What Is Culture For?
What Is Culture For?
The School of Life
Published in 2018 by The School of Life
70 Marchmont Street, London WC1N 1AB
Copyright © The School of Life 2018
Printed in Latvia by Livonia Print
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without express prior consent of the publisher.
A proportion of this book has appeared online at thebookoflife.org
Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the material reproduced in this book. If any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make restitution at the earliest opportunity.
The School of Life offers programmes, publications and services to assist modern individuals in their quest to live more engaged and meaningful lives. We’ve also developed a collection of content-rich, design-led retail products to promote useful insights and ideas from culture.
www.theschooloflife.com
ISBN 978-1-9999179-4-4
Contents
Introduction
Companionship
Hope
Balance
Compassion
Knowledge
Encouragement
Appreciation
Perspective
Conclusion
Introduction
Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture and the arts. Music, film, literature, painting, photography and sculpture enjoy superlative prestige and are viewed by many as close to the meaning of life.
But our societies also have a strict sense of what properly appreciating the arts should involve. Sensible homage is associated with acquiring technical knowledge, with taking advanced qualifications in the humanities, with knowing historical details and with respecting, at least in substantial part, the canon as it is now defined.
Strangely, what we are not generally encouraged to do – and indeed what we might be actively dissuaded from attempting – is to connect works of culture with the agonies and aspirations of our own lives. It is quickly deemed vulgar, even repugnant, to seek personal solace, encouragement, enlightenment or hope from high culture. We are not, especially if we are serious, meant to view cultural encounters as opportunities for didactic instruction.
In Ben Lerner’s 2011 novel Leaving the Atocha Station, an American PhD student, used to considering art as material for academic analyses and scholarly seminars, visits Madrid’s Prado museum. In one of the quieter rooms he spots a fellow visitor who moves slowly, looking intently at a range of key works, including Rogier van der Weyden’s The Descent from the Cross (before 1443), Paolo de San Leocadio’s Christ the Saviour (1482–4) and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1500).
What might it be right to do in front of this?
Rogier van der Weyden,
The Descent from the Cross,
before 1443
What astonishes the graduate student and eventually the guards of the museum is that in front of each of these masterpieces, the visitor doesn’t merely politely look at the caption or the guidebook; he doesn’t just note the fine brushstrokes and the azure of the skies. He bursts into tears and cries openly at the sorrow and beauty on display, at the contrast between the difficulties of his own life and the spirit of dignity and nobility of the works on the wall. Such an outburst of intense emotion is deeply unusual in a museum (museums may routinely be referred to as our secular cathedrals, but they are not – as cathedrals once were – intended to be places to reveal our grief and gratitude). Listening to the man’s sobs, the guards at the Prado grow understandably confused and nervous. As the author puts it, they cannot decide whether the man was:
perhaps the kind of man who would damage a painting, spit on it or tear it from the wall or scratch it with a key – or if the man was having a profound experience of art… What is a museum guard to do…? On the one hand, you are a member of a security force charged with protecting priceless materials from the crazed… on the other hand…if your position has any prestige it derives precisely from the belief that [great art] could legitimately move a man to tears… Should [the guards] ask the man to step into the hall and attempt to ascertain his mental state… or should they risk letting this potential lunatic loose among the treasures of their culture…?
The dilemma points with dry humour to the paradox of our contemporary engagement with culture: on the one hand, we insist on culture’s importance. On the other, we limit what we are meant to do with culture to a relatively polite, restrained and principally academic relationship, at points frowning on those who might treat it more viscerally and emotionally, as if it might be a sophisticated branch of the notorious category ‘self-help’.
This resistance, however well meant, nevertheless fails to notice that the great works of culture were almost invariably created to redeem, console and save the souls of their audiences. They were made, in one way or another, with the idea of changing lives. It is a particular quirk of modern aesthetics to sideline or ignore this powerful underlying ambition, to the point where to shed tears in front of a painting depicting the death of the son of God may put us at risk of ejection from a national museum.
Yet the power of culture arguably best emerges not when we conceive of it as an object of critical study or historical curiosity, but when we rely on it as a therapeutic tool that can be used in a quest to grow somewhat less isolated, frightened, shamed, restricted or skittish. Rather than focus on what a work of art might tell us about the time and place it was made or about the person who created it, we should develop the confidence to do exactly that which we might feel discouraged to do: relate cultural masterpieces to our own dilemmas and pains, using them as a resource with which to address a range of our most debilitating and pernicious agonies.
Companionship
The greatest share of art that humans have ever made for one another has had one thing in common: it has dealt, in one form or another, with sorrow. Unhappy love, poverty, discrimination, anxiety, sexual humiliation, rivalry, regret, shame, isolation and longing; these have been the chief constituents of art down the ages.
