirit…. [Updike’s] “The Music School” is probably as explicit on the subject as a writer should allow himself to become. “The world is the host,” the narrator says; “it must be chewed.”[[15]] Which is why normal life, if it could be truly entered into, without anxiety, would be enough, and why, since it can never be truly entered into without anxiety, we have these stories. [[16]]

[Louis Menand, “True Story,” The New Yorker 12/1/03, p 109]

Great art allows us to recognize the everyday world, and our ordinary life in it, as sacred, as saturated with meaning. (Abstract forms, whether in music or painting or dance, can perform a similar service; we experience the sanctity of their mere being— being cobalt blue, being that particular shape beside this impenetrable blackness.) Not to think, in deadening because too-familiar words, “All the world is sacred,” but to know, wordlessly, perhaps ecstatically, in the moment, the poignant sanctity of what is—in a conversation between two people in a book, or an image of a rock and its shadow—an experience of the world without reference to our own ego. Shelley wrote,

All things exist as they are perceived: at least in relation to the percipients.…But poetry defeats the curse which binds us to be subjected to the accident of surrounding impressions…. It reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.… It creates anew the universe, after it has been annihilated in our minds by the recurrence of impressions blunted by reiteration.…

[Percy Bysse Shelley, A Defense of Poetry]

“The film of our familiarity” is the web of our preconceptions and categorizations and prejudices. We know this, but we forget it.

However, as I have said, my claim is that < >´ is experienced as something more fundamental than that which we understand by the words “the universe.” The great work of art somehow offers experience of the existence of what can be called God, or the Thought of God—we lack any better terms. Such profound aesthetic experience is given by, and belongs to, the work itself, the way in which it is. The work need not imitate or refer to anything else whatever, although such representation or reference may be one of its most immediately obvious characteristics, as in a Chardin still life, or Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. [17]

Professor Menand concludes his article with the statement that “There is something beyond language…but only language, only this language, can disclose it.”

.…The whole idea is to make language perform its own little supernatural act…an effect, an apparition of something not there, a ghost. You could say that the complexity of the machinery used to produce this is hidden beneath the surface of the writing, except that the writing is the machinery…people like Updike…make you aware, by what they do, that this satisfaction is possible in life, and that it can be as supreme a satisfaction as there is. They almost turn to us when it’s done, as if to say, “That’s it.”

[Louis Menand, “True Story,” The New Yorker 12/1/03]

And yet, again, this is not to say that we hear in mind the words “this satisfaction is possible in life…as supreme a satisfaction as there is.” We have the real thing, the experience of < >´, and we may identify it to ourselves in any number of ways. As Wendell Berry says, “the word lives in the death of speech and sings there.”[18] It is beyond words and actions, which is why before applauding at the end of a great theatrical or musical performance, an audience will occasionally sit still and silent for a time, not wanting to lose “it.” Both audience and performers know that this is the ultimate accolade. The audience has been “taken out of itself”—that is, away from the ego and the monkey mind, in the marvel which is the performance—and longs to stay there. “To say ‘green’ is to lose the grass”; to attend the curatorial voice in the museum headphones is to lose the painting. The hills and the clouds are all part of the Great Buddha, but it is a shame to say so.

None of this can be described in the terms of the kind of straightforward communication in which we say that to get to California from New England it’s best to go west, or that “postmodernism, in its post-structuralist aspect, includes a denial of any fixed meaning or any correspondence between language and the world, or any fixed reality or truth or fact to be the object of enquiry.”[19] In fact, as we have seen, various thinkers have concluded that language, as ordinarily spoken, and as chattered by the monkey mind, is an impediment to our experience of the real and its epiphanies—obscuring them in a “mist and veil of words,” as Bishop Berkeley warned. [20] Thus, Language can lead us to a sudden overwhelming perception of the real, or it can prevent our getting anywhere near it.

Precisely because words can obscure reality, the relationship between the arts and any verbal analysis of them is a difficult one. In the chapter “Critics and Cognoscenti” I wrote of experts whose whole interest and expertise is in what has been said and written about art, and in what they themselves can now say in reference to those earlier statements. They are interested in art itself only to the extent that it “has something to say,” or offers a puzzle made up of visual clues—the keys tell us that the figure is St. Peter, the light behind the clouds is the light of God, etc.—which can be identified or argued over one by one. The goal (the more unreachable, the greater the sport) is an understanding of what the work is “saying,” which is, to them, its “meaning.” James Elkins, Professor of art history, theory, and criticism at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago

testifies from within the discipline. In his erudite and fascinating book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? he writes of the current academic preoccupation with this kind of “meaning.”

