Aesthetics & the Purpose of Writing
I've been absent from this blog, though by no means absent from writing, for some months now. Below is my most recent musing on the plight of the writer, the meaning of our existence, our urge and desire to be.
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I’m thinking about the concept of the aesthetic. Is a thing with aesthetic value always beautiful? Joseph Campbell describes aesthetics as something that one does not want to covet (that is pornography, he says) and that lacks irony. He says the sublime is also of the aesthetic realm. The sublime can be monstrous, but it still can be aesthetically appealing. Transcendent. Awe-inspiring.
And art—what is that? Does it lack completely the political, the socially significant? In the introduction to Tony Morrison’s Sula, she talks of the challenge African-American writers face in creating an aesthetic work. Because of their race, critics want to tear apart their output and ask what it means to the black experience, what politics it contains.
I wonder about my own writing. Am I writing a testimonial to the sick and twisted effects of ignorance on the psyche of a young mind/spirit/soul/body? Is my work woven through with irony? (most of the time, yes) Does it mean anything, and is there anything lasting in it?
That’s what we do, we writers. We write hoping that what we write lasts. Hoping it means something in the whole sphere of human existence. I’ve heard it say that writers write because they are making a bid for immortality. Maybe it was Schopenhauer. I don’t know. Anyway, I have this recurring vision of scraps of paper, notes for stories and lines that are too good to toss away but that don’t quite fit into any work in progress, just floating on the wind, drifting away to some niche in the forest, awaiting discovery by another pair of human eyes who will read them and as a result, experience some sort of transcendence. They lay there, exposed to the elements, each rain or snow, each wafting breeze carrying grinding dirt and sand across the ink on the page, wearing away those thoughts, those words. It’s a conflict with what I think I believe – that it all exists, all thoughts, all epiphanies, somewhere in a collective consciousness, that nothing can be lost and that all that is, is and can’t be destroyed. Somewhere I read that the mark of intellect is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in ones mind at the same time. Perhaps I’m not so confused as I am growing intellectually? Nice thought. Nice rationalization.
Getting back to that foreword from Sula (First Vintage International Edition, 2004), Toni Morrison says, “Conventional wisdom agrees that political fiction is not art; that such work is less likely to have aesthetic value because of politics—all politics—is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production.” She goes on to say, “That wisdom…seems to have been unavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens” (xi). Thank God. So, if I can, in my ignorance, write what I know, what I think and what I believe, is there any chance in hell (perhaps somewhere amid Dante’s layers) that I might accidentally create something that falls in that very narrow niche of the political and the aesthetic? Is it wrong to just do it, pull a Nike, and not care about whether or not something qualifies as literature, aesthetic and artful? Does Stephen King lay awake at night fretting over the possibility that his work only appeals to a generation, that it may fade away into nothingness, a footnote in the annals of pop culture of the mid 20th and early 21st centuries?
Aesthetics be damned, I have to follow Audre Lorde’s challenge of transforming silences (mine, nearly forty years’ worth) into language, and hope, pray, encourage that action will be a result. She asks, in her essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” She asks the question, she issues the challenge. She tells us, “…primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.”
What is a writer? What is the goal of a writer? An architect designs a building hoping that it will survive the trials of time and fashion, become a lasting part of history. A teacher teaches hoping to pass along knowledge to a bright, young mind who will then take it and use it for good, for lasting good. A doctor saves lives believing that every life has a value, contributes. Perhaps I’m not the artist variety of writer. Perhaps there are different kinds, and I can take my abilities to construct a sentence that carries the reader along, share my life experiences and convey, in that sense, the message of survival, of moving beyond, of transcendence of life on life’s terms.
Perhaps.
******************************************************************************
I’m thinking about the concept of the aesthetic. Is a thing with aesthetic value always beautiful? Joseph Campbell describes aesthetics as something that one does not want to covet (that is pornography, he says) and that lacks irony. He says the sublime is also of the aesthetic realm. The sublime can be monstrous, but it still can be aesthetically appealing. Transcendent. Awe-inspiring.
And art—what is that? Does it lack completely the political, the socially significant? In the introduction to Tony Morrison’s Sula, she talks of the challenge African-American writers face in creating an aesthetic work. Because of their race, critics want to tear apart their output and ask what it means to the black experience, what politics it contains.
I wonder about my own writing. Am I writing a testimonial to the sick and twisted effects of ignorance on the psyche of a young mind/spirit/soul/body? Is my work woven through with irony? (most of the time, yes) Does it mean anything, and is there anything lasting in it?
That’s what we do, we writers. We write hoping that what we write lasts. Hoping it means something in the whole sphere of human existence. I’ve heard it say that writers write because they are making a bid for immortality. Maybe it was Schopenhauer. I don’t know. Anyway, I have this recurring vision of scraps of paper, notes for stories and lines that are too good to toss away but that don’t quite fit into any work in progress, just floating on the wind, drifting away to some niche in the forest, awaiting discovery by another pair of human eyes who will read them and as a result, experience some sort of transcendence. They lay there, exposed to the elements, each rain or snow, each wafting breeze carrying grinding dirt and sand across the ink on the page, wearing away those thoughts, those words. It’s a conflict with what I think I believe – that it all exists, all thoughts, all epiphanies, somewhere in a collective consciousness, that nothing can be lost and that all that is, is and can’t be destroyed. Somewhere I read that the mark of intellect is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in ones mind at the same time. Perhaps I’m not so confused as I am growing intellectually? Nice thought. Nice rationalization.
Getting back to that foreword from Sula (First Vintage International Edition, 2004), Toni Morrison says, “Conventional wisdom agrees that political fiction is not art; that such work is less likely to have aesthetic value because of politics—all politics—is agenda and therefore its presence taints aesthetic production.” She goes on to say, “That wisdom…seems to have been unavailable to Chaucer, or Dante, or Catullus, or Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Dickens” (xi). Thank God. So, if I can, in my ignorance, write what I know, what I think and what I believe, is there any chance in hell (perhaps somewhere amid Dante’s layers) that I might accidentally create something that falls in that very narrow niche of the political and the aesthetic? Is it wrong to just do it, pull a Nike, and not care about whether or not something qualifies as literature, aesthetic and artful? Does Stephen King lay awake at night fretting over the possibility that his work only appeals to a generation, that it may fade away into nothingness, a footnote in the annals of pop culture of the mid 20th and early 21st centuries?
Aesthetics be damned, I have to follow Audre Lorde’s challenge of transforming silences (mine, nearly forty years’ worth) into language, and hope, pray, encourage that action will be a result. She asks, in her essay The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, “What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” She asks the question, she issues the challenge. She tells us, “…primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.”
What is a writer? What is the goal of a writer? An architect designs a building hoping that it will survive the trials of time and fashion, become a lasting part of history. A teacher teaches hoping to pass along knowledge to a bright, young mind who will then take it and use it for good, for lasting good. A doctor saves lives believing that every life has a value, contributes. Perhaps I’m not the artist variety of writer. Perhaps there are different kinds, and I can take my abilities to construct a sentence that carries the reader along, share my life experiences and convey, in that sense, the message of survival, of moving beyond, of transcendence of life on life’s terms.
Perhaps.
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