I came across an online clip of a song, ‘Proserpina’ (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIFsm4PQnU), almost certainly filmed on someone’s mobile phone, that I found unexpectedly touching, and I sent a link to a friend who I thought might enjoy it. She replied straight away, saying that it was both wonderful and very emotional. I was sufficiently intrigued to try to discover just why it had that effect on us, and presumably on many other people too. Part of the answer to that question is clear. ‘Proserpina’ was the last and poignant song written by the Canadian singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle before she died in 2010. It tells the story of the Roman goddess who was abducted by Pluto and taken to the underworld, and how her mother, Ceres, laments her disappearance and walks the earth looking for her. Proserpina eventually returns, but only temporarily, establishing a cycle that has mythically been associated with the reappearance of verdant spring after the desolation of winter. The song’s melody is plaintive and full of yearning, and ever since Kate McGarrigle’s death it has been used as a kind of anthem by her children, Rufus and Martha Wainwright. Often performed at the end of concerts and frequently accompanied by family members and close friends, it is a moving testament to her memory, and my own response to it, having long liked their music and once having spent a little time with Kate and her sister Anna, is warmly melancholic.
The somewhat rough and ragged nature of the video clip, as well as the performance itself, add to their emotional authenticity. It is affecting to see Kate’s children, sisters, ex-husband, and various close friends (including Emmylou Harris) sharing a spirit of communal celebration, and their overwhelming tenderness does much to heighten the power of the moment. You sense their love and vulnerability, and how these qualities are communicated to each other and the audience. Above all, you feel the performers’ connectedness, their oneness, and how they belong together; as a viewer, however distanced, you somehow became a small part of that encounter.
This feeling of oneness and connection is not normally considered an aesthetic experience, although it is common enough at artistic events, especially when they’re musical, but it is often found at other communal gatherings, both big and small. This was confirmed by some internet exploration, which quickly revealed that the phenomenon is well known and called kama muta, a Sanskrit phrase that has been loosely defined as a ‘sudden experience of oneness - of love, belonging, or union - with an individual person, family, team, nation, cosmos, or God’. According to one website I visited, the immediate effects of kama muta may include a warm sensation in the chest, tears in the eyes, a lump in your throat, irregular or deep breathing, and - especially afterwards - a sense of exhilaration. Overall, the emotion is intense and comforting, and most of us will recognise it.
The term kama muta is usually translated as ‘moved by love’, and although that is fairly accurate, it is rarely added that kama is a word for sensuous ‘desire’ or ‘longing’, and often, more specifically, for sexual desire. Some academic writers are aware of this ambiguity, but nonetheless continue to use the term to describe the feeling that is generally agreed to be caused by ‘a sudden intensification of communal sharing’. It is also widely suggested that this is a universal emotion, common to people in diverse and different cultures, and there seems to be no reason to suppose otherwise. Rarely is it mentioned, however, that kama muta can easily be aroused by emotional manipulation, both benign, as in the case of deliberate sentimentality or exaggerated emotionalism, and corrosive, as can sometimes be experienced at gatherings that generate a pleasant feeling of solidarity at the expense of other people.
The concept of kama muta may perhaps be useful to identify a certain kind of agreeable social experience, but it is less helpful when applied to aesthetics. To continue within an Indian context, the aesthetic experience of 'oneness' is more fully and accurately defined by the theory of rasa. The Sanskrit word generally means ‘taste’, ‘essence’, or ‘flavour’, but in aesthetics it goes beyond that and often refers to the feelings of joy and transcendence that an audience feels when absorbed and moved by a work of art. Impossible to define adequately, rasa functions by arousing dominant emotions such as passion, laughter, sorrow, anger, compassion, fear, and wonder, and then transmuting them into aesthetic pleasure or delight. In a spiritual context the idea is taken even further. For example, according to the philosopher Shankara, rasa refers to a form of bliss that arises within oneself and does not depend on material things; it is spiritual, subjective, and intrinsic to our being. It is also related to the emotional form of religious worship known as bhakti. Although the experience of rasa is open and common to us all, it does not, on the other hand, especially emphasize shared feelings.
