After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern University Press book. He wrote that in a genuine work of art something has been gained for the human race and “the work of art transmits an uninterrupted message.” As so often happens, synchronous occurrences dominate my hours. Just a day later, as my family hiked down a small mountain, my daughter went over a short footbridge and called the water underneath a stream, whereby my wife corrected and offered, small stream. I encroached and called it a rill. I never heard of that, my wife said, and I replied, Read any Cormac McCarthy novel — he uses it as least once and maybe twice per novel, except maybe the last one. This would have been the “uninterrupted message” talking. McCarthy had instilled this identification of natural landscapes in me, from the hills, red oaks, and maples of Tennessee to the dusty plains and playas in Mexico — two places I’ve never visited but I feel a part of their landscape like I have spent some months in each place.
On the second page of Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, we have this: “Across the river the limestone cliffs reared gray and roughly faceted and strung with grass across their face in thin green faults. Where they overhung the water they made a cool shade and the surface lay calm and dark and reflected like a small white star the form of a plover hovering on the updrafts off the edge of the bluff.” Limestone cliffs have never sung so beautifully and intricately, joining the river’s mirroring of more of nature’s wonders. This keeps with one through the years, always fresh. It is these moments that Walter Pater speaks of in terms of our aesthetic experience (“For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass”), but they are double-sided, Janus-faced — the moments of the sentence and the moments of recall after the moments pass. The “uninterrupted message” is in the twin rivers of form and content, those that shape and nurture us.
What is life, but more so what is a life whose main force is to take in and give the beautiful? Life is comprised of other people, nature, and art. I think everything falls under these three rubrics and if they don’t, they are not important. Cézanne had this to say about the last two (human touch gave him travails): “I want to make [nature and art] the same. Art is a personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the understanding to organize into a painting.” McCarthy would never have said the same thing about a novel or sentences in a novel, but I believe he felt this way.
It is purely perfect that “Meaning can never be fully expressed” for why would we want that? Artworks don’t want to be solved, they want to be lived in. If we start from here and proceed, we will enter that mysterious territory Merleau-Ponty gestures at: “Instead of an intelligent world there are radiant nebulae surrounded by expanses of darkness,” like those four Heizer geometric pits in the Dia Beacon you only see the beginnings of, not how far they plunge down — and there is no reason for the imagination to short-change one and not think they continue on to the bowels of the earth. How could there be meaning in our universe, though there is love? The radiant nebulae (people, art, nature) sustain us. So many people, whether they know it or not, hold art (their playlists or their weekend Marvel movies) as essential, though, beyond escapism, its meaning can never be fully expressed since, as Bachelard writes:
The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own…It has been given to us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.
Long or short — biting or lush sentences on nature, people, and emotions give to us, unendingly, as they “make” us. They become a part of us, like DNA, that perhaps has been dormant but just needed to be awakened — the feeling that “we should have created it.” We are “given” a sonnet of Shakespeare’s but as we take it becomes a part of our consciousness’ stream, to be never “thought of” again or to be reified by rereading, by love experiences, by birdsong or the angle of the sun on a particular day — it is now a building block. Meaning can never be fully expressed because we are always creating a poetic image (in painting, sculpture, music, etc.) in our own unique language “expressing us by making us what it expresses…” but doing it differently every time.
