Another gem from Desiring the Kingdom. Smith quotes Vladimir Nabokov on reading Bleak House, for the purpose of demonstrating how embodied our imaginations are:
All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle.
While I don’t think aesthetically engaging a piece of literature, art, or music necessarily only involves these spinal shivers, certainly they constitute one of aesthetic engagement’s finest moments. Revulsion is also a valuable aesthetic reaction, and analysis or synthesis are valuable aesthetic engagements, but one of the best ways to talk about art of any kind is to share shiver-moments.
Example:
This evening I spent a few hours with my friend Dan, chatting of theology and philosophy, eating Clementines, and listening to his record-player. The first disc he put on the record player was by Leonard Cohen. We paused at one point, listening to the scratchy-record sound of Cohen’s allusive lyrics and lovely voice—and he performed one of those chromatic modulations that mark his unique melodic style.
“Whoa,” I said, “that modulation gave me shivers.”
“Yeah,” said Dan, “some of his lyrics give me shivers…”
Suddenly what I believe is an accurate characterization of Cohen’s over-all aesthetic sprung to my mind: the unexpected chromaticism of his melodies, lyrical, musical, dialectical. The fittingness of some of those (what I can only call) ironic melodies for his ironic allusivity became more apparent. And the synthesized characterization that had resulted from comparing shivers led into a discussion of the fittingness and meaning of the fact that Cohen’s “Hallelujah” has been used both (mistakenly) as a hymn in some churches and also as the altogether appropriate background music for the ironic and anti-heroic sex scene in Watchmen.
The point I am trying to make is this: that Nabokov made a good point. We can certainly do worse, aesthetically, than to follow the shiver of our spines.
Good post, but to extend the idea further.
The key to Understanding life altogether is in the subtle structures of the body-mind-complex.
That is to say the key to Understanding life altogether IS in the intrinsic structures or anatomy of our bodies, and not ideas, philosophy or “theology”.
EVERY thing that we see “out there” is a creation of and thus a projection of our brain and nervous system patterning —our spinal line or our “tree of life”.
The Secret of right life, and especially Spiritual Life is how to purify, stengthen and thus re-pattern ones central nervous system altogether so that it is always attuned to and resonant with the all pervasive Conscious (de)Light in which all of this is arising.