Serious Art

In the greatest work of criticism and literary history, Auerbach places the conclusion of the European history of realistic representation in the French 19^th century, specifically in Madame Bovary. Flaubert’s novel culminates the development of what Auerbach calls “objective seriousness,” in which the serious treatment of everyday life is finally achieved. Here, the everyday—from the vulgar aspects of street life to the crude desires that often rule people’s actions to the cloistered rooms in which intellectuals toil in search for whatever it is that they consider valuable—is freed from its artistic association with the comic and the low and comes to be treated as something that is capable of expressing the tragic or transcendent. The everyday, boredom, and even stupidity are then seen as not only worthy of artistic representation but as perhaps the privileged themes for depicting the truth of the times.

The rise of the everyday in literature is related to a broader shift in European culture. The early modern period saw a transformation toward what Charles Taylor calls “the sanctification of ordinary life” in Western Europe. The Protestant rejection of the Catholic idea of higher vocations made the prosaic world in which we live as sanctified as any other. While the church remained the place in which people could congregate to praise the Lord, the ordinary became the space in which one lived a religious life. This democratized religion because no longer was one’s spiritual existence necessarily mediated through a dominant church. The entire world became Jesus’ temple. But even as the everyday seemed like an eminently spiritual domain, the spread and consolidation of capitalist modernity also turned that domain into a space marked by consumption and routine. Everyday life from the late 18^th century on has become more and more determined by routinized labor and domesticity. Everyday life has been subjected to strict schedules and the homogenizing pressures of consumer culture and mass media. Art has focused on the everyday precisely in order to show the hypocritical disconnection between the promise of the elevation of the prosaic as a sacred space and the crudeness, banality, and hollowness that often marks bourgeois life. If the everyday once promised the possibility of encountering the holy, it has become the arena in which stupidity, repetition, and the surrender to crass materiality rule. Literature’s objective seriousness and art’s insistence on depicting the prosaic attend to this reality.

But the serious treatment of the ordinary comes at a cost. We have come to associate seriousness with art itself, as if in order for representation to be art it also has to be somber. No doubt there is a great deal of playfulness and joy in some artistic works, but it seems to me that as a general rule we associate art with solemnity and the playfulness of something like Pop Art only works because of the contrast it exploits. Museums often feel like mausoleums for a reason. I, for one, know that I have side-eyed some yokel for being too animated in a gallery. This attitude has filtered to popular art forms. There is, I think, a marked division in the minds of many people between the entertainment of commercial popular music and the grave introspection or ironic self-awareness of serious pop. Lady Gaga, a real goddamn artist as far as I’m concerned, tries to bridge that divide in her single “Applause.” Not only does she reference artists and artistic movements in this song, she positions herself as a synthesis of art and entertainment: “Pop culture was in art, now art’s in pop culture, in me.” How successful is it? How much can a dance song be considered art? I don’t know, really. But my sense is that those who want to enjoy it as a dance song probably don't think that much about it as art and those that think a lot about art probably won’t take it very seriously.

Love and Emotion

The fruitman’s cart is white but behind the glass everything is color. We buy $5 of fruta mixta. This gets us jicama, mango, coconut, pineapple, watermelon, cucumber, cantaloupe, orange, honeydew, a transparent bag, and a white plastic fork. Echo Park is full of brown-skinned families, the children overdressed and uncomfortable. There are also plenty of people that look like either one of us. We lay a blue tarp on the green grass. We are going to read. We put the books and the bag of fruit on the grass and lie down on the tarp. We eat fruit and talk. You are wearing grey shorts and a red sweatshirt. You are chilly in the shade and pull the hood over your head. I don’t remember what I was wearing. Eventually, I’m on my back looking at the sky. You press next to me. We don’t notice but people watch us. I can hear the churning of the fountain that aerates the lake, the peal of children playing, the vendors selling, the movement of the trees in the breeze, and the birds making their noises. Black coots have followed us from one lake to another without realizing it. Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles. I have driven far and waited long to be here. You don’t touch your book. You fall asleep. I hear you sleeping. I would have driven father, waited longer to hear you sleep next to me. The sky is Los Angeles blue, and up there, in the current of air, the brown tips of the green palm tree fronds move around erratically. I try to make metaphors. I keep staring at the leaves moving as my side warms while you sleep next to me. I think you are undecided about me. I know you don’t talk about me. There are good reasons for that. Eventually, I read my book because it’s what I know how to do. Earlier or later, we listen to Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home” (this video is stupid) in your apartment. I tell you I like that song a lot. We listen to other songs. We go to bed. At some other point, “Hold On, We’re Going Home” comes on the radio as we drive to a bar where later a crazy man will come in and yell incomprehensible oaths at everyone, you will get silly drunk, and we will have a fine time. As the song played in the car you sang along quietly and perfectly in tune and I sang along terribly. Though we stared straight ahead and it’s all in my imagination, I felt that when we sang “I can’t get over you/ You left your mark on me/ I want your hot love and emotion/ endlessly” we meant it about each other. It doesn’t matter if your singing didn’t really mean anything at all. That changes nothing for me.

