Aesthetic Distance

This country has a problem with maintaining aesthetic distance.  Let me explain.  I'm a literaturist.  That is another way of saying I am a retired English teacher.  As an English teacher, I tried to teach my students that in order to evaluate and write about literature (Art) they must first manage to distance themselves from the work.  They must allow themselves to be arrested by the work.  That's what Beauty does; that's what Truth does.  They make the viewers of Art step back and look at the work as it is frozen in time and space.

One must shed all preconceptions, all history, all expectations in order to fully appreciate the work in question.  Without the aesthetic distance, the meaning of the work is informed by the viewer instead of the work itself.  You see examples of this all the time.  There was a woman at Jenny Lake once who was appalled to find me reading Cormac McCarthy's THE CROSSING because it was cruel to wolves and she happened to love wolves.  I've had a few female students and female friends who could not deal with CATCH-22 because Yossarian treated women like objects.  Some folks complain about HUCK FINN because it peppers its pages with the N word.

I can't abide the reader who has to stop half way through a book because it makes him uncomfortable.  You know, the attitude that says "I can't read OLD YELLER because I once had a dog who died."  "I can't watch SCHINDLER'S LIST because I lost my grandmother in The Holocaust."  "I can't watch MY COUSIN VINNIE because my cousin used to drive a Cadillac just like that before he got hit by a train."  "I can't watch SISTER ACT because the nuns at my  Catholic school were mean to me."

Sometimes we should look at moments of Beauty, Truth, and Clarity as exactly what they are: isolated moments that make us sit up and take notice, that make us say "Wow!  I wish I had created that."

Look at MADAME BOVARY for example.  There is that horrible scene where Emma's bumbling husband Charles is talked into making Homais' club foot all better.  The snapping of Homais' Achilles  Tendon is one of the most powerful scenes I've ever read.  I cringe.  I get angry.  I feel sorry for Homais.  I feel sorry for Charles.  I know this is not going to end well.  I feel all those things because that is exactly what Flaubert wants me to feel.  But mostly I feel elation.  Elation that a member of my species could create something that moving.  That is what I mean by aesthetic distance.  It was the way I felt when I saw my first opera (MIDSUMMER NIGHT DREAM - Benjamin Britton).  I didn't get offended because I used to dream about strange stuff.  I just got transfixed, arrested.

Maintaining aesthetic distance is also important in negotiating daily life, especially given the tribalism that characterizes so much of what we do lately.  For instance, we all learned the other day that Trump didn't go to Arlington on Memorial Day.  The reactions on social media and main stream media were immediate and completely informed by partisan rancor, revenge, vindication, and the entire history of presidential behavior.  "Obama went every year!"  "So what if it was raining, here is a picture of Kennedy standing in the rain."  "Our soldiers don't get to stay home if it is raining."  "Just another example of Trump thinking only of himself."  Etc.

Wouldn't it be better if we just treated that action, or inaction, like what it was, an isolated moment that really doesn't mean much?  Maybe he had a good reason.  Why should we care?

And the real problem with this dearth of aesthetic distancing is that humor depends on it.  If I watch a Three Stooges movie and end up worrying through the whole thing that Moe is being unfair to Curly, that Curly must really feel pain when Moe keeps slapping him, that one of them could get seriously hurt and put an eye out, I'm probably going to miss the humor of the whole thing.  It follows that if I look at the world through the filter of my causes, my certainties, my outrages, my VICTIMHOOD, I'm going to miss a nuance or two.

Remember the NEW YORKER cover when Obama first won the presidency?  Barack and Michelle, dressed in Muslim garb, are laughing and fist bumping each other.  I was up at Jenny when the magazine first came out and Michael, the assistant manager, came breathlessly up to me to show me the outrageous image.  My daughter, Obama's trip director, was similarly outraged.  But that's because they were not able to maintain an aesthetic distance from the issue.  I had not made the same investment into Obama that my daughter had and I was able to see it for the rather brilliant piece of satire it was.

I'm afraid that seeing things for the brilliant satire they present is no longer a wise move in today's America.  As a recipient of White Male Privilege, my opinions about a wealth of things no longer matter.  I can weigh in on #MeToo only at great risk.  Since I am not a woman, since I haven't been systematically put down and made to feel inferior, I have no right to an opinion.  It is just like the white artist who created a powerful image of Emmit Till until the museum was forced to take it down.  White artists have no right to comment on the travails of black people.

I truly believe it is possible to "walk a mile in another person's moccasins" through the pages of a book, through a lifetime of learning to be empathetic.  I almost think it is more possible.  Sometimes baggage just gets in the way.