Art as Repose
Why We Should Accept Passivity Within Our Art
Ezra Pound once made a distinction between two particular types of literature:
‘A Books a man reads to develop his capacities: in order to know more and perceive more, and more quickly, than he did before he read them.
and
B Books that are intended and that serve as REPOSE, dope, opiates, mental beds.’
These distinct types were kept separate by the assertion that ‘You don’t sleep on a hammer or lawn-mower, you don’t drive nails with a mattress.’ Whether this statement is infallible is not of particular importance; of more interest are the times in which it is absolutely true, and of particular interest are the texts which serve as the mental beds of our time; places in which we, the contemporary public, can see things in soft-focus, gain some delicate composure, then push our false teeth back into our mouths and return that coarsest of roughages: knowledge.
The Empathy of Repose
A text which fulfills this particular function is an early song by one Donovan, an English folk/psychedelic musician, titled: To Sing For You. The lyrics of the song are fairly straight-forward and can be surmised well enough through appraising the first verse and chorus:
‘When you're feeling kind of lonesome in your mind
With a heartache following you so close behind
Call out to me as I ramble by
I'll sing a song for you
That’s what I'm here to do
To sing for you’
Granted, this is not literature. However, it has a certain lyrical quality and that will do just fine. This piece falls into the B category very easily by virtue of Donovan making the implicit statement that his singing ‘a song for you’ will relieve, at least somewhat, the listeners ‘heartache’ and ‘lonesome’ mind. What keeps it there however is the rhythm and timbre of his singing, which is much the same as can be found in a nursery rhyme. The last line of the chorus, for example, is broken into half, placing emphasis on the keywords – ‘To sing/For you’ – which tends to lull the mind into a sleepy reverie, leading the listener to believe, yes, that his song will somehow solve all their heartache.
This song in particular is of interest to this exercise because it sets up a precedent for category B as a whole; what are these works meant to do for us, except sing? what else can we expect from them, except a song? and isn’t this their unique worth?
The Suggestibility of Repose
A second text from this category is the film Gerry [2002], directed by Gus Van Sant. Here is another deviance from the delicate genre of ‘literature’, but there is no denying the worth of this piece in relation to the concept of Art as Repose; the extended pan shots of the bleak desert, of rolling clouds, of endless walking. These images are at times disquieting, yet in way subtle enough, distant enough, not to disrupt a state of repose.
The audience can be moved, as they would perhaps be moved by some vivid dream. They can, too, apply analysis to the notion of two young men of the information age lost in a desert, to their inability to express themselves verbally, to the almost inconsequential tragedy of its conclusion. It is, somehow, easy to do neither. The film does not pander to a readily digestible attitude or conclusion, but merely suggests. This passivity may be off-putting to an audience unused to or discomforted by such a relationship to art.
However, such a response deserves to be analyzed. Through the expectations we, the art appreciating public, tend to place on texts like these, we fail to appreciate their consolatory nature or their malleability, searching as many of us are for some clarified educational fodder for our engines. And it is this, perhaps, which motivated Pound to make the distinction. As he writes later, ‘Why should people go on applying the SAME critical standards to writings as different in purpose and effect as a lawn-mower and a sofa cushion?’, and indeed, why should we to any art?
Repose
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