So that what I have described is merely the sensation that arrives to me when I encounter reality with the light of reason and faith.
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Which statement I’m sure reveals something about the workings of my mind, but not, I don’t think, workings that are all that unusual. For if I have a tendency toward mysticism, or the metaphysics of truth, it manifests most frequently, I think, as a feeling of fraternity, or unexpected camaraderie, for objects and locations that my glance happens to settle on, when my mind is free of preoccupations, and my passions are at rest, or are disengaged.
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Meaning, I think, that there is a holiness that belongs to a landscape or an interior, or whatever environs a person can imagine, just before and after a consciousness abides there. And not ‘just’ before and after, in fact, but for whatever duration of time, so that the interval when no consciousness is present can be likened, if we want, to a waiting or a lingering that perhaps has no knowledge of itself and yet would sanctify itself by way of its patience.
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Though who is to say, I suppose, what is and is not capable of consciousness, or if consciousness is the only means by which a created thing can participate in the moral life of the universe.
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And which witnessing would mean more to us, anyway, in our apprehension of it, than to the objects themselves, inasmuch as objects seem to lack consciousness, and so would be unaware of the events that they behold.
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Which is not, of course, a witnessing through sight, but through presence.
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The wisdom, I would say, of witness.
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If it can be said that objects have a kind of wisdom. Which I think it can be.
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I mentioned several days ago that I was writing in a hotel room, and I’d intended to say more about that, but since then I have left the hotel and have returned along the highways to the city where I live, and am writing again in my apartment, which is the same, more or less, as it’d been before I’d begun my trip. By which I mean the objects all seem to be in the same place, nothing has been disturbed, the air seems to be sitting or arranging itself with the same monotony or calm, the noises that reach me from outside are no different than I remembered. Which is what I expected, and which I mention only because there is, I guess, something touching or melancholy to me about the fact, for I know that time has not neglected to do its work on this place (merely because I have been absent), but has continued, even if its effects are not very noticeable, since I was not long enough away for any of my items to have toppled, or collected dust, or otherwise deteriorated, though it’s true that if I look at them I will see that they seem to have lost a vitality of posture (the way things tend to do after they’ve remained in one place, without interference, for longer than they usually do), as if their existence has made them weary. Or as if, by contemplating their surroundings, they have resigned themselves to their own languid wisdom.
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My remarks are intended more as a means of classifying than of judging. The nobility of a life does not depend on anything so arbitrary as talent.
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I guess sometimes I come across as critical, or harsh, and I would not excuse it, if that is the case, but would say only that I regret it. I care about art, but not so much that I want to make assertions about it at the expense of someone’s feelings. At least not where there is nothing to be gained from what I might say.
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Nor does it mean that I believe art, as a practice, should be the special domain of the talented, or that the satisfaction or pleasure that can be derived from it, as a hobby (or even as a career, as opposed to a vocation), is of a lesser declension, but only that we are well served in understanding the mechanisms by which art functions as art, rather than as an attempt at art, or as something other than art.
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This does not mean that they are objectionable, or that they should be denigrated and belittled, but only that they belong to a category of talent and execution that one can delight in, or cherish, for reasons other than virtuosity.
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Similarly (though conversely), an artwork is not moral merely because it depicts heartwarming scenes. There are plenty of well-intended works that do not rise above their sentiments, and thus cannot be described as moral, because they are not sufficiently realized, which means their effect on an audience is negligible.
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Further, such a film will require of its audience no reckoning; it will purport to tell us what to feel, rather than bring us to an arena where we must interrogate our feelings, and make use of our intelligence and our conscience.
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An immoral film (or let us even say an amoral film, a thrill or an amusement) is not lacking in morality because it depicts, say, the gruesome and inhumane, but because it does so gratuitously, without the ordering or arrangement, or other reverence for form, that opens the channels through which an audience can participate in the construction of meaning.
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I can say, for instance, that I do not ‘enjoy’ the movie The Shining, but will still concede that it is a moral film, not in spite of the fact that it is gruesome and unsettling, but because it treats the gruesome and unsettling with an artistry that does not allow those things to escape their repercussions, even if those repercussions find no outlet in the film, but are forced into the space of our imagination, where we must reckon with them on our own.
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Those things will have relevance in an artwork that is moral, but only because such an artwork is so true in its imaginative rendering of reality that it speaks to, or has bearing on, everything that can be said to exist in reality, both visibly and invisibly.
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In other words, rarely does the morality of a work of art have anything to do with ethics. At least not in the sense, which some people might have, that an artwork’s subject must concern itself with justness in human conduct, or that it must have a ‘good’ message.
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And so morality, in this context, is measured by the extent to which an artwork is in possession of, and communicates, a stylized and personal vision of reality that is not deficient in complexity.