The Art of the Ideal: An Essay on Dreams, Literature, and Magic

“Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run.” —Steve Prefontaine

“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully or write poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals.” —Donald Trump

“It is easy to be a poet among the gods. But we come after the gods.” —Yves Bonnefoy

“In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.” —Marina Tsvetaeva

“Poetry is the deification of reality.” —Edith Sitwell


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It has become difficult to say what art in fact is. So we tend to remain silent on the matter. Still I will share with you what I think.

For me, the poetic or more general artistic impulse is an acute awareness that intention (spirit) affects life (matter), a sudden sense of responsibility to restore the world to a state of harmony, followed by a need to perform ritual, all of which giving rise to mental representations in need of fresh concrete expression in the world, outside of me. The product is an artwork. Yet it begins from a place which, when we hear about it, has come to feel a bit alien. Thus it is important to recall that artworks in traditional societies are not only “aesthetic,” they are practical as well—often they serve to petition gods for help in practical and worldly affairs.

Things of course are not entirely different in a society like ours, where in the broadest, best sense the artist remains a practical worker. Not complacent to think in terms of what was or is, or how things merely appear, the artist acts and thinks according to what could, should, or ought to be, or even truly is, despite appearances, in a language of sensuous forms.

This amounts to what Ernst Cassirer calls the intensification of reality, which we must understand as distinct from the abbreviation of reality: science’s function. What art and science share is the aim of better grasping the world and sometimes of improving it, for even to posit “what is” (critique) prepares the way for imagining what could, or should, be (improvement), just as it implicitly states: “All of us would be better off if we were aware, or more aware, of this concealed reality—and shouldn't we live in a world wherein people are better attuned to it?” Each at its best, moreover, is the product of deep contemplation and questioning.

When we say a certain work of fiction or poetry is philosophical, what we mean is not altogether clear. We could mean that this work didactically—that is, explicitly—delivers philosophical conclusions through the mouths of characters in an effort to promote a philosophical program. Yet it might mean, too, that the work manages, implicitly, to bring into focus certain philosophical questions, but without providing definite answers—the difference being that the first provides answers, the second provokes questions. The latter does the work of art, however, since it intensifies reality through sensuous means. When art is philosophical it asks questions without technically asking them; it does so by representing conflicts and tension—by showing them, enacting them. If it seems to answer its own question, it does so such that it would be acquitted of the charge if seriously questioned.

Since art’s means are necessarily sensuous, affect plays a significant role. The mere representation of a character’s envy or jealousy can have far-reaching implications. Envy is wanting or feeling entitled to what another has, regardless of deservingness. Jealousy is indignation rooted in concerns about fairness and justice, specifically how one is treated in relation to others. Envy is an amoral, self-centered, childish emotion, while jealousy has an important ethical dimension. If we follow the logic to its end, envy envisions a world where individuals prioritize themselves at the expense of others, while jealousy strives for a fair and equitable society where everyone is treated equally. It is why we readily understand that the envy-ruled Iago is bad, and Othello is not, at least intrinsically. The tragedy lies in our sense that Othello has a basic sense of justice, which makes him a fit leader. Yet it is his sense of justice (manifesting as excessive jealousy) which ultimately leads him to murder. Through a process of intensification, then, by sensuous means, the play hints that the inclination towards cruel punishments in exceptionally moral people is the dark side of justice. Othello’s personal tragedy may even prompt us to reflect on the difficulty of attaining a thoroughly just society, or point to the large-scale horrors which have been carried out in the name of “the good.”

Where science dilutes reality, making it more extensive and abstract such as to enable us to better perceive what is truly the case despite what appearances may suggest, meaningful art isolates particular facets of life, intensifying them in order to lay bare a hidden “truth,” and very often to restore an all too familiar object to its previous, unfamiliar aspect—itself an act of unconcealing. For instance, stand-up comedy’s special role of suddenly elucidating what we all feel.

According to Viktor Shklovsky, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.” To do so has the effect of slowing down our automatic perceptions, turning up the volume, as it were, on particular perceptions and aspects of experience, turning down the volume meanwhile on others. A meaningful selection of elements in a composition can potentially lead to a more intense perception of its subject. This is another way of referring to the purposeful arrangement and structuring of sensuous forms.

Philosophy and art, like science, attempt through intense contemplation to comprehend what truly is, except science does so from the perspective of a neutral God, which is to say, from the perspective of “nowhere,” beyond what the senses are able to inform. Moreover it uses the types of extrapolation employed in thought experiments, or in such speculative forms as science fiction and fantasy. A great deal of philosophy is concerned with what “ought to be”; religion as well. Because art is concerned necessarily with the ideal, it makes itself readily available to religion, which not only makes use of mythic stories but has a stake in one particular ideal—that is to say, paradise.

We treat technological innovators or inventors as artists if they seem to be possessed of what we might refer to as a visionary temperament, even though their work does not deal in sensuous forms. That they can credibly be called or likened to “artists” owes mainly to their explicit commitment to bringing about a world superior to the current one, suggesting an investment in what ought to or could be.

