The yin and yang of art

Music and literature are the yin and yang of art, the two poles of human experience, existing in horseshoe-similar extremes and creating opposite responses in the person engaging with them. Music and literature are both art, but they move in different ways, create a different effect on you, and cause you to feel in a different manner.

I don’t know why I’m only including music and books: it’s a perspective which ignores the fact that I find a lot of art profound – I have favourite painters and playwrights, appreciate movies, wish I knew more about architecture. I love dance and cooking and longform television that marries so many forms of art together. I’m as involved with Arthur Miller as I am with Sylvia Plath, but somehow the solitude of reading his plays rather than seeing them hits differently and feels – in a way that only the best art can – directly aimed at me. I don’t think for everyone it’s the same art that make up the yin and yang, the pain and the pleasure, that sit at the opposite ends of the horseshoe, but I do think that if you are Sensible*, however much you like an art, there are some that feel like home. When I cried this week reading Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’** the only thing I could think to reach for was music. I’ve never cried at an artwork that wasn’t a book or music, I’ve never felt renewed into myself or made aware of my place in the world by other art. Books and music are my home.

Books feel to me like water in the desert. Like a personal and insular achievement; inspiring, unlimited, intangible, like feeling the breath of an angel and viscerally understanding its meaning through a communication that was only meant for you. Books multiply for me: when I read one I must know what inspired it, what its rivals were, the world it came from. I don’t re-read much. I don’t like to talk about the effect books have on me, unlike music which I will gush over and share to anybody who listens, remember people and places from. Books aren’t for gushing – books aren’t a place or a time. Music to me feels like injecting adrenaline into my veins to wake up dormant emotions, rejuvenating but in a healthier way than books – I don’t binge music. I enjoy it best alone – whether in a room full of people or in a room by myself, I don’t want to be seen dancing or worry about another person’s enjoyment, taste, or parasocial relationships; I don’t want to watch which beats or words mean the most to them. Music repeats for me – whilst I love discovering new things, if I love something I listen to it over and over again and a lot of the joy comes from anticipating the beats, the words, the scratches or the cracks, to the extent that I have specific versions of songs that are my favourite, where the file is corrupted just so or the demo says words differently to the ‘proper’ issue. Both music and books make me feel all emotions at once, if they’re done right: they’re complex, nuanced, inexplicable, and that’s in me, not in the artwork. It engenders and nurtures those feelings but they’re not inherent to the text, they’re personal.

Sometimes I wander away from art: life gets in the way, and I find myself less interested in books or music or films, but when I’m alone (like I am now) I remember the profound sense of completion I have always got from these things and return, like a prodigal son, to feast upon them. I suppose I feel about art the way some people feel about god: I have faith in it, I don’t understand the metaphysical effect it has on me but I cling to it. For somebody whose religion is based in politics and compassion, art takes the place of the numinous experience which connects you to the universe as a whole. I suppose as much as my identity as a Quaker is informed by politics, so is my faith in art: seeing the world through somebody else’s eyes, being moved to emotions in a way curated by somebody else I find my place and my movement in an uncaring, amoral universe.

I hope one day to bring some art of my own into the world, to let a piece of my soul loose into the world and land where it may, but even then I will be loathe to discuss my relationship with the art of others beyond telling people what I like. I don’t think it hurts us to constantly evaluate what art means, and for me, it helps me appreciate it all the better. Music and literature are the reason I see the world as I do, and my love for them gives me my vision.

*(it is capitalised because I mean it in the Romantic sense of the word, of course – if you are sensitive, highly-strung, or an artistic soul)

** (at the bit where Connell is thinking about literature only being a social cache for educated people, and then again at the end – yes, I am having a completely normal one, thank you)

To-Do:

• Prepare your ‘table talk’ for Edge Hill university (I’m talking about Heine’s Atta Troll, a criminally underrated text).
• Make a list of things to visit whilst in Erfurt – I don’t want this year to creep up on me and find I never went to Jena, or the Volksmuseum, or any of the art museums. I haven’t even been inside the Dom yet!
• Work out how to get a measles-vaccination-proof that the Bundesland will accept. Or just get a new measles vaccination from a German doctor, I really don’t care at this point.

Today’s Culture:

• Keeping my cupboards tidy and pretty by putting all my carbs into candy jars I bought in Woolworth’s.
• The In Our Time podcast – lord bless Melvyn Bragg and the British academic community for making my own home feel like an erudite cocktail party, even in lockdown (this is potentially the only unscripted podcast I listen to, because everyone’s notes make it more structured and less soapbox).
• Goodreads – since I’m back on my bullshit I’ve been using Goodreads to track it. I think this is the first year ever I have actually submitted everything I’ve read (except for uni books, nobody wants to know about that)