Contemporary art historians tend not to care for pictures with common themes, readily apparent or systematic symbolic programs, ordinary scenes and objects, or familiar stories…. We tend to be fascinated with the first instance of a given symbol or narrative, and we are attracted by oddities, mistakes, idiosyncracies, anticipations, provincialisms, and unaccountable departures from the norm …

…[W]e are especially jaded [bored?] by artists who are indifferent to the symbolic and narrative complexities of their craft.…A hapax (or hypax) is a fascinating obscurity, a sudden failure of meaning…[it] attracts us in any setting because it requires the attentions of a specialist.

[James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? p 46-47]

A “fascinating obscurity [in visual narrative]” is here equivalent to a sudden “failure of [verbal] meaning,” though the subject under analysis is not a story like John Updike’s stories. It is a visual experience. Are Balanchine’s great abstract ballets, for example, of no interest because they lack verbally expressible “narrative complexities”? Elkins admits that many “compelling” paintings are ignored by critics, and he wonders:

Have our institutions taken over, and burdened us with proper nomenclature, specialized terminology, and institutional protocol? What value should we assign to our prolixity, our easy articulateness, our rhetorical versatility, our conceptual acumen? Are they signs of ever-more-vigilant attention to paintings, or symptoms of an inability to write concisely?

[Ibid. p 33]

Visual “narrative,” or musical or even verbal narrative (that is, content we can express in words, however feebly) can be an intriguing addition to, but has nothing to do with the quality, or the value as art, of the work of art.[21] If we retell a luminous Chekhov story, omitting no details, in our own words, the result is unlikely to be art. If the actuality of a work, in its “whatness,” is insufficiently “compelling,” it is not art at all. A critic has proposed that Jackson Pollock’s calligraphic ‘drip’ paintings can be seen to contain the forms of human bodies.[22] Hurrah! A new “unpacking” of Pollock can begin! (His drinking, his sex life, his possible suicide, and even his Cold War usefulness as a symbol for American freedom of expression, have all been gone over so very many times.)

Professor Elkins writes, in offering the last of his book’s nine possible answers to the question, “Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?”:

There is one last possibility, the most easily stated and I think the one that is most deeply under [art historians’] various odd behaviors. Pictures—this can be put quickly because it is a fact in front of our eyes every time we look at pictures— have no words, and therefore they do not “say” anything. If we rarely remember this simple truth in the course of writing art history, it is because we are so engrossed in creating words. The outlandish descriptive armaments we have constructed for some pictures both clarify and alter their meaning, but they also—in the last analysis, at the furthest remove from the writers’ intentions—serve to help us come to terms with the fact that in so far as they are pictures, they mean nothing. Art history as a whole may be a collection of ways of coping with a feeling of helpless bewilderment—a feeling that grows whenever we take time to attend to the persistent, senseless silence of images. [emphasis mine]

[Ibid. p 255]

“Senseless”? Without sense because not only non-verbal but silent? Instead, surely: sensual, sensory, sensible, sometimes sensational.

A clue to understanding such difficulties in the experience of the non-verbal can be found in the discoveries made by Nobel Laureate Roger Wolcott Sperry and his colleague Betty Edwards (later author of popular books such as Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain) in their research into the general functioning of the two lobes of the human cerebral cortex. Their findings have been simplified to the point of distortion in their adoption by the press and public, but it can reasonably be said that the functions of the left hemisphere of the brain tend to be verbal, analytic, symbolic, categorical, temporal, rational, digital, logical, and linear. The functions of the right hemisphere are generally nonverbal, synthetic, and relating to the actual—to “things as they are, at the present moment, in all their concrete, perceptual complexity.”[23] Such functions tend to be referential, metaphorical, nontemporal, nonrational, spatial, and intuitive. They also tend to be “global,” that is, whole things are seen all at once; the many facets of a problem or situation are perceived simultaneously, often leading to multiple, sometimes divergent, conclusions. [24]

The Center for the Educational Application of Brain Hemisphere Research at California State University, Long Beach, proposed a strategy for “gaining access to R-mode”: it is suggested that the brain be presented with a task that the “L-mode” will turn down.[25] To do this might be to produce, in people in whom the left lobe of the brain is strongly dominant, just that “feeling of helpless bewilderment…that grows whenever we take time to attend to the persistent, senseless silence of images” identified by Professor Elkins.

