jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner) (09/12/85)
[...] Do I want to get into the Art discussion? Oh, what the heck... One of the most succinct definitions of Art I have ever heard was the title of a book (sorry, I don't know the author): "Art is forgetting the name of what you are looking at". (Mumbles from the audience: what the hell does that MEAN?) Art is something that opens your eyes (and ears and mind) so that you experience something new. Taking a simple example from the visual arts, think of a drawing of, say, a tree. There are drawings on which you might comment, "Oh yeah, nice tree." Then there are the drawings that make you look and SEE; instead of just thinking "tree" and that's the end of it, you see what is actually in the picture: things like bark texture, the effect of wind, the effect of sunlight, and on and on. The situation is even clearer if we talk of photographs. A million people have taken pictures of that gnarled tree on the rocky butte in Yosemite...but when Ansel Adams takes the same picture, we SEE it without our brains kicking in the handy cut-off valve. The art in writing works the same way. It gives us something that is not shrugged off by our mental reflexes. It makes us see something with a BEGINNER'S EYE. And to do this, the writer/artist must also have the Beginner's Eye. This is why repackaged hash doesn't appeal to anyone. This is why certain books (which may not be that good in any broadly accepted sense) can open our eyes if they hit us at the right time (when they give us something we haven't seen before, that old "sense of wonder"). This gives us both a subjective and relatively objective way to evaluate what literature does for us. From any individual's point of view, the books (and Art) he or she can appreciate are those that induce a beginner's eye view, so that we see and experience things in a fresh way instead of shuffling along with reflexive reactions. There's no way to predict which books are going to work this way for a person -- what a particular book manages to give you depends on who you are, current events in your life, what you have read before, and so on. People who have never read Tolkien before can get excited about pale Tolkien clones that would bore someone who has read the real thing. That's the subjective part. On the objective side, there are authors and books that can provide new and valuable experiences for practically anyone. It doesn't matter what you've read before, it doesn't matter what is currently influencing your life, it doesn't matter what you have or haven't experienced. Such authors and boooks are _alive_ and _awake_, and anyone coming to them with an open mind can have his or her eyes opened. They may not be easy to read: the material could be too intense; the prose may be complex; the structure of the work may be unorthodox. A good read does not mean an easy read, any more than a good physical work-out means an easy one. But after reading and after working out, we can sometimes feel that we have broken out of the mundane and got hold of something more real and solid than everyday blase life. Summary: some authors/books are fresh for particular people, some are fresh for everyone because they are intrinsically unique. There is no guarantee that someone will like one of the intrinsically fresh books...which is nothing to sneer at, because people are not obligated to subject themselves to experience things they don't want. At the same time, it's understandable for you to be exasperated when others don't appreciate books that really opened your own eyes. All this means is that I think there is a way to talk about what Art should be and can be, that Art is more an experience than a thing, and that the experience can be obtained in unpredictable places, even though there are some works that have more universal potential. (Have I straddled every fence yet?) Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo