I think that language is more worth loving - more worth loving deeply - than art. And I hate to say that! Because in truth, I have always considered myself a visual person more than a verbal person. So it pains me very much to say that...to say...you know what, in fact, what kind of an asshole am I to say I think like that? Fuck me AND my presumptuous BULL SHIT.
Anyway. I just got swept up in the language for a moment, over a separate issue, and I lost perspective. I do think that Love of Language gets you deeper into people than art does - all the joys and kinks and shared attempts and experiences and frustrations of people. And in that respect, oh how well repaid the love of language is! But Love of Art can get you deeper into the universal and the transcendent. The power of a created image or object can take you soaring out of your body and even, out of your mere human identity, and lift you up into heavens and hells and firmaments and fundaments, burn away all the amassed connections and complexities in an instant and leave you feeling quite primordial, quite beatific. Certainly language can hit those notes as well, but I think there tends to be a different method and effect with each. When both are working at their highest level, language effects more epiphanies; art works in raptures.
The Love of Math is also fraught with cosmic and spiritual revelation, when approached with the requisite reverence and humility. No. I'm serious. It totally is.
But I think what I was trying to say in the first place is that while as a young man, the powerful and fiery vision of the singular artist seemed all that was needed to frame the universe...as I grow older, I find myself more and more in love with the human scale, in all its frailty, in all its most common needs and desires to express and understand. If art is the uncommon vision of one, addressed to the world, if art is the impetuous attempt to speak a perfect statement (of any scale - from cosmic to tragic to intimate) into six billion hearts, and potentially infinitely more in posterity, then language to me seems so much smaller, so much more dear, the medium through which we each try to reach the heart of maybe only one other person, in one moment, off the top of our own. Art is a colossal and singular act, the death-defying realization of a uniquely conceived goal. Or if it isn't, it god-damn well ought to be! And it deserves reverence, whether it succeeds or dies trying.
But language is where we all die trying. Just about every day. And where we all find life, and occasionally, the great and meaningful victories of having brightened the heart or the mind or even the face of just one other person. Whom in that moment at least, we love. Communication is an act of love.
It may be that I've merely given up on the possibility of the grand act, for myself. But I don't think so. I never wanted that for me, particularly. I love it as much as ever from others! I do love art. Art was my first love.
1 comment:
Ill-conceived and poorly argued! Not even argued, it's not a case at all being put, just a discursive rumination. Riddles with omissions and generalizations. It won't stand up to challenge or serious scrutiny.
It goes without saying that literature too, often aims to speak the voice of one to six billion brains. I was more musing seriously than trying to put together some kind of thesis.
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