I was driving home from teaching a class the other night and the Rilo Kiley song “Breakin’ Up” played. The song starts with a whimsical keyboard phrase, which has a decidedly ‘electronic’ quality to the sound, and it builds from there into a lovely piece of pop music. Listening to that introductory phrase, it struck me that creativity is miraculous. Whether it is noodling with a keyboard until a phrase arises or being struck with a theme and crafting a symphony around it - the synthetic and serendipitous process by which we create works of art is worth contemplating. This is why we in the West accord significant artists with almost mythic status and will often focus obsessively on the biographical and historical milieus out of which are arises. The process is remarkable and we have a deep desire to learn how it works, to explain the process in causal, reductive terms. I too have this desire: I want to know about the artist’s life, what was going on in the world at the time of and in the lead up to the piece, what interested her at the time she created it, etc. Having this desire strikes me as normal given our epistemological need to view physical phenomena in a linear, cause-and-effect manner. Nevertheless, it seems worth considering the process through with objects of art arise (which I hesitate to call ‘the creative process” because it is an indirect return to a linear epistemological mode) independent of the need for a linear explanation. Instead of asking how an object of art arises, I would rather ask why does an object of art arise?
Alle Menschen werden Brűder…
Perhaps I am merely reorienting an epistemic concern into an ontological one. Or more properly, I am maybe giving an epistemological query and ontological component. Regardless, asking why an object of art arises seems to be a more fundamental question than asking how and object of art arises. And the ‘why’ question is in essence a question about being human. This is not to say humans alone can create expressions cognizable as art but rather reflects the simple reality that I am human and am writing specifically about the creation of a type of thing by humans. I consider this to be an important distinction because the question should not limit the felt scope of the object of art by the specific terms used to pose the question. The orientation of the idea of art as being an exclusively human product similarly limits it, in this case as a socio-biological artifact explainable in those clinical, reductive terms. The point being that answering the ‘why’ question should not devolve into an empirical triviality or a species-centric chauvinism.
So why? Why does an object of art arise? Some reductionism in answering the question will be inevitable (if I wish the answer to be coherent). Hence, it seems like we should start with some basics like we have the capacity for wonder. Being reductive by nature, I will try to define ‘wonder’ without stripping it altogether of its essence. Wonder underlies or gives substance to our appreciation for things that cannot be reduced to facts and is more than just passingly emotional. Although Freud sought, in his inimitable reductive way to explain the term ‘oceanic feeling’ attributed to his friend Romain Rolland, the idea of this felt response to the eternal is an approximation of what I mean by ‘wonder.’ I do not, however, limit wonder to a response, however extraordinary, to the eternal. Rather, the subjective response that can be described as oceanic can arise in myriad settings, such as a response to light falling through leaves of trees in a forest or to a speech or to a painting or to a sporting event.
Rudolf Otto also captured something of the idea of ‘wonder’ in his extended meditation on the numinous and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. In contrast to Rolland, whose Gallic roots may have something to do with the difference, Otto’s meditation on the numinous is starker and more awe-ful (in the sense of being a more definitively third party experience), but nevertheless describes the experience of the numinous as the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, which he locates in a somewhat austere, but still wonderful, divine. It is the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable that is key because that experience is not limited to the divine but also arises in encounters with the beautiful, with grace, and with sublimity.
The classical dramatists and philosophers of Greece offer another treatment, if not an explicit definition, of what I call ‘wonder.’ Consider Aristotle and his meditation on tragedy in which the capacity of drama to produce catharsis may be considered an extraordinary, though reductive, interpretation of ‘wonder,’ as it arises through art. So too the Euripidean reaction to the strictures or conventions of Classical tragedy in which he can practically be heard to shout through the lines of dialogue “Wonder has not rules! Wonder flows unbounded like a flooded river!” And through the Euripidean lens we see a definition that is anti-definition, that resists reductivity utterly, that wonder is feeling in extremis with witnesses, it is Medea and Jason, it is the Bacchae and Pentheus, it is consumptive, all-consuming, it is impossible to reduce, to define, to regulate with rules.
And with wonder, as in so many things, we seem, as humans, to want to make it and not just experience it at the whimsy of fortune and circumstance. I don’t think this impulse is reductive, which is why I think the question ‘why’ is more ontological than epistemic. The impulse is additive, creative; seeking to birth a new instance of wonder in the world, an instantiation, an irruption of the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, the phrase that cannot get out of the musician’s head, the lines of poetry that roll on with preternatural power, craft and inspiration, an irruption of the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable into being. And this is why - because wonder inspires us to create wonder. We see this in our capacity to noodle on the keyboard and create a song, to feel the wonder of being human and create a symphony, to feel the wonder of divine self-sacrifice, to create the Eucharist.
