In Diegesis

I just watched Magnolia again and I’m feeling lucid, alive, and nostalgic. Here’s some Tolstoy, from “On Art” for old times’ (and new times’) sake:

“What then is artistic (and scientific) creation?

Artistic (and also scientific) creation is such mental activity as brings dimly perceived feelings (or thoughts) to such a degree of clearness that these feelings (or thoughts) are transmitted to other people.

The process of ‘creation’ – one common to all men and therefore known to each of us by inner experience – occurs as follows: a man surmises or dimly feels something that is perfectly new to him, which he has never heard of from anybody. This something new impresses him, and in ordinary conversation he points out to others what he perceives, and to his surprise finds that what is apparent to him is quite unseen by them. They do not see or do not feel what he tells them of. This isolation, discord, disunion from others, at first disturbs him, and verifying his own perception the man tries in different ways to communicate to others what he has seen, felt, or understood; but these others still do not understand what he communicates to them, or do not understand it as he understands or feels it. And the man begins to be troubled by a doubt as to whether he imagines and dimly feels something that does not really exist, or whether others do not see and do not feel something that does exist. And to solve this doubt he directs his whole strength to the tasking of making his discovery so clear that there cannot be the smallest doubt, either for himself or for other people, as to the existence of that which he perceives; and as soon as this elucidation is completed and the man himself no longer doubts the existence of what he has seen, understood, or felt, others at once see, understand, and feel as he does, and it is this effort to make clear and indubitable to himself and to others what both to others and to him had been dim and obscure, that is the source from which flows the production of man’s spiritual activity in general, or what we call works of art — which widen man’s horizon and oblige him to see what had not been perceived before.”

How does the power of objective reason infiltrate the budding child’s subjectively egocentric mentality? In the history of mankind, there has hardly been documented an entire behavioral set, or whole personae, as principled as Socrates’, and yet even Socrates, who claims in Crito that he is “and always [has] been one of those natures who must be guided by reason,” on occasion drops hints to his more childish, egocentric nature. There is a subjectivity to Socrates’ reasoning that he shields with language. Consider this exchange from Crito:

“S: Ought a man to do what he admits to be right, or ought he to betray the right?

C: He ought to do what he thinks is right.”

Socrates’ language suggests that rightness is very clear objectively, yet Crito’s response twists the meaning of rightness in just such a subtle way as to make it a little more imperfect – that is, rightness is what we believe it to be. Socrates, in embracing Crito’s answer, endorses this level of subjectivity within rightness; however, he seems also to believe that subjective believing is aligned more towards rightness when reason is used as the means to rightness as opposed to any other means (for instance, social acceptance).

Even Socrates’ way of presenting his reason allows for a deeply personal (dare I say even – aesthetic, artistic) manifestation of thought. Yet it’s no person’s reason who he empathizes with, but the entire Athenian state’s. His entire argument which he presents to Crito is from the supposed, personified point of view of the Athenian government or as he puts it, “the law”, which answers and argues and concedes using Socrates’ own tongue. Though the laws of the state are as objective as they are written down, there is truly an element of empathy in Socrates’ understanding of them – by realizing a point of view outside his own, he superficially abandons the simple confines of the child’s self-loving-interpreted-into-self-preserving ego. Of course, the reasonable man is also a grown child with emotions and desires and needs; however, the truly reasonable man (which Socrates undoubtedly, inspiringly is) is sad only when his actions betray virtue; desires only to be engaged with reason; and needs only to live according to his principles. Those principles he accepts as being in some ways contingent, but he respects the means (a la reason) in which they are derived from their contingencies. Insofar as reason is a subjective faculty of the mind, Socrates admits that the arguments of the Laws, which he has been channeling as his own arguments, comes to him as a voice. He says, “This, dear Crito, is the voice which I seem to hear murmuring in my ears, like the sound of the flute in the ears of the mystic; that voice, I say, is humming in my ears, and prevents me from hearing any other.” In this light, reason is not simply a mathematical abstraction of life, but an aesthetic obsession, an artistic arrest by the least likely, yet perhaps most effective, of artists – Reason!

On the Aesthetic Education of Man
Friedrich Schiller
Twenty-Sixth Letter
1.        Since, as I have argued in the preceding Letters, it is the aesthetic mode
of the psyche which first gives rise to freedom, it is obvious that it cannot itself
derive from freedom and cannot, in consequence, be of moral origin. It must be a
gift of nature; the favour of fortune alone can unloose the fetters of that first
physical stage and lead the savage towards beauty.
2.        The germ of beauty is as little likely to develop where nature in her
niggardliness deprives man of quickening refreshment, as where in her bounty
she relieves him of any exertion—alike where sense is too blunted to feel any
need, as where violence of appetite is denied satisfaction. Not where man hides
himself, a troglodyte, in caves, eternally an isolated unit, never finding humanity
outside himself; nor yet there where, a nomad, he roams in vast hordes over the
face of the earth, eternally but one of a number, never finding humanity within
himself—but only there, where, in his own hut, he discourses silently with himself
and, from the moment he steps out of it, with all the rest of his kind, only there
will the tender blossom of beauty unfold. There, where a limpid atmosphere
opens his senses to every delicate contact, and an energizing warmth animates
the exuberance of matter—there where, even in inanimate nature, the sway of
blind mass has been overthrown, and form triumphant ennobles even the lowest
orders of creation—there, amid the most joyous surroundings, and in that
favoured zone where activity alone leads to enjoyment, and enjoyment alone to
activity, where out of life itself the sanctity of order springs, and out of the law of
order nothing but life can develop—where imagination ever flees actuality yet
never strays from the simplicity of nature—here alone will sense and spirit, the
receptive and the formative power, develop in that happy equilibrium which is the

soul of beauty and the condition of all humanity.
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Much has been made recently of the plot of James Cameron’s box-office smashing, visually immersive sci-fi film, “Avatar”. Many are calling it derivative. You may have heard your sister describing it as a “grown-up ‘Ferngully’” or the Oscar pundit in your local newspaper calling it a “‘Dances With Wolves’ Redux” or your girlfriend (or little cousin or any Disney-adoring loved one in your life) saying it reminded her of “Pocahauntus” or -  for that matter – your pretentious cinephile friend calling it an inferior (dumbed down, beefed up) cousin to Terrence Mallick’s “The New World”. More often than not, these descriptions are coming at you in the form of grounds for pejorative criticism, seemingly warranted by the sentiment that the quality of a cinematic experience is primarily contingent on the magnitude of uniqueness particular to the circumstance depicted in the film.

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I. Origins

Where does taste come from? What does it mean to have a favorite film or painting or piece of music or, to put the question more simply, a favorite color? Indeed, why would a person have a favorite color to begin with? I aim to answer all of these questions in this essay and, supposing I am successful, I would not be surprised if many more questions (and answers) reveal themselves. I will begin with the last, and easiest, question. (more…)