What is Culture For?

by The School Of Life

  Henri Matisse,

  Woman Reading at a Small Table,

  c. 1923

  The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott – working in the middle years of the twentieth century – was fascinated by how certain children cope with the absence of their parents. He identified the use of what he called ‘transitional objects’ to keep the memory of parental love strong even when the parents weren’t there. So a teddy bear or a blanket, he realised, could be a mechanism for activating the memory of being cared for, a mechanism that is usefully mobile and portable and is always accessible when the parents are at bay.

  Winnicott proposed that works of art can, for adults, function as more sophisticated versions of transitional objects. What we are at heart looking for in friendship is not necessarily someone we can touch and see in front of us, but a person who shares, and can help us develop, our sensibility and our values, someone to whom we can turn to and look for a sign that they too feel what we have felt, that they are attracted, amused and repulsed by similar things. Strangely, it appears that certain imaginary friends drawn from culture can end up feeling more real and in that sense more present to us than any of our real-life acquaintances, even if they have been dead a few centuries and lived on another continent. We can feel honoured to count them as among our best friends.

  Christen Købke,

  A View of Østerbro from Dosseringen,

  1838

  Christen Købke lived in and around Copenhagen in the first half of the nineteenth century – he died of pneumonia in his late thirties in 1848 – but we might consider him as among our closest friends because of his sensitivity to just the sort of everyday beauty that we may be deeply fond of, but that gets very little mention in the social circles around us. From a great distance, Købke acts like an ideal companion who gently works his way into the quiet, hidden parts of us and helps them grow in strength and self-awareness.

  The arts provide a miraculous mechanism whereby a stranger is able to do the things that we properly identify as lying at the core of friendship. And when we find these ‘art-friends’, we are unpicking the experience of loneliness. We’re finding intimacy at a distance. The arts allow us to become the soulmates of people who – despite having been born in 1630 or 1808 – are in limited, but crucial, ways our proper companions. The friendship may even be deeper than that which we could have enjoyed in person, for it is spared all the normal compromises that attend social interactions. Our cultural friends can’t converse fully of course and we can’t reply (except in our imagination). And yet, they travel into the same psychological space, at least in some key respects, as we are in at our most vulnerable and intimate points. They may not know of our latest technology, they have no idea of our families or jobs, and yet, in areas that really matter to us, they understand us to a degree that is at once a little shocking and deeply thrilling.

  Confronted by the many failings of our real life communities, culture gives us the option of assembling a tribe for ourselves, drawing its members from across the widest ranges of time and space, blending some living friends with some dead authors, architects, musicians and composers, painters and poets.

  The fifteenth-century Italian painter Verrocchio – one of whose apprentices was Leonardo da Vinci – was deeply attracted to the biblical story of Tobias and the Angel. It tells of a young man, Tobias, who has to go on a long and dangerous journey. But he has two companions: one a little dog, another an angel who comes to walk by his side, advise him, encourage him and guard him.

  The old religious idea was that we are never fully alone; there are always special beings around whose aid we can call on. Verrocchio’s picture is touching not because it shows a real solution we can in fact count on, but because it points to the kind of companionship we would love to have and yet normally don’t feel we can find.

  Yet, there is an available version. Not, of course, in the form of winged creatures with golden halos round their heads. But, rather, imaginary friends that we can call on from the arts. You might feel physically isolated in the car, hanging around at the airport, going into a difficult meeting, having supper alone yet again or going through a tricky phase in a relationship – but you are not psychologically alone; key figures from your imaginary tribe (the modern version of angels and saints) are with you: their perspective, their habits of mind, their ways of looking at things are in your mind, just as if they were really by your side. And so we can confront the difficult stretches of existence not simply on the basis of our own small resources, but accompanied by the accumulated wisdom of the kindest, most intelligent voices of all ages gone by.

  Andrea del Verrocchio,

  Tobias and the Angel,

  c. 1470–5

  Given the enormous role of sadness in our lives, it is one of the greatest emotional skills to know how to arrange around us those cultural works that can best help to turn our panic or sense of persecution into consolation and nurture.

  Hope

  Much to the consternation of sophisticated people, a great deal of popular enthusiasm is directed at works of culture that are distinctly cheerful (songs about hope, films about couples that work through their problems); and in the visual arts, cheerful, pleasant scenes (meadows in spring, the shade of trees on hot summer days, pastoral landscapes, smiling children). The bestselling postcard of art in France turns out to be a reproduction of Poppies by Claude Monet.

  Sophisticated people tend to scorn. They are afraid that such enthusiasms might be evidence of a failure to acknowledge or understand the awful dimensions of the world. But there is another way to interpret this taste: that it doesn’t arise from an unfamiliarity with suffering, but from an all too close and pervasive involvement with it – from which we are impelled occasionally to seek relief if we are not to fall into despair and self-disgust. Far from naivety, it is precisely the background of suffering that lends an intensity and dignity to our engagement with hopeful cultural works.

