Quirkiness at the Edge

"What does Interesting mean to me? It means that it seems to have sprung from a genuine artistic impulse, and has the sense of somebody really and truly wanting to communicate something through the medium. This being different from simply trying to make a series popular, visually spectacular, emotionally evocative, intellectually complex, or even just dedicating yourself to making a series 'good.' This is why the accusation that the art style was "a mess" at that time doesn't bother me; it was a transition state, but some roughness of execution does not condemn something that has this genuine core (and a fine finish certainly cannot compensate for its lack).

Now, being able to judge Interesting is, of course, not some simple deductive process. Art criticism never is. All I can say is that in my experience there is a certain cohesiveness to them, like you can tell there are more threads tying it together than are readily apparent. There is also often a type of individuality, where the conclusion, the moral, the story, the execution... it is somehow quirky. Not necessarily radically novel but not quite what you would expect either, with some of the interpretation being clear and others parts requiring further thought . You can't just fall back on the common patterns ('tropes') to easily figure out what is being said, but it is not random; just at the edge of intelligibility. And ultimately, there has to be some quality to the insight being conveyed; the topic can be completely mundane and still be compelling, but if coming from an utterly banal mind it's going to be dim."

Above is a reply I made in a short discussion concerning why I valued anime of the early 2000s rather than of the last decade.  That topic itself isn't of particular interest to expand on here, but what is interesting is Interesting.  

I'm always on the lookout for things that are Interesting.  I guess it's just my own way of saying I'm looking for things I think contain genuine artistic quality, although I try to avoid those words themselves because people tend to feel they know what they already mean and have firm views on them (or their non-existence).  Capitalizing an innocuous word seems to do well; it's like inventing a new term, but is less taxing on the reader while still preventing old views from leaping in immediately.  It also makes it a proper noun, and a subtle emphasis on how important I view it to be.

But beyond the above, I wanted to jot down a side thought I had after writing it.  Why would Interesting things be a little quirky?  Is it just because they are genuine expressions of individuality, and therefore necessarily different?  I think that's part of it, but I also have a guess that perhaps it also involves the nature of art.

If art is to communicate anything, it has to speak a language, as it were.  The more shared that language is the easier it is to reach a wider audience, and indeed that's what cultural traditions help supply: a structure that helps artists frame their ideas and patrons appreciate them.  However, the problem is also that languages are by their nature limited, and while artistic languages may have the power to convey more than semantic content can, they too will only be able to do so much.

What it seems inevitable to me, then, is that anybody really seeing to express something will discover that they have to wrestle with their chosen medium and its languages to find out how to "translate" themselves a little.  If a work is entirely derivative it can be adequately expressed by the common language; no struggles or modifications are required.  On the other hand, a made-up personal language may be supremely expressive... but is largely indecipherable; maybe it's art for the artist, but for the rest of us it's scribbling.  There's a fine line in there where the necessity of trying to find the right way to express something as a unique individual with a worldview worthy of expression forces the work to be just a bit quirky.  

This is assuredly not a new idea out there, but I have yet to read it so I can claim it as my own for now, and leave on looking for things that are Interesting.

Impossibility of Recreating Greek Tragedy

"Remoteness from the immediate here and now, required by tragedy and guaranteed by legendary material, is here [in Aeschylus' "The Persians"] to a great extent achieved by placing the scene in the heart of Persia, so far away and guarded from Greeks that to the audience it might have seemed almost as legendary as the Troy of Hector or the Thebes of Oedipus."

The above is from Richmond Lattimore's introduction to the Oresteia, my latest reading in my Greek Project, and it has me thinking about why we've never been able to quite recapitulate Greek tragedy in modern form.  

I wonder if part of the issue is what Lattimore alludes to above: tragedy must in some sense be enacted by beings that stand at some distance from us in either time or space.  In that way the characters can take on a stature that familiarity cannot find contempt with, despite their often flawed and human nature.  That's the balance, after all, that these larger-than-life personalities must maintain - enough greatness to be archetypal, enough humanness to be relevant.  And even if myth, yet still somewhat believed in.

But our modern world doesn't have any corners left.  Physically we've covered it all, mapped it, seen it clearly from space.  There is no longer any far off land that can be left to the imagination.  The same is also true of time.  We know too much about our own history now; the legends of the past are either validated by fact or dismissed as only myth.  The same is true of the people, where we are all too aware that they were only human too, and it is with a betrayed vindictiveness that we eviscerate the character of all our previous heroes.  As such, there's nowhere for an Agamemnon or a Clytemnestra to hide from critical archeology and its accompanying psychoanalytic dismemberment.

The other idea that also came earlier today is related.  I was reading Middlemarch and came across this line:

"Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the significance of its life - a significance which is to vanish as the waters which come and go where no man has need of them?  But there was nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate, who had some contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little amusement mingling with his pity.  He was at present too ill acquainted with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer."

I recall reading once about the Greek concept of pathos in an art book: "...means suffering, but particularly suffering conveyed with nobility and restraint so that it touches rather than horrifies us" (Jansen's History of Art for Young People).  I also recall reading, I do not recall where from, that Aristotle stated suffering is made heroic because it leads to some insight.  Suffering without wisdom is just pathetic (in the modern sense of the word).  

Since the nineteenth century a focus on people as a whole, rather than only a nobility or an elite, has become increasingly the norm.  We have to account for the experience of the commoner's life as well as the hero's, and the truth is that most of our lives fall far below the level required for heroic tragedy.  I wonder if part of the problem is that the Greeks simply... cannot conceive of writing a play about meaningless suffering.  It is almost as though by definition anybody who was crushed under their suffering was not a noteworthy or valuable person; the fact they did not rise to greatness under the pressure demonstrates this.  The sense that the lost and downtrodden are valuable awaits for a later, more Christian era.  Yet this freedom from charity would perhaps also allow for a purity of expression; no nagging doubts that great people are anything other than great by simple demonstration of their acts.  They can be written on with total conviction that they are superior to the average person while retaining their personhood.  