And just as the desire to innovate has inherently the potential to usher in a worse world, or dystopia, so the artist may choose to present a dystopian portrait of life, perhaps so as to make audiences more attuned to what lies, so to speak, under the surface of things, or awaken the imagination to alternative courses of action which would hopefully lead to a better future.

José Vasconcelos writes, “A noble book is always the fruit of disillusionment and a sign of protest. . . Every book says, expressly or between the lines: nothing is as it ought to be.” For Vasconcelos, the artist reproves the world, an act which at the very least implies the need for something better, something beyond; that is, assuming that the author has not actively instituted the change.

Where science is practiced according to a value-free ideal—and where modern warfare, dependent as it is on technological innovation, leading us increasingly to view survival as an end in itself—the artist rebukes the world, making us remember what real value looks like, what sort of life may be worth living, worth fighting for and cultivating. Having rejected the deterministic, materialist outlook, an artist acts according to the principle of freedom—the freedom to choose one’s present and future, meanwhile putting the ideal ahead of mere practical considerations, what “ought to be” ahead of “what is,” melody ahead of discord, and resemblance ahead of mutual antagonism.

Art is for resolving the tragicomic contradictions we are born into. One cannot know, for instance, what one actually looks like, how one appears to others, yet each of us is the only being in the world with privileged access to her thoughts and feelings. A corollary of this is that she is unable to share with others a dream she dreamt except by using language to tell the dream. While one may surely use ordinary speech to describe a thousand and one things in the world, poetic speech alone is capable of imparting and making meaningful the experience of last night’s dream for others.

To conjecture perhaps too far, it is not wholly impossible that dreams were the internal motivation for the poetic faculties being put to use in the first place, tens of thousands of years ago (unusual natural events being, I suppose, the external inspiration), thus giving to poetic speech a highly necessary, crucial function, which would have ensured its central place in sacred ritual.

A. W. Howitt provides the following testimony from his research in Australia: “In the Tribes with which I have acquaintance, I find it to be a common belief that the songs, using that word in its widest meaning, as including all kinds of aboriginal poetry, are obtained by the bards from the spirits of the deceased, usually of their kindred, during sleep, in dreams." Frances Densmore reports to us also, “Many Indian songs are intended to exert a strong mental influence, and dream songs are supposed to have this power in greater degree than any others."

Since many today regard the notion of dreams as messages from another world with some considerable skepticism, it is not surprising that the status of poetry has fallen with it. Well used poetic language, however, has the special ability to concisely render, for a waking audience, not just the content of a dream, but its general mood, its images, and its strange logic. Beyond merely communicating (or abbreviating) its broad outline and events, poetic language allows for the expression of the dream to others, which in turn makes possible transcending one’s prison-like subjectivity.

Poetry gives to dreams, and other highly subjective or chaotic phenomena, a type of objective validity, as it speaks in the dream’s native tongue—a tongue simultaneously symbolic, sacred, and metaphorical.

Carl Jung tells us that dream images, or symbols, differ fundamentally from ordinary signs and words, and also have a unique importance in various cultures:

“There are… such objects as the wheel and the cross that are known all over the world, yet that have a symbolic significance under certain conditions. Precisely what they symbolize is still a matter for controversial speculation. Thus a word or an image is symbolic when it implies something more than its obvious and immediate meaning. It has a wider “unconscious” aspect that is never precisely defined or fully explained. Nor can one hope to define or explain it. As the mind explores the symbol, it is led to ideas that lie beyond the grasp of reason. . . Man also produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously, in the form of dreams."

As dreams and poetic texts are laden with symbols—which together form a large network of unstable relations—what one oftentimes remembers best of a poem or a dream turns out to be its fantastic, uncanny, seemingly ineffable atmosphere. Symbols are characterized by polysemy, tonal ambivalence, equivocality—thus they tantalize, defying description as well as one’s ability to interpret them.

If Joseph Campbell’s formulation that “myth is a public dream and a dream is a private myth” is true, then poetry has only dreams to sustain it, for myth has since the advent of modernity suffered a demotion; it has been relegated to the background of life (except of course when it comes to entertainment for children and its formulaic, crude sublimation in advertising and politics).

Luckily there exist no means yet, which we know of, by which sleep might be abolished or made profitable, even if some entities would like very much to achieve this, since it would increase humanity’s consumptive and productive powers by some fifty percent. As Jonathan Crary explains,

“Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism. Most of the seemingly irreducible necessities of human life—hunger, thirst, sexual desire, and recently the need for friendship—have been remade into commodified or financialized forms. Sleep poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability, and thus remains an incongruous anomaly and site of crisis in the global present. In spite of all the scientific research in this area, it frustrates and confounds any strategies to exploit or reshape it. The stunning, inconceivable reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it.”

