Tapping the Source

Since the 19th century, the cult of artistic genius has been one of our best ways of thinking about why we have come to value the arts, as if the idea of the artist keeps alive for us certain cherished values that we are unwilling or unable to give up. If scientists are supposed to be the most realistic people around, artists are supposed to be, in some way, the most honest. It is perhaps not surprising that in a world in which people want to make sense and money, the myth of the artist thrives. The so-called artist is the person who makes money out of not making sense or is the person who has thought of something even better to make. Their “inspiration” has shown them something else to want.

Stories about inspiration, such as the ones that Edward Hirsch tells in “The Demon and the Angel”--and that, one way or another, are the subject of every self-help book and religious guide--begin to look like a counterculture, though what is being countered is not always clear. It is assumed, obviously, that “artists” are not merely the darlings of bankers and big business, that the arts are the enemies of cliche, that they freshen our perception and that the artist or the appreciator of the arts inside us--rather like “our inner child”--is the best thing about us.

These impressions keep us out of trouble, and the trouble seems to be that without the arts we will become too staid, too glumly moralistic, too relentlessly sensible. The arts, in other words, are rather like what we want sex to be: something so refreshing, so transformational, that we forget about losing heart. The “inspired” artist makes us love life or love hating life, which comes to the same thing.

So when Hirsch tells us, about a third of the way through this enthusiastic book, that it “essays praise for artistic inspiration, for the dark dictations and struggles that get embodied in works of art. It is a hymn to the irrational triumphs of art,” no right-minded person would take issue with him. But this is partly because it is not obvious what one could take issue with, apart, perhaps, from his claims of religion (why is it a hymn?) and triumphalism. But just as using the word “passionate” a lot doesn’t make you a passionate person, using the words “dark” and “irrational” a lot, as Hirsch does, doesn’t make you a hieratic person.

The virtues of this book--ample and fascinating quotations from, among others, Federico Garcia Lorca, Rainer Maria Rilke, William Butler Yeats, Mark Rothko; a sincerity of tone; and an aspiration to inspire--are marred at every turn by a diminishing insistence. And what is being insisted upon is something akin to an ambitious exclamation, in which Hirsch’s rather arch wonder seems to be doing the work of the imagination.

“The Demon and the Angel” is humorless because it so determinedly refuses to argue with itself. Even though “risk” and “danger” are its key words, it is insufficiently mindful of just what is at stake in the (ancient) ardor for mystery. “It’s stunning whenever a work of art braves the risk and welcomes the dangers, when it gives itself over to another power.” Hirsch seems to believe that if you admire something enough, you will become the thing you admire.

It is one thing to regret (and defy) the abstract intellectualism of academic artspeak or to want to write, as Hirsch impressively does, a more open, accessible, democratic account of why certain art matters. But it is quite another to make writing about the arts sound like a form of quasi-religious patriotism. Hirsch is not quite awarding medals for courage and irrationality in this book, but he is doing the next best thing. He is writing, in “The Demon and the Angel,” a Gothic melodrama--sub Harold Bloom--of the artist as exhilarating extremist: “a shocking alternation between the horrific and the transcendental” (as he writes of the German poet Georg Trakl) is what he is so stunned by. The artist is the terrorist who is good for us.

People are driven by pleasure and suffering, by the pleasures of suffering through political and economic necessity to what we tend to call the extremes of experience. But what is not clear--and what makes Hirsch’s book so instructive--is why we (or rather, some of us) are so drawn to these extremes, and why we use art as our preferred safe distance from experiences we would never really want to have.

“The ancient demons are never far from shore,” he writes with gleeful portentousness. “They dwell within the deeps. They move in the ghostly mists. A highly rational art is especially haunting when one feels the struggle in the thought, or even underneath the thought; when one senses something dark welling up from below, from the primordial mud; when one recognizes the powerful internal pressure of a mind defending itself against itself.”

If this is reminiscent of A. Alvarez’s “The Savage God” or R.D. Laing’s “The Divided Self,” it is, by the same token, also a glamorization of suffering. Being tormented is not an adventure, even when something comes of it (like a great work of art). And the risk of this picture of artistic “struggle,” one that is so impressed by risk and struggle, is that it makes certain kinds of suffering seem like a privilege. The prestige of pain is promoted, not its incredible ordinariness. The difficulties of living should be given their appropriate grandeur, but ancient demons, things primordial and dark welling up, are too vague to do the trick. One can be taken by the mystery of life without adding to the available obscurity.

If “searching for the source of artistic inspiration,” the subtitle of Hirsch’s book, is worth doing, it must be because something good will happen to us when and if we find it. But Lorca’s notion of duende (an imp or demon of inspiration) and Rilke’s fictional angel are not exactly sources we can go in search of. As they are, by definition, beyond our control, it would be truer, though more disarming, to say that they go in search of us.

The duende, Hirsch says, “is ancient, reckless and free”; it is “savage and occult, ruthless in its alchemical pursuit of expressiveness in art.” Like the angel who comes (unlike the duende) from what Hirsch calls “above,” rather than below, it is “a mysterious power which everyone senses and no philosopher explains.” The more familiar figure of “the daimon ... the artistic night mind [is] a distant ancestor of Lorca’s duende and Rilke’s angel.” It is the higher and lower powers that Hirsch invokes, that let “the secret, occult self dangerously loose into the world.” And he calls this experience “beyonding.”

But this post-romantic keenness to hand oneself over, to turn oneself in to powers and forces beyond oneself, too easily sounds like an impatient disgust for, or disappointment with, the recognizably human. Religious longings for a super-power become a nostalgic wish to be able to act out of character, to be possessed, rather than to make a few unusual choices (there is no cure for eccentricity). We can all feel tired of being ourselves, of being so relentlessly the people we happen to be. But what Hirsch is promoting with his “secret occult self” too often sounds like a refuge from political engagement.

There are a lot of people who need us to believe that it is better to be inspired than to vote, that a religious sensibility, properly cultivated, can console us for our political failures. Hirsch’s desire for “art stranger than rational logic, deeper than will”--his having, as he says, “fallen in love with a poetry of oracles and prophecies”--does not necessarily open up democratic vistas. Democrats are not magicians.

Instead of hoping against hope that art can and should do the work of religion for us, or that art can be a refuge from rather more brutal economic and political realities, the challenge now is to work out what the big deal is about art. The poems of the earth, as Wallace Stevens said, have not yet been written. Demons and angels are just not earthy enough.

There is a moment in this book--the best moment in this most topical book--when Hirsch begins to have his doubts. When his always gentle language of certainty falters: “It seems certain that we will always need these strange imaginary beings, creatures of light, winged manifestations of divinity. They are fundamentals of the human imagination. But we need to protect them from superficial callings.”

Religiose to the unbitter end, “The Demon and the Angel” is too short on our more mortal longings. Bertolt Brecht and William James are better company than Lorca’s duende and Rilke’s angel.