Spontaneity and aesthetics

Spontaneity’s a quality roundly appreciated—bingo!—in ordinary experience and in art. OK, but do we know what it means? First, look at its Latin origin: sponte, an adverb applied to actions “done of one’s own free will, voluntarily.” The associations the adjective “spontaneous” calls to mind are freedom, youth, improvisation, surprise, absence of forethought or calculation; and by extension, absence of guile. At the opposite end of the scale are qualities like restraint, planning, discipline, editing, plotting, and even conspiracy. Spontaneity’s usually associated with humor or at least a fresh view of things. We like it when we encounter it in people because, hey, they don’t seem worried about what impression they’re making on us; they’re relaxed and help us relax, often through laughter. (Although: if all the world's a stage it must also be true that some people are good enough actors to seem convincingly spontaneous; clowning is a skill like any other.)

In poetry, spontaneity’s embodiments include informality, avoidance of sequential argument and compositional structure, use of jokes, non-standard grammar, and a vigorous delivery, all of it couched in a “speechly” tone and diction (even slang and cusswords). Yep, spontaneity’s down with interjections, contractions, & abbreviations, etc., abrupt shifts in syntax or subject matter, emotive italicization, and emotive punctuation—the dash, the question mark (or double question mark), and the exclamation point. And, like, why the fuck not, dude?! Why indeed.

Elizabeth Bishop once said the three qualities she most liked in poetry were spontaneity, accuracy, and mystery. Those sound good to me; but I recognize that there is some tension between the first and the others.

Common negative terms applied by critics to poems include: “plodding,” “stuffy,” “stiff,” “dry,” “academic,” “old-fashioned”; all of these are failures spontaneity can alleviate, with its vitality, its freshness, its unpredictability, its subversive humor.

Granted that spontaneity is a value in art, what needs explaining is that it has become the supreme value in our poetry, the one that trumps all others. It seems that the majority of readers now expect a poem to sound like improvisation, not shaped by revision, its words tumbling out of the mind directly onto the page. Allen Ginsberg even made an aesthetic credo of this approach with his “first thought, best thought” manifesto, where he seems to have thought the unrevised life and unrevised text were in harmony with Buddhist philosophy. The aesthetic behind Creeley’s poetry (and many of his followers) seems close to this. A poem is, what, just the uncensored record of your mental/verbal activity at a particular moment. Many of Frank O’Hara’s poems read like they're exactly that, which helps explain why his star is so high these days. And after all, even sobersides Wordsworth said that poetry is, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” Just possibly the phrase “recollected in tranquility” will explain why Wordsworth’s spontaneous and powerful feelings found expression in words and lines so thoughtful as those in “Tintern Abbey” and the “Intimations” Ode.

The bias for spontaneity involves an assumption about the psyche and its relationship to artistic creation, in which the unconscious mind is regarded as unsurpassable, and the thoughtful, editing part of the mind is held to be an enemy to sincerity and vitality. This bias begins in the Romantic period, is upheld by the Surrealist aesthetic (at least in the practice of “automatic writing”), and finally by the permissive atmosphere of American art that began in the 1960s. We see it consciously or unconsciously supported in aesthetic manifestoes like Ginsberg’s, which devalue revision; by experiments of avant-garde performance artists like David Antin, who used to simply stand up and speak ad lib into the mic, and by a sizable critical literature that is dead set against the use of meter, rhyme, and verseform because these involve planning, second thoughts, and revision, an approach some critics spontaneously term “fascistic.”

Obviously, a first-thought-best-thought aesthetic rules out verseform composition, though perhaps not blank verse. There are many poets now publishing who can instantly produce pentameter lines without stopping to count on their fingers, pentameters more complex than “the University of Michigan,” or “So who told Kevin he should punch you out?”

It also rules out other kinds of poems: extended narratives; philosophical arguments; precise descriptions of natural phenomena, people, or artworks; close, dialectical analysis of autobiographical events and feelings about these; balanced self-evaluation or balanced perceptions about other people; textual “architecture”; verbal economy and distilled expression. Because spontaneity is almost inseparable from humor, its tendency is to undermine seriousness and to clash with tragic subjects. When writing about, for example, the death of someone you loved, you don’t want to sound like you’re, um, you know, a goof or whatever.

Spontaneity is one of satire’s strongest resources, and since so much poetry now being written is nose-thumbing, ironic, and deflationary, we get a lot of spontaneity among the new poets on the block. And it’s almost always welcomed as being “fresh,” (that word used to have a secondary sense, which might be relevant here), unpretentious, and, like, sooo not what academics want you to write. The fact that it has a sell-by date and stops seeming fresh after a few years is ignored year after year and decade after decade as new practitioners appear on the scene.

