A lazy musing on art

by Vruba (Charlie Loyd), 28.vii.03 & seq.,
in reply to an earlier version of an essay by Tia,
and adapting from talks with Platypus;

being an informal (i.e., undocumented and disorganized) phantasy on the ethics of æsthetics, addressed to Aletheia Price on the occasion of reading a sketch of her Is it true that to be Catholic is to be boring? Or, a short essay on art and Catholic culture.

*

I cannot address Catholic issues as such; I simply don’t know enough about the religion or its culture. Instead, I’ll try to build on ground common to everyone who has a recognizable sense of ethics, howsoever justified. Let us allow with thanks that people who share a sense of responsibility, even to differing axioms, can learn from one another, for although morals diverge between religions, ethics converge in the minds of people everywhere who work at applying ideas to things: people who try to be good.

I will assume that we — you and I and any others who join in here — each are convinced that we ought to improve the world, that we need principles to tell what is an improvement, and that we can refine these principles by discussion; that we clamber toward truth not to the exclusion of everyday kindness and responsibility but as Part of This Complete Human, that we are neither brainwashed absolutists nor lobotomized relativists, and that love is the only way to travel. I may not always pursue memes out beyond these ideas, onto more slippery theology and philosophy, but in their perimeter I welcome any interlocutor of intelligence, kindness, and a sense of proportion.

Medals and handshakes all around, then, and onward.

I think your treatment of appetites was basically sound. However, our age of advertising seems to produce a slightly different kind of person than those Plato knew. Thus, for the purposes of this discussion, let us adjust The Republic’s scheme of the individual to place curiosity or attention not as an inherent function of the intellect or soul, but as an appetitive desire of its own. This reformulation gives us a way to describe the process by which the everyday practice of an intellectual life may become ennobled or perverted, harnessed or unregulated, and made familiar or strage to the mean. It requires that we agree that simple curiosity can lead us to consume improper material and distract us from better activity: not curiosity at the service of another appetite, but curiosity itself. I feel confident in making this change; it help me explain many ordinary experiences otherwise difficult to grasp. (Of course it may be entirely absurd; feel free to show so.)

To call curiosity an appetite means that to sit down and read both sides of Trivial Pursuit® cards (per se, not to memorize and cheat) is closely analogous to needlessly summing one’s net financial worth, to playing a violent computer game, or to spending a whole day reading comic books. I’ve done all of these things, and they each afford that candy buzz characteristic of sating an appetite; I intuit that they are of one class. Any of those activities can be made into something very worthwhile, but I think they are hollow by default, all in the same way.

What can make such passtimes worthwhile? Plainly the intellect, a.k.a. consideration, the philosopher-king of the person. If I were to read comic books all day while actively appreciating and judging their art and artifice, their ideas and morals, their strengths and weaknesses — if I thought about my reading, and so used it for self-improvement — my time would not be completely wasted. (One might complain that it would not be completely used, either. True, but I’m only suggesting that the intellect is a way by which a low pleasure can be used to a high end.) The intellect can’t be one thing if it is hollow but its presence makes things full, so let us continue with the supposition that intellect is actually two things: (1) an appetite: attention (synonymously curiosity, interest, etc.), and (2) the rational part of the self: intellect proper (synonymously consideration, wisdom, etc.). Such a figuring suggests that the mind is extremely vulnerable through its its baser parts, and indeed it is so; we are easily transfixed by novelty. That it is the mind itself which should detect and correct imbalance in any part of the character makes it no more secure, as it is imperfect at watching itself, and when knocked off balance is all the harder to refoot.

