ego.istic.org

I am feeling dangerously close to being emo of late, but don't go. I will do my best to avoid becoming LiveJournal. Tolstoy, though he is probably best known for his fiction, wrote extensively about the nature of art. His view was (to simplify it to destruction) that art is to feelings what language is to ideas: a means of taking it from the mind of the author to that of the beholder (viewer, listener, reader, &c.). Stated like this it is a fairly mainstream view, but the full ramifications of following that criteria through led him to believe many other things, some of which are widely believed to be unfortunate. But let's not focus on this, and instead concentrate on this more simplified view.

Art, let us say then, is a means of communicating feelings: not just naming a feeling, like “love” or “pity”, but actually arousing the intended feeling in the beholder, causing them to feel the same way the author felt. This is in contrast to the usual uses of language, re-enactment, and pictorial representation, where the aim is to show or describe something to the beholder, without necessarily engendering any particular feeling.

I would like to put art to this purpose. There is a feeling, a feeling there is no word for. Now that I have put my mind to it, I can spot this feeling when I am feeling it, can sense the shape of it, how it feels in my mind. Merely descriptive language is not really adequate to the task of describing this feeling, but, assuming it's not just me, and other people can feel it too, I should be able to use art to explore its boundaries, and to communicate it.

I'm not helped by it being quite hard to pin down. Just as the boundary between fear and hate is fuzzy, so am I not quite sure whether I am thinking of one feeling or two. I don't know what the criteria are for causing this feeling. Like trying to feel the shape of a soft, squishy object by hand, the harder I press to try to find the shape, the more I think I might be distorting it, fitting it into a mental box, a box bounded by preconceptions, that is not quite the right size.

So it is that I don't really know where to start trying to examine this feeling, or the properties that arouse it, in an artwork. All I can do, it seems, is examine real-life and fictional situations, characters, and events, to try to catalogue the things that may or may not cause the feeling. Eventually, I hope, I will have enough data points to set me on my way to creating my own examples, examples that unambiguously say, “Here, this is the feeling I mean;” and then my audience will respond, “Oh, that feeling. I know exactly what you mean.” But at the moment, I don't know where to start. There is a universe of artistic possibilities, and none of them seem right. It's very paralysing, almost oppressive. It's very frustrating to be unable to articulate something clearly, even to myself; in just the same way that it is frustrating to be a misunderstood teenager full of angst, unable to convince yourself that everyone else knows what that's like.

And that brings us back to where we came in. I have several hypotheses about what it might be related to, but hypotheses are not reality, and undoubtedly they are mostly balderdash. So, if I am a bit, shall we say, sullen for a while, it is because I am thinking. Don't worry, I'm not going to start writing about sweet death being a welcome release, wearing black lace, or anything else so cliché; but really, unless I can get my thoughts onto paper in some coherent way, I think my head might explode.