  In reality we rarely have the problem of being naively contented with our lives, or with the world in general. On the contrary, we are remorselessly confronted by our own failings and by the radical imperfections of society. Rather than needing a stern dose of disenchantment, we’re more likely to require art-tools that can feed and sustain our beleaguered optimism.

  Claude Monet,

  Poppies, 1873

  Renoir’s idyllic picture of friends having a picnic together in the shade on a sunny day (overleaf) isn’t imagining a fantasy world in which people magically never have troubles or sorrows. They may have boring jobs or tricky partners; they may have long hours of loneliness. It’s just that, all the same, they can truly enjoy this opportunity of pleasant friendship in a lovely place. Renoir isn’t being sentimental. He’s not implying that life as a whole is a picnic. He’s portraying a much truer and more helpful idea of which we often need reminding: that despite the manifest failings of life and the world it is still possible for us to experience true pleasure. Which leads to the odd conclusion: if (by some strange chance) normal life were to become consistently delightful we would no longer need sweetly charming, hope-inducing works of art.

  Hope made visible

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir,

  Picnic (Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe),

  c. 1893

  One of the less discussed powers of art is that, from time to time, it can bring tears to our eyes. It’s normal to think that what makes people cry are sad things; that’s certainly the way it works when you’re a child. But the older we get, the more we start to notice an odd phenomenon: we start crying not when things are horrible (we toughen up a little), but when they are suddenly and unexpectedly precisely the opposite: when they are unusually sweet, tender, joyful, innocent or kind. This, far more than grimness, is what can increasingly prompt tears.

  We can notice this in films. In Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013), most of the action comprises a bitter series of arguments between a 40-something couple, played by Julie Delpy and Et
han Hawke. They have been together for years, they are on holiday in Greece, and the film homes in on one day when the pair decide to spend time alone in a smart hotel. They arrive in their room with the possibility of sex somewhere in both of their minds but instead, find themselves having a blazing argument. They rake up all the hurt from past years; they blame each other for every disappointment, and swear at and insult one another with abandon. Eventually, the wife storms out, leaving her room key and her husband behind. It feels agonisingly real. But, after a few hours of sulking, Hawke goes out in search of Delpy and finds her alone in a nearby restaurant terrace. They are both a little sheepish around each other, as one often is after a row, and he sits down opposite her with poignant formality. In a beautiful closing sequence, they start to talk with unusual honesty. It’s difficult, but we can see that, despite everything (kids, too many sacrifices, exhaustion, not enough sex, perhaps a one-night stand or two), they do still love and desire one another very much. Their rage is an explosion of the frustration inherent within all long-term relationships. They get so deeply upset because they know that, day-to-day, they need so much from one another and they don’t always get it. They’re not magically going to stop bickering in the future, but this moment of kindness and sympathy, playfulness and gentleness, after such a bruising confrontation, comes as a huge relief and is deeply tender to behold. Their admission of shared love is moving because it reminds us at once of the struggles in our own lives and of what at heart we really want: reconciliation, forgiveness, tenderness, an end to the fighting, a chance to say sorry….

  We start to cry at the brief vision of a state of grace from which we’re exiled most of the time.

  Bernard van Orley (workshop of),

  The Virgin and Child,

  c. 1520–30

  Something similar may happen around a much older work, with a very different theme – such as this sixteenth-century painting of the Virgin Mary with her child, Jesus. Its emotional force is independent of its religious meaning. We’re seeing in her face, the face of true love that we desperately wish might sometimes be turned on us – filled with delight in our existence, warm, forgiving, generous and sad for every trouble that will come our way. When we look upon the picture with these thoughts in mind, we glimpse the love we wish we could bestow on others, but never quite manage to convey; and we see the love we need but may never find. We would love someone to rest their head delicately upon ours, to close their eyes and think with every power of their imagination and understanding how deeply they long for our happiness, how readily they would stand in harm’s way if only it were possible to save us from distress, how precious we are to them. And we cry because life is so seldom like this but so deeply should be. We are weeping at the loss of an idea, which means so much to us, and which we may catch sight of just for a moment when we look at a painting or read a passage in a children’s story book, or catch the echoes of every lost love in the final notes of a song: the idea of true, redemptive love.

  The more difficult our lives, the less it might take to make us cry; even a flower might start to move us. The tears – if they come – are in response not to how sad the flower is, but how its prettiness exists within such a very pitiless and mean world.

  ***

  Vincent van Gogh,

  Still Life: Vase with Pink

  Roses, 1890

  Vincent van Gogh,

  Self-Portrait with Bandaged

  Ear, 1889

  Across his life, Van Gogh produced exquisite paintings of flowers. Yet, self-evidently, he was overwhelmingly conscious of the darker sides of the human condition. His deep love of flowers wasn’t a denial of life’s grimness – or a naive failure even to acknowledge it. It was his radical recognition of sorrow that made him extremely sensitive to, and appreciative of, the transient grace of delicately tinted roses in bloom.

