Say “Yes” to Ecstasy
Until very recently, I was a committed Romantic: I believed art was the result of a violently intuitive process in which reason was eclipsed by semidivine inspiration — and/or whiskey. This was a corollary to my frustration with the interpretive habits of many who, in their zeal to leaven speculation with imagination, often accomplish the opposite.
I arrived at the aforementioned belief by simple logic. If creativity and reason are separated in the artist, then attempts to expose the “hidden meaning” in an artist’s work could be unmasked as propagandistic exploitation, and I could justifiably reject them. This conclusion also appealed to my cherished image of late-stage Beethoven as the archetypal artist: a tortured soul straining against all odds to reveal his heart to the waiting world.
But I said “until very recently.” I have spent much of the last ten months writing a play with my friend John, and after countless conversations, numerous writing sessions, and three drafts, I now have a richer understanding of the creative process than ever before. Looking back on my original take, I can only say, with one of the characters at a watershed moment in our play: “I’m wrong. I’m… so wrong.”
(Well, except about whiskey.)
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Of course, that sounds awfully dramatic. In reality, it was a slow discovery that came in several stages.
First, I realized that creativity is always collaborative. John and I had been workshopping short stories for months with some other friends before we decided to write in double harness, and a big factor in that decision was our experience with those workshops. They taught us that candid, constructive criticism isn’t merely helpful, but absolutely indispensable, for bringing artistic ideas to fruition.
Artists can certainly claim credit for their work, but I have a new appreciation for the acknowledgements in books and award speeches. This isn’t posturing; it’s a creator recognizing that while art may have only one midwife, it has many parents — a far cry, indeed, from my image of the artist in tormented solitude.
What happened next was a direct result of this newfound comfort with collaboration: John’s and my respective roles in bringing our script to life shifted dramatically over the last ten months. At first, I was the violently intuitive one, pacing around, toting a tumbler of Woodford Reserve and muttering ideas while John sat at the laptop, also toting a tumbler of Woodford Reserve. He would listen patiently, asking a probing question or two and writing things down. Then, when my reverie subsided, he would analyze my mantic ravings, excising what didn’t match our characters and plot and improving on what did.
But somewhere along the line, our writing sessions evolved. Eventually John was pacing and producing sudden ideas and I was doing the cold work of pondering their suitability within the story — although the Woodford Reserve remained constant. Our roles evolved so gradually that we didn’t notice the change until quite recently, and we decided that it was a symptom of real progress, both for our script and for ourselves as artists.
Finally, throughout this process, and especially as we shared drafts of the script with our actors, the story seemed to “belong” less and less to either of us. It’s not that we ceded possession to the actors; rather, the script simply acquired its own autonomy. It now seems to open a window into a world where all of us — writers and actors alike — are visitors.
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With this experience as a point of departure, I think it’s high time to rethink the creative process.
I remain convinced that it’s never purely rational; but as John and I discovered, it’s also not a magical fruit of mantic solitude. Creativity involves both mind and intuition, but it’s reducible to neither. To adumbrate this third, mixed position, I want to consider in greater detail why reducing creativity to either of these faculties on their own is faulty.
If you insist on the primacy of reason, you will incline toward what I term the “classical-symbolic” camp, whereas if you insist on emotion, you’re bound to join ranks with the “romantic-intuitive” crowd.
In a nutshell, the “classical-symbolic” folks treat every image and theme as a symbol — every hero is a Christ-figure, even in books whose authors antedate or reject Christ. This is the attitude which the Church Fathers bring to Scripture, and they sometimes employ it to brilliant — if fanciful — effect. It can be an interesting and often spiritually fruitful way of encountering the Bible, although its limitations have been recognized by the most reputable Church authorities.
Of course, the “classical-symbolic” attitude is not restricted to the Church Fathers. Jordan Peterson expounds books and movies by identifying characters and dominant images with this or that archetypal pattern at work, which strikes me as essentially the same method at play. Much the same can be said for feminist, ecological, and intersectional literary criticism.
Regardless of who does it, though, the “classical-symbolic” tendency strikes me as subtly pernicious. It is a sly way of seeming to appreciate, but never engaging with, art.
When we speak of cultural traditions, we seem to mean patterns and symbols which are meaningful to people in a given time and place. But cultural traditions are not discrete entities, nor do they have strictly demarcated boundaries outside of textbooks. They fade in and out of existence, feeding on their predecessors until they are supplanted in turn by the robust cultural parasites of tomorrow. Or to use a different metaphor, history is a palimpsest in which thousands of cultures messily clutter the same few pages, rarely mapping onto each other with ease.
But if this is the case, then imposing one’s own symbolic matrix onto any work of art, regardless of its native matrix, becomes a dubious method of interpreting it; and creating art exclusively out of the symbols in that matrix results in a bland uniformity of style you might call “Renaissance Syndrome”. The problem isn’t just that this attitude is restrictive. My resistance to the “classical-symbolic” attitude is based on the license it grants to closed minds: it is all too easy to equate a preferred style with good style, as such.
For a particularly stark example: I recently watched The Bad Sleep Well, Akira Kurosawa’s take on Hamlet, with a group of friends. At one point, when “Hamlet” is attending a Shinto funeral ceremony — featuring some bizarrely atonal chanting and a beating drum — one of my fellow viewers shook her head with a dismissive laugh, saying, “How can people possibly deny that Western civilization is superior to this?”
She couldn’t enter the world of the film, slipping into the stream of the story and feeling what the characters felt, because she couldn’t see past the differences between Kurosawa’s contemporary Japanese, and her own frigid Baroque, aesthetics. In that moment, she was an avatar of the “classical-symbolic” at its most pathological. I would happily have smacked her if I thought it would do any good. (And, ahem, if I was less than a gentlemen.)