The relation of attention to intellect is perhaps that of eating to health. I know that I have a mild compulsion to look at live screens, at the titles of books on shelves, the epigrams of pseudo-humorous tee-shirts, books lying open, the sides of cereal boxes, pictures of faces, graphs, charts, maps, timetables, and myriad other sorts of symbolic communication; like hunger, I can consciously suppress the desire, or deliberately glut it, but I cannot forget it. Like hunger, it is in the main a useful and usefully trainable impulse, and I’m not sorry I have it. (It might be argued that hunger (independent of taste or gluttony) is a fundamental physical desire, and thus not an appetite (in the sense for which The Republic uses it as an example) but a necessity, and conversely that reading is purely learned, and thus merely a habit. These are valid points, but part of my aim here is to demonstrate a useful broadening of the idea of appetite. Both are neither entirely voluntary nor entirely involuntary.)

What does the attention like, and how are we to train it? It likes motion, novelty, humor, and things that are complicated but innocuous. It is why we play games of strategy and creativity. The potential for good in these games should be clear to those used to forming their appetites to their principles: they can cultivate the mind by sowing both creative imaginings and critical insights. It is hard to leave three hours of Alpha Centauri (a turn-based strategy game in the Civilization series, largely concerned with infrastructure and technological development) without having just imagined several decades of human culture in outline and without having learned a thing or two about macroeconomics and management — and without finding some new appreciation for real life by contrast with a tiny invented one. Perhaps three hours of Alpha Centauri every day would not make anyone into a scholar, but neither would three hours a day of nearly anything else so appealing to any appetite. For something that is primarily (sold as) entertainment, and so relaxing, Alpha Centauri is extremely cultivating. It may even be art.

*

Practical intelligence, as many sages have pointed out — Neal Stephenson, for instance, speaking through Juanita’s grandmother in Snow Crash — is the ability to draw useful conclusions from subtlety and confusion. Subtlety and confusion, of course, are natural subjects of the attention. Once they have drawn the attention to themselves, and the attention has alerted the intellect, the processes of contemplation and appreciation may begin. In principle, every experience of a person dedicated to self-improvement exercises the character and lifts it to higher appreciation of everything; in practice, the everyday events most cultivative of character are those recommended by the well-trained appetites, and chiefly the attention.

It is the particularly strange moments that are most fascinating to the attention, and most quickly move from stimulating it to stimulating the higher intellect. Think of high nonsense, of Alice in Wonderland and unsolved codes, of songs with oblique lyrics, of riddles and paradoxes, and all things compelling and beautiful at first sight. These are perhaps the mental equivalent of optical illusions. If we cannot resolve them immediately, we keep them in mind, because they seem somehow important enough to untie eventually. I am thinking not so much of deliberate brain-teasers as of those innocent phrases and images that hover around the consciousness like mopeds in the slipstream of a 16-wheeler, as quasi-significant little scenes and memes one carries without trying. They are not so random as to be dismissible as meaningless, but not so ordered as to be acceptable at face-value. Some might be: surprising but apt metaphors; long-lost memories recalled by inconsequential things; or that special pattern of order in the whole and chaos in the parts that so fascinates one (or me, at least) in the observation of ant nests. They are hazy things, often too personal to really be called memes, but we intuit that they mean more than they seem to when described straightforwardly.

Such things work as representatives or exemplars of larger issues: as markers of paths we passed once but want to find again. I have a little Lego astronaut on my dresser, and he is an exemplar in this sense. Anyone who sees him and knows me well will think that he must have connotations of my obsessions, begun in early childhood, with the æsthetical engineering of Lego play and the huge adventure of space-travel. It is so, but there is more: he represents to me the unfinished in my ideas of those things. He stands on my dresser to remind me that I still do not feel reconciled to them. (If reconciled is the wrong word, that I do not feel satisfied without understanding them; that I have not yet done right by them.) I must learn either (1) more about æsthetical engineering and space travel, or (2) why I needn’t learn more about them. Until then, the astronaut is my exemplar, my mental name, for that large and nebulous feeling: a tag and a symbol by which I can manipulate it, or at least refer to it. I will know that the ignorance is solved when the astronaut is merely a token of good times.

So the he is a definite name for a hazy thing. Such are memorable things, because we know we need to address our hazinesses. Auden defined poetry as memorable speech and as the clear expression of mixed feelings. I am no Auden scholar, but I think he would not have said good speech, for that which makes speech good is ideally that which makes it memorable; nor the clarification of mixed feelings, for when we need art to communicate, we are exploring beyond the frontiers of perfectly ordered understanding.