However, we are, in public discussion, often unhelpfully coy about the extent of our grief. The chat tends to be upbeat or glib; we are under awesome pressure to keep smiling in order not to shock, provide ammunition for enemies or sap the energy of the vulnerable.
We thereby end up not only sad, but sad that we are sad – without much public confirmation of the essential normality of our melancholy. We grow harmfully stoic or convinced of the desperate uniqueness of our fate.
All this, culture can correct – standing as a record of the tears of humanity, lending legitimacy to despair and replaying our miseries back to us with dignity, shorn of many of their haphazard or trivial particulars. ‘A book [though the same could be said of any art form] must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’ proposed Kafka in a 1904 letter to his friend Oskar Pollak. In other words, a tool that can help release us from our numbness and provide catharsis in areas where we have for too long been wrong-headedly brave.
There is relief from our submerged sorrows to be found in all of history’s great pessimists. For example, in the words of Seneca from his On Consolation to Marcia (c. 40 AD):
What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.
Or the ironic maxims of Schopenhauer in The World as Will and Representation (1818):
There is only one inborn erroneous notion…that we exist in order to be happy…. The wise know it would have been better never to have been born.
Suc
h pessimism tempers prevailing sentimentality. It provides an acknowledgement that we are inherently flawed creatures: incapable of lasting happiness, beset by troubling sexual desires, obsessed by status, vulnerable to appalling accidents and always – slowly – dying.
Life is sorrow
Anselm Kiefer,
Alkahest,
2011
This vast painting (nearly four metres across) by Anselm Kiefer is – unlike the normal habits of our society – extremely forthright about the essentially sorrowful character of the human condition. Everything we love and care about will come to ruin, all that we put our hope in will fail. In a note to the painting, Kiefer writes: Even ‘rock that looks as though it will last for ever is dissolved, crushed to sand and mud’. The dramatic scale is not accidental: it’s a way of trying to make obvious something that is often repressed and ignored: dejection, sadness and disappointment are major parts of being human. The work’s icy, grey, harsh character summons up equally grim thoughts about our own lives.
It’s not an intimate picture because the fact Kiefer is asserting isn’t a personal one: it’s not so much we who are unduly down, it is life itself which demands a melancholy response. He’s not attempting to delve into the unique painful details of our individual sorrows. The painting isn’t about a relationship that didn’t work out, a friendship that went wrong, a dead parent we never fully made peace with, a career choice that led to wasted years. Instead it sums up a feeling and an attitude: lonely, lost, cold, worried, frightened. And instead of denying these feelings as worthy only of losers, the work proclaims them as important, serious and worthy. It is as if the picture is beaming out a collective message: ‘I understand, I know, I feel the same as you do, you are not alone.’ Our own private failings and woes – which may strike us as sordid or shameful or very much our own fault – are transformed; they are the personal way in which a tragic theme of existence happens to play out in our own lives. They are, in fact, ennobled, by their kinship to this grand work. It is like the way a National Anthem works – by singing it the individual feels themselves part of a great community, they are strengthened, given confidence, they can see themselves as strangely heroic, irrespective of their circumstances. Kiefer’s work is like a visual anthem for sorrow, one that invites us to see ourselves as part of the nation of sufferers, which includes, in fact, everyone who has ever lived.
Jean-Baptiste Corot described his painting The Leaning Tree Trunk as a souvenir or memory. It is filled with the idea of farewell. The moment will pass, light will fade, night will fall. The years will disappear, we will wonder what we did with them. Corot was in his late sixties when he painted this work: the mood is elegiac, mourning what has gone and will never come back. Ultimately, it is a farewell to life but it is not a bitter or a desperate one. The mood is resigned, dignified and, although sad, accepting. Our own personal grief at the passing of our lives (if not soon, then someday – but always too soon) is set within a much wider context. A tree grows, it is bent and twisted by fate and eventually will dry up and wither, like that on the lefthand side of the painting. The sunlight illuminates the sky for a while and then is hidden behind the clouds and night descends. We are part of nature. Corot isn’t glad that the day is over, that the years have gone and that the tree is dying, but his painting seeks to instil a mood of sad yet tranquil acceptance of our own share in the fate of all living things.
This is a move we encounter repeatedly in the arts: other people have had the same sorrows and troubles that we have, and it isn’t that they don’t matter, or that we shouldn’t have them, or that they aren’t worth bothering about. What counts is how we perceive them. By interacting with art, we encounter the spirit or voice of someone who profoundly sympathises with suffering, but who allows us to sense that through it, we’re connecting with something universal and unashamed. We are not robbed of our dignity: we are discovering the deepest truths about being human – and therefore we are not degraded by sorrow but, strangely, elevated.
