"The Weight of Glory," with William Collen: Part 2
How art ought to treat audiences and the need for ugliness.
Naturally, the critic William Collen and I had more to say after the first half of our transcribed interview. There’s more to discuss in “The Weight of Glory” by C.S. Lewis. And we hadn’t even gotten around to discussing our reading habits.
If you haven’t already, read our thoughts on eternal yearning in Bacon, Kinkade, and Mozart in Part 1 of this conversation.
*The following was lightly edited for clarity.*
Eternal Souls in Temporal Audiences
Me: In that final passage of the essay, Lewis turns from discussing eternity to discussing the implications in our treatment of one another. In the aesthetic principles, that stuck out to me as to how the art ought to treat the viewer or reader. Here's the the specific passage: "It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and circumspection proper to them that we should conduct our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal." It's that baseline understanding, that ever person has an eternal soul. Anyone experiencing a given piece of art has an eternal soul, regardless of where it ends up.
Lewis traces our eternal souls downstream into what they mean in relationships. I want to see about maybe tracing that further downstream, into what they mean for art meant to be viewed by other people.
WC: Right, right.
Me: "We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is in fact the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously. No flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” It's elegant, and it's transformative when you think about what that means socially and relationally.
WC: Oh yeah, and it's kind of terrifying to think of the opportunities we waste every day. There are people at work that I don't really get along with, but they're immortal. Maybe I should try to get along with them more. There's people who walk past on the street, and it's not really socially acceptable to just start conversations with random strangers these days, but maybe it should be, just because of all the chances that we're missing to minister to these people.
Me: Yeah, and for all the value God has imbued them with like. No matter who they are or what they've done, their value is infinite. It's infinite, eternally-measured value. And I think about that, and I think about the way that sometimes when critics talk about art, there's the question of how the audience will take it. I probably may be drawing from generalizations, but not necessarily, and sometimes there's an understanding of art that assumes an infantilization of the audience. Like, if it's not spelled out to the audience, they'll take the wrong meaning from it. I know I've seen that a lot in literature, that's kind of vaguely in vogue right now. Is that something you're seeing in visual arts and music at the moment?
WC: I see it a lot of movies, actually. Lately, a film will tell a lot more than it shows. Screenwriters are like, 'Show don't tell,' but there are a lot of people making movies who try to tell a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of Christian movies fall into that, where filmmakers think, 'I better make sure that they know exactly what I'm saying. So I'm gonna say it all out loud.' It's not really the best use of the medium of film to just start telling stuff. Books are a much easier way to do that, nonfiction books for sure. Even fiction can easily fall into the trap of telling your reader exactly what they're supposed to think. That's too bad.
Me: It is, definitely.
WC: The tricky thing about art is there are these styles, forms, and ways of doing things. It's easy to try to short-circuit them, but a real richness is lost if you do that, if you don't use the form to its advantage.
Me: Exactly. You referenced screenwriters, and, of course, 'Show don't tell' exists as a maxim in fiction as well, but with film you're doing something in a medium that just so naturally gives itself to presentation, and so much intake of visual information. You'd hope 'show don't tell' shouldn't need to be said given the visual medium of film, but there's definitely a worry on the part of artists, like, 'If I don't spell out my meaning or if I leave my meaning ambiguous, the audience will take something I don't recognize from what I've done. They'll take something that I don't want, that I don't agree with.' And I wonder if that's not a proper or full respect to the audience.
WC: I think it could be considered that. It's easy for artists to disrespect the audience, just as it's easy for the audience to disrespect the artists. A lot of people who are going to museums or concerts or whatever expect to be catered to. It's very easy to think, 'Well, I'm going to the art show so I expect to see X, Y and Z. I don't really come to be challenged.' Some people do come to be challenged, but many people come for other reasons where they're not respecting the artist's attempt to communicate. But artists have picked up on this, and it becomes very easy for artists to say, 'All they want is a quick, easy thing, so let's give them that.' And they really miss out on a huge opportunity to communicate. There's a lot of art that is not trying to communicate very much at all. And that's fine, we all need wallpaper. We all need decorations.
Me: [Just giggles]
WC: But there is so much potential to communicate that it's almost saddening, it's almost wasteful to not use that potential.
Me: Yeah, it's the multiplicity of meanings that will be intentionally left off because, like when you mentioned the word 'challenged,' a multiplicity of meanings, an ambiguity that someone has to deal with is challenging. I maybe think there's a self-preservation, to not allow too much ambiguity because ambiguity is uncomfortable, because ambiguity will probably enable the wrong conclusions, the uncomfortable conclusions from the audience?