This whole argument, this often hostile standoff—between, on the one side, proponents of verbal analysis and of the idea that verbally expressible meaning is the only meaning, and on the other the defenders of the power and the experienced meaning of the “thing in itself”—could it be simply a matter of a regrettable mental disability in some people? Does a percentage of the population, contemptuous of the “intuitive,” find it difficult or impossible to switch back and forth effectively between the lobes of the brain: idiot savants, brilliant in some ways, handicapped in others? A pitiable condition, surely.

In fact all undamaged brains use both hemispheres, but the ability to consciously switch between them varies from person to person. Under-development or inertia of the right hemisphere may in fact provide significant advantages in a determinedly pragmatic, materialistic, linear-thinking culture like ours. Such a disability might originally be a matter of genetic inheritance, but it would be reinforced by an entirely verbal and mathematical education within systems with no funding, because no respect, for music, for drawing, for theatre or dance—for learning to think other than verbally.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, an accomplished musician and architect as well as a profound twentieth century philosopher, provided an illustration of his own whole-brained thinking:

I just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time. I had to cut half off many of them and throw it away. Afterwards when I was copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes a picture for me of what I am thinking about at the time. (Is there something feminine about this way of thinking?)

[Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy p 67]

For centuries women were told that their thinking processes were “intuitive” rather than “rational,” which is no doubt why Wittgenstein wonders whether his (irrational, perhaps synaesthetic) association between apples and sentences is “feminine.” I have read that the corpus callosum, the thick bundle of fibers connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, generally comprises more fibers in women than in men.[26] Artists of all kinds are often described as mentally androgynous because so many can employ either lobe of the brain in their thinking (Leonardo da Vinci is an obvious example), or switch so easily from one to the other, or use both at the same time—which in fact we all do, usually unconsciously. Why would intuitive thinking be suspect as “feminine”? Perhaps women, whose intelligence was contemptuously dismissed for so long, could get away with such thinking without fear of losing what status they had. In her remarkable book Lyric Philosophy, Professor Jan Zwicky follows the history of the gradual domination of Western philosophy since Descartes and Francis Bacon by analytic, verbal and mathematical thought; she demonstrates some of the limitations of such thought despite its obvious value. Today, an analytic rationality is the only mode of thought seen as fully respectable—or as being “thought” at all. [27]

Is the sometimes petulant unwillingness of the most celebrated artists to explain what they’re doing a product of their certain knowledge that it can’t be done? Mozart played his composition again. Picasso demanded of an interviewer, “[O]f what use is it to say what we do when everybody can see it if he wants to?” [28] If so, then the greatest critics would be those who are attracted to and love art in its own being, and who make the attempt to identify and talk about what it is. What they say about it then is like Einstein’s transposition of his ideas about the universe into “words or other kinds of signs,” a process he described as “laborious.”[29]

The great novelist Thomas Mann wrote about greatness in music without venturing into puzzle-solving, and with an acceptance of mystery as a quality of the things that matter most. In his Doctor Faustus, the principal character, a gifted student of music and eventually a celebrated musician, reflects on the subject:

“Tell me, what do you think about greatness? I find there is something uncomfortable about facing it eye to eye, it is a test of courage…. A manifestation of the highest energy—not at all abstract, but without an object, energy in a void, in pure ether—where else in the universe does such a thing appear? We Germans have taken over from philosophy the expression ‘in itself [an sich]’ we use it every day without much idea of the metaphysical. But here you have it, such music is energy, rather in its actuality.…[T]hat is almost the definition of God. Imitatio Dei—I am surprised that it is not forbidden….[T]he most powerful, most varied, most dramatic succession of events and activities, but only in time, consisting only of time articulated, filled up, organized…. I do not like to call it beautiful, the word ‘beauty’ has always been half offensive to me, it has such a silly face….But it is good, good in the extreme, it could not be better, perhaps it ought not to be better….”

[Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, p 78]

+

A mute calling out for the attentions of a “specialist” (as in the James Elkins quotation above), seems characteristic of much contemporary art. Noteworthy work is that which critics and art historians, on behalf of, or with, museum personnel and dealers and private collectors, deem worthy of attention.[30] Such work is often banal, shocking in some way, or simply inept. But it is also: 1) relatively easy to produce, 2) attractive to expert attention, analysis, and authentication, and 3) easy to talk about and therefore, today, relatively easy to sell. If the talk, the “hype,” isn’t copious, then both seller and buyer are made anxious. Critics make their livings as well as their reputations by talking, and such talk itself comes to be seen as an art form. Arthur Danto has written that critical analysis can now “make” the work; talk about art can make art. He describes his theory of interpretation as “constitutive,” since “an object is an artwork at all only in relation to an interpretation.…Interpretation in my sense is transfigurative. It transforms objects into works of art.”[31] Dross into gold, almost anything into art! How nourishing for the ego of the “interpreter,” the critic! He can now see himself as being in reality the artist.

The trivialization of the word beauty has been noted. It came to mean the graceful, the feminine, the pretty—and artists eventually rejected it. Professor Danto writes:

I owe to Duchamp the thought that from the perspective of art aesthetics is a danger, since from the perspective of philosophy art is a danger [just as Professor Elkins noted] and aesthetics the agency for dealing with it. But then what should art be if it throws off the bondage to prettiness? It is not enough to be self-assertively ugly…since being ugly remains a way of being an aesthetic object and hence underscores bondage instead of overthrowing it.

[Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p 13]

That is to say, if art need not be beautiful (i.e. “pretty”) how are we to think (verbally) and talk about it? The answer is that art’s real source of power lies in the relationships which constitute it—as Duchamp proved wordlessly and therefore, to some, inscrutably, with his Readymades.

+

Complex structures of theory can be built on small visual evidence by the creative critic with or without the gift for obfuscation. The whole broad array of work by artists now dead is at the mercy of such experts, while much contemporary work consciously and actively invites their attentions. This could be justified as simply a natural evolutionary adaptation to the prevailing critical environment—except that the victorious survivors are experts and theories rather than artists and art.

James Elkins recognizes the fact that “For some reason, pictures make [experts on art] anxious, and one of the things that people do when they are anxious about something is talk a great deal—as we all do in art history….” Why is Elkins, who is a professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the Art Institute of Chicago—a true “expert”—able to see this so clearly? Perhaps it is because his undergraduate work and first post-graduate degree were primarily in art-making, in “studio art.”[32] On the flyleaf of his 1999 book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? a promotional blurb tells us that it is the first book of its kind. This is not surprising, since it sharply questions the prevalent conviction that paintings are puzzles needing solutions, that is, that they require verbal explanations of their “meanings.”

And so a consenting game is played, mutually supportive and aggrandizing—on one side by art historians and critics, and on the other by accomodating artists. Now that most art schools have been absorbed by academic institutions, artists are commonly educated at the same institutions and take many of the same courses as do future critics and academics, courses with names like “Pre-Renaissance Narrative Art” (stories!) and “Issues of Epistemology in the Art of Cranach–the-Elder”—epistemology being the study of foundational texts. The “artist” then churns out work which invites the attention of specialists, and thereby “succeeds” or not. He or she has been trained at the same game, and can talk the necessary talk, though perhaps not quite so glibly.

The students who concentrate in studio art probably tend to be better than the future art historians and critics at manipulating—or, even better, “creating”—visual symbols which fit current theories or demand new theories. The art history students don’t make art, they analyze and talk about it; they attempt to solve the puzzles it offers, though they can’t answer the fundamental question of what art is. The game is played at the hazy mental boundary between the reality of the work, and the word. [33] “What about this,” challenges the artist. “Can you ‘get’ this?” “Yes Yes Yes!” exults the triumphant expert. Elephant dung on a painting of the Virgin? “The rage, or perhaps sardonic resentment, of the missionary-educated and colonially oppressed! We get it!” And the bourgeoisie, the outsiders, will hate it, which proves that we’re right there at the cutting edge, the only place to be.

I’ve read that when James Joyce had finished writing Ulysses, with its convoluted riddles and arcane references, he remarked that the book would keep academics and critics happily occupied for years, untangling its allusions and symbols and jokes. And of course he was right. In 1998 the publishing company Modern Library honored it as the 20th century’s best book written in the English language.

