Art is not a Dream

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In Wim Wenders' film Until the End of the World, a scientist who hopes to give the blind a way to see inadvertently creates a device that makes it possible to record a person's dreams and play them back at will, just like watching a movie. It does not take long for the characters who have access to this technology to start behaving like the most desperate addicts, uninterested in anything other than viewing their own dreams over and over again. I think that, obsessed as I am with myself, if a device of this kind fell into my hands, I would meet the same fate almost instantly.

A dream is a perfect, personal metaphor, a metaphor that only its creator can truly understand because it is not separate from its creator. A person knows in dreams things about himself that he could articulate in no other way, things that he may never be able to access in any other way, things that he may never even know that he knows. In our dreams, everything has meaning.  Everything is itself and at the same time something else. We are everything in our dreams—the characters, props, landscape and perspective. It is our mind come to life and knowable as our own backyard, more knowable than ever our waking selves may seem to to us to be.

Art is not a dream. Art is wakefulness. If dreams—most dreams, anyway, with the exception of True Dreams which come not from us in the way we usually understand our own being—are produced from and out of our own minds, art (True Art) has no truck with the psyche, or if it does, it is to show us the mind as it is in its nature, not as it appears to itself. Art is not a medium merely for expressing emotion, for highlighting a state of affairs or for teaching any lesson that can be taught in any other way. The artist and her life are incidental even, when it achieves the level of art, in the most unaffected memoir.

Erich Heller in his Art and the Artist's Self teaches us that, when the lens of art is focused on the life of an artist, even her suffering makes sense. What would otherwise seem flawed or broken is able to communicate perfection. Through art, we can experience the most profound sadness without becoming unhappy and the most sincere disgust without becoming cynical. Schopenhauer or Hegel would have us believe that art redeems the world but I believe that, through art, we are redeemed because we no longer wish to stand against the world, to fight against Nature, to see things the way they were not meant to be seen, to become something that we were never meant to be.