Dreaming the revolt of the Muses--

Gustave Moreau, Hesiod and the Muse, 1891.
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Wikipedia gallery / public domain

The world is a Silk Road--we have been adopting and adapting bits of other people's culture from the start. Culture is no more a static thing than is language. It's a living, growing thing, and we should hope that it is in good health for all our sakes. What many froth over--cultural influence--is the condition of the planet for many thousands of years. Cultural contact meant and still means change and growth and a way of re-imagining one's own arts. At the moment, I don't think the culture is in especially fit health, in large part because we've cheerfully let in the Trojan horse of entertainment (enjoyable and fun and occasionally rising to heights, yes, but not usually the height of human achievement) to defeat the high works of culture and leave only tiny audiences for many of our most important arts. Precious traditions dwindle and die away.

Take poetry as an example. We find ourselves--at least in this country--with a vision of poetry that is extremely small these days. As readers and as writers, we have forgotten our Western classical roots, seldom study the great works of the past in our own language (we oust Chaucer and Shakespeare and Milton from the English major in many schools), and have abandoned our knowledge of a range of forms, prosody, syntax, modes, tropes, figures, and auricular pleasures. And that means we have kicked a good deal of variety and surprise and liveliness out of the poetry tent.

A great many writers have come through the Romantic period and into Modernism and Post-Modernism with a conviction that poetry can only begin with our own (sometimes itty-bitty) feelings and end in an epiphany of some sort, and that stance cripples us. We have been devoted to the small lyric for too many years, and we have ignored the other possibilities. When such things happen, we fall into the world of diminishing returns.

I like this (already somewhat old) trumpet call from Mary Kinzie:

...the poet aims to restore to poetry the universality and aboriginally that over time has mistakenly been reassigned to prose. Poetry is the preconditional state of language, not its late and shiftless offspring... Poetry was once the queen of literature, not its poor cousin. At various junctures drama was written in it; so were letters. Once the medium of songs as of satire, of philosophical meditations and allegory, of civic as well as private praise and lament, poetic verse periodically could do anything a thoughtful or unruly bard wished it to do. It was the very expanse of possibility in which literary structure was secured. I subscribe to the notion that, if language can be thought of as a pyramid, its base is poetry, not prose. Poetry is the ground--the ground of resemblance, controlled in time--from which literature of all kinds takes shape.

Isn't it time for a revolt of the Muses? My hope is that we are entering a period of unruly bards who will take new territory and unruly readers, who will look far beyond the limits of entertainment.  We ourselves are, after all, the ones who can change our world. The past and tradition don't just make us look backward but are the nourishment that helps us look forward.

Here are some thoughts about the state of poetry and the arts from writer and poet Jeff Sypeck, drawn from a series of comments on the previous post, "The Fool in his fish skin cloak," that I thought deserved to be in greater light and not tucked away in the comments section.

And it's not just at universities. I spent two years attending major conferences in the museum world, and everyone was fretting about how to meet the demands of young people, with almost nobody willing to claim that their field should be promoting slow-paced contemplation and beauty as an alternative to the culture. I've seen museums use their exhibition spaces as dance clubs, and some symphonies now make a big deal out of programs devoted to movie soundtracks or video-game music.

I don't necessarily object to any of those things, but you can smell the nervous sweat of arts professionals desperate to be liked by the culture at large, even though the culture has overwhelmingly opted to embrace corporate entertainment instead. Museums, art centers, indy publishers, orchestras--they should all be starting with the premise that for at least some people out there, alternatives exist to a $410 million piece of crap like "Batman vs. Superman," and I don't mean "Batman vs. Superman II."

What can we do? I, for one, am trying to promote and spend more money on art and entertainment that's weird, independent, unaffiliated--but I think it would help if we had stronger rebuttals to cries of "elitism!" and "snobbery!," the most common smears against fine-art and high-arts advocates. People who like crap aren't open to hearing someone scold them to like better things--but how to persuade them is something I've been thinking a great deal about lately.