WC: Right.
Me: Okay, so that helps me understand. It's not only that the artist ought to treat the audience as eternal beings worthy of wrestling with ambiguity, it's also that the audience should come into viewing a piece of art knowing that the artist deserves the same respect. The artist is also an eternal being fully capable of ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning.
WC: Right. Both the artist and the viewer are worthy of respect. They're both eternal beings, and they just need to remember that.
Again to the Christian Aesthetic, Dear Friends
Me: So before reading the essay, what was, as as quickly as you can put it, your Christian aesthetic vision?
WC: I would say it centers around communication and also putting out what Lewis sees as glimpses of the glory. I haven't really articulated it in my mind the way he does. I fully understood when he started talking about "the terrible secret." I think a Christian aesthetic vision would be pointing out the existence of the secret, which should tie into communication as well. Maybe to sum up: a Christian artistic aesthetic would be respectful communication.
Me: Respectful communication of the eternal secret, the eternal hint?
WC: It could have a wide spectrum. You could be communicating the eternal secret, you could be communicating the truth of Heaven, Hell, and sin. You could have a very Christian art that just says, 'Look at these pretty colors.' Mark Rothko is the painter who's famous for these huge canvases of just flat color, and he's not doing it pretentiously or anything. It's just like that purple and red are beautiful colors.
There is beauty in the world, even though Lewis talks about "the secret." There is actual beauty here on the earth. God created it and said it was very good. There's still a lot of beauty here. And when we see that, a Christian thing to do would be to point out, 'These colors are beautiful. These sounds together are beautiful. These words together make a beautiful metaphor and a great poem.' It's a very Christian way to approach art.
Me: To point something out as beautiful or present something as beautiful, is that far enough? Since by the definitions of this essay, beautiful is kind of an inadequate word. Does that make sense?
WC: Yeah. Lewis talks about how we start to idolize the beauty and think that's all there is. Yes, 'beautiful' is an inadequate word to talk about this stuff, but it's as close as we can get here on this earth, to say something is beautiful. But there's always that asterisk: 'It's beautiful, but it's not as beautiful as it could be. There is greater beauty that I can't express to you.'
Me: Yeah, there's beauty in this world but it's only a foretaste. It is only a shadow. A beautiful shadow, but a shadow all the same.
The Need for Ugliness Alongside Beauty
WC: But there's also a big place in a Christian aesthetic to point out the lack of beauty. I don't want to say that Christians should only ever make beautiful things. There are Christian truths to be said about how there is the brokenness on the earth. We need to not whitewash everything and say, 'Everything's perfect, everything is great, pretty, and beautiful.' We want to make sure people realize that, yes, it's beautiful but here are good explanations of why it's not all the way there. Here's some bad stuff I'm seeing. So don't idolize the beauty, don't venerate the earth we're in now, because there are problems here too.
Me: Absolutely. You've written about Dostoevsky before, and one of his main thrusts is fully understanding the fallenness of the world. And another example that comes to mind to me is Flannery O'Connor. It'sinteresting. She's deeply Christian writer, with extremely un-Christian characters. Actually, I don't know, that might be a little reductive. I just mean that she's not writing about beautiful characters. She's not writing about beautiful people or beautiful acts. But her sensibility of, 'Alright, this is a broken world. This is how a broken world makes meaning. This is how a broken world desperately turns to violence.' I think that's her Christian aesthetic, a sort of lens: In the light of eternity, here is why this world happens as it does.
WC: Right. And as Christians, that brokenness should make us sad. I don't watch horror films because I get scared too easily but also because they just seem gratuitous. A lot of horror movies are scary for the purpose of being scared, but I would think that anything horrible should direct you towards sadness, the grief that such things can be. anything else.
Me: Okay, I was actually I was thinking about the concept of melancholy, or mournfulness. A mournfulness definitely could figure into a Christian aesthetic, because it's about knowing that we are eternal beings, deeply fallen and deeply broken, doing irreparable damage to one another, when it was not originally like this. In Eden, at one point, there was an unfallen, perfectly beautiful world.
