It’s been well over a year since I’ve watched Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, but, in a movie filled to the brim with fantastic imagery, one image has stuck with me more than others. That image is an old man, the master of the strange alternate universe that the protagonist finds himself in, delicately balancing an array of blocks. The blocks are not stacked in any logical way. The formation is totally precarious and seems like it must fall over. A cube balances atop a sphere, a cylinder stands upright with its base leaning over the edge of the block beneath it, and so on. It’s a wonderful image, and is central to one of the point’s of the movie, which is artistic vision and vocation, and ultimately, what an apprentice can and cannot take from a master.
Mastery
The movie is deeply concerned with the idea of mastery. Our hero, Mahito, finds himself in a strange world that really is a series of worlds that all share certain symbols–most obviously, the birds who populate these worlds in different forms. These worlds are all enthralling and strange, and have interesting resonances with the real world that Mahito has left behind, such as the young pirate woman who is clearly one of the older women that Mahito knew in the real world–her spirit is preserved here as a young sailor.
The point is, we finally get the the master of this world, Granduncle, who has this precarious stack of blocks. He is the master of these worlds, and as he explains, all these worlds are variations dictated by this stacking of blocks. This master is the creative, and the blocks are his “obsessions,” the things that he can’t let go of, that come back time and time again in his work (think of Scorsese and you’ll think of gangsters, power dynamics, Italian Americans, etc., or of Tolstoy and you’ll think of human nature, the soul, the upper class v. the peasant class, and so on). He says they are the things that he has found in the world that are free of malice–ideas that are true, beautiful, pure. The movie seems to be saying that an artist tends to actually only have this small set of obsessions, and that, in turning these things over and over, giving them different shape, proportion, balance, and so on, an artist is able to continually create. Certainly, it is interesting to take a look at artists one loves and look for these constant obsessions. The master then isn’t necessarily one who is able to come up with completely new obsessions for each work–indeed, this would seem impossible–but is instead someone who is forever giving new form to the same set of ideas, or the same “vision”.
Apprenticeship
The master then sees Mahito and recognizes in him the artistic vocation. His initial instinct is to force his own vision, his own set of blocks, onto Mahito. But at the end of the film, the master and Mahito both recognize that this is impossible. While the master and the master’s works have given Mahito an apprenticeship in the artistic life, the artist is not one who simply reiterates what someone else said and did. The artist must strive to cultivate his own vision. From his greatest master, from whom he learned the most, Mahito only takes a single block, a single shared obsession, or obsession is the wrong word. A single, pure idea, free from malice, from which he must then go out into the world and add more blocks, all in order to complete his own vision to which he will give artistic expression. The master raises the apprentice up, only to let him go, ultimately giving him the gift of freedom to create a world entirely his own.
One of the most persistent battles I’ve fought as a fiction writer is against the English Major mind. What I mean is that, frequently when I write, my mind gravitates toward thinking about what the story I’m writing “means”. The meaning of a text, or of any work of art, is what we’re taught to focus on in the setting of a literature class, or in any discussion of art as a whole. We, culturally, have taken art as essentially a form of rhetoric, conceptualizing fiction as basically an essay written in code, and the student of literature, like Alan Turing, must break that enigma. Once the code is cracked, the literature reveals itself, and once its message is understood, the reader can happily move on.
This framing of fiction as rhetorical extends out to all works of art. In our own day, we make very piece of art about politics, since politics is basically all anyone talks or thinks about. So we analyze everything through the rhetorical lens of what its message is politically.
However, you’ll find that often in interviews, artists are asked what their artwork “means,” and the question, bafflingly it seems to us, leaves them at a loss for words, perplexed. They may even deny ever thinking of such things. But worse yet, as I’ve written about elsewhere, some artists are over-eager to explain their works, to the point where the explanation, the rhetorical message of the work, seems more important to them than the art itself.
The Intuitive “Yes”
Annie Dillard, in her wonderful book The Writing Life, returns again and again to images of artists who have no idea what the outcome of their art will be, what people will make of it. They describe feeling like they are simply pulling on a string to see what comes at the end of it, or, in the famous example she provides of the stunt pilot, that he is, essentially, hanging on for dear life, keeping the sun on a certain side of his face, and so on. She portrays art as process-driven, as giving in to a certain experience, regardless of the outcome.
But what exactly is this experience? George Saunders seems to give the answer in his book on craft, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. It’s worth quoting in full, which I will pull from a piece he wrote in The Guardian that goes through the exact analogy:
A guy (Stan) constructs a model railroad town in his basement. Stan acquires a small hobo, places him under a plastic railroad bridge, near that fake campfire, then notices he’s arranged his hobo into a certain posture – the hobo seems to be gazing back at the town. Why is he looking over there? At that little blue Victorian house? Stan notes a plastic woman in the window, then turns her a little, so she’s gazing out. Over at the railroad bridge, actually. Huh. Suddenly, Stan has made a love story. Oh, why can’t they be together? If only “Little Jack” would just go home. To his wife. To Linda.
