The Importance of Art Part III: Seeing Real Depth

I know I haven’t come back to this series of blogs in a while (a long while) but it is important that I return to these ideas. Art is something that no person who wishes to think deeply (be it politically or spiritually) can long avoid.

One of the often overlooked reasons that art is important is because of the skills it teaches us. It teaches us to think, to examine to look deeper. No, I don’t mean the philosophical skills I brought up in the first part of this series. Yes good art raises philosophical questions of life, ethics, politics and attempts to answer these questions or get us to answer them for ourselves. But I’m talking about something deeper. The peeling away of the layers of meaning one after the other, the stripping away of the surface meaning and even the meaning after that…the analysis of small details, and word choice, and metaphor and symbolism.

This is far too often the truth.

Right about now most of you are rolling yours eyes. You’re thinking back to your high school English class and your English teacher telling you that the cup on the table was supposed to be symbolic of some major political upheaval and you just stared at the page thinking ‘is she on drugs?’ Let me get something out of the way, your reaction was likely not one of ignorance or stupidity…most English teachers are terrible at their jobs. I’m an English teacher and I can tell you without a moment’s hesitation, most English teachers are hacks. They really are. A disturbing portion of English teachers just want to pile onto their students endless heaps of obscure crap and modernist shit that they think is oh so deep…and why do they think it’s deep because they have been taught by other terrible English teachers that anything you can’t understand is deep and meaningful so they parrot what they have been taught and teach crap that amounts to nothing. They believe because they can’t understand it, it must be great. Don’t believe me? Go listen to an English teacher talk about their favorite work. Four times out of five they trying to justify the fact that they don’t get it by saying it’s just so damn wonderful. And because they believe it is great they search for meaning where there is none, and since they believe it is great they create meaning where there is none.

But they have this theory because they misunderstand great art. Art is supposed to be difficult and art is supposed to make you think…but what they misunderstand is that just because you don’t get something on the first round doesn’t make it great…it’s only great if there is something underneath all the work. For instance both T.S. Eliot and Herman Melville do not give up their depth easily…but where Eliot has some rather harsh and pertinent critiques of human civilization buried under obscure references and complex metaphor, Melville only has pompous musing about knowledge buried under whale blubber. The ideas have to be valid if you’re going to bother hiding them under layers. And then these terrible hacks get into the problem of thinking that everything written must have layers upon layers. Yes, Shakespeare is the greatest artist writer ever because he hid a pro-Catholic plea to the Protestant rules of England under universal themes of the human condition under complex character development under rich and exciting plots and great comedy under rich metaphor and language…but just because Shakespeare could master that many levels to be perfectly balanced at all time, that doesn’t mean that it’s in every book or work of art. Sometimes a rosebush is just a rosebush in a story and not a complex symbol for the imprecise use of symbols (and sometimes it is), it depends on the author. Shakespeare and T.S. Eliot have layers…Stephen King not so much. And in between those two extremes is a whole lot of layers of authors who use different amounts of layers—the intelligent person realizes this and doesn’t try to force more layers on something than it deserves.

But back to the central point, good art has layers upon layers, and it does not yield its answers immediately to the first passerby who only give it s a cursory review. Great painting should require hours of study, great music should require multiple listenings, great literature should require you to read it three, four, five times over. Each time finding some new idea, some new detail, some new insight, some new thing to apply to your life or your understanding of the world. Because that is what good art does.

It’s important because it is training for life. I sense eye rolling again, stop it…oh you didn’t know this was going to be a New Agey spiritual blog*…ha ha, I got you in this far now you can’t leave.

This kind of art is important for life because life is not simple. Life does not give up its answers easily—even when they’re staring you in the face. The problems in life for most people come from the fact that they only look at the first level of things. And this is a problem, because the universe and everything in it actually does make sense…but only if you look for that sense.

The universe, God, angels, spirit guides—call it what you will—they’re giving you answers and signs and signals every single day of your life. Images, numbers, people who cross your path, your ears perking to hear one little phrase in the background of Starbucks, your eye catching a headline or a title…you are bombarded with signs every day to try and get you to take a different road of thought. The universe is filled with patterns, themes, and synchronicity that are designed to get you to learn. But if you’re not looking for it, you’re not going to see it.

And this is what good art teaches us. It teaches us how to look for the patterns, how to strip away the layers of superficial differences and see recurrent themes in our interactions with people so that we can learn from them and move onto a new pattern with a new lesson. To look for the symbols that keep suggesting to us that it is time to move on to a new stage in life. To see the signs that now is the time to just swing away at that risk you’ve been debating about. To not take everything at face value and to dig and try over and over again to find the more important meaning.

It is only this way that we get any true value out of life, it is only through seeing the deeper meaning that we learn and progress. That is why art is important, because it trains our mind for the complexity of life.

*Actually you’ll find similar arguments to this in all religions, but most of the Western religions would simply put this skill as being useful in interpreting scripture rather than all of life.