Lost art

This morning after walking downtown this crisp and clear January morning, my eyes watering from the bright sun, I finally sat down for my coffee. What was playing on the house system was an especially obnoxious pop song, I think it was the vile Cat Stevens, aka Abdullah or something, whose whiny voice evoked images of a skulking sewer rat. Not what I want to hear in the morning. Amazing that a bookstore owned by a Jewish woman would display the work of someone who wants to exterminate the Jews. Sometimes I wonder if all those centuries of dhimmitude have left a permanent mark on the Jewish soul.
Anyway, thanks to the wonders of iPod and a nice set of Shure ear plugs I have a way of circumventing the crassness of the modern idea of music. And what a contrast. It was Jussi Bjoerling's turn to randomly appear, singing a duet from Aida with Jonel Perlea, La fatal Pietra. And all of a sudden I'm in a different world, a world of beauty and nobility. I understand hardly a word of Italian, and I don't know the story of Aida, but it doesn't matter. There has never been another voice like Jussi Bjoerling's, and Verdi's music can be incredibly effecting even without a knowledge of the words. (With opera I sometimes think I like it better without the words.) Just the music and the human voice is all that's needed to transport me to another and more perfect sphere of cosmic reality.
An acquaintance of mine asked me yesterday if I had heard the CBC program where the topic "Why we like jazz" was discussed.The answer to me was obvious: jazz is great music, a fresh and new musical idiom that extended the possibilities of music. Thus it will always be new, and thanks to the invention of recording technology, will always be available for rediscovery by a new generation. My reply posed the question of why anybody liked hip hop. I know a lot of people claim to like it, just like a lot of people claim to like broccoli, but I suspect they are lying and future generations will be incr4edulous that anybody listened to it.
I'm not doubting people believe they like hip hop or broccoli. People are capable of believing just about anything if they think everybody else believes it, and the more preposterous the belief, the more hostile they become towards a nonbeliever. Hence the loathing true Bolsheviks felt toward Trotsky, or the rabid Islamist toward the Jew. More than mere logic is involved. Our deepest, most irrational impulses govern the outpouring of hatred of the believer toward the apostate because his entire personal conception of reality, his sense of self, is undermined. Panic and fear bubble up from the depths and the believer loses his bearings. Instead of engaging the non believer in a rational and courteous conversation where he tries to understand the other's point of view, he sees only enemies who must be destroyed. I mention these points because I intend to insult some dearly held beliefs as I go along. But there's no way out of it, no way to be nice.
The deeper question is why we listen to music, compose poetry, carve images on mountain sides, wear color coordinated outfits, mow our lawns, and worry about whether one set of beliefs is true or not. Why do we plan for the future, for our children's future, or care about people starving in Africa? Isn't it enough just to eat, stay warm, seek pleasure, have sex, avoid pain and toil? Why worry about anything but my immediate needs, why worry about what anybody else does? Why do we need to be loved, have friends, crave self-respect? And why do we need beauty? None of these questions can be answered by a utilitarian/materialistic explanation...they don't even make sense.
Yet materialism is a belief system itself, one that has permeated western attitudes for the last few centuries. It's a system of belief that has produced casualties, the most recent being a disregard of beauty. Beauty is out. The grotesque is in. Hip hop is only one recent example in music (I use the term loosely) but you could go back to the early days of rock and roll. Poor Elvis was grotesque. Madonna copulating with a brass pole on stage is grotesque, an image not even Dante could have imagined for his Inferno. She, Alice Cooper, the Rolling Stones, and so many others have carried the grotesquerie way beyond anything Elvis could imagine. He at least still had some lingering attachment to melody and sentiment. With him the yowling school of singing first broke through to the mainstream. Now yowling is everywhere. There is rock and roll yowling, country and western yowling, "world" music yowling, in fact it's almost impossible to escape it. This is the real air pollution, not carbon dioxide which actually helps plants grow.
While it may be a mystery why people believe what they believe- as Will Rogers quipped, 'People know a lot. The trouble is, most of what they know is wrong.'- there's no doubt that what we believe is vitally important to how we act. What is it we believe now? I mean what are the beliefs that drive people to vote a certain government in, or to listen to obnoxious noises or to strap explosives to their bodies?
Last week when it was so sunny and clear I spent an hour strolling through Fort Rodd Hill near Victoria and thought about those suicide bombers. How is it they hate the world and their lives so much that they will connive and plan to kill and maim as many people as possible, I wondered. How could they ignore the overwhelmingly beautiful world we are lucky enough to awaken to when we are born? Life is an immersion in wonders to be explored, beauties to be contemplated and all they can think of is death. The suicide bombers are not the only ones who seem impervious to the beauties of this world. It's a disease of our age, as much in the children of the west as in the children of the middle east. It seems especially common in the art world.
I've never been especially drawn to the visual arts but on occasion I browse through a copy of Artforum magazine at the library. Apparently an up to the minute periodical of what's going on in the upper strata of the art world, it's chockablock with images of decay and mortification. Flipping the first few pages of the December '07 edition, the reader is regaled with two images, one of a man, one of a woman, superimposed on each other. Which image is which is made even more ambiguous by the prominent sexual parts. The woman holds a large, erect penis protruding from her genital area through the rear of the male and emerging from between his legs below a patch of penisless pubic hair. I think the name of the artist is Jonathan Monk who was having an exhibition of his work in Paris. An emasculated man and a defeminized woman is what he takes away from his ideas about sexuality. Of course when homosexuality, baby killing and so on become normal and accepted then humans no longer have organs of generation. Their purpose is reduced to those brief moments of ejaculatory pleasure. There is no connection anymore between the generations. Sex is no longer the bridge between the past and the future. Love means nothing, in fact is obsolete, except as an entry in the thesaurus under sex. A few pages further on a young man dressed in a black suit, tieless, with a baseball cap stands in front of a white fence. Untrimmed weeds, grass, shrubbery seem ready to devour him. In fact the suit suggests coffin attire as if he is about to become compost. What meaning the artist had in mind is not something I am interested in. A few more pages and I see a 'Chocolate Santa Butt Plug,' the brainchild of one Paul McCarthy. It is an advertisement. The product was for sale, the perfect gift for the hip metrosexual on your list. As I progress through the issue, it's too tedious to describe the sad scenes that unfold. In between the advertisements (it's all about money, you know- don't tell anyone) are articles covering various scenes across the country and around the world. What must it be like to inhabit a world of such sterility?
Taking the contents of this magazine as representative of our times, what am I to make of it? First, I should say that the artists seem to have just as good an eye for colour, composition and imagery as any generation of artists. But what is wrong with them? Why are their gifts dedicated to the service of what seems to be a death cult?
I've always thought that all art is religious. Again, we can't help it. It's a fundamental reality like gravity, time, space. So what religion do these artists follow? If there is any message to all the art presented in this magazine it is pain, a great desparate groan of pain. This is exactly like a scene from Dante's Inferno.
But the sin here is that they have no beliefs, except certain visceral ones: existence is evil. Life is a big mistake. Human beings are inherently savage. Death is truth.
Where did all this come from? Historically, art has dealt in the transcendent aspects of the material world and found beauty and hope there. The artists were our guides. Where are they guiding us to now? And who were their guides?