Affectivity and art

The most amazing thing about art to me is its ability to affect you. There are many situations in life when one is greatly affected by a certain event or interaction and it brings about a certain emotion or feeling, but art stands in its own category as being one of the few things that is capable of bringing about those feelings and emotions without the event or interaction that normally accompanies them.

Music is the most primary art in this sense, because of how strongly a song can affect a certain feeling; it can be intensely spiritual, as in certain classical pieces, or arouse feelings of national pride and strength, as in that silly song that accompanied Mitt Romney’s entrance on stage when he announced Paul Ryan as his running mate.

But this affective power is not limited to music, although I think that it is probably most easily accessed through music, at least for me. It can also be achieved in literature, although it is much harder. It requires more dedication and a more cultivated aesthetic. Even the most derivative dub step can have the affective power in a club to draw people together for dancing etc… But literature nevertheless has this ability. I think of Faulkner’s experiments with perspective in The Sound and the Fury. His use of language, especially in Quentin’s psychological disintegration and in Benjy’s chapter, allows us not to see what the characters are doing, but, if we can allow the language to rupture something in us, to actually feel what they are experiencing. I had a similar experience in War and Peace when Pierre is held prisoner by the French. The existential realizations he goes through are so well expressed by Tolstoy that I couldn’t help but feel with Pierre (and Tolstoy, through Pierre), his newfound astonishment at life.

But I think this affective power has been best cultivated by Zen writers, especially in koans and poetry. After all, the point of a koan is not to understand it, but to be affected by it in a way that will bring about enlightenment. It is entirely affective, it is meant to be felt more than understand, it is meant to be embodied, not idealized. It uses language as something that, in itself, has the power to affect our lives, rather than simply to serve as a symbol for something that has that power.

Not all Zen writing is like this, however. Much of haiku writing is too devoted to a strict adherence to the 5-7-5 syllabic structure, or to having a “cutting word” at the end of a line, or the correct usage of “seasonal words.” As much as I love Basho’s haiku, he was such a stylist (and an incredible one at that) that after reading too many of his poems I am stuck more with the style than the affectivity.

But in the poetry of Ikkyu, which is in line with the aesthetic of haiku, but is a decidedly idiomatic form of that style, the affectivity shines through. Take this poem, which I think is one of his best:

 

nobody knows shit nobody lives anywhere

hello dust!

 

While there is some meaning in this poem, and it is important to see, it is not the whole story. The first line is more devoted to meaning; my interpretation would be that nobody really has any kind of permanent of definitve knowledge, and there is no place that we can ever be that will be unchanging or solid, we have no permanent home. The idea is basically that permanence is an illusion, and that freedom can only be found in completely renouncing a search for any kind of stability or totality.

Once we have been primed by the first line, we are ready for the second, which is much shorter, and in its brevity and directness serves to reorient our view from a search for stability to a direct apprehension of what is always already around us: dust. And in this sense there is still some meaning. There is more security trusting in dust than knowledge. But even this contrast is affective; we are given dust in the place of knowledge, yet we are expected to appreciate dust more than knowledge. This completely reorients what for most people is a reasonable view of the world, that knowledge is “more valuable” than dust. But this brings that value judgement, and any kind of value judgement into question.

But it is the directness and brevity of the second line, especially in contrast to the first, that stands out to me. It is like the impact of a Zen master’s stick on a disciple, or like the sudden impact of enlightenment realization. It is like the sudden impact of reality which becomes evident in every moment when one attunes one’s being completely to the present. And unlike the first line, which is  negative, this, “hello dust!” is affirmative; it finds joy in dust, and it expresses a kind of joy peculiar to the Zen experience. When I first read that poem, it made me, like Pierre, laugh and cry simultaneously at the inexplicable joy that permeates experience as long as one has engendered a certain type of spiritual poverty.

Moreso than any postmodern narrative structure or detailed system of symbols, the affective nature of art has a unique ability to permeate our lives, and to integrate the work of art into our own being. And I think that if art can use this affective power vis a vis the environment, it can turn people on to environmental issues in a way that many other approaches fail. Because it relies on a direct transmission of experience unmediated by words, symbols or ideologies, it also has the ability to transcend the difficulties that all of those things bring to the table. And maybe that’s an unreasonable expectation. Not everyone is going to meditate like I do, or open themselves up to that kind of experience. But it is nevertheless a very powerful tool, and I feel very lucky to be able to use it and be affected by it.