  There’s a strange contrast we sometimes catch sight of around parents and children. The child might be joyfully singing and dancing along to a favourite song. As they watch, the parent’s delight has a different quality: they are deeply conscious of how fragile and fleeting such moments of intense happiness are; they see this lovely, innocent moment against the backdrop of life’s sorrows and troubles – adding a layer of poignancy and tenderness which the child can’t as yet imagine. And this is what makes the sight so moving to the parent.

  It’s not fair to condemn all art that is joyful or sweet as ‘sentimental’ and therefore unworthy of the attention of an intelligent adult who has a realistic view of existence. The pleasure we take in pretty, charming or very gracious art doesn’t at all mean we are naively denying the darker aspects of the world or of our own nature. We’re not pretending that the pretty work is an accurate portrait of existence – in fact, we’re agonisingly conscious that it isn’t. It’s because we’re burdened with frustrations, disappointments, failings, errors, regrets and compromises that the sight of grace, innocence, lightness and carefree joy is so moving; and if we cry it is because we’re glimpsing something we love and need and yet cannot now hold on to.

  For many of us, instead of being complacent and unwilling to confront awkward truths, we’re liable to have the reverse problem: we’re so aware of what’s wrong that we’re despondent and paralysed. The Beatles’ warm, supportive song ‘Hey Jude’ (1968), with its key line, ‘don’t be afraid’, sees the reasons for potential despair as obvious: we get withdrawn and lonely, we give up, our problems feel too big. The song’s optimism isn’t denying this. Instead, it sees hope and cheerfulness as important ingredients in facing difficult situations. Similarly, one of Mozart’s most beautiful arias – ‘Sleep Softly’ from Zaide (1780) – captures a beautiful moment of love: you see your partner sleeping and you feel incredibly tender towards them. It’s not a denial that couples often squabble, disappoint and frustrate one another. It’s not pretending that this is how we always feel. Rather it’s taking a rare, and very lovely, experience and preserving it, so that we can strategically reconnect with it when things have grown dark. It is because we are so aware of how hard relationships can be that we need an artificial way of reminding ourselves of the very positive and kindly feelings we also really do have towards our partners – but which tend to get lost amongst the normal conflicts and stand-offs of being together.

  We’re leaky creatures. Hope drains away, not because the situation is genuinely hopeless but because we are so attuned to seeing what’s wrong. It’s precisely because we so readily lose hope that the optimistic reminders provided by culture – hope in amber – are so important to us.

  Balance

  Few of us are entirely well ‘balanced’. Our psychological histories, relationships and working routines mean that many of our emotions incline a little too much in one direction or another. We may, for example, have a tendency to be too complacent. Or else too insecure or too trusting. Or too suspicious, too serious. Or too lighthearted, too calm or too excited.

  The particular imbalances we suffer from may be specific to us, but the phenomenon of being unbalanced is general – and, surprisingly, it is an issue that culture is particularly placed to help us with, for works can put us powerfully in touch with concentrated doses of our missing dispositions, and thereby restore a measure of equilibrium to our listing inner selves.

  It is an emotional skill to be ready to sense an inner imbalance and then to take the steps necessary to rectify it with the help of culture. We might register that we are suffering from a mood of longing and disenchantment with what strike us as our rather humdrum and ordinary lives. The realisation isn’t complex in itself; what counts is the confidence to see that culture might have a solution to our mood – as well as the imagination to seek it out. We might find our way to a film about an ordinary schoolteacher who we, the audience, realise is delightful even though they lack any of the external markers of status. Through the film, we may be taught how to see the very real dignity and grace of ordinary life, and recognise that a little of this, fairly, be
longs to us as well.

  In another mood, we may discern that it is a different sort of film we need. We often go so far down the track of teaching ourselves about the importance of gentleness and compromise, that sometimes we unwittingly develop a problem with self-assertion and resistance to the demands of others. We might have learned too well to suppress our own appetite for a fight, our own desire for victory. In a world where conflict is unavoidable, good people sometimes need to strengthen their willingness to face down opposition – not always to compromise and play it safe, but to take risks instead, to get out and fight, to relish victory and to be a bit more ruthless in the service of noble and deeply important ends. Sometimes it is not enough to be right: you also need to win.

  So, some of us might well benefit from watching films that tell tales of heroism: that follow someone who has to navigate the world, kill a dragon, outwit some baddies, or penetrate a corrupt organisation. Ideally, the film shouldn’t simply leave us in awe at the daring of another. It should do that far more valuable thing: educate us by example, so that we too become just a little more heroic and brave where we need to be.