Last summer – I think it was last summer – I saw an exhibition by the Spanish artist, Joaquin Sorolla. There was a painting of a fishing boat coming in to land its catch. The sunlight filtering through the sail moved me to tears. I don’t know why. I wasn’t feeling especially emotional. I’d liked the other paintings in the exhibition and had been impressed by the way the artist captured light on canvas – but this light through canvas on canvas captured my heart, my soul.
What is this? Awe? Wonder? Ineffable experience.
I recall a somewhat similar feeling – a kind of profound aesthetic appreciation – listening to Vivaldi in Venice and Pergolesi in a country chapel in the Cotswolds. Just listen to this - when the voice of the countertenor comes in it truly is enough to open a portal to my soul
Lessen the tears and increase the creative fire and that gives a sense of what I experienced watching the baroque and genre-defying A Very Expensive Poison at the Old Vic and, up the Road at the Young Vic, Brecht’s Life of Galileo. For that, they had music by a modern techno composer ramped up high as, on the ceiling, a vast image of the sun burning and orange-red-red erupting was projected. I was transported by sound and fury into the sunspots and the genius and the moment of time that stretched from the sixteenth century right through to the twenty first. You get a tiny sense of it from the trailer.
Increase the tears – add pity and fear - and that’s the feeling induced by Juliet Stevenson’s portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I in Mary Stuart at the Almeida. The same theatre’s production of The Wild Duck, when the shot is fired in the attic and you know the child is dead, aroused a soul-overflowing of feeling. The opening scene of Hamilton and Barr singing to Theodosia. The production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm - oh and where did I see that? And, and, ah, yes, The Seagull at the Lyric Hammersmith. At the Young Vic, Macbeth and Nora: A Doll's House, the last play I saw before the theatres had to close their doors.
They, the Young Vic, streamed their production of A Streetcar Named Desire the other week. Good on YouTube, but, had I been there? I’d have been swept away.
I had tickets for five or six productions that have had to be cancelled. I fear for the theatres. Can they survive? This in recent weeks, this loss, this potential loss, has made me weep. Middle-class elitist that I am.
Simon Critchley in Tragedy, the Greeks and Us, considers various views of the effect tragedy has on audiences. I think that last feeling, the one I experienced at Mary Stuart, The Wild Duck and so on aligns with the traditional concept of pity and fear which is said to lead to catharsis. But what is catharsis? Purgation – like taking an enema? Purification – like being cleansed? Transformation – like being modified and educated? Do we need to ‘get rid’ of pity and fear? Does experiencing them act as a slate-cleaner? Or is the experience of philanthropia, empathy, enrich us? And indeed, is this the purpose of art? To make us better? Maybe we just like it. In the same way that those who watch horror movies like being scared. Or those who watch romcoms like feeling whatever warm snuggly safe feeling they get out of happy endings.
I mean, does great art have a great moral purpose?
I don’t believe that artists should be driven by such an ideology. If they were, they’d be constrained by the mores of the day, of those in power, of those seeking power, of those seeking to destroy those in power. And I tend to feel that if artists are constrained – as many were in the Soviet era – their art suffers. It becomes propaganda, not art.
Art, it seems to me, attains this emotive force because it expresses a kind of truth that cannot be empirically proven. It accesses a deep ravine of experiential and aesthetic profundity, a ravine so deep that all the different empirical mountains of neuroscience and experimental psychology and anthropology and history and sociology have their untouchable roots there along with the roots of the mountains of myth and religion, of philosophy and literature. In this deepest place reside some essences of conscious feeling and conceptual understanding which, once moulded by a genius, have the capacity to strike wonder and awe into disparate minds. Down there, with the genetic components of mitochondrial Eve, can be found core aspects of what it is to be human. Down there are the seeds of awe and wonder and the greatest mystery of all – the rich qualia of being human.
So, I don’t think there is a moral purpose for the artist – she does not, cannot know, what she does in the act of creation, as she delves into her psyche and her past and her skill and her experience and her expertise and her reading and her knowledge. She dips in the spoon and out comes something and she shapes it as best she can – and if she’s a playwright, she’s reliant too on the cast and the producer, the director and the staging. If she’s a painter or a sculptor, some days the paint or the clay flows better than others. A dancer or cellist may transition into sublimity or no. A composer can’t always ascend like Vaughan Williams’ lark. For a novelist or a poet, sometimes the words and the rhythm rise better to the occasion than others. There is contingency.
I think of lines by Andrew Marvell and Louis MacNeice, by Mary Oliver and Michael Longley, by Shakespeare and Catullus, by Baudelaire and Carol Ann Duffy where I felt the majesty of mystery in a phrase, an image. They seek that mystery, but it is indefinable, for, like Gerard Manley Hopkins’s conception of instress, or Donald Winnicott’s conception of the psyche, wonder is in ‘the space between’. And perfection shouldn’t be sought for either, because perfection is too-much-made and not ripe for the interpretative effect that awe demands.
The person reading, watching, listening, looking has to be receptive – radically open – willing to be… what? Purged? Purified? Transformed? No. Enriched, perhaps? Or perhaps affirmed. Maybe what awe does is to offer us a reminder that this is what we are: beings who can wonder at a sunset; at the flow of clouds in a stormy sky; at the death of Cordelia; at light through canvas on canvas; at the sun’s spots on a ceiling and the genius of an Italian; at the all-together-of-us in this theatre feeling the same thing; at the all-across-time-of-us reading this same line; at the lark and the music and the mind of the composer and the mind of me listening; at the scarlet glare of poppies, rising from rubble to rescue colour in a world where we see so often only in black and white.
What makes us open? It's natural, I'd suggest. Children are creatures often struck with wonder. The baby's delight at peek-a-boo is proto-wonder. Consider a child's response to a first pantomine. But this wonder-responsiveness has to be fed and watered, this reaction. A child mocked for sensitivity, an adolescent told that her interest is elitist or posh, a teenager told to focus on a career or getting a job. They'll lose it, like fitness and flexibility can be lost. Those neural connections may be trimmed to dullness. No doubt a liberal arts education or parents who valued beauty, art, music helps, but it's also up to the individual to be on the look out for wonder.
And why? Let me suggest an answer. For those of us, so many of us, for whom there's a lacuna in the psyche caused by some early-life pain or absence, trauma or harm, wonder, while it may never, can never, entirely fill the hole, can, in moments of wholeness or holiness or holistic-ness, make the void less frightening, ease the ache and soothe the sore. Wonder is medicinal for those with psychic gaps at core. Wonder reminds us of the possibility of who we are.
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