Universal Art
no metaphor can say this
but I can’t stop pointing
to the beauty
The poet Jelal ad-Din Rumi does something to me, something wonderful. He makes me feel one of those feelings that I deeply cherish but can never quite describe. Certain works of art do this to me. It’s like being in love, but just as with love each time is different, some sort of joy or longing or both at once – some sort of awe at simply being there. Sometimes, I understand how this is done. I am beginning to see how the art I admire recombines things everyone has already seen into surprising and beautiful patterns. But Rumi does something else. His poems are like something a lover would whisper to me when it is very dark and quiet. How he wrote these poems for me is a mystery, because he died seven hundred years ago on the other side of the world.
A work of art in itself is dead. Meaning lies not in canvas or words or stone, but within people. The work itself is nothing but a code for transmitting something human. Not everyone will receive the same transmission, of course, or indeed anything at all. That is probably why I don’t really enjoy I Love Lucy: I did not grow up white and middle class in 1950’s America. Similarly, the Ramayana is only moving if you know at least a little about Hindu theology, and artists like Andy Warhol would be nothing without the objects they critique. But Rumi’s poetry is subtler, deeper in some way. It transcends the culture that created it, somehow affecting people living almost a thousand years later who shared nothing of his life or culture. How does Rumi strike me so directly when we lived such impossibly different lives?
Rumi. Or Bach. The architects of ancient Greece. Depending who you ask, the Mona Lisa or the murals of Knossos. The strange impenetrability of the Sphinx, the delicate designs of the Ming Dynasty. Shakespeare, perhaps, depending on how well Hamlet works centuries from now when only academics can read the original Elizabethan English. In every culture there are patterns that persist long beyond their original contexts. There is a type a beauty that seems to last forever.
everyone understands this voice when it comes
it speaks with the same authority to Turk and Kurd,
Persian, Arab, Ethiopian, one language!
Such things must be at the core of being human.
Universally recognizable art is a key to all that is not optional. A web cartoon about Bush vs. Kerry, no matter how brilliant, only works if its viewers are already steeped in something highly specific to time and place, whereas Bach seems to hold something interesting for just about everyone. Although we might, if we were properly schooled, recognize Bach’s music as very German, there is a more immediate experience that transcends zeitgeist. I think we can learn something from such art, in the same way that we always learn something when we ask where beauty comes from. This is a good question, because it is really a question about people. Asking why Rumi remains beautiful to a culture he never could have imagined in his wildest hashish visions must tell us something very deep about ourselves.
Or, we could learn by doing. I want to learn about people by attempting to make art that crosses improbable boundaries. Differences of culture are a fine example, because for all of our global connectivity we still don’t read each other’s newspapers or watch each-other’s films. Culture is still not terribly motile. So until the if and when of globalized monoculture, an experiment is possible. Take two grand cultures just beginning to intersect, say the ancient divisions of East and West. For concreteness, Switzerland vs. Thailand. Belgium and India. America and China. Doesn’t really matter exactly what pairing you choose, as long as it makes no immediate sense. The challenge I propose is to design a work of art that speaks equally well in both cultures. Write a piece of music, or poetry (translations are allowed) or make a film or a car that thrills both a child in the slums of Bombay and a stockbroker in Zurich. Make it good in that instantly recognizable way for the members of two very, very different civilizations. Make something that people will love deeply. For bonus points, make it recognizable through time. Extend the same trick forward so that it’s still magic a century from now.
what is the connection between
what lives in time and what lives in eternity?
I’m not saying I know how make art that will be meaningful to two different cultures, let alone all the cultures yet to exist. Very few artists are sufficiently steeped in multiple cultures, let alone the possibilities of future history, to even begin to understand the problem. But perhaps I am approaching this the wrong way. Perhaps I need to be looking not for what is complex, intricate, rich, but what is simple and immediate. Culture is arbitrary. It will change and eventually wither, or else become unrecognizable. The most universal art must be that which speaks to what is essential in being human.