If we merge Auden’s definitions of poetry with the idea of exemplars, poof!, here is a working definition of art. We will consider an artwork to be anything which sticks in the mind to stand for a mystery. The mystery might be anything: it might be the strange ways of distant things; it might be numinous might; it might be, as you say, our dual nature; it might be some particular depth of the human character, such as perseverance or romantic love; it might be a truth that is unfamiliar in a certain place and time; it might be some paradox of everyday life or of abstract reasoning; it might be a mystery about the nature of art itself; the mystery might arouse joy, anger, satisfaction, or any other reaction from the appetites, the spirit, or the reason; its object could be theological, social, biological, or otherwise. There is no definite limit of the kind or value or meaning of the mystery to which an artwork refers; we require only that it be mysterious. Therefore, art is not a simple synonym for (e.g.) beauty or education, although it lends itself naturally to such uses: it is not the whole of them and they are not the whole of it.

Many concrete objections to this definition are easily resolved by thinking of an artwork’s creator as its first and most attentive viewer, but the definition remains less than self-evident. I think its primary weakness is its fundamental reliance on the viewer’s experience, which makes it such a, well, relative outlook, smelling slightly of patchouli and postmodernism. Luckily, it does provide some points for compromise with more conservative notions of Art-with-a-capital-A. Plainly, I don’t claim to have any universal criteria for excellence in art, because it must by this definition appeal to the individual: to the best in the individual, certainly (that part which, desiring to know truth, hunts and hounds and answers every question it can), but nonetheless to one person at a time. Art is simply a way of representing the general through the specific.

Specificity is essential to this definition; the general representing the general is philosophy, not art. As expression becomes abstract, it loses its hold on the attention, and thus its primary route to the mind. In these terms much of the poor art of MSNBCNN et al. is actually poor philosophy. It’s easy to mock a lousy metaphor, but a more common problem is lack of metaphor, or of anything else to engage cultivated attention and sympathy. That which is sold as art these days often has too much of the wrong kind of παθος, and too little of the right kind of βαθος. Here we find innumerable love songs that shy away from any actual descriptions of love or a loved one, or of one’s own emotions in a way more insightful than I’m in love.

Consider two classes of bad art or non-art: not exclusive or exhaustive categories, just momentarily useful ones. First is the more famous sort, which is something like candy. It is full of details which transfix the appetites — violent arguments, fiery explosions, bare erogenous zones, foreshadowed surprises, severed heads, desirable possessions — but to no good end. It is entertainment and nothing else; perhaps we can redeem it by examination and consideration, but in itself it does not recommend anything worthwhile. Any narrative, elevating, or educational form it has is a form only, made of fulfilled fantasies and violated taboos — they hunt for sentiments to fit into their vocabulary (Henri Davray, q. and tr. by Pound, The ABC of Reading). The second class is bad philosophy, which is often more dangerous as it is not so obviously corrupting. Instead of being too sweet and spicy, it is too bland; it dilutes the immediacy and predictive power of our ideas, and it inures us against trust in abstractions. It often explicitly claims some sort of legitimacy as art, and holds respect by prestige, authority, and intimidation. It is not a frontal offense on the integrity of the mind, but an attempt to weaken it from within, to play on the prides rather than the lusts.

We often find that what we thought belonged to the second class is in fact good art which we had not really appreciated, and this sort of realization is often encouraged by the taste and intellect of others. It is very hard to find ten-year-olds who enjoy Wagner and Beowulf, but the process of education is in many ways a sustained effort to make/let them do so. A large part of my effort in self-improvement goes to appreciating things that seem dull (ambient music, for example), thus to sensitize my appetites to quiet things and small details, and I am confident that it is well-spent. Thus, in examining what we have summarily put in the second class of pseudo-art, we often find things that belong instead with the best of real art, and, in that examination, we sharpen our critical skills and concentrate our ability to see through appearances to deeper reality — which is to say that searching for art is in itself worthwhile, just as is appreciating it once found; both lead to understanding.

