A Mused (Part Four)

If, as I pointed out in Part Three of this essay, it’s true that the supernatural needs humanity, it’s equally true that humanity needs the supernatural, something our contemporary age seems to have forgotten. Sure, it’s the case that, despite all their mewling about being persecuted by secular society, Christians have more power, both socially and politically, than they’ve had for a long time, but is modern Christianity about the supernatural anymore? Flip through the channels some Sunday morning and you’ll see the message these days doesn’t have much to do with a numinous or awe inspiring God, or even hellfire and damnation. For the king of the evangelicals, George Bush, God is just an enabler, an encounter with whom, rather than being humbling, has filled our worst president with fatal hubris and allowed him to sleep soundly at night. The entity presented by popular preachers is not an "other," but a sort of familiar, a pal, a kind of fuzzy Dr. Phil Jesus home boy.

The relationship with the supernatural is now conducted entirely on the material plane, with God presented on T.V. as a sort of superior stockbroker – just invest a few bucks in the ministry of his close associate the preacher and you’ll get a fantastic return of health, wealth and prosperity. There’s a Tibetan Buddhist guru in my town, the brother of a now deceased, even more famous Tibetan guru, who in the middle of a benefit for his local operation that featured Patti Smith and Allen Ginsberg got up to tout Buddhism as primarily a great way to lose weight and stop smoking. In reality, whatever its supernatural origins, religion has become thoroughly housebroken, just another tentacle of the materialistic/statist/capitalist octopus. Even Islam, the only religion people still seem willing to die for, has been manipulated for geo-political ends rather than mystical ones.

Not that I’m lobbying for organized religion by any means – I wish that all the superstructures that obscure man from the numinous could be ripped away, but the apparatus serves too many interests and makes too much money for that to happen. I think it was partly a reaction against the ossification of religion that caused the Romantics to elevate art as a substitute in the first place, and I guess I still believe, along with all those ancient cave painters, classical sculptors and weird nineteenth century symbolists, that art is the best vehicle for reaching the supernatural. To me Modernism was just a redefinition of Romanticism, and Post-Modernism a further variation, but now the dictionary’s been closed and we live in a deeply anti-Romantic age. When I was young my ambition was to join a modern art movement like the Fauves, Futurists or Surrealists, but today there are no viable art movements, only inviolable art professors. The Situationalists of the sixties and the Punks of the seventies, who were in their own way Romantics, were increasingly despairing and nihilistic reactions against consumer society, all the more poignant because they knew that they themselves were doomed to be consumed. No future, indeed.

An example of the current deeply anti-Romantic spirit can be found in an essay that has haunted and nauseated me by that master of the Zeitgeist, Stephen King. In La Belle Dame sans Merci Barbara Fass equates the profound feelings of helpless attraction and deep fear engendered by the titular lady in the Romantics to their conception of their own muses, beings of supernatural allure who inspired but could also lead them into madness and meaninglessness. King doesn’t see his own muse in quite the same way – to him it is "…one small animal, sometimes quite vicious, that makes its home in the bushes. It’s a scruffy little thing with fleas and often smells of whatever nasty mess it’s been rolling in." This whole A Mused train of thought began for me with the images of Klimt’s muses, the implacable, otherworldly goddesses, the naked truth he struggled to portray. One need only place one of these magnificent visions next to King’s flea bitten mutt to see how debased our age has become.

It’s a new kind of Classicism, guilty of exactly what Fass quotes Robert Graves as saying was the defect of the mode:

King doesn’t even grant his muse a human form, but presents her as a semi-domesticated beast who comes if not impeded by muse repellent, and then apologizes for being "too lyrical."

The old Classical template demanded that art serve society by being "morally uplifting," and that’s still in effect in academic circles both left and right, but what’s been added to the equation, as it has been added everywhere, is money. Except for politically motivated ones, money is now our only yardstick, our only value. Art is no longer about aesthetics – believe me I know, there’s a contemporary art gallery next to me run by a college professor in the strictest highbrow style and how the "pieces" look is considered the least important thing about them, and in fact the works themselves are nothing next to the conceptual/political concepts that "inspired" them and their hoped for collectability. Whatever King’s virtues, they don’t extend to his work’s most basic component, his awful, cliche ridden prose, as evidenced by his risible advice to would be writers to forget about le mot juste and just slap down the first word they think of and forget about it.

That would be fine if King, after years of lobbying the literary establishment, wasn’t finally getting serious critical plaudits. Since all other critical values are bankrupt, the fact that he’s sold so many books over such a long time has forced the book world to take him seriously. That the latest pissing of his mangy muse was declared a notable book of the year by the New York Times Sunday Book Review is more testimony to the cluelessness of the literati than to any sudden flowering of his talent. Just has commercial success has made King artistically notable, the forces that cause The Color Purple to be declared the greatest novel of our time have more to do with politics than art.

We’re a culture driven entirely by money and power, on a headlong course away from the Romantic conceptions of the inspired artist, art for art’s sake, and beauty being truth and truth beauty. One of the reasons for this flight can be found in another disturbing essay called "A Youthful Intoxication" in which Cynthia Ozick dismisses her early infatuation with the Romantics and mysticism. Fortunately, she says, she was cured by reading one Rabbi Baeck, who introduced her to "the classical, ethical idea of history." It’s perhaps a little catty of me to say that the accompanying photo of Ozick reveals a woman who has little consideration for the aesthetic, a wearer or sensible shoes if there ever was one, but the real reasons for her terror lie deeper. There is a real irrationality about Romanticism, one that, as Fass points out, the Romantics both feared and sought. Though Ozick is too classically circumspect to say it, the subtext of her aversion to the Dionysian is the blind, atavistic violence that can emerge from the ecstasy, a violence she unspokenly equates to the detestable sacrifice of eight million of her fellow Jews at the hands of the Nazis.

I’ve written before about the troubling connections between Modernism and Fascism, and the similarity of their anti-moralist stance and aesthetic preoccupations, but to blame the Romantics for the Nazis is crude reductionism, which is probably why Ozick hesitated to ink in her dotted line connecting the two. Her motivations for running screaming to her Rabbi when first confronted by the wild face of the muse must remain obscure, but no doubt help account for the mediocrity of her literary career.

The contemporary reaction against Romanticism is tied to its alleged complicity in the horrors of the twentieth century, but it’s also useful to ask whose interests a specific line of thought serves. The ideals of Promethean rebellion, uncontrollable ecstacy and allegiance to an otherworldly muse are just as threatening now to institutional power as they were when the Romantics first took up arms against Classicism. Does it serve the powers that be more to have artists see their muses as implacable goddesses or mangy mutts? Of course Ozick’s Rabbi Baeck would disparage a concept that would so diminish his own power as mediator between God and man. But that’s the thing about the goddess, as the Tannhauser myth shows, she can be exiled but never really restrained. Despite the evident bankruptcy of a culture that would have Stephen King as one of its leading literary lights, you’ve just got to hope that this is just one of those periods of transition when nothing much is happening artistically. Eventually the goddess will speak again and shoo all those mangy dogs away.