What did Stan (the artist) just do? Well, first, surveying his little domain, he noticed which way his hobo was looking. Then he chose to change that little universe, by turning the plastic woman. Now, Stan didn’t exactly decide to turn her. It might be more accurate to say that it occurred to him to do so; in a split-second, with no accompanying language, except maybe a very quiet internal “Yes.”
He just liked it better that way, for reasons he couldn’t articulate, and before he’d had the time or inclination to articulate them.
“He just liked it better that way.” Imagine giving that answer to your high school AP English teacher when they asked you why Melville spent an entire chapter talking about the whiteness of the whale instead of cutting it altogether. And yet, this seems the truest explanation of why.
Learning to See
Now, I have been listening a lot to the band Geese and Cameron Winter’s solo material. I came to them through them opening for Vampire Weekend in Philly. Something I think a lot about is their song “Long Island City Here I Come” from their recent album, Getting Killed. That whole song to me feels particularly inspired, as though they just continually said yes to stranger and stranger escalations in the music that, nevertheless, felt just right to them. One of the most hilarious and inspiring moments is when Cameron Winter sings “I’m about to kick your ass up and down this street” then proceeds to mutter “Here I come” over and over again and let out strange vocalizations for several minutes straight. It’s strange, funny, a little deranged, totally awesome, and, it would seem, deeply inspired, and inspired by a “Yes” that the entire group of musicians, or at least, some of them, must have felt when that moment first emerged.
The above-mentioned Vampire Weekend has tons of moments like this in their music too. I mean, from the jump, who would have thought of combining pop music, African rhythms, and Western classical influences into a single thing? I actually don’t believe it could be totally thought up. It had to be felt. In their song “Mary Boone,” off their most recent album, a sitar, an elegant piano riff, a hip-hop-style backbeat, some strings, and a choir, all play together at once after each chorus. It really shouldn’t work. But it totally does.
In their song “Ya Hey” (which features some chipmunk vocals that, again, really shouldn’t work, but do), they pretty explicitly reference this kind of bizarre genre-mashing in the bridge:
Outside the tents, on the festival grounds As the air began to cool, and the sun went down My soul swooned, as I faintly heard the sound Of you spinning “Israelites” Into “19th Nervous Breakdown”
Here, this very mixing of incongruous sounds is attributed to God, here represented as a DJ at a festival. They’ve touched something deep, something like reality or Being itself or God, in this mixing.
Now, I’ve spoken only to really over-the-top, explicitly “inspired”-feeling moments in song, but the point is, all of the song, every moment, must feel touched in this way, the musician must feel that “yes” at each moment of the song. Often, especially at first, it may be only the musician themself who feels the “yes”. I think here of Jack White, who, now famously, showed the “Seven Nation Army” riff to a friend, who was unimpressed. It is, in the grand pantheon of riffs, taken on its own, really not the greatest thing. And yet, White simply felt differently. He heard the riff and felt the internal yes, and pursued it to a song that is now an iconic anthem.
Similarly, you might be a musician. One of the things that may young artists do is write music that sounds like the musicians they like, but ultimately, they don’t find that satisfying. Why? Well, they chased someone else’s intuitions, vision, inspiration, “yes”, not their own. I love Jack White, but when I write songs, I stay away from riffs. They simply don’t excite me when I write them. Now, each song, story, painting, whatever, has its own craft and must be followed through on by the artist according to their own intuition, meaning one day, a riff may strike me as a “yes”. It simply hasn’t happened yet, but one should remain open to possibility. This is also why people a bit more tuned in to art are repulsed by music that sounds too much like music that came before, or like a pop-form of that music that is packaged to sell to the radio and Spotify and all that. It is clearly not the vision of the artist, but a stolen vision, and a decidedly lesser version of that original vision.
Back to Stories and Rhetoric
All this is not to say that stories, songs, and any artwork, doesn’t have meaning. I think they actually tend to have many complimentary meanings, particularly if they’ve struck beauty, being, reality, since reality can be looked at from a number of different angles to find a number of true, complimentary takeaways. Some saints were kings, some went to live in the desert. This is all only to say that these meanings are best discovered and fully worked out on the other end, often without the artist. Nothing ruins a work of art as readily and with as much good intent as pushing the meaning/message of the story so far forward that it ruins the inner workings of the art itself. I think of Chesterton’s White Horse, which is a really fun epic poem that then has to end with Alfred having a vision that the pagans will return, but with pens instead of swords! It flattens the entire poem to basically a message directed at barbaric academics, which, even if an important message, flattens the story. Or, similarly, moments like the girlboss moment in Avengers: Endgame, where for reasons inexplicable, all the female superheroes and none of the male ones have to carry the infinity gauntlet for a few moments, forcing a message into a scene at the expense of the scene itself.
