Feeling v. understanding

"The proper response to poetry is not criticism but poetry." Norman O. Brown, Love's Body

"A poem should not mean / but be." Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica"

"...the Cartesian paradigm is actually a fraud: there is no such thing as purely discursive knowing, and the sickness of our time is not the absence of participation but the stubborn denial that it exists -- the denial of the body and its role in our cognition of reality." Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World

Our culture has lost an appreciation for mystery. This has been true for a long time. To know something is to explain it -- not to feel it: this narrow bias of human experience expresses itself most restrictively in the arts, where explanation (formal criticism) becomes a substitute for the art object itself. When we see a play or read a novel or poem and watch an opera, we want to know, What does it mean? The question assumes that the proper response to art is understanding.

All this comes to mind after the opera last night. Wagner's music in "The Flying Dutchman" swells and recedes with an expression of longing that is matched in the storyline, which focuses on the quest for ideal eternal love. Oh to find it in this life! The heart breaks before the impossibility of it. Only in death, only in death. Wagnerian lovers, like Romeo and Juliet, express their fidelity by dying together.

This is not a theme to be explained but felt. We may not buy the entire package but most (all?) of us have longed for more profound connection and communication than we grasp. "Your suffering moves me," says Wagner's heroine -- because she, too, has felt it. We do not enrich the experience of the opera by saying so here, however. This, explanation, discussion, happens after the fact. It gives us something to talk about over drinks afterwards. But it's the experience itself, the present tense of the opera, that matters and that gives art its reason for being. We respond to art in the present tense.

I've had very few teachers who understand this -- or who bring what understanding they have into the classroom. One was the late J. Robert Trevor, an early teacher who remained my favorite. Trevor began each class by reading a poem. We did not discuss it. He simply said, "Listen" ... and read a poem. A silence, while it sank in. And then class started.

I learned more about poetry from that experience than in any classroom literary discussion in undergraduate or graduate school later.