The world of art has shifted, especially in the last twenty-five years, by which I refer primarily to books and films. Y2K started something, call it the emphatic beginning of Heidegger’s concerns about technology: “Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it.” It seemed then art contended with something newborn and needing so much — incredibly, a Cronos-type figure, for it thought it gave birth to all these essences and so would freely start to eat them. This new technology would grow into cell phones, tracking devices, further internet frolics, and AI and beyond. What happened to human beings? Their art suffered — it became conservative in form and then the indubitable political turn: “[it] merged increasingly with the sensibilities of actual, concrete political structures, which have discovered in contemporary art and culture a means of exhibiting liberal, enlightened, globally conscious moral values,” according to Anton Vidokle and Brian Kuhn Wood. The dictates of the market have no room for a Bachelardian or Merleau-Pontyian way of looking at things, a vision that is physical and textural (Emerson: “I read for the lustres”) and apart from the concerns of “returning customer,” or the multi-part series for “novels,” or the branding of an author so people buy their new books each time (“You don’t sell a guy a car once, you sell him four cars over fifteen years”). How can Merleau-Ponty’s views (and many other aesthetes’) be compatible with the most honored fiction and films of our day? Maurice Blanchot: ‘’Before it is read by anyone, the nonliterary book has already been read by everyone, and it is this preliminary reading that guarantees it a secure existence. But the book whose source is art has no guarantee in the world, and when it is read, it has never been read before; it only attains its presence as a work in the space opened by this unique reading, each time the first reading and each time the only reading.” The authors of books, whose source is art, like Wall (Jen Craig), The Logos (Mark de Silva), Doom Town (Gabriel Blackwell), and Disembodied (Christina Tudor-Sideri) are not household names, except in certain constituencies.
Have you followed me all the way here, reader? Many threads but only one true pull-chord. “His life was the projection of his future work,” Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne. Today, to claim such a mantle, even only as an aspiration, is to be scorned. Who could support such a statement? Is the contemporary disdain for artists a product of our proximity to them? Are people too close to the artist? Can we smell their underclothes and garlic breath? Merleau-Ponty adds: “It is impossible to separate creative liberty from that [schizoid] behavior…already evident in Cézanne’s art,” though Bachelard might extend this to the viewer/reader. The current gatekeepers don’t want artists who give the public “a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses,” they want a didactic view, but mainly a fiscal one — Taylor Swift recently thanking her “fans” for what “they did,” i.e. making her have a record, the top fourteen positions on a pop chart: essentially she complimented them on consuming her. Let’s pretend this is not importantly sick — and the music removed from all the brouhaha is serviceable, some people get a groove. But even in the reading community there are tiers of enjoyment — some people prefer the stadium rock of the Barbara Kingsolvers, who then give NPR-softball interviews about the trials they’ve gone through in life — Proust would call these “drawing-room essays [answers] that are scarcely more than conversation in print…product[s] of a quite superficial self, not of the innermost self which one can only recover by putting aside the world and the self that frequents the world.” Can you imagine Terry Gross asking Joseph McElroy if his life as he led it was a projection of his future work? Surely not: Terry Gross never means to imply to listeners that there are certain kinds of knowledge that stretch us beyond the kinds of things we can ordinarily and easily know.
Let’s say “meaning can never be fully expressed” and recall Bachelard, then riff that the poetic image continues to express us by making us what it expresses throughout our whole life, since our meaning can never be fully expressed, either within life or after death. The poetic images of McCarthy in Tennessee especially express something imbricated, physical, and deeply sentimental for me — the time of McCarthy’s fiction, which is in the 50s, but also time out of time, plus the multiple occasions reading that particular novel which function as building waymarkers in my life that decay as new ones follow. I’ve long recalled that introducing myself to Ingmar Bergman at age nineteen changed my life. His images made me in their image — this seems strange, even prurient, but I believe it turned out true, complete with an episode of melancholia.
The book or art object is here and the reader/viewer is over there, but only for a brief moment — when they come together chemicals are released — maybe many, maybe few. The viewer goes away with something, maybe bothersome, maybe not. The response to art is everything — and in that microsecond encounter we create a portal to a different world, the one between us and the art, where there are no boundaries or limits, only mostly unseen secret union. Today, we want to think the author did it, that the muse is in retrograde, but in actuality so many people who create do so through their wisdom texts or their ancestors, who are not writers or artists, but who have made their way into our work. The same can be said for the reader/viewer since the “uninterrupted message” continues on with them. I can live in Brooklyn or on the banks of the Tennessee river watching a plover — I still carry the “message” in the fractaled moment.