But people don’t seem to think that the same sort of process, working in parallel or symmetry, is incumbent upon us when we see something and judge it as of the first class of bad art. Almost anyone would agree that often what we find dull we often are merely not appreciating, but it’s no less reasonable to give the same second chance to what we find vulgar. This blind spot can be found in the innumerable attacks on pop culture implying that if it can be ridiculed in one way, it is worthless in all ways. And any slice of popular culture can be ridiculed, simply by association with the rest of it; few would consider defending, say, Spongebob Squarepants, because its advertisements, neighbors on the air, producing corporation, and majority of viewers so plainly repay suspicion. Thus, in careless talk, any appreciation of it can be dismissed with, e.g., indeed, a worthy successor to Shakespeare — but that is a bluff, a rhetorical maneuver and not an argument. Such offhand dismissiveness will not do if we are to take the search for art seriously. It presumes that Spongebob ought be be like Shakespeare and that it isn’t, but it supports neither supposition, and thus is itself dismissible after examination. In a discussion of the worth of popular culture, one is obligated to dismiss a given element of popular culture from a position more basic than because it is an element of popular culture.

The prime enemy of entertaining art is the sort of Puritan/bourgeois instinct which sees in the physical facts of our life something not pathetic and potential, but dirty and worthless. It disdains joy in the specific and the immediately real, because it is ashamed of anything that can be criticized at all, anything that could be taken as wrong by anyone in any way, anything that can be faulted (however wrongly) as improper. It thinks it is concerned with purity, but in fact it is obsessed with the appearance of purity. This schoolmarmish pettiness would prefer that we ignore the facts of our mortal lives instead of trying to come to terms with them and improve them; it is founded on a fear of applying principles, because the physical can never be as good as the ideal, and therefore it is not ethical. It appeals to the ideal of an examined life, but it is a mockery of it, because it is all examination and no life. It is equal and opposite to the more widely-criticized faults of ignorance and hedonism, but it is more dangerous to those interested in the growth, integrity, and hygiene of the intellect.

The worst thing about the classics must be that the reverence in which they are held encourages goofy imitation. Many appeals to classical memes are only fearful of striking out on their own, and they muddy the waters for works which seriously and necessarily build on the classics. There is too much ambition to make timeless art, I think. It is not that timelessness is bad, but that aiming for it not to aim for art, any more than to aim for money is to aim for art. Moreover, although we keep past times’ most timeless art, we have no way to say that it was their best art. There is nothing in our definition of art to make an artwork bad simply for being better at one time than another; if it addresses universal mysteries only for people of certain specifics, what’s the harm? Timelessness per se is only a valuable property to us in art made long ago. Like many popular-favorite properties of art, it positively correlates with excellence, but it is not the essence of it. The offending line of reasoning must go like: art is good insofar as it evokes the universal; this poem of mine has some specific parts and some general parts; therefore, I will make it more artistic by removing the specific parts.

When we actually look at timeless artworks, however, we find them solidly chained to their place and time. They are very long chains, to be sure, with billions of people in reach, but strong ones. The classic artworks (glance at any widely-praised story, painting, or poem) are full of specifics of many kinds. Often they are so dated that they are good historical sources as well as purely intellectual ones. They need details to be what they are, and their transcendence of those details — which are always criticizable, imperfect, and dated — should suggest, if anything, the importance of details in achieving transcendence.

It is well within our rights to criticize things that are morbidly obsessed with ephemeral inconsequentialities, but the use of the ephemeral to make art is not tainted by its abuse elsewhere. If the artwork survives, after all, its parts are not ephemeral.