What we need are good arguments—not lofty statements that we ourselves already believe, but claims that persuade. To my mind, one of the best is an honest expansion of the argument used when music and theater programs in schools are threatened: that these things are lifesavers for kids who desperately need outlets. There's no reason that thinking should apply only to kids or only to school programs; I've seen middle-aged people find new purpose in their lives by learning oil painting or becoming mosaicists, and I once saw a 60-year-old student, a construction foreman, discover that he loved opera (to the bemusement of his patient wife). We should greatly expand the thinking behind the cry that sensitive kids need the drama club; all kinds of people need this stuff in all phases of their lives. 

Lately I've been thinking that another viable argument involves a bit of gentle shame aimed at the more liberal-minded: if you so distrust and dislike corporations, why do you give them 100 percent of your art and entertainment budget? Diversify! 

I should note that I write this as someone who used to be a popular-culture junkie. I still like a good superhero movie, danceable music, ambitious comics...but I'm grateful to have had bigger things to grow into. I foolishly assumed that this more high-minded culture would always be there; I never imagined that popular culture would so overwhelm it. 

I'm still thinking about how to promulgate the arguments and use not only the shame but also the hope and the curiosity and even the fear of people who opt for corporate entertainment by default. I don't expect to start a cultural revolution, but every person who takes a little more non-corporate art and entertainment into their lives is a victory as far as I'm concerned. I want to come up with arguments that are as scrupulously honest as they are persuasive, but to be persuasive, those arguments can't be disdainful or insulting. It's an interesting rhetorical challenge. (One of the strongest tactics may be to appeal to an ongoing countercultural impulse. Is there anything more establishment, more pro-corporation, more consumerist than marching off to the latest superhero movie?) 

I also think it has to be a face-to-face process: getting people into artists' studios, art centers, theaters, literary events, and so forth. I'll go so far as to say that even video-game night or sci-fi theme-song night at the orchestra could be good starts, as "pops concerts" once were, if these events were presented not apologetically, but as the first promising glimpse of a much larger creative world.

So what do you think of all that? I expect there are plenty of people who have interesting ideas about how to deal with the conquest of entertainment and the need for unruly bards! If you are one, leave a note. How to care for culture is a issue that sings out to us all.

Update: Lots of views, no comments! Maybe I'd better promise not to put any comments on the front page! I also ought to say that a great deal of what we once regarded as entertainment has lasted, and lasted well--Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Fielding, etc. Evidently the meaning of this word entertainment has changed over time, though, and perhaps I need to figure out what it meant and what it means now.

The Fool in his fish-skin cloak

Today is a rainy ferrywoman day, so I leave you with a snip from The Book of the Red King, as I will be working on it when I return, and also a bit of the pleasantly obsessed fairy painter, John Anster Fitzgerald (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons), in honor of the brave snowdrops and crocuses in the yard. Perhaps it would be sweet to be so obsessed with fairies as John Anster Fitzgerald was, to flit to another realm where things like the Brussels attacks and the Lahore Easter bombings do not happen. But then, even in Faerie, the Queen must pay a tithe to hell, and she prefers her tithe to be human...

So here's a poem with a bit of fairy glamour, the subject being the Fool's beloved, Precious Wentletrap. This one was originally in Yew Journal, and was picked up by Shirl Sazynski for her future anthology, Persephone's Kiss.


THE WENTLETRAP MYSTERY


Who is the Princess Wentletrap? 

Is she a gleaming heaven-fish,
All splotched and straked with milky stars,
A trout that shatters pools with light?

Or is she only a spiral shell? 

Listen. Closer. Glass bells shiver.
The sea is captured in a whorl.
The thimbled music of the spheres.

Is she a castle’s winding stair? 

But can you follow, gyring up
To an observatory height?
Dance high-wire on the horns of moon?

Or is she threshed from lunar fields? 

Is she the bounty of the dark?
See, stepping from the ruffled waves
Onto a strand of quartz and gold!