Our lives too will pass and fade, like this moment
Jean-Baptiste Corot,
The Leaning Tree Trunk,
c. 1860–65
We can feel this elevation through sorrow especially in the presence of ‘sad’ music. One of the most calming things that societies have ever devised is the lullaby. In almost every culture there has ever been, parents have sung their babies to sleep. A humbling point that a lullaby reveals is that it’s not necessarily the words of a song that make us feel more tranquil. The baby doesn’t understand what’s being said but the sound has its effect all the same. The baby shows that we are all tonal creatures long before we are creatures of understanding. As adults, we grasp the significance of words of course, but there remains a sensory level that cuts through and affects us far more than an argument or an idea ever could. The musician can, at points, trump anything the philosopher might tell us.
Ancient Greeks were fascinated by the story of the legendary musician Orpheus. At one point he had to rescue his wife from the underworld. To get there he needed to make his way past Cerberus, the ferocious three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the land of the dead. Orpheus was said to have played such sweet, enchanting music that the wild beast calmed down and became – for a while – mild and docile. With this myth, the Greeks were reminding themselves of the psychological power of music. Orpheus didn’t reason with Cerberus, he didn’t try to explain how important it was that he should be allowed to pass, he didn’t speak about how much he loved his wife and how much he wanted her back. Cerberus was – as we ourselves are at times of distress – pretty much immune to reason. But he was still open to influence. It was a matter of finding the right channel to reach him.
When we feel anxious or upset, kindly people sometimes try to comfort us by pointing to facts and ideas: they try to influence our thinking and – via careful arguments – to quieten our distress. But, as with Cerberus, the most effective way to deal with sorrow may simply be to play us music.
For instance, in Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ (composed in 1825) we feel enfolded in a generous, tender embrace, encountering no criticism or rebuke, but endless depths of understanding and compassion for our troubles. The music lifts us up and gently distracts us from any immediate cause of agitation, as a parent might try to distract an upset child. Peter Gabriel’s ‘Don’t Give Up’ (1986) is designed as a similar kind of musical therapy. It’s intended for those times when we do feel like giving up, when we’ve lost all confidence and feel crushed by the demands of the world. The strategy is to be as sympathetic as an imagined mother: first to acknowledge the horribly painful sense of failure and then to offer a kindly reassurance. The message is not that our plans will inevitably work out, but that our human worth is not on the line if they don’t. The music offers us what at such points we can’t offer ourselves: compassion and faith.
Between 1733 and 1749, J. S. Bach produced his Mass in B minor, perhaps the greatest musical axe ever to be brought to bear on that frozen sea within us. Near the beginning there is the ‘Kyrie’: a call to the congregation to recognise the ways they’ve hurt and wronged others, and a plea that God will forgive their unkindness. A five-voice fugue theme (soprano I, II, alto, tenor, bass) and a step-wise ascending melody, interrupted by a lower sighing motive, encourage us to feel repentance about our own failings while hinting at the eventual certainty of redemption.
Not only are we sad, we are also, most of us, lonely with what saddens us. We can imagine ourselves as a series of concentric circles. On the outside lie all the more obvious things about us: what we do for a living, our age, education, tastes in food and broad social background. We can usually find plenty of people who recognise us at this level. But deeper in are the circles that contain our more intimate selves, involving feelings about parents, secret fears, daydreams, ambitions that might never be realised, the stranger recesses of our sexual imagination and all that we find beautiful and moving.
Though we may long
to share the inner circles, too often we seem able only to hover with others around the outer ones, returning home from yet another social gathering with the most sincere parts of us aching for recognition and companionship. Traditionally, religion provided an ideal explanation for, and solution to, this painful loneliness. The human soul – religious people would say – is made by God and so only God can know its deepest secrets. We are never truly alone, because God is always with us. In their touching way, religions had identified an important problem: they recognised the powerful need to be intimately known and appreciated and admitted frankly that this need could not realistically ever be met by other people.
Religion has been replaced in our imaginations by the cult of human-to-human love we now know as Romanticism, which bequeathed to us a beautiful, reckless idea that loneliness might be capable of being vanquished, if we were fortunate and determined enough to meet the one exalted being known as our soulmate, someone who could understand everything deep and strange about us, who would see us completely and be enchanted by our totality. But the legacy of Romanticism has been an epidemic of loneliness, as we are repeatedly brought up against the truth: the radical inability of any one other person to wholly grasp who we truly are. Yet there remains, besides the promises of love and religion, one other – and more solid – resource with which to address our loneliness: culture.
Henri Matisse began painting people reading in his early twenties and continued to do so throughout his life; at least thirty of his canvases tackle the theme. What gives these images their poignancy is that we recognise them as records of a loneliness that has been at least in part redeemed through culture. The figures may be on their own, their gaze often distant and melancholy, but they have to hand perhaps the best possible replacement when the immediate community has let us down: books.
What is Culture For? Page 1