As an artist, it is completely damaging to your art to be too focused on a rhetorical dimension of your work, because it will kill the “yes”. I found this moment from a Cameron Winter interview in Far Out:
“I feel like there’s nothing worse than going into a song, like ‘I have something to say with this song’.”
He continued, “Because then it’s just too much, like you’d end up writing a song that’s all about some super-specific issue – they don’t age very well, those songs. The clearer the message, sometimes, the less powerful it can come across.”
He added jokingly, “It doesn’t come across artistically. You should just make a tweet, or something.”
However, the singer-songwriter admitted, “Sometimes I do have something to say, unfortunately,” before admitting, “I get self-conscious about being too on the nose, and then if I’m not on the nose at all and it’s just like Goobledee-Girk, Lewis Caroll, horse-talk. Then I have to reverse engineer the message.”
He is exactly right. If you have something to communicate, write a tweet, or an essay. Essays are wonderful! But a song shouldn’t be an essay, a story shouldn’t be an essay.
The truth is, it seems to me, that while art can communicate truths, it does this by essentially capturing something deeper than can be expressed in, say, a string of formal logic, a speech, a debate, whatever. Those things are all well and good–all well and great, actually–but art taps into a deeper vein, where an entire fabric of truths and intuitions became a rich tapestry married to an expression given material form (a painting, a song, a narrative) that is beautiful. We can then go back and pull on some of those strings to explain those truths, but the artist is the person who is simply working their art (trying to make a painting look just right, trying to have a certain scene really capture the horror of loss, trying to give someone a character arc that makes sense, etc.). If they’ve written something “true,” something that gives them an intuitive “yes,” then, having touched the Real, it will be able to be dissected and discussed in hindsight, as it were.
Tuning into the “Yes”
The goal of the artist, then, is to tune into the “Yes”. I believe there are periods of learning where other things should be focused on. Certainly, a beginner fiction writer should learn the art of plots, character arcs, sentence structures, word choice, and so on. They should read the classics, the great works, and try to take them apart and see what makes them tick. They should workshop and learn from teachers (I’ve actually found one of the great benefits of workshopping is that readers pick up on moments where I wasn’t feeling the “Yes”–they could sense it, and could tell something about that part just didn’t work, which helped me tune into the intuitive sense more). I think people should read philosophy and try to come to a deeper understanding of art in general. But when really trying to work, trying to write, let go, lock the English Major out of the room. Lock the Alan Turing out of the room. Artmaking isn’t a code to crack, but a dance to dance. So go for the “Yes”, and revise and revise until the entire story feels like one long, protracted “YES!”
Once, at a teacher conference, a literature teacher summed up his ideas on teaching literature to me. “Literature,” he said, “is just philosophy that’s fun to read. That’s all it is.”
Being young and not particularly quick-witted–after all, I’m only addressing this now, five years later, in an essay–I used one of my stock responses when something seemed to me at once true and false, either “Huh,” or “Hmm,” or “That’s interesting.” Perhaps I used all three, one after the next. But regardless of my response, what he said has stuck with me for years as I’ve worked through my two artistic endeavors–teaching and writing fiction.
Before that point, I had tried for years to write fiction that would make people think. My process was something like this–settle on an image or story, settle on some theme, and work like hell to marry the two, like some crazed matchmaker bent on joining the two instincts of my mind. After all, I had loved literature classes in high school, and I majored in English in college, and much of what was done in those classes was trying to “understand” the texts, coming to some interpretation that one could write out in an essay or impress other students with during class discussion. When I began writing fiction, before I set the first words of a draft down, I was thinking about the interpretation of my story, what I wanted it to mean, what I wanted my reader to get out of it. And as a teacher, this is how I taught my students as well.
But at the teaching conference where I was confronted with my peer’s pithy take on fiction and philosophy, it struck me as wrong, and I found I was uncomfortable confronted by something that I could have said myself only a year or two before. A few things had begun to happen. First, I had begun reading philosophy. I was struck by wonder at hearing, on several different occasions, friends having conversations that I was simply unable to follow. I recognized that they were talking about something, perhaps that something being everything, or certainly, that something being of utmost, life-or-death importance. And yet I stood as though outside a room, unable to enter, lacking the key. So I asked them what I should read, and they recommended Plato and Boethius as well as John Paul II. So my journey, long and arduous and ongoing, began, and I found that reading philosophy, with its highly logical, propositional arguments and deep reasoning, was really not like reading fiction at all.
