I love watching videos of flowing lava. Back when the big island was blowing up, I sometimes procrastinated by watching successive news clips of crusty molten flows crossing roads and consuming garages. It makes me feel warm inside: not because lava is literally hot and orange, but because it connects me to the big, loud, scary forces that shaped the universe.
Lava is not really of our world. It’s a part of the violent storming and clashing of elements and particles in space that made the world we normally see. An output of processes taking place at temperatures so extreme that they defy our perception. Before there were trees and flowers and swimmable lakes, let alone modern comforts, there was stars exploding, dust compacting, planets colliding -- and lava.
We humans are suited to live only in this strange little moment of peace and quiet on a sphere of rock with air to breathe and water to drink. The normal state of the observable universe, in which our existence is an interlude, is way too cold and empty or way too hot and crowded. But sometimes that rock we live on cracks open and we are reminded what our moment is really at the mercy of. Seeing lava is similar to if a tiny star passed through our atmosphere, fusing nuclei and everything that stars do, but is small enough that you could look at it without being irradiated or incinerated. To be in our arbitrary world, of streets and awkwardness and deadlines and everything else, and see concretely a flash of the vast forces that made us and will someday unmake us, fills me with a kind of awe that is both mysterious and calm.
Art makes me feel the same way. An acting performance that is ambiguous, angry, sad, and wild, or a painting of things that are twisted, deeply impressed, scarred, textured with light and darkness, make flesh the history, relationships, culture, emotion, and identity, expressed in ungovernably large groups across untraceably long chains of generations. These are forces that are not literally the power behind the stars, but just as vast, inspiring, terrible, and visible but beyond reach. The right kind of artistic experience does not create these feelings, but perhaps independent of the creator’s intent, reveals charged glimpses of them.
Literature classes want me to draw out a logical interpretation of what crawled across the floor that Nakata had to kill. A museum placard or audio guide wants to tell me who the dead mother in the painting is, and therefore what the painting represents. All very interesting, but turns the work into some kind of high-brow newspaper. I’d rather let Murakami’s intense but possibly pointless climax and Schiele’s broken limbs and molted skin speak for themselves.
One of my favorites scenes in Mad Men is when a bunch of low-level employees sneak into the lead partner’s office after hours to get a look at his new painting. It’s a Rothko, and they’re confused about what it means. “Maybe it doesn’t have to mean anything,” says Ken Cosgrove, the literary account executive. “Maybe you’re just supposed to experience it. When you look at it, you do feel something.” When I look at it, I feel the same as when I’m watching lava: like I’m among quarks, bathing in primordial soup, sensing whatever is going to happen once all of this ends for all of us.