WC: A great film representation of that truth is one of my favorite movies, Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream," which I can't get anybody to watch with me because it's unrated and really graphic. In the movie, the four main characters have dreams. They have a vision of what they want their lives to be. They're working towards that, but then all four of them get sidetracked and lost along the way. The movie follows their harrowing, horrifying descent into the absolute depths of darkness and despair in a very Christian way. It's a great representation of our dreams, of the way that there are things that we can work towards, goals we can achieve here on Earth, but wow, look what happens when we give up on them. Look what happens when we forget that we're supposed to be pointing ourselves towards vying for that glory. It's just sad. It's a very mournful movie.
Me: Yeah, I feel like there's an impulse towards judgement when we're looking at brokenness and depravity. I don't particularly want to get into all of the hair splitting as far as who is to judge, it's a complex issue. But maybe a better response in terms of artistic representation is mournfulness. It's grieving that this depravity exists in eternal beings in whom it shouldn't exist.
WC: Right. It should make us sad. That kind of depravity shouldn't be something that we can shrug off. I think that's what Lewis was saying towards the end of the essay: Everybody is either an immortal, glorious being or an immortal, horrifying mess.
Me: Yeah, like a nightmare. And this concept of mourning reminds me of a passage where Lewis is describing what it is to feel something beautiful and then know that the beauty is not staying, that you've not actually been allowed into it. It is so melancholy. Keats calls it "'the journey homeward to habitual self.' You know what I mean. For a few minutes we have had the illusion of belonging to that world. Now we wake to find that it is no such thing. We have been mere spectators. Beauty has smiled, but not to welcome us; her face was turned in our direction, but not to see us. We have not been accepted, welcomed or taken into the dance. We may go when we please, we may stay if we can: 'Nobody marks us.'" I found that less mournful but more melancholy, in the way that it's an existential sadness to know that we're here.
We're not progressing beyond where we are here, because where we are here is unnoticeable and unremarkable. We keep looking beyond the door. Did that passage jump out to you?
WC: Yeah, and it reminds me a little bit of an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel called This Side of Paradise, where the main character, Amory Blaine, has this sequence of girls that he knows. He has a girlfriend, it doesn't work out. He has another girlfriend, it doesn't work out. In the end, he meets this pixie-girl who is just this free spirit, wild and connected to nature. But he knows he can't have her, and it just fills him with sadness. She's like that "Beauty," smiling and not inviting you in. He sees her and knows, 'There's something here in this world that I'm longing for and I will never get it here.' It's a very sad ending to the book.
Me: That actually sounds like almost a direct fictional representation of what it is to see beauty and to know, 'Oh, that is a beautiful thing. That is a thing worth having,' but then also understanding simultaneously that the beauty is not yours to have, that is not a place where you're going to be. Granted, it sounds like in that specific storyline, that's a self-contained world that contains no heaven, where that longing is not fulfilled.
WC: Right, right.
Me: Okay. I'm also thinking that a manic pixie dream girl makes sense, given that F. Scott was married to Zelda but hey.
WC: [Laughs]
Me: Anything else about this essay? Frankly, I'm going to keep chewing on this aesthetic vision and the things you talked about because I have to write it up formally at some point.
WC: Right, that's something I would like to work towards also. So my church has a little gazebo outside of it, and when it gets warm, I'm going to try to round people up and read this essay aloud to them. I really enjoyed the essay, and I want to share it with other people.
Me: Yeah, my younger brother is a diligent reader of nonfiction, I am still catching up to him on that one. He talks to me in Lewis, he references Lewis so often that it's so inspiring and also so convicting. I feel like, 'Oh, I should probably know that better.'
WC: [Laughs] Yeah, yeah.
Further Lewis and Current Reading
Me: The copy of the essay that I grabbed from the library has a couple other essays I'm also going to read. It's a collection of essays, and Lewis is a thinker that lends himself to so many different areas of the Christian heart and intellect, in a way that many Christian writers and intellectuals didn't and don't.
WC: Yeah, it's interesting. I've dipped into him a little bit here and there, and it seems like he is interested in a lot of things but also very serious about a lot of things. It's easy to find someone who's very serious about one small thing, but it's almost like everything Lewis writes about feels like it's worth my whole life's attention. And then the next essay might be something totally different, and you think, 'Whoa, this is most profoundly serious.' And the next one? The same way. And the next one is the same way.
Me: That's an incredible bandwidth. It's an incredible depth and intensity of focus that he can just pivot from one subject to the next. Have you have you read Mere Christianity?
WC: No, I haven't.
