Thanks for sharing film suggestion re: “Waking Life”. In all honesty, we could not take in more than 20 minutes of that academically abstract film (in which different ideas of reality are explored), which emitted a dystopian resonance, not only via the film’s visual animation artistry, but also via the musical soundtrack – depressing neuvo tango style very much like Piazolla’s music. That film emits a darkly negative Affektenlehre quality. I much prefer listening to Bach! I suppose that, in itself, is some kind of demonstration as to where “art” has progressed. We’re curious as to your own response when you first viewed that film… and how you would rank it in terms of “high” art…? Curiously enough, I found the Wikipedia article about how the film was made, to be fascinating. There was a quote in that article about Linklater’s film idea: “I think to make a realistic film about an unreality the film had to be a realistic unreality”.
Lately, I’ve been reading a copy of “The Best Known Works of Voltaire” (1927), and in that book is a story called “The Huron, or Pupil of Nature”. What is interesting about this story, is that it was written by someone who lived contemporary with Bach – and so there were thoughts about Renaissance ideals coming through the words – just like Bach’s works also captured higher Renaissance elements through sound. At the same time, Voltaire also experienced the dystopian elements of life under elite rulership, and his Huron character, who was being enlightened by another prisoner in a dungeon, remarked (pg 211) “I suspect that illusion, fashion, caprice, often warp the judgments of men”.
Voltaire, himself, was tossed into prisons simply for speaking his mind, for simply saying what he thought about things. In Canada, there have been a lot of political prisoners and people who have lost their jobs for simply speaking the way they see reality. A new law is being proposed that will criminalize any opinion that differs from the politically forced logos, as “hate speech”. And we are closely following the work (including her books) of (former) Professor Frances Widdowson PhD, who is exploring these issues of how societies break down when they revert to tribalistic identity politics. It is Voltaire’s idea of caprice being played out to its fullest in such a law (and which was embodied in Piazolla’s musical ideas) – where if you say anything that differs from the political flavour of the day, you can be tossed into prison for uttering “hate speech”.
And this brings me to Shadownet’s fascination with Bach’s high art – it is the opposite of “caprice”, and consistently so, no matter which of his compositions you take in. Bach’s compositions offer an art form that is stable and grounding, even while it moves, even through all of its brilliant complexity. By contrast, I’ve not developed a taste of some of Piazolla’s compositions or other composers who followed his neuvo tango style (despite my being an accordionist), because of the destabilizing “capricious” nature of this style of music – which were brought to mind in the soundtrack of “Waking Life”.
We went to an art display yesterday, of an artist who sculpts true-to-life images of animals and people from pieces of driftwood and paper. This reminded us of the dire need to support the high arts, in any ways that we can. Artists like this give us hope that there are still segments of society that are able to connect to the spiritual realm to inspire their imaginations, and thereby inspire the rest of us to move deeper into exploring spiritual life to balance our materialistic values.
Thank you, Shadownet, for your throughtful post, and giving us to ponder a little about the value of high art traits in a civilization that does not think about them.