Robin-Wood-001Two exciting finds yesterday at the record store: The reissue box of Life’s Rich Pageant and a cool box filled with six different historically important recordings of The Rite of Spring (one by Boulez! Wow!) with a bonus commentary CD.

The Stravinsky set was an acquisition inspired by Robin Wood’s love for and recommendation of Stravinsky; my deep love for, and affinity with, Wood’s claims about art and responses to art form the basis of this entry. The R.E.M. set is one I’ve been hunting in used stores for a while (yesterday’s find was used but in perfect condition, hee hee), and I’ve been very happy with how the music holds up even several months after last summer’s R.E.M. “initial discovery” phase ended (listened to the main record twice last night, right after coming home); in keeping with the form I’ve set up for my blog, this entry is titled after a wonderful song on Life’s Rich Pageant.

Yet I added the subtitle because I’m reconnecting to an earlier entry, from October 2013, about my tendency to “go deep” and explore a particular artist, and/or a narrow portion of an artist’s work, for a very long period of time, reading and thinking about almost nothing else while in a “phase.” A Wood passage in Personal Views, in a chapter explaining his position as a “humanist” film critic in an era (1976) of semiotics–dominated film studies, describes what this approach to art is about, and why it matters, much better than my blog entry did–after all, my current goal as a writer could be accurately framed as trying to practice these entries until I can write criticism even remotely like Wood could. So here I go, just quoting an extended Wood passage verbatim:

“A work of art affects our emotions, fascinates our mind, becomes a part of our consciousness and our unconscious—a part of our selves. Repeatedly, through life, I have found myself living with a particular work, or the works of a particular artist, over a period of time, with the greatest intensity and growing intimacy: at present it’s Schubert’s Winterreise, which I have recently discovered. It’s not just that I want repeatedly to listen to it—it’s part of my breakfast every morning, it runs through my dreams at night, it’s with me while I do the cooking or fiddle about my garden. Gradually, I feel it becoming a part of me, and the obsession begins to diminish. From there on, I need to experience it less, because it’s absorbed into my life, it’s in my bloodstream.

This kind of assimilation—of which I’ve given an extreme example, for we are not capable of “living” every work of art we encounter at such a pitch of intensity—seems to me fundamental to any understanding of what art is and what art is for. The process of absorption I have described is clearly not only—perhaps not primarily—a process of conscious understanding and of intellectual exploration: it is a process of engaging the emotions and instincts as much as the mind. It becomes impossible without some degree of trust: trust of our own response, trust of the artist and the work. It is easy to see that, from the Marxist viewpoint, this trust is itself an aspect of bourgeois ideology, or, rather, the means by which that ideology can perpetuate itself. Yet if we deny it, it seems to me that we deny our own humanity and deny art (as Godard, indeed, has done or at least tried to do).”

Exactly that; exactly that. That’s what I believe. That’s what I wanted to say, what I was trying to say, when I first wrote about “phases” and why they are meaningful responses to art in my life. Wood is self-consciously defending emotional, instinctive, and above all personal responses to art as valid in the face of materialist semiotics, and I agree with him; but in the process he’s articulating a description of response to art that makes complete sense to me. One reason I like titling each blog entry for a song is that, for me, it’s one way of “living” the song in the ways Wood describes. Like him, I believe that art can and should change us, change how we understand and make sense of our lives; that’s what art is for. He’s careful to clarify that this is distinct from believing that art “teaches us” or is “equipment for living,” two tired tropes about art and life that I also don’t much connect with. Art doesn’t “teach” because didactic art is more “claim” than it is “art”; art is not “equipment” for anything because a work of art is not an object, not a tool, it’s a living text that we live with and live through.

I know that I’ve way, way too strongly overemphasized the intellectual, the “making sense,” in my responses to art. That’s what a blog entry as art criticism is, in part, an analysis and a situating of something that cannot be easily described, analyzed or situated. But I do think that one strength blogging has, in this respect, relative to an essay in a pamphlet or a book is that blog entries by their nature read like time–bound yet timely, partial, buildings up of responses more than “final words.” I hope that picking song titles as entry titles/epigraphs pushes at least a little of the way toward artistic response to art, a little bit of the way away from the descriptive/analytic and toward the creative.

I also think that, as so often happens when an intelligence is as sparkling, ravenous and complex as Wood’s is, the incoherence of Wood’s position on popular music can be traced through his own words, specifically those I quote above. He’s a definite music snob; though he’s a film critic who “admits” (he’d hate that word, and I do too, but it still reads like an “admission” when he writes it) to watching trashy horror films for great lengths of time and to having a very catholic taste in films, he’s assuredly dismissive of rock music in particular—at one point writing “I believe that not all rock music is worthless” just 40–odd pages before the two paragraphs quoted above. This from a British guy who was 31 when “Love Me Do” was released; ugh. What I’d say to him if he were still alive is this: I could not find any position at all from which to “trust” my own response, the artist or the work when I experience music—not Mozart, not Miles Davis, and certainly not the astonishing Carl Neilsen, who you [Wood] yourself led me to—if it were not for the bourgeois cultural contingency of being the son born in 1970 to my particular mother, a woman six years away from being a 14–year–old Beatlemania screamer/fainter who wrote love symbols to Paul all across the backs of every single LP and who passed on to me the legacy of the Beatles and Elvis and the Beach Boys as music worth responding to. For me, to deny the Beatles, after any amount of immersion in, any period of transformation by, the high art traditions of orchestral and operatic music that Wood valorizes so much would be to deny my humanity and to deny art.