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joculumI'm lying; as I often quote from T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, I shall say it again. And probably real soon, too.
The good professor Boyd mentions in passing that sufficiently repeated stimuli cease to stimulate. So as not to be overwhelmed with having to re-invent the world every time we wake out of sleep, we develop as many habit patterns as possible, and our society does its best to make sure that those habit patterns are to the benefit of those in power.
So one of my repeated hypotheses has been that yes, traditional religions often inculcate habit patterns that help the powers keep the lid on, but there have also been traditional religious practices designed to help blow the lid off, only less destructively than uncontrolled revolution would. One of many questions up for grabs is whether those practices are just disguised ways of acquiring street smarts (of recognizing patterns that the powers do not want you to recognize) or whether there really are other orders beyond the visible, too.
But we can get a long way along by bracketing the question of the actual existence of invisible entities, and just looking at the techniques that increase awareness of the whole surrounding environment and such like.
Religious-studies scholars get ticked off at re-readings of Zen and Tantra and what have you because to look at the techniques ignores the social structures that those techniques often support. But some of the most incisive and socially insightful psychological techniques are embedded in religions that have actively supported an oppressive state, and been in turn supported by it.
So I keep wanting to flip a couple of theorists around and suggest that yes, some of these supposed mystics were really social revolutionaries avant le lettre, making the best deal possible for the people under circumstances in which real liberty was no more than a future hope. But they may also have been providing a form of individual inner liberation from the self-made prisons of our sexual obsessions, fruitless longing for unattainable luxury, and all the other crap that in general keeps us unhappy no matter how good things get.
And artmakers have been doing the same thing, too. So art and religion really are parallel in ways that Andre Malraux saw and our pissed-off theorists of the present day do not. Not that Malraux was right about the details. He wasn't. But like some other folks I like to cite as wrong but inspired, he saw that we could now pick out some patterns that might well be really there.
But given the sheer quantity of nonsense currently abroad about retraining yourself, is there really any way to pick out what it is that literature sometimes does to change us and not just to entertain us? or music, for that matter?
The trouble is that we seem inclined to all-or-nothing models of the self. But anybody who has tried to learn a language knows that sometimes you can pick up a dozen odd words plus the uses of the suffix to indicate possession, and after that you hit the wall. Reformatting your habit patterns and/or learning to think about things in a new way is always like that.
So it's silly to say, as George Steiner once did, that it changes our view of art and literature to know that a man can listen to recordings of Bach at night and go to his work at Auschwitz in the morning. It means that some people are just more habituated and harder to reach than others. One of the most discouraging experiences for any author is to find out why his fans like to read his stuff; it's seldom for the reasons he would have liked.
Boyd implicitly raises the issue of finding out why it's harder for potentially revolutionary aesthetic insights to break through to some people than to others. Mostly, we've learned to look at things in just one way, and nothing is ever going to break us out of that rut, short of simply shocking experiences, whether the shocks be unpleasant or pleasurable.
So it makes sense for someone to fantasize that a sequence of pleasant and unpleasant experiences might help wake somebody up. If one thing doesn't do the trick, two things in rapid succession might.
Or maybe not, but that's another part of the story.
The good professor Boyd mentions in passing that sufficiently repeated stimuli cease to stimulate. So as not to be overwhelmed with having to re-invent the world every time we wake out of sleep, we develop as many habit patterns as possible, and our society does its best to make sure that those habit patterns are to the benefit of those in power.
So one of my repeated hypotheses has been that yes, traditional religions often inculcate habit patterns that help the powers keep the lid on, but there have also been traditional religious practices designed to help blow the lid off, only less destructively than uncontrolled revolution would. One of many questions up for grabs is whether those practices are just disguised ways of acquiring street smarts (of recognizing patterns that the powers do not want you to recognize) or whether there really are other orders beyond the visible, too.
But we can get a long way along by bracketing the question of the actual existence of invisible entities, and just looking at the techniques that increase awareness of the whole surrounding environment and such like.
Religious-studies scholars get ticked off at re-readings of Zen and Tantra and what have you because to look at the techniques ignores the social structures that those techniques often support. But some of the most incisive and socially insightful psychological techniques are embedded in religions that have actively supported an oppressive state, and been in turn supported by it.
So I keep wanting to flip a couple of theorists around and suggest that yes, some of these supposed mystics were really social revolutionaries avant le lettre, making the best deal possible for the people under circumstances in which real liberty was no more than a future hope. But they may also have been providing a form of individual inner liberation from the self-made prisons of our sexual obsessions, fruitless longing for unattainable luxury, and all the other crap that in general keeps us unhappy no matter how good things get.
And artmakers have been doing the same thing, too. So art and religion really are parallel in ways that Andre Malraux saw and our pissed-off theorists of the present day do not. Not that Malraux was right about the details. He wasn't. But like some other folks I like to cite as wrong but inspired, he saw that we could now pick out some patterns that might well be really there.
But given the sheer quantity of nonsense currently abroad about retraining yourself, is there really any way to pick out what it is that literature sometimes does to change us and not just to entertain us? or music, for that matter?
The trouble is that we seem inclined to all-or-nothing models of the self. But anybody who has tried to learn a language knows that sometimes you can pick up a dozen odd words plus the uses of the suffix to indicate possession, and after that you hit the wall. Reformatting your habit patterns and/or learning to think about things in a new way is always like that.
So it's silly to say, as George Steiner once did, that it changes our view of art and literature to know that a man can listen to recordings of Bach at night and go to his work at Auschwitz in the morning. It means that some people are just more habituated and harder to reach than others. One of the most discouraging experiences for any author is to find out why his fans like to read his stuff; it's seldom for the reasons he would have liked.
Boyd implicitly raises the issue of finding out why it's harder for potentially revolutionary aesthetic insights to break through to some people than to others. Mostly, we've learned to look at things in just one way, and nothing is ever going to break us out of that rut, short of simply shocking experiences, whether the shocks be unpleasant or pleasurable.
So it makes sense for someone to fantasize that a sequence of pleasant and unpleasant experiences might help wake somebody up. If one thing doesn't do the trick, two things in rapid succession might.
Or maybe not, but that's another part of the story.
