Aesthetics

When I look closely at what I admire about certain pieces of literature I find myself popping a quarter in some literary jukebox in the back of my mind.  It’s the language that trips a fault line in my soul, not the underlying philosophy of a text or the peculiar development of a character.  Those things have a more accumulative, contemplative affect, but it is the language that hits the mainline.  To look at a text through a New Critic’s lense or to use a Psychoanalytic approach has as much use for me as wearing 3-D glasses when I read.  I don’t detest theory, but I do detest theory’s ability to turn reading into something as cold and practical as anatomy.  A text isn’t a dead cat we poke and pry at from a distance, and speak about in a detached, bloodless tone.  The words I remember and cherish, while everything else I can forget about with the swiftness one might shake out a match.  Maybe I have a dull and porous brain that couldn’t mop up a small puddle of spit, but I genuinely think that if one can’t acknowledge the poetry of the language itself, then maybe they should find a different hook to hang their lab coat on.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy literary theory; in fact I’m really subscribing to an Aesthetic approach popularized by Oscar Wilde, yet its roots can be found even as far back as Longinus.  The difference between Longinus and the Aesthetics is that Longinus believes that a great work is the residue of a great soul, while the Aesthetics see no need to speculate on morality, and are only concerned with beauty.  What they share is a common belief that the role of literature is to produce ecstasy.  In these moments of ecstasy, I feel that if someone were to crack me open like a hot dinner role, this feeling would rise right out of me.  I can feel my marrow boiling, an ogry of butterflies flitting in my stomach, my body filling with an opiated, warm glow, and colors flickering like a school of tropical fish swimming in my mind.

Beauty is a very loose, subjective term that can be used to lasso anything, but literary theory itself is subjective, and if it were not there would not be trivial cat fights amongst theorists.  I feel almost embarrassed writing about it.  In fact, whenever I talk about aesthetics I always feel as if I end up sounding like a stoned-out hippie kindergarten teacher rambling on in overly poetic, lofty tones about children’s art.  Maybe I should pepper my descriptions with the word “man” and maybe throw in the phrase “you know” here and there to complete the transition.  But I focus on it because I am a writer (a writer in the sense that some asshole in his mom’s basement doing a color by number is an artist I suppose), and also because I don’t think enough people acknowledge the overall pleasure that can be derived from the language itself.

Does it make for a superficial read?  Not at all.  Charles Simic’s poem “Watermelons” is a minimalistic gem I have always stored in my mind.  “Green Buddhas/On the fruit stand/We eat the smile/And spit out the teeth.”  I am overtaken by this image, but I don’t just put it on the bed post for later when I am done chewing on it.  I look at the oddly violent image of eating something as innocent as fruit.  Why does he describe them as “Green Buddhas”?  And by describing them as “Green Buddhas” he assigns them a peaceful tranquility that is disrupted and perverted by human beings.  And so on.

I can remember the first piece of poetry that gave me that feeling.  I was an awkward youth.  I had snail trails of snot on my sleeves, a small mountain range of pimples on each side of my face, and the clumsy gait of a new-born calf.  There was nothing poetic about me.  I read “Thanatopsis” in 10th grade and felt a tightly steamfitted pipe explode in my mind.  “All that tread the globe are but a handful to the tribes that slumber in its bosom.”  There may not have been anything particularly poetic about me, but there was poetry in this world.  These words, not exactly mind-blowing now, have always stuck with me.

Once again, I am not advocating a mass book burning of  modern literary theorists, but I think there is something of value that can be taken away from the long forgotten Aesthetics.  Art has always had practical purposes whether as cave drawings done to enlist the forces of magic on a hunt, or novels like Candide and Gulliver’s Travels that serve to rebut philosophies and satirize human inadequacies, or even Samuel Beckett’s work, which attempts to defy literary theory altogether.  There is nothing wrong with the practical side of literature, nor looking at it through a tightly focused microscope.  But there must be a balance, and without that balance, one might as well be turning the pages with a pair of forceps.