The Role of Aesthetics

If you search for the tag "aesthetics" you will come up with many, many posts on this blog--hundreds at least. There are two reasons for this, first, that I tend to slap on the "aesthetics" tag when I can't think what else it could be or if the post is uncategorizable, second because of the crucial role aesthetics has played in my life and the one that I believe it does, or should play, in social life in general. One of the few places one hears this addressed is in a couple of times that Jordan Peterson has mentioned it in talks and clips on YouTube. Here is an example:

One interesting thing is that Jordan Peterson was born very close to where I was born in northern Alberta, Canada--twenty or thirty miles apart, which up there is like being next door neighbors.

The role of aesthetics in my life is so important that I think of it as what I fled to, trying to escape the stifling environment I was born into. I say stifling because, even though it was wide open nature, to someone with an intellectual bent, it was like being in one of those tanks where you float without sensation--no sounds, no light. One place we lived when I was young, was so far north it was taiga with permafrost, meaning that you could dig down in the ground at the end of August and, about ten or twelve feet down, the ground would still be frozen. The summer wasn't long enough for more than just the surface to thaw out. This was when I was five or six years old and, honestly, the only thing I could find to play with was moss.

The landscape was basically small, stunted trees and moss: frozen in the winter and soggy in the brief summer. You might say, gee, go to the store and buy a toy. Ah, no stores, not within a two or three hour drive at least. Well, wait, there was a Hudson's Bay trading post where if you took in some mink or beaver skins they would trade you flour and sugar. Yes, it must have been one of the last. There was a Department of Defence radar base in the neighborhood, and a tribe of Indigenous People, but that, literally, was it. My father ran a small rail terminal that served the DOD base.

You have to recall that this was before the internet. Indeed, in this place, not only was there no internet, there was also no television, no radio, no newspapers, no bookstores (no stores of any kind). The only place I have ever been that was more desolate was northern Vancouver Island when I worked as a tree-planter and while in one place there was not even a building, there was always the beauty of nature.

The first time I was in a place that had a library big enough to have books with aesthetic content I fell in love with Japanese art, specifically ukiyo-e:

Some of these, and some Chinese landscapes, looked a great deal like the landscapes of northern Vancouver Island.

To me, this art and music when I discovered it, offered what seemed to be the only door out of a drear and narrow life. I think this is the role of art: to beckon, to widen, to draw us out of the narrowness of our lives.

But in some ways, I regard my early life as being of immense benefit because it was free of the false appeal of the Internet, social, and mass media of today. It is hard to imagine what it is like for a child now. Instead of just some moss to play with, he has an iPad, with access to literally everything in the world. But 99% of what he sees is cacophonous drivel. Instead of silence and distance, the experience is of a million hucksters and a million diversions that may very well mean almost nothing. That's enough to make you long for a little moss! (By the way, after collecting different varieties of moss, I would take them home and install them into a large glass bowl, creating a little terrarium.)

But back to art: the benefits of real art in anyone's life are enormous. Even if you have little sensitivity to art you can still derive tranquillity and perhaps a bit of perspective from it. With more acquaintance it can give you access to a thousand worlds, a million points of view. But remember, real art always has a price of admission: you have to learn the context, the methods, the history, before you can understand and appreciate most artworks.

Well, enough preaching for today. Let's listen to some music by Toru Takemitsu, Folios, for guitar (that I played at Wigmore Hall in London at my debut concert there). It ends with a quotation from a chorale from Bach's St. Matthew Passion.