Returning, then, to the experience of the clip of ‘Proserpina’, it is probably fair to say that its effect is caused by a combination of gratifying kama muta and, to a lesser extent, the aesthetic enjoyment of rasa. This may not be how the performers or most of their audience would think of the song or its effect, but it is one way of considering them without diminishing their satisfying impact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-Cudn4goNo
http://kamamutalab.org/about/
https://escholarship.org/content/qt4zv550pt/qt4zv550pt.pdf
https://www.routledge.com/Kama-Muta-Discovering-the-Connecting-Emotion-1st-Edition/Fiske/p/book/9780367220945
Sunday, December 29, 2019
The Patron Saint of Outsiders
Patti Smith likes to visit the graves of artists and writers she admires, and she often writes about those encounters, accompanying her narratives with monochrome Polaroid photographs. In one of her more recent books, Devotion, she describes traveling to Ashford in Kent in order to pay respects to the memory of Simone Weil, the French philosopher and activist who was well-known from the 1950s to the 1970s, but who receives comparatively little attention today. Her grave is inconspicuous and not easy to find.
I can’t recall why I bought Weil’s Waiting on God many years ago, but it may have been because of the novelist André Gide’s remark, quoted on the cover, that she was the patron saint of ‘outsiders’. In any event, despite her dense style and obsessiveness, I soon grew to love the passion and austerity of her thought. But there may also be a wider context for my enthusiasm, one that is shared with Patti Smith. Laure Cagne, writing in her introduction to Weil’s Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, says that it is not surprising that Weil, who died in 1943, ‘quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of countercultural intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her writings are radically, vehemently anti-bourgeois, as was her short, intense life’. She adds that Weil ‘sought to uproot herself from everything - her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement - to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammelled heart - the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth’. It was for that reason that Weil, even though tempted to do so, was never willing to join the church.
What I do remember about my early reading of Weil’s writings is her emphasis on the importance of beauty in the world, the necessity of ‘attention’, which is an act that is close to what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’, and her somewhat morbid attraction to suffering, which she called ‘affliction’. All of this explains why she has been regarded as a contemporary mystic, and it probably accounts for my own attraction to her books. After becoming aware of Patti Smith’s interest in her, however, my own curiosity was rekindled, and in the course of subsequent reading I discovered another side to Weil’s life, of which I was only dimly aware forty years ago.
Weil was an extremely clever woman, possessed of prodigious intellectual abilities, and in her early years she had little interest in overtly spiritual matters, although she soon became absorbed by ideas about truth, purity and poverty. This led to the development of a strong social conscience and activism, and after she began to teach in girls’ schools, she quickly came into conflict with educational authorities that strongly resisted her pronounced left-wing views. Weil supported workers in the towns where she was employed, engaging with marches, pickets, and writing articles for socialist journals. She gave away most of her salary. Before long she became a worker herself, taking jobs at a several factories in Paris, and was barely able to endure them. Partly because of her experience of poverty and suffering, she became involved with Christianity, despite her Jewish upbringing and ongoing attraction to Greek and other philosophies. Later, during World War II, she worked for the Free French in London. Deciding to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, whom she longed to join in active resistance to the Nazis, Weil restricted herself to what she believed were fighting men’s rations. She became ill with tuberculosis, malnourishment contributing to her predicament, and she died in a sanatorium in Kent, aged just thirty-four. The attending doctor described her death as ‘suicide’.
While thinking about Weil’s fate, Robert Bresson’s early film, The Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, came to mind. It tells the story of a man who is determined to love others to the best of his ability and to trust in the reality of 'divine presence'. The setting of the tale is bleak and wintry northern France, its dark mood reflected in the priest’s face, which is perpetually solemn and withdrawn. His parishioners scorn and insult him; reluctant or unable to defend himself, he is unable to understand their hostility. The young priest suffers deeply, more or less stops eating, and becomes ill. At the end of the film he dies.
Although much of his politics was conservative and reactionary, Bernanos had no interest in bourgeois Catholic piety; he empathized with social outsiders, with people who were not at ease with themselves and even less with society. Feelings of shame, self-hatred, and estrangement are common in his books. The country priest, whose life has long been marked by loneliness and isolation, lives in fear of being mocked and rejected, but he is convinced that God loves us; he is also determined to be good to his fellows. From a Roman Catholic point of view these simple values are a way to salvation, and Elizabeth A. Dreyer observes that Bernanos’ novel ‘opens a window onto the difficult, beautiful, elusive presence of grace in the concrete, physical, "real" world.’ As the priest writes when faced with death, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.’