Language formerly used in theology is now found everywhere in the analysis and criticism of the arts—words like “epistemology,” “hermeneutics,” “exegesis.” Why is this? Art is now subject to the kind of analysis and explication once devoted to questions such as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, or the correct interpretation or “deep analysis” of a word or phrase in the Torah. Is this phenomenon in some way a product of the quasi-religious role now played by the arts in the lives of the educated elite? Or is it only one more result of the academic need for material which can be taught, using words, to students—whose success in absorbing it can be measured by examinations—and by the need to publish, or perish as an authority? The game is open only to the expert few, and richly entertaining to puzzle-lovers, provided the themes are not too “common,” the symbolic programs not too “readily apparent,” the “stories” not too familiar.

All this might seem merely ludicrous, were it not so all-pervasive in the world of art history and theory, and were that world and its judgements and theories not so powerful in influencing critics and museums and private patrons, and in training art students. In many art schools now, the successful students are those gifted in playing this game, both in analysis, and in producing work which invites it. Students are required to take part in “artist’s talks;” here they can practise their skills in making the necessary appealing pitches to justify and explain their work (which usually is not on view) to other students and to faculty. I am told that at one such session, a student showed a small example of her work as illustration of what she was talking about. A fellow student asked scornfully, “What is this, a game of Show and Tell for grownups?” [34] In the long war waged by art historians and critics against the non-verbal (which can arouse such anxiety in them) the Word appears to be winning most of the important battles.

The British scholar and thinker Mary Midgley laments a similar situation in the disciplines of literature and philosophy. Academic literary critics, she writes, are “more and more occupied with highbrow technical battles between various theories of criticism—theories which are not even meant to concern anybody but scholars.” She further notes that there is in fact a strong prejudice in academia against writing on any subject which might possibly interest a wider public. [35]

Let me say that I do not in any way begrudge the experts their pleasures. The problem is the misconception, among both academics and lay people, that what is being talked about is Art. Luis Menand, in the passages quoted, is talking about art, and the fact that art resists any definitive naming. James Elkins writes of Velazquez’ great, and much analyzed, painting Las Meninas that it is “an occasion for our texts, and also an excuse for them: despite our close analyses, we hardly notice how reflexively we are drawn to its mirror and its ‘paradoxes’ of self-reflectivity.”[36]

Although Professor Elkins regrets some of the excesses resulting from current practices in art theory, he wonders what alternative is possible. Should we return to worn out Platonic theories of mimesis, and to an art which merely holds a mirror to the world around us? This would seem to be a useless retrogression, as he observes. “Illusion” as the principal and/or most interesting function of art is merely a different misunderstanding, and it is at most only peripherally relevant to art’s fundamental purpose, as I have tried to persuade the reader.

In illustration of mimesis Elkins offers, not a painting that is “compelling for other reasons,” but a saccharine and fuzzy rural landscape of the kind offered for sale in furniture stores as “wall décor.” It shows a picturesque cottage, flowering fruit trees, a pond, and ducks, all cloyingly painted by Bruce Crane.[37] The image is certainly not interesting. But this is due to its flaws as a physical entity, as an object intended to be art, not to its failure to carry the requisite new story or puzzling “hapax.” Is Elkins suggesting that work of this caliber is the only real alternative to “puzzle” pictures; that we live in an age when original work of quality is not to be found? Or is it that only works that lend themselves to the spinning of theories, that call out for the “attentions of specialists,” are brought to public attention in museums and galleries, in the press and in the academy? In a later book, Why Art Can’t Be Taught, (2001) Elkins writes that “Overall…what stays in museums is powerful, aggressive, uncompromisingly avant-garde, and statistically unusual. It’s the cream of the crop, no matter how it’s chosen.”[38] In the earlier book he notes the remarkable quantities of discussion and analysis now produced by art historians. He does not, he says, intend any judgement as to “what constitutes trivia or over-interpretation.” However,

Contemporary literature [in art history] is “excessive” in the sense that it drastically exceeds earlier work, if not in the sense that it needs correction. When we begin to look…we come to this kind of complexity, and to the strange tendency of art historical accounts to become unmanageably intricate no matter what they are arguing. Our writing is extravagant, ruleless, and often fantastical, where earlier work was restrained and decorous. We write intensively, with an aversion for plain meanings, technical mastery, and simple illusion; we are attracted to metaphors, and especially ones loaned by other disciplines; we love whatever can be made conceptually intricate. [emphasis mine]

[James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?. p 44]

