Up, Down, Up. Down. Up?
It's funny. When I get sick, it strips off some of the layers of stoicism and balance and reserve. Makes me do weird things like listening to songs obsessively, opening up to people, telling incoherent (as opposed to merely terrible) jokes, and, strangest of all, posting on El Jay.
But the starting theme for today (bear with me, I tutored for six and a half hours with a head full of cotton wool) is art. Literature, to be exact. Taking my newest tutoring student (henceforth, "Girl genius") through Orwell's 'Why I Write' and 'Politics and the English Language' got me thinking - as his essays are wont to do - about ambiguity in literature. I love it. Orwell doesn't. For me, ambiguity in literature is a privelige to experience: it gives me a chance to stretch my legs, to be unsure. I'm not usually a very unsure guy, so the experience of not finding a clear resolution is novel, and interesting, and somewhat addictive. This is why I love Donne, for example: no matter how hard you look, you only ever get recursive layers of different meanings. It's a puzzle that's built to be unsolvable, and I find that fascinating.
Of course, the ambiguity has to be elegant, well-executed: Orwell spins around and around the issue of aesthetics, sometimes admitting its relevance, sometimes appearing ashamed of himself for caring, but in his less political moments he admits that aesthetics are key to our judgement of texts. I identify with Orwell's conflict here: I can't stand texts that aren't well-executed, even if I agree with their purpose, but I still think that purpose should be the core of art. I see literature, art, language, as tools of persuasion first and expression second - beautiful tools, intricate and valuable in their own right, but nothing without their purpose. And when you add enough ambiguity, the purpose is lost.
So why do I love deliberately broken, or dysfunctional, tools? That's exactly what Donne's poetry is: a beautiful, clever, brilliantly useless tool. It's why I love puns: they break the tool of language. It's why I love self-referential humour: it breaks down the function of the joke. The only purpose is cleverness, it seems, and that seems shallow. Is it?
Maybe that cleverness, that pointlessness, teaches us what the tools really are. Maybe breaking them proves you understand them. Maybe a broken tool is a statement: to hell with purpose. Donne I like because he was compelled to build tools for others (the church) and he carefully, brilliantly, built them *broken*, like Schindler making defective shells for the Nazis.
These are all good reasons. But I have another one. Maybe I love broken tools because they appeal to my sense that, at some deep level, the world's just broken, fucked beyond repair or hope. That everything's objectively meaningless, and the only thing that holds us together is each other. We cling to other people because they're the only thing between us and that deep terror that nothing matters, and we're not important at all.
When people betray you, hurt you, let go of you, then, you are on your own. And if you haven't stared into that deep fear, if you haven't faced it, well, I don't know how you'll survive. How do you prepare? How do you immunise yourself, at least a little, against that existential dread?
With broken language, broken literature, broken art: purposeless, cynical, mocking our idealism and conviction. Terrible, but beautiful and fascinating. A way of facing the fear. Maybe even laughing a little at it.
That is why bottomless ambiguity in literature, in art, in language, fascinates me. I swing violently between the summit and the abyss, between hope and fear, between strength and weakness, between brilliance and uselessness. But at the worst times, I still have the beauty of brilliant, beautiful, broken things to cling to.
Here's another one. I listen, and teeter between hope and despair, never sure which is stronger. Maybe you will too.
In hope and despair,
-Me.
But the starting theme for today (bear with me, I tutored for six and a half hours with a head full of cotton wool) is art. Literature, to be exact. Taking my newest tutoring student (henceforth, "Girl genius") through Orwell's 'Why I Write' and 'Politics and the English Language' got me thinking - as his essays are wont to do - about ambiguity in literature. I love it. Orwell doesn't. For me, ambiguity in literature is a privelige to experience: it gives me a chance to stretch my legs, to be unsure. I'm not usually a very unsure guy, so the experience of not finding a clear resolution is novel, and interesting, and somewhat addictive. This is why I love Donne, for example: no matter how hard you look, you only ever get recursive layers of different meanings. It's a puzzle that's built to be unsolvable, and I find that fascinating.
Of course, the ambiguity has to be elegant, well-executed: Orwell spins around and around the issue of aesthetics, sometimes admitting its relevance, sometimes appearing ashamed of himself for caring, but in his less political moments he admits that aesthetics are key to our judgement of texts. I identify with Orwell's conflict here: I can't stand texts that aren't well-executed, even if I agree with their purpose, but I still think that purpose should be the core of art. I see literature, art, language, as tools of persuasion first and expression second - beautiful tools, intricate and valuable in their own right, but nothing without their purpose. And when you add enough ambiguity, the purpose is lost.
So why do I love deliberately broken, or dysfunctional, tools? That's exactly what Donne's poetry is: a beautiful, clever, brilliantly useless tool. It's why I love puns: they break the tool of language. It's why I love self-referential humour: it breaks down the function of the joke. The only purpose is cleverness, it seems, and that seems shallow. Is it?
Maybe that cleverness, that pointlessness, teaches us what the tools really are. Maybe breaking them proves you understand them. Maybe a broken tool is a statement: to hell with purpose. Donne I like because he was compelled to build tools for others (the church) and he carefully, brilliantly, built them *broken*, like Schindler making defective shells for the Nazis.
These are all good reasons. But I have another one. Maybe I love broken tools because they appeal to my sense that, at some deep level, the world's just broken, fucked beyond repair or hope. That everything's objectively meaningless, and the only thing that holds us together is each other. We cling to other people because they're the only thing between us and that deep terror that nothing matters, and we're not important at all.
When people betray you, hurt you, let go of you, then, you are on your own. And if you haven't stared into that deep fear, if you haven't faced it, well, I don't know how you'll survive. How do you prepare? How do you immunise yourself, at least a little, against that existential dread?
With broken language, broken literature, broken art: purposeless, cynical, mocking our idealism and conviction. Terrible, but beautiful and fascinating. A way of facing the fear. Maybe even laughing a little at it.
That is why bottomless ambiguity in literature, in art, in language, fascinates me. I swing violently between the summit and the abyss, between hope and fear, between strength and weakness, between brilliance and uselessness. But at the worst times, I still have the beauty of brilliant, beautiful, broken things to cling to.
Here's another one. I listen, and teeter between hope and despair, never sure which is stronger. Maybe you will too.
Click to viewIn hope and despair,
-Me.