Rock Island, IL

Were it not for the prick of conscience, or the brief spots of time, or the melancholy fits that fall sudden from heaven, or even the odd enterprises of great pitch and moment, our lives, no doubt, would be little more than long dull stretches of inattentiveness.

Or so it has seemed to me at certain moments in Elgar, or Brahms, or Lear, or Gray’s Elegy, or Michael: something deep within rouses itself from a dull stupid slumber, and all at once I know that whereas once I slept, now I am awake. My rough and weathered skin, long calloused to the harshest abrasions, is suddenly turned inside out. The distinction between pain and pleasure recedes and dissolves into something like joy, whence it disappears altogether. It is as if my fingers have suddenly torn at an itching wound, ravenously scratching it into a relief so intense that the relief is more like a heightened irritation, in proof whereof blood trickles from the wound and gathers to a hardened darkness under my nails.

Scarcely anything compares to this felt change, this shift in consciousness, at once so real and yet so difficult to give voice to. The materialist has his ready and easy answer, it is true, but we can hardly credit it—not with so bright and open a wound as now throbs before us, not with our breath only now returning, not with the taste of joy–that longing more pleasurable than any satisfaction thereof, that irritant more sought after than the balm of satiety itself—still hanging upon our tongues.

For great art performs this one great function at least: it tells us that we are more than lumps of galvanized meat. It places before us certain puzzles; it puts to us certain questions. What, for example, is Hecuba to this lump of meat, or it to Hecuba, that it should weep for her?

Of course it cannot weep for her. But we can, for we are susceptible to sorrow, capable of it. Sorrow is not synapses, and we err to tell the grieving mother who stands over her son’s grave that her sorrow is one thing bumping against another up in the gray matter between her ears. We err and we presume.

Art may not solve what else we are, but this much is sure: it doesn’t countenance any reductive nonsense.

And yet, when there’s a momentary break in the long dull stretch of inattentiveness, I would ask of myself another question still: what has the prick of conscience, the spot of time, the melancholy fit, the enterprise left me feeling? What has it left me thinking I must do? Because it hasn’t left me unaffected. It is a great pleasure, and I, like others, want to repeat the pleasure. But it is also a great pain, and I also want to repeat the pain. That is to say, the break from slumber is a great unresolved mixture of pain and pleasure—it is joy itself—and I want the joy again—the joy and not the long dull stretch of stupid sleep. In sleep there neither is nor can be any longing, and I must have the longing. Not the satisfaction of the longing, but the longing itself—the longing that is its own satisfaction—a satisfaction yet unsatisfied.

The answer, I propose, is that it has left me thinking that I must sustain the break, or seek often to repeat it, for it has intimated to me that in the break from inattentiveness I have been reminded of who I am. There, in the break, I am aware of a real movement of the soul; there, in the break, I am aware of something like the soul’s real progress. I am aware that where there is no longing there can be no motion of the soul.

I suppose I am describing in something like aesthetic terms a “religious” experience, though again I sense here a difference that recedes, dissolves, and at last disappears. Mind you, I would not blur that distinction altogether: blurring can lead pretty quickly—and quite disastrously—to the favorite nature trail or concert hall as “church,” and once your favorite stump becomes your altar you’ve stopped making sense altogether. A stump is a stump; an altar is an altar.

No. What I mean to suggest, though I am by no means the first to suggest it, is that if the experience of art and religion be analogues of each another, as I suspect they are, then we had better be prepared to make moral claims for art—and artistic claims for religion—or for morality, if you prefer. The former—that we must be prepared to make moral claims for art—is what I have in fact been doing here all along. (And be it noted that I have included in my definition of art “spots of time,” which, to my way of thinking, could include the sound of sheep munching—so long as the sound hits you just right, as, indeed, it has sometimes hit me.)

In his famous Preface Wordsworth (who gave us “spots of time”) made a moral claim for poetry. He thought poetry a viable antidote to the “general evil” manifest in the “savage torpor” of minds too blunted for any kind of voluntary exertion whatsoever. He argued (as well as he could) that the mind is capable of being moved “without the application of gross and violent stimulants” and that a renewal of poetry might, in 1802, do a nervous and beleaguered country some good, what with all that perturbation going on across the water to the east.

I can’t see that there’s anything particularly odd about Wordsworth’s faith at that time in poetry, given the tendency in our own to turn to the motion picture in moments of national uncertainty. We’re often given movies that we’re supposed to rally around, the difference between Hollywodd and Wordsworth being that whereas the one offers an easy untaxing art form the other offered a difficult one (the additional difference being, perhaps, that Wordsworth would say our preferred medium does more to dull than to move the mind, whereas we would say “whatever“).

That, I suppose, is contestable. But at any rate the point is that, whether then or now, we assign to art a social and therefore a moral function. We expect it to accomplish something in the way of good. We expect it first to move us, and then to move us.

Of this movement, this motion of the soul, I have had a few words to say. And I would say them still. I would have us capable of being moved by art, and then of moving because of it. There is a relation between being moved and moving that I would retain.

But that, of course, is where things get messy. That is where art, left to itself, is wholly insufficient to the task at hand. Thus abandoned, it requires us to speak of other things we had better be prepared to speak of.

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