*

For our working definition, the question of intent in art is open-and-shut: no, it does not matter; no state is necessary to the creation of art. Artist may be a very useful word for those rare and excellent people whose τεχνη (skill or artifice) is the creation of art, but it is only that. Of course, we as people looking for good art are chowderheads if we do not notice some kind of non-essential but very strong statistical correlation between sincerity and artistic fertility. Obviously it is hard to make good art without intending to, as it is hard to make scrumptious, filling, and nutritious food without intending to. (Nature makes both, I suppose. This essay is about mortal artifice, but some of it may be as or more applicable to nature or a deity.) However, if somehow someone should do so by accident, there’s no reason not to eat it. Just watch out for those scrumptious, filling, and horribly poisonous meals: whether made intentionally, by accident while trying to make a good meal, or entirely by accident.

Although our viewer-based working definition does not rely on the viewer’s knowledge of the maker or the maker’s intent, nor in principle on anything else except the artwork itself, it must take such knowledge into account when it is there. Like it or not, it matters to me when I learn whether a painting I am looking at is by a widely-acclaimed painter, a computer program, a friend, an elephant, a collaborative team, someone with outspoken political views, a convicted criminal, a newly-discovered artist, an artist under especially complimentary or disparaging review in an accompanying article, or something else. We are remiss if we do not admit that we carry such bias, and that it can easily distort or destroy our judgment. Happily for us, bias can be subdued and improved. My preconceptions and grudges are useful as trained behaviors of the appetites and thus as clues to an artwork’s eventual depth and worth to me. If a painting seems to be in High Renaissance style, I will look perhaps for geometrical motifs on theological themes; if in the style of the Dutch Masters, then for light falling in ways bringing to mind ideas personal character; if it is entirely in black lines at right angles and solid fills of bright color, for insight into the workings of my own æsthetic sense. When regarding something of a genre I’ve sometimes found objectionable or harmful, it is no great matter simply to be a little cautious, and not to accept its assumptions and theses without consideration.

I see nothing improper, or especially difficult, about having a set of assumptions and defenses for the study and appreciation of popular culture. Reading The Republic can teach me a great deal without ever making me support sex between men and boys, or slavery, or the practice of matching one’s wits against only the most sycophantic of sheep. Similarly, I can watch The Simpsons in moderation without serious ill effects. If some think that by appreciating these things, I am implicitly approving of their worst aspects, I can hardly see what I owe them except a demonstration that such is not the case. The appreciation of any given artwork implies a certain amount of risk; it remains potentially useful. Whether it is worthwhile must be decided on the merits of the case. To dismiss popular culture in bulk and sight unseen is merely to cry sour grapes in a way that is moderately difficult to refute without sounding like a hedonist.

*

The finest art made today is within an order of magnitude of the finest art ever made. We’re just distracted from it, because (as has so often been pointed out) modern life is swamped by poor art of many kinds. To say that it is simply too hard to sort through the mess, and to recline in comfort with the best of past ages, is indeed tempting. Tis nobler, however, to suffer the slings and arrows: to work for what is right, and against what is wrong, in one’s own place and time. Most of today’s grapes may indeed be sour, but they are all fresh, and even the finest raisins are no replacement. The best modern artworks address mysteries of modern life, and those mysteries need addressing. The classics are timeless, and they do deal with universal issues, and surely for everything that happens in our lives we can find something in the classics to treat it — but we may be forgiven for consulting as well with people alive today, and for trying to understand their art. It is not that novelty per se is good, but that now is when things are happening. As I was reading The History of the Peloponnesian War in college, similar events were developing in this country, and Thucydides did give insight into them. However, it would have been ridiculous for me to think that I had the master key to human experience rather than a helpful set of memes, or that I knew more about the politics of the moment than I would have if I had read the newspapers as well as the classics. Moreover, it was Thucydides’ deliberate and personal engagement in his times that makes his history so useful in our times. Classics are written by people who find great insights into things: to find them, they must look at things.

