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We are all circling the revelation like detritus whirling at the edge of the drain. It's becoming clearer to us collectively even if we can't express it yet one by one. The restless dissatisfaction grows like a mordant cloud with each Aesthetics Poaster declaring "we used to be a proper country," every public tantrum over gallery openings filled with blatantly meaningless and formless antiart. We are slowly losing our grip on decades of ecumenical insistence on form parity and product equality. Somewhere along the way we realized that The Art is Terrible Now [1].
If you are a new reader to this publication, you may not yet have heard our relatively constant opinions on this issue. If you are a veteran, you absolutely have. In either case, I don't intend to linger long on the diagnostics. Bear with me a moment longer, however. Foundations are vital. I will simply lay a pair of data points on our intellectual table before I begin to spin a hopeful vision of what the future might hold. Point One: the previous five hundred years of human history have seen the gradual removal of the supernatural from the minds and hearts of mankind. This is a broad generalization but fits our purpose here. In the rest of human history, the world was a place permeated by metaphysical possibility. There were of course vastly differing explanations and systems around what places existed, how they were populated, and other vital details. But this invisible realm was teeming with life, benign and otherwise, that was vitally important and proximate to human existence. Consider that we are living within the first few generations of human history in which the generally accepted viewpoint, the philosophical lingua franca, is a version of naturalistic secularism. Hold this carefully in your mind. And now, Point Two. Envision me slapping it triumphantly down onto our mental table to stand accusingly next to its companion. In the identical period of human history, as we have agonizingly peeled ourselves free from the spirits and ghosts and crammed them out the back door of our souls, the artistic production of humanity has gradually decayed to a ludicrous and pathetic status.
I can hear the murmuring from the back, but please maintain your composure and embrace common sense for a moment. Your exception scraped from the fly-ridden heap does not prove the rule. Look around, and be honest with yourself. Can we actually claim to be engaged in the same type of craft as our forebears? They produced cathedrals, we produce crap. They could make crap, if they chose, and often did. Cathedrals seem lost to us forever. This isn't just the rantings of a historically-obsessed malcontent, either. The jewels peeking out of the rubble deserve celebration in each age. But let's speak broadly for a few more moments. The decline in both is easy to correlate, and accelerates along a similar trajectory. We look around now and marvel at our seeming cultural inability, whether through failures of craft or vision or something else, to plan and execute art that communicates beauty and majesty. The diagnosis is the easy part. Causes and cure? I have a few ideas.
Let's place ourselves back in the mind of an artist from one of these previous ages. For them, the production of art was a deeply haunted and haunting experience. They constantly spoke of it in spiritual terms. The Muses and the treks up holy mountains, the dedications to attending spirits and pursuit of ecstatic states. The inescapable quality that buffets the viewer on experiencing so much of this art that you are glimpsing another world, through a fragile portal kept open by the strength of the creator's artistic power. Our clinical age has explained the metaphysical stories as something the ancients also created, meta-art to explain their own art. This is directly opposite to the truth (and a tragically hilarious projection of our own neurotically metafictional mind). The metaphysics of the ancients caused their artistic production like a seed explodes into life. You cannot have Chartres without Christianity, the Pantheon without Paganism. One gives birth to the other. Enraptured by the spirits that haunted their waking and their dreams, artists of old feverishly worked to immortalize the reality just at the edge of their eyes. Capturing the migraine-corona of spiritual experience in concrete or clay or canvas or codex is a Great Work on a scale most of us will never attempt. It literally kills many. They heard the whispers of other realms through their whole lives, and so they produced wonders to stop themselves from going mad. Sometimes it worked.
Meanwhile, we are haunted by nothing, or so we claim. And predictably, we produce nothing; at least, nothing of consequence. Content is laughably easy. Churning out grist for the mill and clout for the brand is all we're left when we drown out the living force that makes Art possible. Dead husks rattle through our gallery halls, either monstrous nothings assembled in feeble rebellion against reality or uncanny simulacra possessing everything but the spirit that fires the eyes and kindles the flesh. Do you truly desire to create Art, the kind that breaks minds and leaves us gasping with the immense possibility of the world you have revealed? Then you must allow yourself to be haunted again, friend.
That might be a concept far beyond your personal frame of experience, but I'd argue you've already encountered a haunting without the terms to categorize it. They never left our world, the spirits. We just all agreed to stop noticing. Central to the feeling of so much of our postmodern literature is that telescoping worlds-within-worlds expansion, the stumbling into parallel worlds. This narrative is immensely popular: that the things you always knew are not true, and that reality is even stranger than those things. We seize on any chance, any description, any fiction that closely aligns or tangentially points to the thing we know ought to be real. And it feels right, the world telescoping into place with a click. The worlds behind worlds behind worlds showing themselves in a passing glimpse. Stepping behind the door. These feelings are signposts, a key that helps us unlock things as they really are. The whole goal of Art is piercing the nihilistic patchwork of quasi-realities strung distractingly across our faces, shouting and pointing towards the golden light. But to do that, the Artist has to allow themselves to bask in that glow first.
Unlike most of my work, this essay even contains an Exercise of sorts. The closest I've come to understanding the two eras of human art has been this question, one I ask whenever I'm viewing a piece. What did the artist see? What disturbing image, for good or ill, so captured their spirit that it produced this sacrifice of time and energy? The question has so changed my relationship to art that it actually reveals a flaw in my argument so far [2]. The question shows me that all artists are haunted, even those producing the stale, chaotic and formless oeuvre of our generation. Because the spirits cannot be unmade, only ignored. If we produce vapidity, or horrors, what have we seen?
You'll find the workers who produced marvels feasted on them as well. Our only hope for the future is emulating their process. You see, it's not enough to create pastiche of past ideals, to "re-enchant" by aesthetic recapitulation. We have to make new wonders. We suspect that we have been exposed to great glories. They deserve new language and forms. The enchantment is produced by the spirits, (the best kind, by the Spirit), and you cannot conjure them by reversing the process. Enough cargo cult thinking. Time for some humility.
And now we teeter on this knife edge, knowing that the real world is different from, adjacent to, the world that we've been swimming in lately. We are right to fear the venture back into the fey realm. Not all paths are viable. In fact, all paths but one contain damnable threats. We don't call it the anxious age for nothing. We are standing at the nexus of realities, the observatory that points us back out towards Deep Heaven. Many of the beings that have mummed the Muse for tortured souls of our past meant them great harm, and succeeded. But we know what we must do. Once reality is revealed, the protagonist is not allowed to go back. You can't unlearn the way the world is, it's just decisions from that point. And the decisions begin to narrow and narrow as you continuously accept that reality. This is where we are. Once we understand that the world could contain the supernatural or the supra-physical or whatever term you would like to use, the door is unalterably opened. We're now deciding which map of Deep Heaven we will use on our dread voyage. The charts are so different, so irreconcilably in conflict, that the choice carries enormous weight. Here there be dragons. But here also, the depthless glory of the stars.
Prepare. What do you see?
I brace myself as steps approach
To eat the flesh and leave the bones
I'm scared but I will only know
If I face it
I'll face it
A Holy Ghost or just my own?
There's no way to silence it
There's nowhere to hide
So I'll face it
I'll face it
All the thoughts that haunt us most
Are nothing or a Holy Ghost
But there's nowhere to hide
~ My Epic, "Voices" |
