On Difficult Art

or, I watched a weird anime movie on youtube a bunch of times and want to tell you about it

I also wrote about it over at Anime Herald. I actually really want you to read this essay published over there. Originally, I was going to post it here, but I thought I’d pitch it around. Samantha over at Anime Herald is good people, too. She helped make this better than it was.

I also like what Anime Herald is doing. I’ve said before that all anime is bad, but I like how Anime Herald is very interested in the history of the medium as well as the way genres within anime have developed over time.

So, uh, check them out.

Cool discussion at the Agitator podcast about Angel Egg from last year, which I suggested to them via instagram DMs instead of text message because there are way too many ways to communicate with the people you know.

don’t

Don’t give your heart to dead art.

Don’t give your heart to people who will never love you back or love you the way you need.

I have often spoken about my general dislike of Marvel movies and so on, but I am, at my core, a thing-liker. I like things. I like to like things. I even like trash art made by goblinized European men from a century or more ago.

Even though I’d never tell you to stop listening to Imagine Dragons or stop watching The Big Bang Theory or stop reading Dan Brown, I will also gently nudge you towards a more expansive view.

Difficult art is, well, difficult. Difficult to enjoy at first glance, unless you’re some freak¹ predisposed to enjoy things that are hard². But I promise you, it can be worth it, so long as you find the kind of difficulty that works for you.

won’t

Won’t let the night in while staring at the moon in your ten-year-old body believing in world’s far away enough that they’re out of reach but hoping with all the hope you can gather in two tiny child hands that you’ll someday be there swallowing the night the way you feared it would consume you.

Won’t let the light of love smother me.

Dark Souls is a game famed for its difficulty that many people bounced right off it³ never to see it again. But some amount of people didn’t bounce off but instead kept playing. After hours of smashing their head into a wall, they broke through and found a game unlike any other, hitting them with more emotion than any game they’d previously encountered. Maybe more than any other kind of art ever has.

I’m not going to tell you to play Dark Souls, but I think it’s a useful metaphor here. The difficulty is part of the point. You’re meant to work at it, work on it, dig through the meat and bones to find the value buried well beneath. Because if you do, what you find there may change your life.

And working at it is like exercise or learning to ride a bike. You’re training a muscle, training a concert of neurons to begin firing together so that they’ll build dendritic bridges making the next journey easier. Rather than slashing machete-like through the grey matter of your brain, you’re walking a neatly built stone bridge.

can’t

Can’t let you see me or know.

Can’t let the dreams boiling inside me substantiate where anyone can see for fear they’ll laugh or, even worse, ignore the cloud of everything I’ve ever loved or worked towards.

I am a chronically unhappy person. This has made me an idiot.

But I have found solace in difficult art. It has saved my life. Enriched it to the degree that I can still sit here and type. Can still breathe and face the day without shattering, without wishing I had died, a long time ago.

And so when I first stumbled into Virginia Woolf’s Waves or Herman Melville’s Whale, when I first drank in Arthur Rimbaud’s Season in Hell but especially his Illumination, when Pen-Ek Ratanaruang’s camera spun me round and made me collapse inward like a dying star while two people did nothing but sleep on a couch, when The Sound of Animals Fighting’s Heretic thrummed through me, I woke from each experience wholly new with even the world around me changed.

I saw with new eyes. Felt with new skin. Breathed with new lungs.

And I spoke with new dreams.

1. like me

2. alternatively, the first time you read a Joycean sentence, you felt it like electric spicing your blood. You opened your eyes wider to take in a passage like this

God, he said quietly. Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a grey sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks. I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.

and your eyes just kept opening wider until they rolled right out of your skull. And then there was the magic vignettes of Terrence Malick making your heart stutter, then stop, then start again but beating in a way that made your own body feel like a new place rather than home. Or the way the Threnody for Hiroshima burst through your chest like Ridley Scott’s alien and you struggled to breathe for an hour while you kept hitting that repeat button, trying not to cry and not even knowing why.

3. like me