Looked at from a humanist perspective, the story might be described as a tragedy, the tale of a true, albeit misguided, believer who is faced with the incomprehension and rejection of a cruel society. In that respect The Diary of a Country Priest has some connection with Simone Weil. The idea of self-sacrifice for a metaphysical ideal is completely at odds with contemporary culture’s core beliefs, and there are many today who would respond both to the country priest and to Simone Weil’s life and thought with puzzled dismissiveness. One recent commentator, for instance, has observed that ‘though prissy, sanctimonious, and prejudiced, Weil’s writing still has something to teach us about disconnection in modern society, and how we can begin to reconnect’. Susan Sontag, sceptical about most aspects of Weil’s life and thinking, has put it more generously, remarking that ‘she is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Simone Weil might vigorously have argued that they are both completely missing the point.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/who-was-simone-weil-introduction
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-diary-of-a-country-priest-1951
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/holiness-comes-through-humanness-not-opposition-it
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/
I can’t recall why I bought Weil’s Waiting on God many years ago, but it may have been because of the novelist André Gide’s remark, quoted on the cover, that she was the patron saint of ‘outsiders’. In any event, despite her dense style and obsessiveness, I soon grew to love the passion and austerity of her thought. But there may also be a wider context for my enthusiasm, one that is shared with Patti Smith. Laure Cagne, writing in her introduction to Weil’s Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us, says that it is not surprising that Weil, who died in 1943, ‘quickly achieved legendary status among a whole generation of countercultural intellectuals and spiritual seekers. Her writings are radically, vehemently anti-bourgeois, as was her short, intense life’. She adds that Weil ‘sought to uproot herself from everything - her parents’ solicitousness, the comfortable surroundings of her childhood, and even the normal benchmarks of academic achievement - to which she might form an attachment. Her goal was an untrammelled heart - the necessary condition, she believed, for knowing the truth’. It was for that reason that Weil, even though tempted to do so, was never willing to join the church.
What I do remember about my early reading of Weil’s writings is her emphasis on the importance of beauty in the world, the necessity of ‘attention’, which is an act that is close to what Buddhists call ‘mindfulness’, and her somewhat morbid attraction to suffering, which she called ‘affliction’. All of this explains why she has been regarded as a contemporary mystic, and it probably accounts for my own attraction to her books. After becoming aware of Patti Smith’s interest in her, however, my own curiosity was rekindled, and in the course of subsequent reading I discovered another side to Weil’s life, of which I was only dimly aware forty years ago.
Weil was an extremely clever woman, possessed of prodigious intellectual abilities, and in her early years she had little interest in overtly spiritual matters, although she soon became absorbed by ideas about truth, purity and poverty. This led to the development of a strong social conscience and activism, and after she began to teach in girls’ schools, she quickly came into conflict with educational authorities that strongly resisted her pronounced left-wing views. Weil supported workers in the towns where she was employed, engaging with marches, pickets, and writing articles for socialist journals. She gave away most of her salary. Before long she became a worker herself, taking jobs at a several factories in Paris, and was barely able to endure them. Partly because of her experience of poverty and suffering, she became involved with Christianity, despite her Jewish upbringing and ongoing attraction to Greek and other philosophies. Later, during World War II, she worked for the Free French in London. Deciding to fast in solidarity with soldiers at the front, whom she longed to join in active resistance to the Nazis, Weil restricted herself to what she believed were fighting men’s rations. She became ill with tuberculosis, malnourishment contributing to her predicament, and she died in a sanatorium in Kent, aged just thirty-four. The attending doctor described her death as ‘suicide’.
While thinking about Weil’s fate, Robert Bresson’s early film, The Diary of a Country Priest, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos, came to mind. It tells the story of a man who is determined to love others to the best of his ability and to trust in the reality of 'divine presence'. The setting of the tale is bleak and wintry northern France, its dark mood reflected in the priest’s face, which is perpetually solemn and withdrawn. His parishioners scorn and insult him; reluctant or unable to defend himself, he is unable to understand their hostility. The young priest suffers deeply, more or less stops eating, and becomes ill. At the end of the film he dies.
