The Pain and Struggle of Communication
There is no art without limits. Absolute freedom of expression, attractive as it may be as a theoretical principle, ought never to be allowed into the arena of artistic endeavor. Art thrives on finding ways to imply what cannot be said and to reveal new beauty within the constraints of existing forms — and existing norms. Even the artists whom we have come to consider the most radical innovators were always more akin to the standards they violated than they were different from them, seen from the perspective of history.
The first person who baked a cake that was square rather than circular probably thought that he was trying something absolutely new, and may have seemed so to others at first. But it was still cake — a concoction of flour, eggs, sugar — that he was baking, and hence his novelty, viewed in hindsight, entailed no fundamental rejection of shared essences or assumptions, but only a new way of framing them. Reject the essences outright and you are left with only presentation — novel shapes — which say nothing and speak to no one, least of all anyone who knows and remembers what cake is. The radical thrust that cuts away the past (or more exactly seeks to cut itself entirely free from the present) rather than addressing or continuing it in a novel way, or the fundamental disregard for norms that aims to eradicate morals and social structures rather than tweaking or stretching them, are the methods and means of non-art, of the nihilistic dismissal of the inescapable burden of communicating beauty, and of the solipsistic disavowal of responsibility and citizenship.
Language is common by definition. To express anything without recourse to language — which means without deference to accepted meanings — is to express nothing at all, regardless of whatever private insights one might have attained. One must communicate in the language available within one’s given arena. On its face, this might seem to constrain everyone, however original in his pre-linguistic thoughts, to saying only what can already be, and therefore likely has already been, said. This apparent prison of the present, however — the limiting confines of the common — is the very condition that inspires the true artist and the true thinker alike. In what does this inspiration consist? Precisely in the relentless struggle to find ways to squeeze new sense out of old meanings, which is to say the quest for figurative communication. All truth, all wisdom, all discovery, are communicated first and most fully in figurative terms, because these are the only terms in which the most personal and/or universal insights may be translated from their pre-linguistic (private and uncommunicable) form into a form that others can receive and contemplate. The frustratingly essential commonness of language, elevated and transcended by metaphor and other methods of indirect expression, thus serves as the most viable bridge, inevitably imperfect but always indispensable, between souls, between individuals and societies, and across centuries and civilizations. It is the very combination of the instrument’s imperfection with its indispensability that ignites the desperate and all-consuming obsession of the artist or thinker to find a way. It is this painful mix of impossibility and urgency that has given birth to every great and life-enhancing work of shared beauty and understanding that has been bequeathed to us over the millennia.
No one can say what has never been said, for there is no existing language in which to say it. And yet no advance toward wisdom is possible without new insights and inspired utterances. The synthesis of this inescapable dialectic of the soul, which comprises the source of every important work of art or philosophy that we have, is the novel use of accepted notions, which means transforming the limitation of the common into a foothold for guiding others just a step beyond themselves, into a world that is still familiar enough not to be disconcerting, while being simultaneously strange enough to excite new stirrings in their souls. In other words, into that bridge-world that is the defining standard of human communication.
