Poetic Connectivity
December 11th, 2011 § 1 Comment
In chapter one of the Russian director Andrey Tarkovsky’s book Sculpting in Time, a book laying out his meditations on aesthetics and filmmaking, Tarkovsky defines poetry (and perhaps art in general) as “an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.” And since he talks elsewhere of man’s poetic awareness as the sense by which we apprehend the true, the good, and the beautiful, for Tarkovsky, this poetic awareness is of the essential consciousness of man perhaps even transcending his sensual and rational faculties. Therefore, when one perceives an art form, his poetic awareness is stoked such that:
Through poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active. He becomes a participant in the process of discovering life, unsupported by ready-made deductions from the plot or ineluctable pointers by the author. He has at his disposal only what helps to penetrate to the deeper meaning of the complex phenomena represented in front of him.
Both art and the world are “complex phenomena” that stand in front of us, both possessing a “deeper meaning”, with art being an epitome, a microcosm, of the cosmos itself. Since the “process of discovering life” happens independently from judgments or “deductions” that could be intellectually ascertained, Tarkovsky suggests a trans-cognitive or trans-rational element of man’s nature, one that senses the really real, the real that mysteriously animates the reality we immediately experience with our senses. For as Tarkovsky notes, our “poetic visions” are not things that are normally perceived in the “framework of the patently obvious.”
We know from St. Paul that we now only see “through a glass, darkly“, that this present world is anticipating the final coherence and culmination of all things when we shall see “face to face” and know ourselves even as we are truly known. And if Tarkovsky is right, our poetic awareness and connectivity is of the essence of the Imago Dei and through it, the image creates an image and knows that image. And in that image we create, we can perceive more clearly the nature of the Image which we ourselves embody and live within, having recapitulated the creative act of God.
Art is then knowledge of that which now abideth: faith, hope, and charity.
My goodness, how different your assessment of art as “Art is then knowledge of that which now abideth: faith, hope, and charity” is from the early church Father’s distrust of the arts in general, and the visual arts more specifically. Although I am ambivalent about that distrust, as someone who has always had more than just a passing interest in the literary arts, I have to acknowledge the aptness of their suspicion, having known more than a few for whom the arts, literary and other, served as a substitute religion, effectively insulating them from encounter with the Living God rather than facilitating experience of the divine.