To Make the Stone Stony
“At the back of our brains, so to speak, there [is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life [is] to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he [is] actually alive, and be happy.”
G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography
I still remember a particular autumn morning, years ago, when I stepped out of my front door, to be confronted with a grey mizzle. It was one of those days when it doesn’t quite seem to be raining, but, nevertheless, you get wetter than a towel in a washing machine within a couple of minutes. Overhead were steely clouds, lighter in swirling patches where the sun was trying, but failing, to break through. They were so low I was standing within their damp misty fog. My reaction was the obvious one: a pause on the door-step, a sort of guttural throat-clench, a turn-up of the coat collar and so out into the murky twilight.
My daughter, aged about 3, followed me out of the house. She also stopped abruptly on the door-step, but as I turned to cajole her forth, I realised that her reaction was entirely different to mine. Mouth wide-open, hands wrapped together, she stared in a sort of amazed joy, as she proclaimed with frank astonishment, ‘Oh, it’s a silver day!’ She had never seen such a thing before in her speaking life.
In my previous posts, on the cultural threads of the Food for Thought programme, I have discussed the idea of Art for Art’s Sake, and the cultural treasure or inheritance that I believe it is our responsibility to pass down to our children. Both ways of framing the question of art tended, I suppose, to suggest that it has no purpose beyond itself, that its value lies purely in itself. And I think this is true, to a certain extent. But even if art does not have a purpose beyond itself, it does arguably have a function.
Often, if you ask children, why, for example, they like reading adventure stories, the answer you will get boils down to ‘living vicariously’: it’s like the adventures are happening to them. Even though they may never actually go on safari, or be a spy, or go to the moon, or find themselves transported to a magical world, they can experience those things through their imagination when they read.
That is a very common idea and I think there is a great deal of truth in it – but I think that such a view has a flipside that is even truer and more important. It has been argued that the primary purpose of art is not, in fact, to make unfamiliar things familiar – to make going to the moon seem like the sort of thing that happened to me yesterday – but rather to make familiar things unfamiliar.
Here is how one literary critic put it:
“Habitualization devours objects, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. If all the complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been. Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life; it exists to make us feel things, to make the stone stony. The end of art is to give a sensation of the object seen, not as recognized. The technique of art is to make things 'unfamiliar'[.]”
On that grey morning years ago, to me, who had seen a hundred damp October days in my life, another one was just a nuisance, and not even a very significant nuisance at that. To my daughter, it was a world transformed, as if our front door had suddenly, quite unexpectedly, opened onto another astral plane. Habit and familiarity had devoured my sense of wonder; for my daughter, seeing a mizzle consciously for the first time, she could experience and feel what Gerard Manley Hopkins called ‘the dearest freshness deep down things’ of nature.
Now, arguably, the purpose of art is to help us recover such an attitude of wonder towards the world, to recover the ‘freshness’. Art makes us look at things anew and see them again, as it were, for the first time. The cuckoo of Mahler’s First Symphony gives us back, as if newly washed and gleaming, every cuckoo call we ever heard and every cuckoo we will ever hear. Yeats’s “faery vats, / Full of berries / And of reddest stolen cherries” gives us back our earliest childhood joy and astonishment at a fistful of pilfered summer fruits, and gives future freshness to every strawberry we will ever pick on a summer’s evening. Even Munch’s Scream gives us back, with uncomfortable vividness, our first waking horror from a childish nightmare. As Sklovsky put it, art helps us to recover the sensation of life.
Now the long vacation is upon us, thoughts turn to holiday trips, around the country or abroad. Chesterton once wondered what it would be like for a man to travel all around the world and to come upon his own home as if it were a foreign land – but we all have a similar experience when we return from a holiday. No-one really wants a holiday to end (unless it’s with the in-laws) but everyone knows the secret pleasure of getting back to your own house, to rediscover your own things, to sleep again in your own bed, for the first time in what feels like ages. That’s defamiliarisation – by losing things for a while, we get them back with their flavour refortified.
So perhaps the purpose of art is to make us look at the world properly again. Looking at a painting of a fantasy world, full of multicoloured foliage, purple streams and strangely elongated or squashed creatures with an armoury of horns, claws, teeth and scales, makes us see this world as fantastical as it really is, only we’d forgotten. It’s no less strange that the plants of our planet boast bright green leaves, our becks and burns run blue, our animals run, galumph, flap and slither about in all their eccentric variety. Reading about a voyage to another planet makes us realise that we have ourselves been dropped from nothingness onto a foreign globe spinning through empty space.
I hope the Food for Thought programme may help pupils to see the world both as a riddle to be solved and as a mystery to be intrigued by. The puzzle-based elements of the programme provide the one; the cultural threads, I hope, provide the other.
May the Summer Holidays bring us all fresh experiences, strange adventures, good fun – and renewed appreciation of a life well lived.
DPB