I’ve suggested before that the way we write reflects the way we live our lives. And our nation is—spontaneous us!—the world capital of spontaneity, of “whatever,” of impulse-buying, of fast food, of maxing out credit cards, of tactless comments, of road rage, of spontaneous combustion in public opinion, of Columbine-style massacres, of launching military operations without forethought and planning; and of rushing into publication.

I like humor in poetry and I like the spontaneity that gives the impression that a poem is--no, seriously--being spoken rather than written. I also recognize that, when this quality is combined with precision, nuance, careful reflection, interesting word choices and sonic texture, the quality is an artistic illusion, what could be called spontaneity of the most calculated kind. Given how long it took Elizabeth Bishop to complete her poems, their apparent and charming spontaneity can only be the result of long labor and careful revision.

No one seriously questions that the first source of artworks is the unconscious, the irrational, the realm of dream. But the best artworks are those that take impulses from the dark and fishy deep and combine them with elements of a conscious art. The unconscious is universally distributed, but not all people are artists. Only those who develop the skills and reflexes needed for art can hope to produce works of lasting value. I disagree with Yeats when he says the “only singing school” is found in “monuments of unageing intellect.” But certainly that is one of the places where we learn to (let’s avoid flowery poesy and not say "sing") write.

Aesthetics and physiology

Freedom of expression: there's an ideal I can get behind. I entirely concur with J.S. Mill's concept concerning the arena of philosophical (or political or aesthetic) debate. If we have freedom of expression, the best and strongest arguments will carry the day eventually. And weak or hysterical or cheap or mean-spirited arguments will be shown up as just that. They fall under their own gavel.

There's a sort of interesting TV show called Numbers, one of whose installments I saw recently. The charming lead, a young mathematical philosopher, made the point that human beings can't be expected to like just anything: our organs of perception, our neurons, and our mental capacity limit the field of what can attract us, just as they dictate what will repel us. If we narrow the focus a bit to the field of aesthetics, this observation is a restatement of something Nietzsche once said: "Art is applied physiology." Actually, the word "aesthetic" is derived from Greek aisthesis, which means "sensation." Aesthetic experience begins in sensation and develops into something beyond perception. As human beings we can't truly like just any old or odd thing, even if told we should. Sometimes when told we really must, we try to like something we're simply not wired to enjoy--I suppose out of a desire to please the person telling us to like this or that or some other thing. But doing so comes at some cost to our instincts. I'm not saying that first reactions are always trustworthy. We can sometimes be led to like and even to adore artworks we didn't immediately cotton to. But after dozens of tries, after proper instruction and explanation, we still find a work of art tiresome or revolting, why ignore what we feel?

Marxist aesthetics assumes no permanent fixtures in experience; it asserts that human consciousness is a tabula rasa and that we can be programmed to get pleasure from any object, process, or artwork that history has decided we "should" approve of. So that, for example, if history decides we should value as an artwork, what, oh, a five-hundred pound block of concrete sculpted in the shape of a prickly pear and oozing a pinkish-orange pus that has the smell of ozone and commercial "air freshener," then we must, absolutely must, like such sculptures. To which a good reply is: "Sorry. I'm just not wired that way." History will have to go about its business without our particular aesthetic votes of confidence.

Nietzsche's statement was made long before Chomskian theories about language development had been presented. Linguists before Chmsky had been arguing, again, that the human mind begins in infancy as a tabula rasa, and that any sort of grammar could be imprinted on it. But Chomsky observed that, in practice, only a limited number of grammatical features ever appeared in the world's thousands of languages. Which confirmed his hunch that the neurological structure of the brain includes certain processes while it excludes certain others. I think Chomsky is right. And his theory has a bearing on the making of art. Not all possible approaches, combinations, dissonances, amplitudes, discontinuities, repetitions, and insistences can be experienced with anything like pleasure. And where there is no pleasure at all, there can be no art.

Yet we have, as an audience, been browbeaten into putting aside our own instincts and responses in favor of many kinds of art that really have nothing to offer in the way of pleasure; or if they do, a pleasure at several removes from direct, sensory appreciation. The arid "pleasures" being inculcated include the self-congratulatory conviction that the audience is part of a small, rightminded group possessing the best ideas; that this group is on the progressive side of things; that the grating or empty or trivial artworks proposed for this group's appreciation contain the appropriate "message" or attitude for us all; that direct pleasure (or "positive cathexis," to use Freud's term) is a banal cliche', unworthy of the sophisticated art consumer. It's a strange kind of asceticism, better suited for, say, the Trappist order of monks. Asceticism or even masochism. We flagellate ourselves with really awful art. Why? Because we "should."

But really, should we? How long can we defy our own physiology and neural organization? I notice that two writers in recent years have published books on the theme of the return of beauty. Elaine Scarry and Zadie Smith. Coincidence? A shift in the wind? The arena of ideas will decide.