On Art as a Spiritual Practice
Or religious experience, if that religion worships at the church of art.
When I was a young lad, I used to write very ostentatious missives to myself about art. I suppose I still write them, but nowadays I’m less sure about anything I say with certainty. One thing that has held true, though, is that art is my only spiritual practice. I perform it with some ritual, after all, sitting at my table with an array of my specific and favorite tools (though, I’m sure you’d all agree, I could stand to do it with some more regularity and discipline). And the conjuration that occurs is what allows me to take a long, deep look into myself, and through myself into the universe.
What follows are several entries I’ve written over the years, centered around this idea of art as religion or spirituality. To bridge the gap of time, which has been fortunate enough to see me as many multiple people, I’ve included a bunch of footnotes that explain my current and changed thoughts about things — my attempt at telling my foolish, wild-eyed, upstart youth to sit down and shut up a little bit. I have to apologize in advance for past Jonah’s sweeping and excessive language — not that I have cured myself of the impulse to write like an old Victorian man, clearly — but it is a bit, in our current vernacular, cringe.
December 18, 2018
Today I was in the shower thinking about art (typical!) and about how people’s reluctance to watch arthouse films comes entirely from a lack of fluency in the language of film (also typical!). Led me to think about how I would, if I had a ready volunteer at my disposal, run an experiment to see if my hypothesis rings true, start them on a steady diet, ease them in with stuff like Citizen Kane1 and McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Kurosawa and Stalker, then we work up to the gnarlier stuff like Godard, Cries and Whispers, The Turin Horse, the rest of Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. I would say nothing to introduce each film so that the viewer could judge the film purely on its own terms, then after the film we would have a short discussion, I would introduce any necessary historical, social, and personal context about the filmmaker’s life, and the viewer would be free to say if they liked or disliked it, but they could not get away with an easy answer and would have to elaborate on exactly why. There would be no “right” or “wrong” opinions, instead a safe space for (non-bigoted) points of view would be made (as art education should be conducted!). I would want to conduct entry and exit interviews with my willing volunteer to judge if this kind of “exposure therapy”2 indeed increased their enjoyment of such films, and whether or not their ability to engage with such films was strengthened over time. Because the common complaint of “I don’t like arthouse films because I don’t understand them” is maddening — arthouse films do not care for understanding because they are predicated on the exploration of the unknown, of the uncertain, of complex emotions that cannot be expressed simply and clearly and must be navigated through some foggy moonlit trench. And to think that arthouse films are unnecessary or simply indulgences of the pretentious operates under blind folly — oh, friend, you have no idea how necessary they are.
I have this theory (and here I reveal my Nietzschean biases again) that religion had once served its purpose not only as strictures for morality but also as a way for people to cope with arbitrary cruelty in a way that would not make them suicidal or despairing (see: the Christian “God gave me these trials for a reason” thought experiment). It was also a way for them to experience awe (the True, soul-shifting kind of awe that I wrote about once) and exaltation, the raising of one’s soul into something higher than the terrestrial. Now, in an increasingly secular world, we have no such outlets for that except for art. (See also: why so much of the great art in the world has been historically tied to religion.) The feeling of awe and exaltation — though most would think is disposable, is not — aids one in being, paradoxically, grounded in their existence, to feel oneness with the world and to not pit one’s pains against the pains of another. The best art can do this, it is what we feel when we say we were “moved beyond words.” And, things like poetry, difficult literature, abstract art, and yes, arthouse films — these are important because they force their reader/viewer to engage with the fearsome unknown and uncertainties of life. (Think of how many could be better people if they knew how to deal in such fears.) They can express things beyond what we feel capable of expressing, they can unearth the ineffable feeling, they can touch the deepest parts of us that remain unrevealed to anyone else — art creates religious experiences in a secular world. My friend, this is necessary beyond belief. I have a vision where art saves us all and turns blackened earth to paradise3. (But then again, this is what prophets thought of God, isn’t it?)
I'm getting a little out of hand here, but I believe in a religious experience, even if its origin isn’t religious. I only use this term because there are no other words available. It is a difficult feeling when most see artistic mediums as avenues of escapism and barely think to investigate further layers, meanings, purposes, etc. That most people only see the surface value of something and fail to arrive upon the celestial.
To use the parlance of youth:
normal brain — using art as escapism
expanding brain — using art as a means of political/social critique
galaxy brain — using art as a pseudoreligious experience in a secular society in order to healthily cope with the often merciless and arbitrary vicissitudes of life, with the unending, cruel, and oftentimes unbearable pain of human existence
I wish more art education a) taught literacy of a medium4 and b) created an environment for true differing opinion and discourse (fuck white lit teachers!). Having a teacher/professor that openly expresses pure and wide-eyed passion for the subject also helps.