Although much of his politics was conservative and reactionary, Bernanos had no interest in bourgeois Catholic piety; he empathized with social outsiders, with people who were not at ease with themselves and even less with society. Feelings of shame, self-hatred, and estrangement are common in his books. The country priest, whose life has long been marked by loneliness and isolation, lives in fear of being mocked and rejected, but he is convinced that God loves us; he is also determined to be good to his fellows. From a Roman Catholic point of view these simple values are a way to salvation, and Elizabeth A. Dreyer observes that Bernanos’ novel ‘opens a window onto the difficult, beautiful, elusive presence of grace in the concrete, physical, "real" world.’ As the priest writes when faced with death, "Does it matter? Grace is everywhere.’
Looked at from a humanist perspective, the story might be described as a tragedy, the tale of a true, albeit misguided, believer who is faced with the incomprehension and rejection of a cruel society. In that respect The Diary of a Country Priest has some connection with Simone Weil. The idea of self-sacrifice for a metaphysical ideal is completely at odds with contemporary culture’s core beliefs, and there are many today who would respond both to the country priest and to Simone Weil’s life and thought with puzzled dismissiveness. One recent commentator, for instance, has observed that ‘though prissy, sanctimonious, and prejudiced, Weil’s writing still has something to teach us about disconnection in modern society, and how we can begin to reconnect’. Susan Sontag, sceptical about most aspects of Weil’s life and thinking, has put it more generously, remarking that ‘she is rightly regarded as one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit’. Simone Weil might vigorously have argued that they are both completely missing the point.
https://www.plough.com/en/topics/faith/witness/who-was-simone-weil-introduction
https://aeon.co/essays/why-simone-weil-is-the-patron-saint-of-anomalous-persons
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-diary-of-a-country-priest-1951
https://www.ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/holiness-comes-through-humanness-not-opposition-it
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/02/01/simone-weil/
Crowds
The author of a recent article in The Guardian grumbled about how major exhibitions around the world are now so crowded that it is almost impossible to enjoy them. ‘Can you really appreciate art when you have to crane your neck, dodge elbows, and wait for selfie-takers to move on?’, she asked. Overcrowding is not, of course, a recent phenomenon, as the number of visitors to museums and galleries have grown steadily in the last few decades, but it seems to have become something of an issue. There is now so much demand for new cultural experiences that the likelihood of anyone actually having agreeable or lasting engagements with art, at least in popular exhibitions, is becoming increasingly remote. As in most areas of contemporary life, cultural activity is usually based on a need for entertainment, distraction, and - at best - well-meaning curiosity. While all of these desires can be catered for in crowded rooms, the experience of art is diminished.
During the many years I worked at a Dublin gallery there was always pressure to increase visitor numbers, and the main reason for this was this was the supposed necessity to justify the funding that came from the public purse. In my final years the pressure became insistent and relentless. I resisted it, but although this sometimes gave rise to accusations of élitism, I was always pleased when an exhibition was popular. On the other hand, it wasn’t a priority; I liked the fact that the gallery was normally a quiet place, withdrawn from the bustle of city life, somewhere where people could slow down, gather their thoughts, and let the art work on them. I remember once justifying this approach, when pressed to do so, by saying that there was a great deal of purpose and beauty in a small whitewashed Greek church that was lit by a handful of candles and which wasn’t listed in tourist guides, and that I wouldn’t at all mind if the gallery had something of the same evocative and luminous anonymity. Apparently my analogy was not convincing.
There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons why quiet galleries are a good thing, and some of them are to be found in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, a book first published in 1934 but still of relevance. Dewey is especially insistent on the idea that art is a form of transfiguration, and that it is not inherent in objects or commodities. When art is dissociated from life, he writes, it loses its power and just becomes a thing. The aesthetic experience, he adds, should not be reduced to the level of pleasurable transience but should help to create order out of chaos in a world that is constantly threatened by disorder. Otherwise, that experience is simply confirmation of what you already know or anticipate, with occasional moments of surprise. To Dewey, engagement with art implies reflection and the overcoming of uncertainty, a process that involves the suspension of judgement, at least for a while, as well as the willingness to endure a degree of ambiguity. This is close, he says, to the state of mind that the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’. There is often, Dewey remarks, an intimate connection between slowness and depth of response.
None of this is easy to achieve in a crowded gallery, and while it is certainly fair to argue that it is good and democratic to have more people enjoying cultural activities it is not unreasonable to counter with the suggestion that excessive popularity can destroy the very experience that people want to enjoy. Dewey proposed that the rise of capitalism removed art from life by making it a commodity of class, status and taste, but while there is probably a desire for upward social mobility in the growth in the number of visitors to major exhibitions, a more plausible cause to be found, as The Guardian article suggests, in the ubiquity of smartphones and in the dominance of social media, both of which encourage superficial notions of familiarity, novelty, and connectedness.