Consider the Studio Ghibli movies, which I gather you have seen, and which I think must be some of the finest artworks of the last twenty years. The movies are, if nothing else, splendid entertainment, and certainly conductive to the best sort of imaginative play (as condoned in The Republic, VII.536e, as opposed to compelling young children to learn like slaves). But I see no reason why, for example, Princess Mononoke could not be a κτημα ες αει (a thing for the ages; a possession forever): integral to its pleasing of the appetites is a very sound evocation and treatment of problems of the individual within society, and of human society within the rest of the world. If it will not someday be a classic, I am certain that some other contemporary art will be. We have only to look around to find things worth seeing. Often excellence simply jumps out: in the Ghibli movies is a sense of nostalgia which I have nowhere seen better evoked. C. S. Lewis wrote, in the preface to the third edition of The Pilgrim’s Regress (which is fairly rare, so I’ll quote at length):

What I meant [by Romanticism] was a particular recurrent experience which dominated my childhood and adolescence and which I hastily called Romantic because inanimate nature and marvelous literature were among the things that evoked it. I still believe that the experience is common, commonly misunderstood, and of immense importance: but I know now that in other minds it arises under other stimuli and is entangled with other irrelevancies and that to bring it to the forefront of consciousness is not so easy as I once supposed....

The experience is one of intense longing. It is distinguished from other longings by two things. In the first place, though the sense of want is acute and even painful, yet the mere wanting is felt to be somehow a delight. Other desires are felt as pleasures only if satisfaction is expected in the near future: hunger is pleasant only while we know (or believe) that we are soon going to eat. But this desire, even when there is no hope of possible satisfaction, continues to be prized, and even to be preferred to anything else in the world, by those who have once felt it. This hunger is better than any other fullness; this poverty better than all other wealth. And thus it comes about, that if the desire is long absent, it may itself be desired, and that new desiring becomes a new instance of the original desire, though the subject may not at once recognize the fact and thus cries out for his lost youth of soul at the very moment in which he is rejuvenated. This sounds complicated, but it is simple when we live it. Oh to feel as I did then we cry; not noticing that even while we say the words the very feeling whose loss we lament is rising again in all its old bitter-sweetness. For this sweet Desire cuts across our ordinary distinctions between wanting and having. To have it is, by definition, a want: to want it, we find, is to have it.

In the second place, there is a peculiar mystery about the object of this Desire. Inexperienced people (and inattention leaves some inexperienced all their lives) suppose, when they feel it, that they know what they are desiring. Thus if it comes to a child when he is looking at a far off hillside he at once thinks if only I were there; if it comes when he is remembering some event in the past, he thinks if only I could go back to those days. If it comes (a little later) while he is reading a romantic tale or a poem of perilous seas and faerie lands forlorn, he thinks he is wishing that such places really existed and that he could reach them. If it comes (later still) in a context with erotic suggestions he believes he is desiring the perfect beloved. If he falls upon literature (like Maeterlinck or the early Yeats) which treats of spirits and the like with some show of serious belief, he may think that he is hankering for real magic and occultism. When it darts out upon him from his studies in history or science, he may confuse it with the intellectual craving for knowledge.

.... Every one of these supposed objects for the Desire is inadequate to it. An easy experiment will show that by going to the far hillside you will get either nothing, or else a recurrence of the same desire which sent you thither. A rather more difficult, but still possible, study of your own memories, will prove that by returning to the past you could not find, as a possession, that ecstasy which some sudden reminder of the past now moves you to desire. Those remembered moments were either quite commonplace at the time (and owe all their enchantment to memory) or else were themselves moments of desiring.

Lewis goes on to cast this longing in theological terms (which may be useful to your argument; I can send you the book if you like — but I have to warn you that I feel he constructs this point quite carelessly, and jumps to theism without demonstrated cause; it is after all merely a riff in the preface to the third edition of a relatively obscure book), but regardless, anyone who has felt this longing recognizes it, and anyone who has watched Spirited Away or Laputa has felt it. It is distinctly a feeling found and aroused within the person, not brought in from the outside, and I cannot imagine feeling it as anything but worthwhile. This Romanticism, or call it what you will, is central in my tastes; many other things are important, but this mystery fascinates me and I desperately want art that addresses it. Studio Ghibli addresses it. Its films are contemporary, popular, and exactly the kind of art I want. QED, for me at least.