No Heroics, Please

I wanted to take her somewhere else. The first couple of times it was my old downtown neighborhood, The Commodore, Maya’s, walking down Yamhill or Morrison to the waterfront, walking up Everett with me complaining: “This Pearl District bullshit didn’t exist when I lived here” or some similarly stupid observation about the passing of time. So we went to the eastside, to Hawthorne. We went up the street and down, nothing that exciting. We went into a pub that was trying to be both fancy and hip and ordered beers. We drank a few beers, got tipsy. Phoenix came on the sound system. This was a while before their music started playing on the radio. I pointed the song out to her and she said she liked it. We bored of the place, and I suggested we walk next door to the record store, pick up a copy of the Phoenix CD, and drive to this place up on the west hills that I hadn’t shown her. We got in her car, put the CD in and played it loud. I screamed directions over the music and we somehow found Council Crest Park, high above the Portland skyline. By the time we got there we had almost sobered up. But it was late in the day and the soft angled light and view of the city kept us light-headed. Full of love, we stayed for a while and wanted to linger longer but we both had things to do the next day, so we took turns hiding in an enormous cedar to piss, then got back in the car for the long drive back. We played the first few songs of the CD over and over on the way back, laughing at the seeming senselessness of the lyrics but enjoying the music immensely just the same. As is my wont on the freeway, I kept getting distracted by the skid mark of tires as they veered off the road and stopped before cracked concrete or bent metal. Those tire marks were a kind of writing, telling stories of ruin. At the time, I failed to interpret properly the narratives before me.

When she broke up with me, Phoenix was on heavy rotation on the radio. Hearing the first few bars of “Lisztomania” or “1901” made me miserable and I couldn’t change the station fast enough. One time I left one of those songs on long enough that my eyes welled with tears before I changed it. After a long while hearing Phoenix on the radio only made me a little sad. I could feel my heart contract but the feeling wasn’t strong enough to make me change the station. Eventually, I felt okay when they came on the radio. Not good, not sad, just okay. These days, Phoenix reminds me of that trip and that it was fun, even if what followed it wasn’t.

What I have never felt is that sense of triumph that Katy Perry sings about in “Roar.” When she sings, “I went from zero to my own hero,” that sentiment is lost on me. But let’s be honest, she’s a famous, ambitious person whose personality was forged through very public successes and failures. I’m obviously not that kind of person. Nonetheless, I don’t believe her, as I wouldn’t believe anyone else who claims to have been made stronger by heartbreak. All that roaring silliness is what you tell other people to hide the fact that after a broken heart you don’t want to feel like “a fighter, dancing through the fire,” you just want to go back to feeling normal.

The Devil in the Detail

The only concrete thing about love is the details you remember about a body. The taste of a woman’s jaw, her skin softening or tightening under your lips. The feeling so complete you forget there is anything else. But there are so many jaws and so many kisses. The flesh sweet or salty like water or acrid from makeup or perfume. But no matter how she tastes you remember your arm around her waist as you sit on the couch, stand by the door, lie in bed. You picture your hand under her shirt and the involuntary calculation through which you measure the difference between the coolness of her jaw and the warmth of her stomach.

Roland Barthes wrote that in fiction a concrete object can establish the mimetic sense of the objective world, what he called “the reality effect” of fictive discourse. A clock, a curtain, a table, these could serve in fiction to differentiate between the hermeneutic order in which fiction develops meanings and the referential order in which it grounds those meanings in the experiential world outside of the text. Those objects can be made to serve no other purpose, says Barthes, than to say to us: “I come from the real world. I am a testament to the realism of this work.”

But the concrete object does not serve the same purpose in music. I’m walking down an unfamiliar street on my way to meet friends for a drink. I am on the shady side of the street and the light shines on me filtered through the branches of the trees that line the block. A breeze picks up from the west and when I feel it I’m left rooted in place by an unobjectifiable feeling. The breeze and the light transport me into a composite past where I feel the aspirations I felt as a teenager in Los Angeles mingle with the desire for a different life I had as a young man in Portland and the hopes and disillusionments I have about life these days. My eyes filled with tears and I made myself walk faster so that I wouldn’t start crying.