Professor Elkins also observes that despite all this excess, “any [art historical] account…that is unaware of the contours of the scholarship will be unable to find serious readers.” Further, he writes, “Accounts that receive the most attention are likely to be those that carry the metaphorical and interdisciplinary meanings forward rather than tearing them down or returning to talk about illusion.”[39] That is, in order to talk about art and be taken seriously, one must read and respond to this flood of “extravagant, ruleless, and often fantastical” writing about things that at best are peripheral to art’s real value and importance. The first editor to read the early chapters of this book (on behalf of a university press) refused it for exactly that reason, saying that since it did not address all important theories of art published thus far, it was not a scholarly work—merely a personal essay. But what am I to do? There is so very much such writing, and I find so much of it stupefying. Its “excessive” character (the limitless and ever-increasing quantity and self-referentiality of it) is made possible by the fact that, as noted earlier, a paucity of ideas can so easily be obscured in a tangle of jargon, or protected by an impenetrable and thorny thicket of “dense” prose. Such writing avoids some of the common difficulties that beset the writer: the requirements for clear thinking, clear prose, and coherent organization. Purposely dense writing, rather than demonstrating the amazing descriptive or expressive powers of words, or using them to imply and suggest and somehow to invoke the inexpressible, is useful only in that it provides further puzzles, further grist for the mill of endless analysis.

What is the remedy for all this? Full recognition and respect must be given to those aspects of reality which cannot be named or satisfactorily described in words, which are “beyond words.” At present, the tendency is rather to presume that anything lying outside the power of words is either unworthy of attention, or has no reality at all.

The great Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote,

A pure poem could not be made of words and would be, literally, unsayable. At the same time, a poem that did not struggle against the nature of words, obliging them to go beyond themselves and their relative meanings, a poem that did not try to make words say the unsayable, would remain a simple verbal manipulation. What characterizes the poem is its necessary dependence on the world as much as its struggle to transcend it.

[Octavio Paz, quoted in Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy p 108]

The poem exists in its factual physical being as a group of words, and in the relationships among those words—in reality, in this world. At the same time, it has a reality which is beyond words. It is an incarnation.

1] As in Poincaré’s demonstration that Isaac Newton’s equations representing the interaction between two planets are logical and straightforward, but that as soon as the effect of a third planet is added the necessary mathematics becomes vastly more complex, the equations “irrational.”

[2] Many people prefer painting or music that appears to make this kind of obvious reference, though it is not essential to either—while poets occasionally try to set language free of it.

[3] One example: a summer night’s performance of Antigone, given in a Roman amphitheater in Spain, at which I was present purely by luck, and in the company of four adolescent children. The play was performed in a language we didn’t understand—none of us can remember whether it was Spanish or something else…Greek? What we had was the setting, the floodlights, the round bright moon in the black sky, the white doves released clattering into the surrounding darkness at a crucial moment, but most of all the abstract qualities of the language, its shapes, its pauses, the music of its sonorous intonations. We all remember this as one of the great theatrical experiences of our lives, although the only word we could be sure of was “AN—TI—GO--NE!” It was incantation, producing emotion and action by unknown means, demonstrating the aesthetic (sensory) quality of words, so familiar that we seldom notice it.

[4] Erich Fromm, Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis, p 100

[5] Ibid. p 109

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, quoted in

Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, p 254

[7] It seems clear to me that this “It” is that phenomenon called the Logos by the pre-Christian Greeks, and experienced by human beings through the ages.

[8] “Effect” is Edgar Allen Poe’s term, by which Menand says Poe meant “something almost physical, like a sensation, or… a frisson”... “Every word in a story, Poe said, is in service of this effect.”

[9] Aristotle’s term was to ti ên einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι), or to ti esti (τὸ τί ἐστι, that is, Essence. [Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1030a]

[10] The New Yorker, 12/1/03 p 108

[11] For both scientific information and personal experience relative to this, see neurophysiologist Jill Bolte Taylor‘s remarkable book, My Stroke of Insight.

[12] Since the 1970s, neuroscientists have been giving more and more attention to the phenomenon of consciousness, in physiological studies using brain imaging machines and by means of computerized neural modelling. Oliver Sacks writes that “William James… always insisted that consciousness was not a ‘thing’ but a process.”

The neuroscientist Gerald R. Edelman, “a pioneer in such thinking,” says that “the neural basis of these processes…is one of dynamic interaction between neuronal groups in different areas of the cortex (and between the cortex and the thalamus, and other parts of the brain).” According to Dr. Edelman, consciousness arises from ”the enormous number of such interactions between memory systems in the anterior parts of the brain and systems concerned with perceptual categorization in the posterior parts of the brain.” Thus consciousness, another great mystery, is “explained,” with an air of casting light into the dark places of superstition. Edelman assures us that there is nothing “spooky” about it. We dutifully accept this idea, but bridle at, for instance, any reference to a Virgin Birth, symbolic or not.