Anime and animation seem to lend themselves particularly readily to more delicate sentiments (perhaps by virtue of such artificiality, every frame being made deliberately): think of The Iron Giant, which captured a very similar feeling of familiarity mixed with otherness. This feeling is wonderful and desirable, but as Lewis says it is in some way the appreciation of a painful problem. To feel it is to know that there might be a better world in which we would not have to feel it. Perhaps this is akin to the problem of dual nature. It seems to me to be related to all our dualities and irreconcilable differences, to all our problems and lonelinesses. Glenn Gould, a classical pianist, said:

I cannot imagine a life in which I would not be surrounded by music — and I mean that in the McLuhan sense, if you like, of having a sort of electronic wallpaper decorating your room. I mean in the sense of driving along in your car with a cassette cartridge in, which shelters you from the world, which protects you and keeps you at a certain distance from the world, because I think that the only advantage that any artist has, and the only thing that any artist can really write about (and all artists do write about it, whether they know it or not), is that distance from the world. Some realize it, and some do not realize it. I do realize it, and I know that I obtain it through media, and I know that I would have been very unhappy as a nineteenth-century man.

Gould claims we need a constant translation of natural mysteries into human terms. This makes a little more sense when we consider that Gould claimed that art was a sort of a phase of humanity, a temporarily necessary practice which would eventually cease to be useful. I think he was not bragging about his inability to feel at home in the world; he was saying that artists are people lucky enough to be able to express the feeling of wanting that feeling.

*

The Biblical parables, the Homeric analogies, the Greek philosophies, the ideals of the noble Romans, the expressions of Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dr Johnson: we cannot read these things without taking them to heart somehow, whether or not we believe them entire, because they are full of excellent memes. Some may be excellent false memes, in which case we must keep them out of our beliefs, but we need not keep them out of our minds; their excellence of form is enough to recommend them to our study. Having understood a flawed but compelling idea, we are able (first) to recognize and reject its falsehood more easily where next we see it, and (second) to use its persuasive form in the service of truth.

This way of reading (or listening, or museum-going, &c), as it gathers up the good and dissects the bad, is very much an ethical behavior. It is certainly not the only such behavior, and in many instances not the best; it is simply a convenient and common one for those of us with particularly voracious attentions. No matter how one pursues the good, one must leave off the chase now and then to organize and apply what one has learned, and to plan the next hunt. There are many scholars whose research and attitudes I admire, but whom I cannot entirely respect, because (so far as I can tell) they do nothing with the wisdom they gather. They appear to me as creatures of appetite, for honed and ennobled though that appetite is, it serves no ends but its own. One has to do something with knowledge in order to make it truth.

Of course, it is presumptuous of me to judge another’s wisdom or metawisdom. In principle, a lifetime of perception and contemplation might bear entirely on one vital act, showing up nowhere else, and still be worthwhile. But for myself, I can say that I doubt I would even notice if I were ever at such a crisis, so I try to apply everything I can all the time. (At least, I try to try.) Furthermore, I need the practice, and I flatter myself that I can help others as an example as well as directly. Art serves to cultivate our characters, and on the way it teaches us how to cultivate others’ characters; thus I feel I am both obliged and able to produce what art I can. Needless to say, I must not consider myself as good an artist as any other, nor mistake my abilities for genius. So what? Neither is it an impossible effort not to think of myself as a weightlifting champion when I carry a bag of groceries into the house. When art is needed, we should each be ready to provide. We live curious lives in a mysterious place — art is often needed.

