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Oct. 17th, 2011 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
proximoceptionSo I'm concluding it's rereading that may be the problem - I was entranced by Logue's Homer, all those Chekhov stories, the Whitman poems new to me. Someone observed somewhere online that while they loved every song on their iTunes playlist they were bored by fourteen out of fifteen when they played it on shuffle. Something like this happens even when I've been craving to reread something, where its pins and mine are usually not lined up quite correctly, and even when the connection's quite strong you're not happy because you remember how it was last time. You can look at this positively - it was there to teach you something, and perhaps you've just already learned it. I remain entirely Shelleyed and display extensive Ibsening.
You start to see how accurate Stevens' 'It Must Change' insistence really is, when this happens. We saw Mulholland Drive a couple nights ago and though bits of it had inevitably faded other ones were still striking, new ones even, or in new ways. Near-unintelligibilities, trains you can barely catch up with, may seem initially annoying but help extend an artwork's lifespan across yours. You begin to understand why Shakespearean English isn't quite Elizabethan English, why Dante alludes so insistently and graphically when he could just be saying. They don't hate you, they hate the thought of you leaving them.
Of course, mere baroquery doesn't help - you have to feel you got somewhere, and the most reliable way to have that feeling is to have done so, through all the shell games and doublings back and double meanings. They have to be wrestling into writing what changes for them too, the thing that stays itself through and because of its changes. But you can see how near-trickery, near-obfuscation are the tools you'll catch them using, and maybe direct trickery and unnecessary hoop-provision the most common small ways they fail. They fool the thing into appearing for them, fool themselves into being the people that thing would appear for, fool you into watching the thing not quite what you came for, to the immense benefit of all parties. The mystery of what doesn't make sense isn't the point, but rather the mystery of what doesn't look like it will but then does, barely, sometimes only partly. It has to remind us of what we're bound to again forget - that's the class of revelations poetry-type art can handle.
Not that when art doesn't work on you it's because you understand it. It's more likely to be that you feel you understand it already and hence can't pay full attention, just look for signs of what you thought it was when revisiting, shut your mind down and coast once you've pinned a few tails on that mockup. The furthest seeing artists punch through this resistance too, find ways to shock you out of lazy reading habits that stay strong even when you know what shocks are coming. Even if art weren't concerned, and quite properly, with what perpetually unsettles us it would have to make use of that to work on us at all.
But there's an honor to what can only work well once - and inevitably such artworks are what get us into art in the first place, impress us that it's something for us and not just something to do or be seen with.
I actually didn't much like American literature once, much like how I was hostile to scare-quote literature itself until I was about 20. I just tore through everything that called to me in Russian, British, French, German works etc. until American was the lion's share of what was left that people praised. And I guess one reason I went into it academically is because it was still live, a length I was still burning along at the time. It's kind of neat that that happens because it pushes you to new places, against your own ubiquitous, indefensible revulsions. Which doesn't mean everything widely or deeply praised is worth it, just that it's among that group you're likeliest to find the many things you still need and will love - despite how unnecessary and irritating they'll seem for some number of hours. Art-type love is a going, not a staying - if you keep going back to some it's because you or they keep on wandering off.
You start to see how accurate Stevens' 'It Must Change' insistence really is, when this happens. We saw Mulholland Drive a couple nights ago and though bits of it had inevitably faded other ones were still striking, new ones even, or in new ways. Near-unintelligibilities, trains you can barely catch up with, may seem initially annoying but help extend an artwork's lifespan across yours. You begin to understand why Shakespearean English isn't quite Elizabethan English, why Dante alludes so insistently and graphically when he could just be saying. They don't hate you, they hate the thought of you leaving them.
Of course, mere baroquery doesn't help - you have to feel you got somewhere, and the most reliable way to have that feeling is to have done so, through all the shell games and doublings back and double meanings. They have to be wrestling into writing what changes for them too, the thing that stays itself through and because of its changes. But you can see how near-trickery, near-obfuscation are the tools you'll catch them using, and maybe direct trickery and unnecessary hoop-provision the most common small ways they fail. They fool the thing into appearing for them, fool themselves into being the people that thing would appear for, fool you into watching the thing not quite what you came for, to the immense benefit of all parties. The mystery of what doesn't make sense isn't the point, but rather the mystery of what doesn't look like it will but then does, barely, sometimes only partly. It has to remind us of what we're bound to again forget - that's the class of revelations poetry-type art can handle.
Not that when art doesn't work on you it's because you understand it. It's more likely to be that you feel you understand it already and hence can't pay full attention, just look for signs of what you thought it was when revisiting, shut your mind down and coast once you've pinned a few tails on that mockup. The furthest seeing artists punch through this resistance too, find ways to shock you out of lazy reading habits that stay strong even when you know what shocks are coming. Even if art weren't concerned, and quite properly, with what perpetually unsettles us it would have to make use of that to work on us at all.
But there's an honor to what can only work well once - and inevitably such artworks are what get us into art in the first place, impress us that it's something for us and not just something to do or be seen with.
I actually didn't much like American literature once, much like how I was hostile to scare-quote literature itself until I was about 20. I just tore through everything that called to me in Russian, British, French, German works etc. until American was the lion's share of what was left that people praised. And I guess one reason I went into it academically is because it was still live, a length I was still burning along at the time. It's kind of neat that that happens because it pushes you to new places, against your own ubiquitous, indefensible revulsions. Which doesn't mean everything widely or deeply praised is worth it, just that it's among that group you're likeliest to find the many things you still need and will love - despite how unnecessary and irritating they'll seem for some number of hours. Art-type love is a going, not a staying - if you keep going back to some it's because you or they keep on wandering off.