The next thing that began to happen was that I started reading the Bible. Or, more like it, I started having the Bible read to me by one Fr. Mike Schmitz, a testament to how technology need not be all bad. The Bible’s influence began to change and deepen my worldview, which, though it had been inspired by those who knew and loved the Scriptures, had never gone through this one true Source on its own. My faith was deepening, and I was trying to put it into practice.
Last, all the while I was attending Miami University’s MFA program, and I was learning quickly that ideological writing was not good writing. This is the kind of thing that I had heard many writers say, but that didn’t become part of my own way of being until I began to run up against how awful my fiction was when I was thinking more about themes, ideas, messages than things like plot, character, setting, details, sentence structure, and the like. My fiction was bad, and the only way to make it better became, in a creative breakthrough, to let go of the idea of writing essays disguised as stories, the “mongrel thing” that Flannery O’Connor refers to in Mystery and Manners. Suddenly, I found, I could write anything, where before, my stories by and large fell apart before I finished them, or ended dull, sterile, lifeless, lacking any mystery. I came to think that, while philosophy and fiction were connected, it was in a far different way than I had initially thought. Philosophy, or more broadly, worldview, is the stuff that stories are cut from. The fiction writer has a way of seeing, and that way of seeing comes through in the stories that they tell, through plot, character, and so on. The story is not a set of propositions that come to a logical conclusion, but rather, a series of events, of characters making decisions and facing consequences in certain times and places, that come together like a great tapestry and communicate something deeper than an idea, but rather, a whole way of seeing reality itself. The writer need not think about themes and ideas–they are working with something far more complex and mysterious that will come through all the more the less they consider it. You are dealing with worldview and also the deep mysteries of the human heart, things that philosophy struggles to deal with, particularly the latter.
Two of the most logical, philosophical, dialectical works of art–Sophocles’ Antigone and Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Me–seem to actually prove this point. Teaching Antigone was a revelation, both as a writer and teacher. Antigone seems deeply philosophical and dialectical. Antigone seems to represent the Justice of the gods, true Justice, while Creon represents the justice of the state, a lowercase, flawed kind of justice. The two are at odds with each other and have several exchanges over which form of justice is knowable and must be followed. The entire thrust of the narrative is the thrust of this argument. And yet, as Antigone is sentenced to death, she gives this monologue:
“Yet he who thinks will praise what I have done. Never, were I a mother and my son Lay dead, were I a wife and he that died My husband, never had I so defied My City’s will. Ye ask me on what ground? A husband lost, another might be found; Another son be born if one were slain. But I, when Hades holds my parents twain, Must brotherless abide for evermore. Therefore I did thee honour, and therefore: Hath Creon called me mad, my brother, yea, A doer of evil. And I am led away Unwed, unsung, robbed of the love that should In right be mine and joy of motherhood. Friendless, by fate accursed, with my breath Yet warm, they cast me to the House of Death.”
Antigone doesn’t care about her logical arguments about Justice. She loved her brother. That’s all, and that’s what she was willing to risk it all for. She would not have done it for a husband, or her own child had she any. She did it for her brother, for never would she have another brother. It’s quite a strange and cruel, yet also true and lovely, sentiment, all twisted and gnarled. She seems to have used reason about divine Justice and the gods, merely as a cover-up to her true, strange, foreign intentions. Here, the mystery of the human heart is laid bare, and we can only step back in silent wonder.
A similar moment is found in Twelve Angry Men. At the end of that film, only one juror, Juror 3, is holding out with a guilty verdict. Finally, he reveals why.
“The whole thing about hearing the boy yell? The phrase was ‘I’m gonna kill you.’ That’s what he said. To his own father. I don’t care what kind of man that was. It was his father. That goddamn rotten kid. I know him. What they’re like. What they do to you. How they kill you every day. My God, don’t you see? How come I’m the only one who sees? Jeez, I can feel the knife goin’ in.”
Juror 3 here is willing to sentence a young man to death because of his own fractured relationship with his own son. His heart is on full display for us, and soon after this pivotal moment, the movie ends. We have seen the human heart laid bare. There is little else to see.
In each of these stories, and in any story worth anything, the human heart is laid bare, as is all of reality–in the movement of plot, in characterization, in sentence structure or shot framing, in how the story ends and how the story begins, all of it works together to reveal an entire way of seeing the world. This also, in part, explains why no two authors write the same story, even if the premise may be similar. The two authors have two ways of seeing the world by their two separate lives.
I am sure in future posts I will address these issues one at a time, more specifically, but for now I can say that my writing and teaching has improved that I no longer teach literature as philosophy that’s fun to read, a statement which belittles philosophy and literature. After all, why read philosophy if fiction is more fun, and where does beauty go if all that matters is logical ideas?