As I said at the beginning, my hostility to the “classical-symbolic” drove me initially toward the ranks of the “romantic-intuitive” folks, who gladly welcomed me with open arms.
How to describe the “romantic-intuitive” attitude? Perhaps it’s best to turn to the poets, although I’m not principally talking about the historical Romantic movement. Wordsworth famously defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful passions.” Keats, meanwhile, concludes his “Ode on a Grecian Urn” with the equally famous lines
Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
If an artist isn’t inflamed to create, if an audience isn’t stirred to their core by a work of art, it is somehow defective. For the “romantic-intuitive” folks, the measure of art is how effectively it moves the spirit — or often, à la Hegel, S-pirit. The underlying themes and images are taken, it is supposed, not from corrupted human cultures but from nature — more often, N-ature, an abstraction that strikes you as suspiciously Greco-Roman when you get down to brass-tacks.
When you translate this “romantic-intuitive” impulse from freshly post-Christian cultures — Goethe’s Weimar, the nineteenth century England of Keats and Coleridge — to our more advanced stages of contemporary paganism, things get a bit hairier. The chasm between creativity and craft — the latter being one of the many shackles which drop from the wrists of liberated intuition — begins pronounceably to yawn, and new figures, like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, arise to supplant this decadent artless sentimentalism with alternatives of their own devising.
If I thought the “classical-symbolic” attitude rationalistic, the “romantic-intuitive” alternative was far too emotional. Any work of art worth its salt makes demands on an artist’s mind as well as emotions. It’s a rare book or poem which sees the light of day after no or few revisions, and nothing feels so deflatingly alien to intuition than trying to revise something you wrote while inspired.
John’s and my experience resonates with that of many fellow artists and writers, and we don’t fit into either the “classical-symbolic” or the “romantic-intuitive” camps. But I’m not prepared fully to accept Eliot’s position that “poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” If I have learned anything in the last year, it’s that creativity isn’t some autoerotic tool for personal self-discovery or collective self-celebration. The truth is far more unsettling.
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Where does art come from, and how should its provenance affect the work of interpretation?
I can hear the Aristotelians in the peanut gallery piping up, “Art is imitation!” And that’s fine, so far as it goes — I just don’t think it’s terribly far. Art is imitation at a basic level, but I think it’s imitation of a specific kind, suffused with a specific spirit. Since I’m less interested in the ontology of art and more in the phenomenology of creativity, I want to know about that specific spirit, that vibe, that prompts us to call some imitations, art.
As numerous writers and painters have said, and as John and I learned, creativity is far more like discovery than invention. A work of art is somehow a real, separable thing, some aspects of which are better suited to emotional, others to rational, scrutiny. The process by which we discover this complex thing is itself complex — and so is a work of art’s significance in its final, published form.
Art is an imitation of reality which somehow deepens our experience of reality. It isn’t, or isn’t only, that it reveals some Platonic overworld. Art instead expands the sphere of this world to include things we might otherwise have thought far beyond its ken.
But don’t take my word for it.
C.S. Lewis delighted in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, so much so that he sent Peake a gushing fan letter. “I would not for anything have missed Gormenghast,” he says. “It has the hallmark of a true myth: i.e. you have seen nothing like it before you read the book, but after that you see things like it everywhere. What one may call ‘the gormenghastly’ has given me a new Universal; particulars to put under it are never in short supply.” And elsewhere, C.S. Lewis wrote that “[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.”
I have italicized these sentences, because I think Lewis is hitting on something which is central to the spirit of true art and creativity. The goal seems to be more than assembling a lifelike imitation of something that already exists. The goal, rather, is to infuse an imitation with a distinct — and often either beautiful or sublime — blend of reason with feeling.
Perhaps a different way of making the same point would be to say that every work of art is like a person — neither pure reason nor pure emotion, but an unrepeatable blend of both. When we first encounter a work of great art, it is not unlike meeting a person: it challenges our preferences and preconceived notions. For this reason, I reject Eliot’s position that poetry, and art more generally, is an escape from emotion and personality. And yet he’s not entirely off-base: art is not simply an expression of the artist’s personality. It has — it is — a personality which didn’t exist before the artist brought it into being, and it’s as foreign to the artist as it is to the audience. It’s as if an artist meets his works of art in a strange world intimated, but not exhausted, by the word “inspiration,” and reports his discoveries to the audience in dispatches which invite them to visit this strange world for themselves. In a word, producing and engaging with art is like true friendship: ecstatic.
And here we come to the point: both the “classical-symbolic” and the “romantic-intuitive” stymie just this ecstatic dimension. The former prevents the audience, the latter the artist, from being pulled into that strange world, that unpredictable space beyond themselves and the security of their heritage. This is a space in which the uniqueness of one’s experiences and insights is challenged by encounters with similar experiences and insights in the works of the masters; it is a space in which alien symbols lurk in a metacultural darkness, challenging the sufficiency of the symbols with which we comfortably interpret away the ambiguities of the world.
This strange world might not be a space which we can ever truly call home. John and I both left our writing sessions profoundly depleted. In my own reading and encounters with art, I find that I can only delve so deep for so long before I have to watch Seinfeld or listen to Morgan Wallen. I suspect that all of us need inherited symbols and a sense of our own uniqueness in order to live from day to day with anything like sanity. As Stephen King observes in On Writing, “Life isn’t a support system for art. It’s the other way around.”
But though we cannot live in its unnerving recesses, I think we have a responsibility to make frequent pilgrimages to that space, to avail ourselves of the ecstatic dimension in art, for which I have a new appreciation thanks to writing this play with John. In our humble way, we have been imitating Will Navidson’s explorations of the house on Ash Tree Lane, leaving the security of what is familiar to venture, for a while, in deep places.