[13] Webster’s Third New International Dictionary: “epiphany”

[14] Ibid.

[15] See Archibald MacLeish, in the epigraph to this chapter: “…to ‘know’ the world… directly, like apple in the mouth.”

[16] In writings on meditation, this “anxiety” is often attributed to the ego’s frantic resistance to being set aside even for a moment. In fact we can enter into it; we must, in order to be fully alive. Mystics sometimes say that we are the universe observing itself. Dogs, or tomato caterpillars, are too, and are generally “happy” in it... but we feel ourselves compelled to comment, to categorize and compare, to differentiate, to analyze and explain.

[17] On first hearing the Hallelujah Chorus, the king stood up. We also stand, experiencing what he experienced, sharing in the epiphany.

[18] This again is “Word” used in the full broad sense of the Greek Logos.

[19] Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy.

[20] Unsurprisingly, there are various philosophical views as to what constitutes the real. By “real” I mean simply that which is here within my present experiencing of it, simultaneously astonishing and “nothing special,” as they say in Zen.

[21] In the ever-shifting world of 17th C French regal politics, the great Peter Paul Rubens was aware of the advantages of paintings “intentionally dense and obscure in their symbology.” One example was The Felicity of the Regency, “a masterpiece of allegorical flummery in which a bare-breasted Marie [de Medici] surrounded by a catalog of gods and symbolic personifications, balances the scales of justice.” A few years after the series of large paintings of which it was a part was installed in the Queen’s Luxembourg Palace, an expert complained that the “meanings” of the paintings were almost impossible to determine. Rubens himself no longer had his written program for the series, and wrote that “perhaps my memory will not serve me as accurately as I should like.” In time, Marie’s advisor the abbé of St. Ambrose, “interpreted” the paintings for her son Louis XIII, “’changing or concealing the true meaning with great skill,’” in Rubens’ words. [Mark Lamster, Master of Shadows; The Secret Diplomatic Career of Peter Paul Rubens, p 122]

[22] James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles, p 199-200.

[23] Printout on the perceptual skills of drawing published by the Center for the Educational Application of Brain Hemisphere Research at California State University, Long Beach, CA., circa 1980.

[24] This is why it (R-mode) is the thinking suitable for considering problems in which there are multiple variables, as is the case with most real-world situations. Divergent, multiple conclusions are precisely the products of non-linear equations.

[25] Or perhaps be hypnotized by, as by a mantra in meditation.

[26] For example, an article in the journal Cerebral Cortex: “Ardekani, B.A., Figrasky, K., and Sidtis, J.J., “Sexual dimorphism in the human corpus callosum: an MRI study using the OASIS brain database.” [Cerebral Cortex, 2013, 2514-2520] But apparently there are major differences of opinion within the scientific community as to the relationship between the corpus callosum and gender. Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_callosum (8/28/16)

[27] In this, the ancient Greeks were better off: their language distinguished between scientific or reflective knowledge (as in: ‘He knows mathematics’), and gnosis, which is knowing through observation or experience.

[28] Pablo Picasso, in an interview. Published in a translation approved by the artist in The Arts (New York) 1923. In Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p 263-265

[29] See chapter 6, “Thought and Contemplation,” p 69.

[30] A similar situation exists in the other arts, but Professor Elkins notes that most music critics can play an instrument and read music, and literary critics are themselves word-users. Since the studio is in general outside the area where art experts feel comfortable, the separation between artist and expert is more radical in visual art,. [James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? p 252] The experts are drawn to art, want to be around it…without being able to say why.

[31] Arthur Danto, The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art, p 44.

[32] James Elkins, Why Art Can’t Be Taught, p 3.

[33] This “boundary” is indefinite only within the mind: in the real world the separation between thing and word is vast, and clearly obvious, a difference in kind.

[34] At Concordia University, Montreal, circa 2002

[35] Mary Midgley, Wisdom, Information and Wonder, p 18

[36] James Elkins, Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles? p 42

[37] Ibid. p 52

[38] James Elkins, Why Art Can’t Be Taught, p 69

[39] In contrast, Emerson, in Self Reliance: “The highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men but what they thought.”