And so, to the objection to your essay that it does not provide a way of identifying worthy art, I say pish-posh, pooh-pooh, and piffle-paffle. Neither does it provide an infallible way to tell any other set of good things from bad things, nor does it name any perfect piece of art, nor does it find a Northwest passage to the Indies, nor Jimmy Hoffa alive and well and living in Flagstaff as a real estate agent. None of these things were within your essay’s scope. Its thesis, as I read it, was that we unworthy people will not grow through deliberate ignorance of everything we deem unworthy. It supports that argument amply and intelligently, and the reader is given a new desire to find good in unexpected places — and is that not enough? Must you describe the unexpected things to expect? I hardly think so. Nowhere did you promise, and nowhere should you have promised, E-Z instructions on how to cock one’s head at something, close an eye, hold up the thumb at arm’s length to better judge proportions, and declare Yes, this thing is 93% worthy.

We want art to improve ourselves; equivalently, good art is that which improves us. Asking how am I to tell good art? is more or less to ask what is right and what is wrong with my character, and how am I to fix it?. To address this question in general terms is the role of one’s (religious) philosophy, and in specific situations it must be answered on the merits of the case. Either way, it is a entirely within this question that your essay resides. You have brilliantly clarified a question which is simply not answerable all at once. Fine!

An analogy: ethical people are like gold-miners. You have said (to a certain group of miners) that there is gold in a nearby stream (which some of them have considered barren), but are disconcerted when asked what gold looks like. I say that such questions are proper to a discussion of how to mine, not of where. That is, a person who is unable to distinguish good from bad with some degree of confidence has bigger problems than deciding which radio station to patronize.

On ethical issues, such as judgments of art, we may give and take advice, but we are as alone as we ever can be. Telling excellence from deception is a matter for the individual: the well-advised and even-tempered individual, as part of a culture and in adherence with a moral philosophy, to be sure, but the individual nonetheless. If your essay had presumed to establish a system for discerning good art from bad, and had claimed that it was both absolutely specific (i.e., that it was obvious how to apply it correctly to any artwork) and absolutely universal (i.e., that it really was the last word), I would have sighed and made a lemony face. I could find no such double claim credible. But, as far as I can tell, this is what is asked of you: not only to direct people to a place where art can found, but to spoon-feed them only the purest of it.

Hogfeathers and horsewash. Let people hear you and go their own way. In a paper on artificial intelligence, or the moral education of small children, we might expect a list headed Handy Tips for Telling Whether a Thing is Good, Evil, or Indifferent, but in a practical paper for decent people assumed to be capable of carrying on in a reasonable manner under their own recognizance, it is quite proper to leave a small blank spot in the application to real life section, where they will fill in the obvious ethical mechanics for themselves.

One looks at a supposed artwork and applies one’s best judgment. If more instruction than that is needed, it is in general techniques of judgment — not in, for example, the hallmarks and identifying behaviors of good art outside what is typically considered the Catholic culture. You have volunteered to make some general comments about art, not to wrap up an entire academic field and moral difficulty with a ribbon, a $15 mail-in rebate, some frequent-flier miles, and free overnight shipping in the Continental US.

Bleh; I’ve let myself get riled up and ramble. My point here is simply that a perfect knowledge of art can only come with perfect self-knowledge, because the one is the messenger of the other. (And if you have perfect self-knowledge, you’re well on the way to omniscience, so why are you worrying about art? Get back outside the cave, you carpetbagger!) Until then, our admittedly approximate ideas of art allow us to discuss some of the finest experiences in this life. I think you have made a refulgent contribution to the discussion, and I could ask no more.

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And so I thank you for the beginning of a well-conceived and well-written essay. It brought me to new ideas, and helped order old ones. It has gone a long way to justifying my vague suspicion that boredom is to moral health as starvation is to physical health. It has given me stronger aguments against the claim that today’s entertainment is only lust, rage, and chaff. As an insight into Catholic culture it was certainly rather oblique, but interesting nonetheless. In return, inadequately, I hope these comments and inconsequentialities will give you some memes to tinker with, or at least refute, as you finish your essay — the career of which I will watch with considerable interest. Again, thank you.

(And a warm hello to all of you who are not Tia, too. Join in, please. You are of course heartily encouraged to e-mail me with comments, refutations, donations, requests, etc.)