As I close this little post, I wonder if the two theories above are related in some way.  It is all a type of removing remoteness, that we can no longer see the relevance in something that did not happen (unless it is long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away or in the previous era of Middle Earth, both of which as remote as Persia) or if it does not somehow represent all of us, the link with the archetypal somehow having been severed.  I am unsure; something to continue to think on.

On Taste

Lying in bed the other day I thought on how physical taste was a remarkably useful metaphor (and perhaps not entirely a metaphor) for artistic taste.

In the beginning, as children, what seems to us the acme of good food?  Simple: foods that stimulate us the most.  Extremely sweet sugary confections, very sour candies, and strong salty-fat foods such as french fries.  In order to put all the focus on these experiences, though, these foods by necessity must also consist of only one or a few basic flavors.  If what you want is sweet, then the other aspects must either be very minor (it tastes sort of like raspberry) or separate (perhaps a sour center to a sweet jawbreaker); it's just the inevitable reality of trying to make an experience bold for its own sake.

The other aspect that guides childish tastes is familiarity.  By our nature, one of the first things we appraise food of is whether it is one we have already eaten, with a natural inclination toward that which we already know but have not rejected.  It's safe, after all: we tried it before and liked it (and in the case of food, it didn't poison us either).  No need to worry about any uncertainty, or the associated effort of scrutinizing, a second time.  By comparison, unfamiliar foods always meet with an initial degree of skepticism; they not only have to prove themselves with no assistance of previous association, they are compared against things that we already have fondness for.  The hurdle has been raised and many dishes that are quite palatable fail simply because they are not what the child has eaten before.

So this is the baseline human state: we like what is highly stimulating with a prejudice toward the familiar.  This can endure for some time, and indeed for some people all their lives.  However, for many there begins to creep in a basic dissatisfaction with the repeated monochrome flavors.  Despite their intensity they become dull.  How do we overcome this?  Simplistically we may try to make them ever sweeter or sourer, but this soon runs into the same limitations, and indeed becomes unpleasant when taken to an extreme.  

The other course is to combine flavors.  If salty and sweet by themselves are not engaging, perhaps together they create a new experience.  It is novel, and we are suspicious of novel, but boredom helps us overcome our trepidation.  What we soon discover, though, is that it is no longer just the intensity of the flavors that matters, it is the relationship.  Too salty or too sweet and the other flavor is eclipsed; they have to exist not only at the right absolute levels to be enjoyable, they must also be the right level relative to the other flavor.  We have the beginnings of the idea the parts must exist in some relation to the whole and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Now, unlike the relatively limited set of basic flavors, the number of combinations of flavors is exponentially greater, both due to possible pairings as well as their relative contributions.  It's a whole new world of possibilities, and while many may not turn out to be very tasty we nonetheless are exposed to much we wouldn't otherwise.  Also as we explore these combinations we realize that the secondary characteristics that originally were not as important take on greater relevance.  They further differentiate what were once single flavors, and we find that these sub-flavors have great bearing on each other.  Raspberry sweet doesn't make a very good teriyaki sauce.  So not only has our ability to experience a broader array of dishes increased, so too has our ability to differentiate what we once regarded as monolithic flavors.

A side effect of this experimentation is that we discover that while some combinations/dishes are popular with most people, because they really are good, there are some that for us hold a particular place.  This is a natural result of discovering that there are much finer gradations than we previously thought existed.  And in a way, they didn't before - the food was always there but the experience of eating it only occurs when the food reaches a mouth connected to something which can process that information.  Before then it tastes like nothing (or like one hand clapping).  Now that these subtleties are available to us, though, we find that there are some which, for some reason or another, we are particularly sensitive to.  There are flavors that only a few people can discern, and therefore reflect not only the nature of the food but begins to say something of the nature of the taster as well.

Having started down this path, however, there's no saying where it ends.  For instance, perhaps we add a temporal component: the order of the dishes matters, as some are more appropriate for whetting the appetite and others for rounding it out in satiation at the end.  This also serves as contrast, for it is patently obvious by now that too much of one thing in succession causes us to become habituated to it.  Sight and aroma become more important for they can play into the experience through anticipation, which in itself is a significant component of enjoyment.  By now the original categories that one started with, the sweets and the sours, have become all but insufficient to characterize the experience.  What the child perceives and what the connoisseur perceives have become entirely different.

At this point I reach the edge of my culinary knowledge.  I am no gourmet, and while I have used this as an illustration I admit I do not believe that epicurean pursuits are particularly elevating for the soul.  The human olfactory/gustatory system is not all that refined by comparison to our vision and hearing, our primary modes of art, and I suspect are too much tied up with basic needs of satiation.  Nonetheless, even given these limitations I hope that this simpler, more neutral subject is an effective illustration of a progression in artistic understanding:

• An early state ruled by the intense and the familiar
  
• A more developed state that perceives relationships and subtleties and is open to new experiences
• A growing state that internalizes, learning more about the self and in turn more about the subject
• An advanced state where only hints are required to call up associations, the experiencer's own nature having taken on a far greater role than before
  

This is why an expert cannot just explain anything to a beginner - the very vocabulary they use will be incomprehensible.  They can try to guide and offer suggestions, but ultimately an education in this topic works a change in the person that cannot be offered externally.