This is good, as I see it, because so long as we are able to keep sleeping—which of course is the precondition for dreaming—language will retain its connection to myth; the private reserves we draw from in order to imagine and express different, more fulfilling realities will never dry up, and poetry will remain possible. In turn this makes change possible. According to E. L. Doctorow,

If our response to what is going on today were appropriate, it would probably produce books of a grubbier, sloppier, and more energetic sort than we are doing. Books with less polish and self-consciousness, but about the way power works in our society, who has it, and how it is making history. In order to begin to rebuild our sense of ourselves, we may have to go back to childhood, to the past, and down into our dreams, and start again.

Thomas Merton finishes the thought for Doctorow:

“All really valid poetry (poetry that is fully alive and asserts its reality by its power to generate imaginative life) is a kind of recovery of paradise. . . the living line and the generative association, the new sound, the music, the structure, are somehow grounded in a renewal of vision and hearing so that he who reads and understands recognizes that here is a new start, a new creation. Here the world gets another chance.”

Much of what we call art attempts the seemingly alchemical transformation of strife into love—chaos into harmony, pain into pleasure—by means which are at once sensuous, formal, and structural. Whether the transformation is merited and sincere, or lazy and superficial, will much of the time determine a work’s social value, its usefulness and life span.

The undesirable entity (i.e. life as it currently is and has been), though changed in a certain way, should not be negated, but re-presented in a different, objective, more neutral light, and tend to elicit fascination and awe rather than fear and disgust. An artist must face up to what is undesirable and find ways of making it feasible for those who have encountered her work, to encounter the entity or situation depicted in the work differently, more perceptively or, in a manner of speaking, from the vantage point of a god. Works of art fascinate and in so doing they invite a special kind of contemplation, empowering us to penetrate into life’s very core, while allowing us to survey it from on high. Gabriel Zaid writes,

“Great works focus our minds, speak to the best in us, and spark our imagination. We feel more alive, more engaged in meaningful conversation with life. Reality makes more sense. We make more sense. It’s as if we’ve experienced a miracle, as if we’ve been granted access to eternity. It’s only natural to spread the word, to share the experience, to bring that higher level of living to ordinary life."

But unlike science (I am about to use an analogy Merton would not like) which is monotheistic and strives to re-present life—by abbreviating reality—from the perspective of the one and only God, art is metaphorically polytheistic: which is to say, again but a bit differently, a successful work intensifies reality, re-presenting it from a single god’s perspective, as the truth of one god among many, not as the Truth.

What is missing from art practice now, not to say from philosophy (which has necessarily been the case ever since philosophy’s and, after it, modern science’s establishment), is a genuine investment in magical ritual. In this way, art has most fundamentally been influenced by philosophy and science. Mythical thought is based in a logic of sympathies rather than conceptual difference, and this logic once accompanied and underlay art’s function of presenting and re-presenting intensified reality for the purpose of contemplation.

It was at first philosophy, followed by science (indeed rational systematic treatment of culture precedes the rational systematic treatment of nature) which supplanted—rather than supplemented—mythical thought. Consequently, our ability to so much as consider using sympathetic magic to affect the world was drastically undermined. It had become nearly unthinkable, and remains so. Now we feel as though we can never go back to the unreason of magic. But in its intention, in seeking to alter the world, poetry and magic (and what we call art in general) once resembled science and politics, both of which are regarded as dynamic and change-oriented activities rather than leisurely pastimes.

Lyric poetry keeps intact, by formal convention and perhaps a foolish temperament, our unconscious connection to magic, and the possibility of restoring myth and dream to common, public life. Our embrace of science and technology in its place meanwhile compensates for this loss of faith, our disappointment in magic’s falseness. It is precisely a faith in magic, however, which gives us courage to go beyond ourselves. Yet, as the ethnographer Michael Jackson suggests, the basic impetus remains the same, even if the confidence of the sorcerer has left the artist (and audience):

the passion and paradox of writing lies in its attempt to to achieve the impossible—a leap of faith that bears comparison with the mystic’s dark night of the soul, unrequited love, nostalgic or utopian longing, or an ethnographer’s attempt to know the world from the standpoint of others, to put himself or herself in their place. (The Other Shore 3)

One of lyric’s hidden functions is that it keeps open the possibility of using the language of sympathy, of again (or at last) using words which perfectly correspond to what they mean, of finding an intuitive language which feels right, and can be shared between all people without misunderstanding… T. E. Lawrence seems to be contrasting the conventional person with the poet when he writes, “All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds, wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act on their dreams with open eyes, to make them possible.”

The poet is not just one with a unique, defamiliarizing point of view, but who has an expansive, desirous, and naively hopeful disposition, one who implicitly expresses, through imagination and the artful use of speech, a desire to go beyond the known, in pursuit of a place where there is more meaning, a place at once possible and impossible. As Christopher Caudwell has it,

“The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose, without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality—a world of more important reality not yet realised, whose realisation demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Here is room for every error, for the poem proposes something whose very reason for poetical treatment is that we cannot touch, smell or taste it yet. But only by means of this illusion can be brought into being a reality which would not otherwise exist.”

For Caudwell, then, it would seem, to bring into being what should be, the poem produces nostalgia for what does not yet exist.







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