Not that long ago museums and galleries were for the most part muted places, even in capital cities, and popular exhibitions could be visited without too much discomfort. There was time to stand still and look, and this meant that moments of understanding and discovery were possible and often commonplace. I’m also sure that such experiences come to us through a form of grace, in the absence of wilfulness or desire. As Buddhism emphasizes, being is of more value than becoming. In J.D. Salinger’s masterly short story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, the main character, when asked by his fiancée’s mother what he will do when he leaves the army, replies that he would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder, who is interested in psychoanalysis, concludes that Seymour Glass has psychological problems, missing the point that he was alluding to a Zen parable about a spiritual master who said that the most valuable thing in the world was a dead cat, precisely because no one could put a price on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/02/caught-in-the-crush-are-our-galleries-now-hopelessly-overcrowded/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/11/art-as-experience-john-dewey/
https://hyperallergic.com/67081/reconsidering-john-deweys-art-as-experience/
During the many years I worked at a Dublin gallery there was always pressure to increase visitor numbers, and the main reason for this was this was the supposed necessity to justify the funding that came from the public purse. In my final years the pressure became insistent and relentless. I resisted it, but although this sometimes gave rise to accusations of élitism, I was always pleased when an exhibition was popular. On the other hand, it wasn’t a priority; I liked the fact that the gallery was normally a quiet place, withdrawn from the bustle of city life, somewhere where people could slow down, gather their thoughts, and let the art work on them. I remember once justifying this approach, when pressed to do so, by saying that there was a great deal of purpose and beauty in a small whitewashed Greek church that was lit by a handful of candles and which wasn’t listed in tourist guides, and that I wouldn’t at all mind if the gallery had something of the same evocative and luminous anonymity. Apparently my analogy was not convincing.
There are other, perhaps more compelling, reasons why quiet galleries are a good thing, and some of them are to be found in John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience, a book first published in 1934 but still of relevance. Dewey is especially insistent on the idea that art is a form of transfiguration, and that it is not inherent in objects or commodities. When art is dissociated from life, he writes, it loses its power and just becomes a thing. The aesthetic experience, he adds, should not be reduced to the level of pleasurable transience but should help to create order out of chaos in a world that is constantly threatened by disorder. Otherwise, that experience is simply confirmation of what you already know or anticipate, with occasional moments of surprise. To Dewey, engagement with art implies reflection and the overcoming of uncertainty, a process that involves the suspension of judgement, at least for a while, as well as the willingness to endure a degree of ambiguity. This is close, he says, to the state of mind that the poet John Keats called ‘negative capability’. There is often, Dewey remarks, an intimate connection between slowness and depth of response.
None of this is easy to achieve in a crowded gallery, and while it is certainly fair to argue that it is good and democratic to have more people enjoying cultural activities it is not unreasonable to counter with the suggestion that excessive popularity can destroy the very experience that people want to enjoy. Dewey proposed that the rise of capitalism removed art from life by making it a commodity of class, status and taste, but while there is probably a desire for upward social mobility in the growth in the number of visitors to major exhibitions, a more plausible cause to be found, as The Guardian article suggests, in the ubiquity of smartphones and in the dominance of social media, both of which encourage superficial notions of familiarity, novelty, and connectedness.
Not that long ago museums and galleries were for the most part muted places, even in capital cities, and popular exhibitions could be visited without too much discomfort. There was time to stand still and look, and this meant that moments of understanding and discovery were possible and often commonplace. I’m also sure that such experiences come to us through a form of grace, in the absence of wilfulness or desire. As Buddhism emphasizes, being is of more value than becoming. In J.D. Salinger’s masterly short story, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenter, the main character, when asked by his fiancée’s mother what he will do when he leaves the army, replies that he would like to be a dead cat. Mrs. Fedder, who is interested in psychoanalysis, concludes that Seymour Glass has psychological problems, missing the point that he was alluding to a Zen parable about a spiritual master who said that the most valuable thing in the world was a dead cat, precisely because no one could put a price on it.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/dec/02/caught-in-the-crush-are-our-galleries-now-hopelessly-overcrowded/
https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/11/art-as-experience-john-dewey/
https://hyperallergic.com/67081/reconsidering-john-deweys-art-as-experience/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)