Me: Okay. I would recommend listening to it because I think that was how it was originally delivered. It was originally delivered as a set of radio broadcasts during the Blitz in London. And so hearing it, maybe I'm a little kooky about it, but hearing it feels more similar to how it would have first been experienced. And for being such unvarnished, totally logical, absolutely rigorous apologetics, it is very comforting. Especially when you keep in mind the context of a populace under German bombs. So yeah, I would definitely recommend Mere Christianity. I need to listen to that again.
WC: I'll try to catch a copy of it or listen to it.
Me: What are you reading right now?
WC: Right now I'm reading all sorts of books about cities. I don't know why I got into this cities jag, but now I'm reading all these architects complaining about the suburbs, and then some people talking about great neighborhood design. I live in a dense area of the city, and I love that. There have been town meetings to talk about different improvements, and I guess it got into my head.
Me: Okay, so you're on an urban design kick?
WC: Something like that.
Me: Are these books pro-urban? Are they for better urban? Is there a unifying theme across all of them?
WC: They all basically say that density is preferable to sprawl, which probably is intellectually lazy of me to only read books like that, because that's my own opinion anyway.
Me: [Laughs] Just confirming your thoughts, okay.
WC: Yeah. One of them was too much and I had to put it down, because it was these three architects talking about how every suburban development is just terrible and how their method is just the best thing ever. And I thought, 'Okay, this book is a giant ad for your own architecture firm.' I get your point but seriously, come on. But that's the general gist of them all, that dense cities are better than not dense cities. I'll tie that into the Lewis essay: a dense city makes it easier to bump into people and have relationships with them.
Me: Absolutely. I was thinking just about mean the quantity of human interaction in urban density. We've seen some of the drawbacks of dense cities just through the pandemic, but that's always existed. So is urban planning something you're going to write about, or is it just a jag you want to experience?
WC: Just a jag. I'm probably not going to write anything about it.
Me: Okay. I'm reading Bernard Malamud right now. So I have a TBR list. It's really long, and this novel was not on it. It's called The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud. It's early 20th-century Russia, and the titular Jewish Russian fixer leaves his shtetl and he goes to Kyiv. I find it transporting and the prose is simplified, but I don't know yet. I'm not far enough in to like readily render a good judgment of the quality of the prose, but the the world is interesting. I find shtetls and Jewish history pretty interesting.
WC: I think I heard about that book in a completely different context this last week. So maybe it's time for me to read it too.
Me: Alright. I'll let you know. If it's terrible by the end, I'll warn you off. What was the context when you heard it?
WC: I can't remember. But when you said the author and the title, I thought, 'I know I've heard that somewhere.' I don't know.
Me: Apparently there's a false accusation that will come up. Maybe that was the context you heard it in?
WC: Maybe, maybe.
A Poem a Day, a Penny for William’s Thoughts
Me: And, on top of that, I've been working my way through an anthology of American poets. I read it slowly, like one poem in the morning or one poem at lunch. I've been doing that for about eight months.
WC: That's probably the best way to read poetry. About 10 years ago, I subscribed to two or three poetry journals. So they'd come quarterly, but they were about half an inch thick. I started reading the poems and they would all blend together. There was just too much poetry at once, by all different authors. And I kept thinking, 'This might not be the best way to read poetry.' One poem a day might be the better way.
Me: What I do like about the anthology is that the poems are grouped by poet. To me, I see experiencing a work of art as experiencing the artist in a way, and so to read a cluster of poems from Mark Doty or Anne Sexton gives you at least a decent sense of them. They are tiny clusters, they're not representative. I understand it's an anthology, and I don't lend it ultimate authority, but it does gives me at least a look at a poet's shared aesthetic or if their aesthetic changes over time. I've been enjoying the poems, and I dog-ear it like nobody's business. I'm trying to copy down lines of the poetry. That's something I did in elementary school, copying things out, and it's a lost skill I missed doing.
WC: I had a poetry teacher in college who told me to do that. I copied out Elliott's "Prufrock," and I really learned it. I just understood it in a way I had never had before. It was probably one of the first times I'd really seriously understood a poem. So since then I've thought, 'If I ever come across a poem that I need to really seriously understand, I'll take time to write it out.'
Me: I would definitely recommend it. It's also been helping with memorization, because I'm trying to memorize poems. I have 1,000 useless things memorized, I might as well memorize poetry.
WC: Yeah, why not?
Thanks for being here, y’all. I’ll be in touch again on July 21 with an essay on reading aloud as a spiritual experience — maybe with some audio experimentations.