How the Fool dreams Precious Wentletrap . . . 

Thinned-out aspen leaves and mica:
Nothing can be so lovely-frail
As her white hands, held up to light.

Why manifest to the King’s Fool? 

He has the gift of fetching her.
He sings, wearing the fish-skin cloak
Under a crown of sparkling dust.

* * *

If you are interested in literature and criticism, read and enjoy or tussle with Joseph Epstein's new review, Where Have All the Critics Gone? Clip: Today the standard of highbrow culture has been worn away, almost to the point of threadbareness. For political reasons, universities no longer feel obligated to spread its gospel. Western culture—dead white males and all that—with its imperialist history has long been increasingly non grata in humanities departments. Everywhere pride of place has been given to the merely interesting—the study of gay and lesbian culture, of graphic novels and comic books, and more—over the deeply significant. Culture, as it is now understood in the university and elsewhere, is largely popular culture. That battle has, at least for now, been lost.

***

"Heaven have mercy on us all--Presbyterians and Pagans alike--for we are all somehow dreadful cracked about the head, and sadly need mending." --Melville, Moby Dick

Fra Angelico at Easter

Update, 16 hours later: One thing I love about comments is that people say curious things, and then that helps me to know my own mind. Here's a bit of my reply to the ever-interesting poet (and more) with the alliterative name, Roderick Robinson, drawn from the just-prior post on Fra Angelico's Christ:

I look at Fra Angelico with a kind of relief, knowing that he would never, ever believe in "a senseless act of beauty," that beauty for him is always meaningful. So different from our own day. He's always so direct and clear and devoted to the art. Like George Herbert, he could have been much in a worldly sense but turned away from those chances. I admire that sort of understanding, one that sees so clearly what is important in life and what is not. And there we are veering closer to what you call "unfashionability as a virtue."

* * *

I'm too tired to think in words, so here's a little more Fra Angelico to admire--a detail from a fresco, "Resurrection of Christ and the Women at the Tomb" at the Convento di San Marco, Florence, 1440-1441. Public domain image. Here are some more beautiful San Marco images from Fra Angelico.

Here is how Giorgio Vasari describes Fra Angelico in his Lives of the Most Excellent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects:

He would not follow the ways of the world, but lived purely and holily, and was a great friend of the poor. He painted constantly, and would never represent anything but the saints. He might have been rich, but did not care about it, saying that true riches are nothing else than being content with little... To sum up, this father, who can never be enough praised, was in all his works and words most humble and modest, and in his paintings facile and devout; and the saints whom he painted have more the air and likeness of saints than those of any one else. It was his habit never to retouch or alter any of his paintings, but to leave them as they came the first time, believing, as he said, that such was the will of God. 

And now good night! Or good morning, elsewhere.

* * *

Nancy Olson, founder and 29-year owner of Quail Ridge Books of Raleigh.

 Requiescat in Pace

500-year art for Good Friday

A few years back, I was startled by a face looking out of the marvelous Fra Angelico show at the Met. It is a common enough compliment to say that images are arresting, even when they are not. I can say from experience that this one is.  ‪It's right for the day, right for a week that reminds us of murdered innocence and grief for the world.

The image also reminds me of painter Makoto Fujimura's essay, "Fra Angelico and the Five Hundred Year Question."

I entered the halls and the golden aura of a diminutive Virgin Mary painting greeted me, with her azurite robe, and the Christ child’s supple body, reflecting her humanity -- a simple work full of weighty colors. Then I had to close my eyes, after a few seconds of pondering the saturated surface. I realized this was too much to behold, all at once. As I staggered about looking for a blank wall to stare at, almost feeling ashamed to be in the presence of such greatness, I had a “500 year” question pop up in my mind.

What is the five hundred year question? Well, it’s a historical look at the reality of our cultures, and asking what ideas, what art, what vision affects humanity for over five hundred years. It’s the opposite of the Warholian “15 seconds of fame.”

It was, you see, inspired by his visit to the Fra Angelico show.