Kay Ryan, "Venice"

Hi all --

I'm studying Heidegger's "The Origin of the Work of Art" because 1) active reading is good 2) I have an idea for a future paper on Heidegger and art 3) A question: what does it mean to experience art? On that last point, there's a rich passage about respecting the "thingly character" of artworks close to the beginning of the lecture:

Works of art are familiar to everyone. Architectural and sculptural works can be seen installed in public places, in churches, and in dwellings. Artworks of the most diverse periods and peoples are housed in collections and exhibitions. If we consider the words in their untouched actuality and do not deceive ourselves, the result is that the works are as naturally present as are things. The picture hangs on the wall like a rifle or a hat. A painting, e.g. the one by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes, travels from one exhibition to another. Works of art are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest. During the First World War Hölderlin's hymns were packed in the soldier's knapsack together with cleaning gear. Beethoven's quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar. (1)

Heidegger starts innocently with "works of art are familiar to everyone," then launches into how art is everywhere, interacted with all the time. It is the buildings around you; it is literal history; it hangs on the wall; you could even say it travels, moreso than some people. It does get shipped like the materials of industry, it does find its way onto the battlefield, and it can serve as nutrition for people, not just for culture. The "thingly character" of artworks is a powerful defense of art against bureaucrats who only want measurable outcomes to pressure your budget. Or a certain sort of fanatic refusing to acknowledge anyone else could make anything worth engaging. Or the engineering/organization mindset Vonnegut lampoons in Player Piano: what won the war is useful, nothing else is, so let's destroy society by reducing it to a response for an emergency that isn't happening.

There is a certain darkness to this passage. The hymns in the knapsack of the soldier aren't an image to romanticize. The resentment of the First World War, the frustrated nationalist drive for glory, turned into the bloodbath of the Second. The "thingly character" of art easily turns, for Heidegger, into a famous comment on Van Gogh's Shoes widely considered fascist propaganda.

One of the things I want to do while studying this text is learn more about art. Sure, there are questions to pursue about aesthetics and nationalism, but being able to talk well about an individual work of art is an incredible skill.

Before we talk about poetry, I had better recommend watching the Panic World interview with Ben Collins

The crew at Garbage Day had Ben Collins on to talk about The Onion and Infowars. It is worth every minute of your time. I think some of us resist thinking about the history of the Internet and social media, and while I understand that–it is a kind of nerdery–it is just true that we are shaped by the platforms we use. By the way those platforms behave independent of us. By the incentives for more powerful actors and more influential audiences than some of us. That's not to be depressing; there are tenacious people on this podcast who do what they want to do and refuse to fail. I think for anyone interested in creating anything, this is a great resource. I came away from it inspired to make more things I want to make. The Onion is trying to be platform-agnostic with its Infowars launch, and I know that's the right call. The audience will find you, as they are looking for what's real and want to boost it.

Kay Ryan, "Venice"

"Venice" commemorates the onset of anxiety. One might feel this is an unusual choice of subject matter. An old city, famed for canals as streets, legendary commercial dominance, history in every brick and corner, is only described as "gorgeous intensities." An "assault of abundance" which drives some to a "departing train car" for ease.

Venice (from Smithsonian)
Kay Ryan

There is a category
of person eased
by constraint, soothed
when things cease.
It is the assault
of abundance
from which they seek
release. The gorgeous
intensities of Venice
would work best
for these people
at a distance:
sitting, for example,
in a departing
train car, feeling the
menace settle.

On the one hand, we can relate. I remember being a young, terrible tourist in Venice. Eager to see, energized for experience, treating the city like a video game. Visit a location, briefly take it in, collect invisible points in my head, level up, run around again. I would not want, nowadays, to deal with a flood of those like me, snapping photos of every old building while lost in some combination of luxury and neediness. Add the bright sunlight of typical tourist seasons, quantities of water which scare basement owners, gondolas crisscrossing like a giant amusement park ride, and I can see an older me reacting a number of ways, none of them good. If I were in Venice now, I'd want to walk with a sensitivity to the generations who walked before. Try to understand it as a seat of power, an oligarchic republic, a technical marvel, a work of art which innovated in art. I don't need too many others around. I would like those I care for, and then some historians, guides, books, and opportunities to talk to actual Venetians. What is it like to live in the city these days? What does living within the legacy of the city mean?

Ryan's lyric sounds personal, a snippet of autobiography in verse. How does a poet who loves the quiet riddles of daily life deal with a noisy, crowded, overwhelming city? Not well: "There is a category / of person eased / by constraint, soothed / when things cease." Constraint is good; it is good when "things cease." The "assault of abundance" requires "distance." The wonder of Venice can't be engaged without space and time for one's mind to work.

On the other hand, there is a hint of criticism in that word "constraint." It isn't that some people can navigate busyness better than others and automatically deserve respect. We don't judge those swamped by a place with too much going on. But what about someone who always wants constraints, who never tries, who complains that anything other than their routine is unacceptable? That's not someone who would go to Venice, sure. One you see someone wall themselves off, though, you won't forget it. "Venice" ends with "feeling the menace settle," the narrator in the train, away from the city. For a moment, the menace has passed, but for how long? You've placed yourself in a "category," one that always has a hint of menace because of everything which lies beyond that category.

A final story. In graduate school one of the most perplexing thinkers I encountered was Machiavelli. He uses the tools of esotericism, but he also says the most outrageous things rather loudly. It feels like reading something written in code–it is hard to identify who he is even talking to–but then in the middle of the code are explicit anti-Christian statements, not-at-all veiled criticism of the Papacy, and contempt for despots. I talked to a student ahead of me who did thorough, detailed work on the Platonic dialogues, asking him how to handle Machiavelli. He made things even more complicated: maybe place names stand for themes he wants to treat at length, but not reveal outright. Maybe Venice is the City of God, an entire city that walks on water. In which case, I would need more than historians or guides or the right books to navigate it.