In part, the impulse to instantiate wonder, to create it, is a social impulse. Despite the fact that sometimes it is a lonely impulse of delight, the creation is not meant to be unheard or unseen or unfelt; the creation is not meant to be alone. Yeats’ beautiful elegiac poem was written to be read. He was not engaging in some form of intellectual onanism. Despite the fact that the narrator professes no love for his people, he did not remain silent. The created instance of wonder is a communicative act. If we ask ‘why’ we must acknowledge the need to share, that wonder, that the oceanic feeling, that the mysterium, arises in the context of sociality.
Perhaps it is because of our sociality that we can access wonder. To the solitary creature how can wonder be possible? How can there be an oceanic feeling? It would seem that all of the various characterizations of wonder require a modality of thought-feeling that arises out of the intersubjectivity of group life and behavior. The felt impossibility is only possible if one can grasp the self simultaneously as subject and object which is both the essence and difficulty of self-aware agents living in groups. This is what gives us our capacity for transcendence, of being above and below simultaneously, which, it would seem, is the path to wonder and art.
This idea of transcendence is a blessing and a curse. Without it we wouldn’t have the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, but with it comes the knowledge that we can’t escape the lower, that the felt understanding is the best we can hope for, that we won’t inhabit the higher plane or know precisely what it is to be like, to be the same as, the virtually inconceivable. Religion promises a path to the inconceivable, but only through absence, through various forms of apotheosis; art lifts us so we can feel the virtually inconceivable, so we can get as near to it as our humanity allows. And this is part of the why - wonder and transcendence are (and feel) extraordinary. We want to experience transcendence and wonder and we have, at least some persons have, the capacity to construct things that will take us there. And the capacity generates the impulse and the impulse cannot be sated unless it is shared. Otherwise the artist would be a hermit who practices mysticism.
And so the artist does not retire to a cave or a cell but instead makes something, an object the purpose of which is social. And if the artist succeeds, the object causes or helps those who experience it to also experience transcendence and wonder. And this experience is not serendipitous. The artist intends to create the experience and those seeking out the object of art intend to have the experience. When I went to a Chihuly exhibit I did so in part because the whimsy and organic energy that Chihuly’s large works possess cause me to experience the sublime, the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable. This is why. Not for me specifically but because Chihuly knows there is some ‘me’ who will glimpse the eternal through his remarkable chandeliers.
The movement that art inspires in the individual consciousness exhilarates and almost by necessity crosses boundaries. This is a necessary component of transcendence. Being above and below necessitates movement across a threshold. The movement across the threshold to the transcendent, which is the felt understanding of the virtually inconceivable, is, in itself, value-neutral. The movement is simply that - a movement of thought-feel.
Unfortunately, the movement frequently causes fear and consternation among various parties that have an interest in controlling the transcendent or who worry about the effect that the transcendent will have on those who experience it. In some cases, persons find the experience to be liberating, which can cause those persons to reevaluate their lives and especially those aspects of them which seem to act as a bar to experiencing wonder. For those who want to control behavior and ideas, for those who are in the business of policing norms, the experience of liberation among subjects who are deemed to be governed by the norms will often be seen as dangerous. Norms, whether we care to admit it or not, retard persons from experiencing wonder. Love is exhilarating, marriage is not. Hence, the authoritarian impulse to characterize the liberating experience of wonder and the art that fosters it as libertinous at best and more often as obscene, lascivious, or libidinous. And from there it is short work to characterize the work of art as depraved, destructive, and dangerous when it is in fact almost certainly none of these things.
Even intentionally provocative art is not depraved, destructive, or dangerous insofar as it uses received norms to help us transcend our workaday experiences and achieve the felt understanding that I call wonder. Of course artists intending to create provocative art often fail to do this and produce works that merely provoke or are in fact depraved or obscene. But this is not an indictment of art, whether of the intentionally provocative sort or not. Art fails to be transcendent most of the time. This is not an indictment of art but rather a condition of being human. Not all pieces of art can be transcendent. If they were, transcendence would be deprived of meaning. We cannot always be simultaneously above and below. If we were, there would be no distinction between the two states because their simultaneity would then be our natural state, which would be experienced as a single state.
Nevertheless, when we ask why, we must answer with “because we can experience wonder.” Even in the most authoritarian, desultory, and controlled environments we display a persistent and remarkable capacity to experience wonder. Amid terror and violence we retain the capacity and desire to experience wonder. And when we can and want to experience wonder we create art, insuperable and beautiful butterflies at Maidenek, Dostoyevski after the gulag, the spirituals of American slaves. The provocation may be political or rebellious, but if it causes or assists us in achieving transcendence, that in itself is not a political or rebellious act.
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