Concerning the history of ideas

Lewis once again hits the nail on the head:

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

- C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love, ch. 1

I think the folks here at school need to make this the motto for the humanities program.

Fun fact: I'm reading a library copy of the book, and these lines are underlined and starred in this copy. Apparently someone else liked what Lewis had to say, too. (There's a parallel about the universality of human thought in that somewhere...)

Ownership

From The Grapes of Wrath, which I'm reading for school:

...It's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, and died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

What do we mean when we say we own something? The word has different shades of meaning. We say we "own" our clothes, by which we mean they are our property. But we also say we "own" someone as a friend, by which we mean we acknowledge the relationship, not that we possess them. What makes something our property? A book may sit on your shelf, but can you really say it's yours until you've read it and slipped bookmarks in the folds or dog-eared the pages or stuck sticky notes to favorite paragraphs or added notes in the margins or whatever you do with books—in other words, until you've made it yours by spending time with it and letting part of yourself become involved in it? The relationship makes it yours, not the purchase.

In the library--

In the library reading
a journal of poems
I found much to be
dismayed at, a little
to give pleasure, for
in those I read were some
laced with crudities, some
effusing nothings, a few
full and firm and sweet
like the first ripe apples in summer,
none a satisfying meal. But
among the readers' letters
someone quoted Frost, saying
poetry should tell of griefs,
not grievances. At that
I rose and left, for here
at last was sustenance,
and I knew
it was enough.

Letting Go of the Kite

The show that I've been a part of for the last few months, Little Women, had its last performance today. Endings are harder than beginnings. Beginnings can creep up on you unawares so that you're in the middle of things almost before you know they've started, but there's no getting around endings.

No, it is over now, the theater empty and the sets dismantled. They are gone, the characters that lived here. They are dead; no, not dead, but shut away, locked in memories of long nights and brilliant evenings. We shall not meet them thus again, not the way they were here, so alive that they kindled the stage with fire and burnt the air with passion. We were permitted a while to share their joys and sorrows, their loves and dreams; we lived with them in a dream, returning to their world day after day till it became a second life, a second home. Now at length the last curtain has fallen, and our time here has come to an end. Hence we know them as dreams only. We look forward now to new days and new dreams. But we shall keep the friends we made here. We shall keep the memories we made here. We shall keep the lives we lived here. As dreams they shall remain, a fire within us, through all our days of plenty.

As the days pass I will probably post more about the show itself. I already have some stuff written down, and we got plenty of photos from rehearsals, behind-the-scenes, and performances. (Most of the photo credits, by the way, including the one above, do not belong to me. They're all thanks to various friends in the audience and backstage.)

About the Teaching of Art

Should art be taught for enjoyment or understanding? Or can it be taught for both? I've been wondering about that for a few months. Last fall I had some talks with my mom about the place art should have in a curriculum based on relational principles (i.e. Charlotte Mason). Now my college semester has begun, and with it my fourth and final semester of humanities. We've been studying history chronologically, so this semester is about the 20th century. We've already studied plenty of modern art.

I've noticed, however, that all we study are the avant-garde, envelope-pushing works. We've looked at Matisse and Picasso and Munch, watched Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, listened to atonal music and talked about Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. Our discussions of "what's happening in art" during the 20th century have focused on modernism and post-modernism: the rejection of traditional Western aesthetics, experiments with other styles, and the serious, searching art that was produced as a result.

[Admittedly, the literature we've studied—World War I poets, W. B. Yeats, Pygmalion—has been more traditional. (In other words: no Joyce!) We haven't studied the literature as art, however, but as illustrations of contemporary ideas. The WWI poets demonstrate the two ways people looked at the war (romantic, patriotic sentiment versus shocked, disillusioned realism). Pygmalion expresses and criticizes the behaviorist principles of B. F. Skinner. And so on.]

I understand to a point why we ought to study the latest developments in art. The state of the arts can tell us much about the state of a culture. But my question is this: why do we privilege progressive art over works created in older styles, works which may do nothing to advance the art of art, but which are still profound and moving and beautiful? Why the bias towards the new?

I asked two of my professors this question, separately, and got several answers. One professor replied that, in a survey course such as humanities, we have limited time, and have to focus on the tip of the spear, so to speak, as art moves forward. He explained that, once you hit the 18th and 19th centuries, old styles no longer die out as new ones are born; thus by the 20th century you end up having neoclassical, romantic, realist, and a whole list of other styles all being used simultaneously with the developing modernism. That modernism is the new element, so that's what needs our attention. But just because we're not studying the other art of the 20th century doesn't mean it's not important.

The other professor replied that the humanities course is focused on understanding art rather than enjoying it. (This professor, by the way, enjoys art as much as anyone I know.) I may be misinterpreting him, but I think his point was this. When we look at the diverse collection of 20th century styles, most of them are ones we have studied before. Romanticism we met in the 1800s; neoclassicism in the 1700s. So, while artists may still be using those styles, they offer no new perspective on the human condition. The new styles, those that offer a different approach: those are the ones we can learn from. Those are the ones that add something substantial to our understanding of the world.

I think I understand their arguments, but they don't satisfy me. If students are taught to understand art—that is, to analyze it—without being taught to enjoy it, then education has missed the point of art. If we approach a work only to extract its philosophical underpinnings, then we have forgotten how to listen, and if we do not listen, we cannot learn. Art must be experienced, not merely studied. We learn from art only when we respect it enough to build a relationship with it. That means entering without an agenda and without trying to analyze. It means entering with attention, even with humility, to ask the art what it means.

Any good art will be rewarding if we take the time to build that relationship with it. In saying this, I disagree with the bias towards new art. I don't mind learning about the new as well as the old; we have to know the whole history in order to understand where we are now. What bothers me is the tendency to say that an artist must say something new in order for his work to have significance; to say that the only legitimate, honest art is that which speaks in the most current dialect; to say that today's questions can only be answered with today's artistic styles.

If art were like science, always gaining more knowledge, always correcting old theories, then the bias towards new art would be necessary. But art is not progressive like science. An old work of art, or an old style of art, has as much to say to us now as the art that is current. Plenty of music composed in the 20th century was sophisticated and significant without abandoning tonality or aesthetic standards. Vaughan Williams comes to mind, as does some Prokofiev, or later works by Stravinsky. Plenty of literature written in the 20th century was beautiful and meaningful without abandoning traditional narrative structures or poetic forms. I'm thinking of The Lord of the Rings, or the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, or Yeats's lyrical works.

We can gain as much by getting to know these traditional works as we can by studying new styles. Atonal music, abstract art, stream-of-consciousness literature, and the like may be more "advanced" (that is to say, newer). But that does not make them more valid or more valuable than art which says well what needs to be said, whether it has been said once or a thousand times.