In music the concrete image does not denote the real. It is late in the night and I can’t sleep. I read poetry in Spanish through tired eyes. Neruda writes: “Estoy mirando, oyendo/ con la mitad del alma en el mar y la mitad del alma en la tierra,/ y con las dos mitades del alma miro al mundo.” Again I tear up like a lachrymose cretin. This time in my bed, I let myself cry for no reason. I feel the tears stream toward my ear. This kind of foolishness is lost on people who see the world in sensible terms, who don’t understand why some people go crazy at times.

I heard Fulanito’s “La novela” on the radio a couple of days ago for the first time. The song made me so happy I wished I could hear it ten more times in a row. But as delighted as I was by the song’s rhythm and sense of humor I didn’t really know what it was about. I didn’t know who Iris Chacón was, although she serves as the reference point for the song’s lusting. Not surprisingly, Iris Chacón was some fine-ass entertainer lady from the 70s and 80s, very popular in Puerto Rico where Fulanito are from and in the other parts of Latin America. My ignorance, however, clarified something for me. The solid details in music are references not to experience but to amplified and distorted memories. They evoke the past as we sometimes want to remember it, full of desires and emptied of facts. Those details relate to the past as a feeling and not as the objective events that add up to our lives. Unlike the reality effect of fiction, music uses the referential order to evoke emotion. Tear up if you like music, fools!

The More Things Change

Melancholy is a vice. It is a nebulous grieving that we indulge in for something we cannot understand, let alone name. It is a mourning that gives us pleasure, thus we continue to inhabit this diffuse pain, which remains beyond the level of full cognition. Unlike real loss, where the thing we loved and cared for is gone and our minds work on processing what cannot come back to us and thus get over the pain, melancholy fixates on something that gives us the pleasure of feeling sorrow. Mourning, then, is about the world, melancholy is about the self. Freud, in an essay that like nearly all of his writings is equal parts brilliant and loony, argues that melancholy is the product of a loss that we have internalized as an identification between self and object. In melancholy, argues Freud, the mechanism that keeps us attached to a desired object, person, or ideal is let loose by some traumatic event and rather than reconnecting us to another object it establishes a bond between the ego and the lost object. The loss of the thing is felt as a loss of the self and grieving the thing allows us to contemplate something about ourselves. Or to put it a different way, the grieving of melancholy is purely self-indulgent.

Romantic love is the perfect material for melancholic suffering. So much of that kind of affection is related to the way we cast things in us unto other people and the ineffable shit that draws us to someone else. The sentimentalism of romance has everything to do with the way we want to imagine ourselves in connection to other people. For that reason songs that resist the sentimental impulse while at the same time dealing with love and its aftermath seem exceptional. For example, despite conclusions and memories there is little melancholy in Interpol’s “Obstacle 1.” Beyond the harshness of the music, the sense of the past is one of absolute endings: “It’s different now that I’m poor and aging/I’ll never see this face again/You go stabbing yourself in the neck.” Few feelings remain here beyond anger and resignation. There is no romanticizing the past, internalizing the loss into a reason for joyous sadness. Things will be different, “we can find new ways of living,” but what was is over.

Graham Parson’s “A Song for You” splits the difference between sorrow over loss and maudlin satisfaction.  A phrase like “Oh my land is like a wild goose” evokes the kind of atmospheric feeling that is melancholy’s natural terrain. But there is an atonal, jagged quality to the song that interrupts any easy sentimentalism. And when at the song’s ending its protagonist says “I loved you every day and now I’m leaving,” the feeling there is too specific, too pointed to be self-indulgent. What is there is hurt feelings, lost hopes. This song may draw on the idiom of melancholy but it is ultimately about what’s left over after a broken heart.

 Taylor Swift’s “Everything Has Changed” is at the other end of the spectrum. Her song takes an unapologetic approach to dreamy fantasies and the origins of melancholy: I have just met you; I know nothing about you; I’m deeply attracted to something in you I may never be able to describe; my entire sense of self has been changed by something which may have no significance at all; I can begin to love you without reason; this means everything to me even if it’s actually meaningless. Affect in this song is a projection cast from the desiring subject onto the wanted object, which if to be considered “real” must take the shape of the illusion.  That is, if love is genuine, then it must be as it seems to the person who “wants to know” the object she already craves. This song makes us melancholic for something that hasn’t even happened yet because it understands that melancholy is a feeling that emerges from the self and not from the objective world. And while it would be easy to judge this song’s proleptic melancholy, such an attitude misses the point. The song’s fantasies are illustrative of something that all of us do and that few of us would be able to express in such emotive detail, and it reminds us that while melancholy is a vice it is a vice that satisfies all of us.