January 4, 2019
Sometime in the shower maybe about a week ago, I thought again about art and religion (as I am wont to do) and was going to write it down and forgot to, and then forgot much of the content. But I’ll try my best to recreate it, regardless of how scattered and winding this end product musing will eventually become. So I’ve replaced God with Art (with a capital A!)5 in my mind, and maybe by Art I don’t even mean art but the feeling behind it. I don’t believe in a higher power, per se, but I do believe in something cosmic. It feels like a pure, neutral energy that emanates from the universe and crosses through every thing and each and everyone of us, and sometimes when I really concentrate, I can reach out and commune with that energy. And when I create, while I use the faculties and functions of my material and mortal brain, I am communing with that universal energy, that cosmos that feeds all mankind. And when I say this I do not mean this literally, but that it is a useful framework in which my emotions and process are contained. In life, even, the way I live day-to-day life, I am not satisfied by simply the things we can see. Social media, career, “experiences,” milestones, these things are meaningless to me. Sometimes we think that travel allows us to achieve the “higher meaning” that I am talking about, but I feel that, too, is a diversion. There must be something closer to home, inside me. And higher meaning — I don’t even know how to describe this, because I do not mean a life’s purpose, but it lies somewhere above material reach, slightly outside of ordinary life. And here I am trying to reach it even though I know it’s unattainable. And sometimes I feel like I can catch a glimpse of that higher something. Even though it is impossible to describe in mere words. But I write, I make art, to both bring myself closer to it and also to try and capture its definition.
November 1, 2021
“How about journalism?” someone always inevitably suggests when I say that I am a writer and that freelancing is a struggle, as if journalism wasn’t also being throttled of all its available livable income. Someone always says this and requests it as a salve — we need more Asian American journalists, we need more journalists who care. But I am no journalist, I possess no skills of a journalist, I would be terrible at conducting interviews or keeping my sources straight, I am investigative but only in matters of the human soul, which is not so much reportage as conjecture, and I only tell all the truth slant6. People who are not writers will tell you this because they have no conception of skillsets, but people who are not writers will also tell you this because they are telling you exactly what it is they value — which all non-artists do — material and transactional information. They want facts and I do not blame them for it — but journalism7 is perceived to be the practical elder sibling of creative writing, the reputable version, the one that parents can brag about at dinner. No love for the poet or fiction writer, whose work lacks any value to the cruel, quid pro quo world except as movie deals or pithy quotes on Instagram graphics.
The value of art is something I’ve been thinking about for the past year. How can art even be for the betterment or education of human society, Tarkovsky asks, when human society has not eradicated its horrors in 5,000 years8? Art has very little value, except when traded by the wealthy as Pokémon cards. Have you got a Van Gogh? one will ask. No — but I’ve got an NFT of a bearded monkey skateboarding and wearing sunglasses.
But this is the trouble with the word “value” — or, at least the way the non-artists parse it. Art is the only religious and spiritual practice that I have (every time I sit down to write or draw or edit films I am in fact communing with the higher power of the universe) so I’ll say it like this — art is a benediction for the soul. Art moves through us so that we can live. Its effect on us is totally intangible and incalculable. Art makes it easier to live — but how? It does not feed us, so we starve; it does not house us, so we freeze; it even to some extent troubles us. Yet we cannot live without it. The non-artist sees art’s intangibility and dismisses it as nothing, non-existent; the artist knows that just because one cannot see it, does not mean it isn’t paramount to our continued existence.
I have come to learn in the years since that in fact many a cinematic layperson has seen Citizen Kane and hates it with a burning passion. What can I say — I love an extended character study on a flawed, unlikeable man. I also have no idea why I thought that Stalker, of all films, would be an easy and digestible film in this regard.
If you are balking at this whole thought experiment, just know that I now also think this is a ridiculous idea.
And frankly, it’s hilarious to me how passionate I once was about this idea, because I have really fallen off the “cinephile” circuit — according to Letterboxd, I have only watched 6 films so far this year.
As I state in the 2021 entry, this reads as terribly naïve to me now. I’m not so certain that art has the power to “change the world,” like some suggest. It can influence, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, but to provoke total revolution and permanent change? Doubtful. (I explain my pessimism on this subject in an essay that reflects Andrei Tarkovsky’s own pessimism, found here.) Moreover, I’m finding less and less utility in assigning art a “purpose.” A “job,” so to speak. This, to me, feels like a capitalistic impulse. If art has no purpose, no endpoint in mind, it does not make it any less meaningful. And art, at least for me, is full of meaning. As the years go by, I see it clearer and in plainer view: art simply makes me feel less alone and less insane while living through the “oftentimes unbearable pain of human existence.”
Though, despite embarrassing past bluster, I seem to have accidentally repeated Tarkovsky, this time unintentionally. In the same essay linked in the previous paragraph, I share a quote of Tarkovsky’s, where he claims that “the aim of art is to prepare a person for death.” With so many of Tarkovsky’s films explicitly dealing in religion and spiritual experiences, I like to think we are reaching in the same direction here.
What I mean by this is “how to read a piece of work.” The way you would teach composition and color theory in painting, perhaps — the why’s of an artist’s choices, and how the individual elements composite into a whole.
Ugh. Just ugh. This whole entry is cringey, but I include this one because I reference it in the next entry (which is only slightly less cringey). If you can believe it, this line pre-dates my Dickinson phase.
Evidence of my Dickinson phase.
To be clear here, I am not dunking on journalism — I have the utmost respect for the craft and trade. I am instead dunking on people’s value perception of journalism and creative writing. (Though perhaps I was being generous even in this regard — I know that the AI bots are attempting to run roughshod all over journalism as well.)
This is again me referencing the pessimistic Tarkovsky-inspired essay linked in footnote 3.