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The Painted Poem

"L'Art est une religion sans espoir." [Art is a religion without hope] I make mine this statement, whose reference I've lost. For me, Art is one of these things that make life worth living. It can both defeat Pascal's Ennui not only by allowing us to temporarily escape in another world, but also by giving us a deeper understanding of our own and opening our senses to the beauty around us.
I'll first discuss my feelings when I listen to a piece of music by Bach; then, I'll give two complementary examples of my experience in reading Proust. Finally, I'll try to compare both arts.

I've often heard Bach's Sicilienne from Sonata in E Flat Major for Flute and Harpsichord played in my parents' room when I was younger. I think I adopted it much later.
I don't actually remember my first reaction to this piece and the development that led me to like it today. As another example, It took me many repetitions to start to enjoy Rachmaninoff's Piano Concertos, perhaps because the patterns were so new and convoluted to me that I couldn't "hear" anything the first few times. In Bach's Sicilienne, I've never felt anything as such. I can only make up a few hypotheses: the music was in "the background" for so long, that it never sounded unfamiliar; or it is constructed in a way I am familiar with from my general musical background.
The emotions I go through while listening to the piece are ambiguous, almost contradictory. It seems to express pain and sadness, perhaps the sadness of memories, but at the same time, there is serenity in this painful contemplation. The choice of the flute as the main instrument accentuates the "sighing" side of the music, while the harpsichord's accompaniment probably contributes to the serenity. In addition, the rhythm, for example in the first phrase,
taaa - ta - taa - tâ - tâ - tâ - taaa
plays a role in this initial and final impression of sighs in a midst of hope. Interestingly, the low pitches occur on the long notes (taaa, taa, taaa) and the higher pitches on the short ones, symbolizing the little attempts to disrupt the sadness. And during the whole piece, crescendo, this disruption becomes more important, moving from notes to whole phrases. Ultimately, sadness reconquers its grounds, but on the way, it has acquired a more serene dimension. It finally appears as a subdued pain.

Proust's "A la recherche du temps perdu" is such a monumental masterpiece, that even though I have always been curious about it, I only attempted to start its reading this summer. I am glad I did, as it is the most wonderful writing I ever came across. I always carry a volume in my purse, and it is like always having a friend with me.
In the first subsection "Combray", the narrator describes the gentle emotion of receiving his mother's goodnight kiss as a child and its feverish "withdrawal symptoms". Even though I haven't experienced the extremity of the narrator's feeling, I can sympathize, and even identify, with him through his analogies, with love in particular. As he is about to get caught by his father, waiting for his mother to kiss him goodnight while he should be asleep, the rhythm of the sentences, paralleling the dramatic tension, increases.
As a contrasting example, when the narrator describes his love for Gilberte in "A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs", I can relate to him directly. This time, the comparisons, metaphors and nuances allow me to analyze my own past experience in finer details and at a deeper level: the cycle of increasing desires, the over interpretation of the loved one's gestures, the doubts, the jealousy, the unconscious ambition of proving one's ability to live without the loved one, and most of all the development into which all these feelings fit repeatedly in parallels and oppositions.

As in literature, music is experienced differently whether some of its aspects are familiar or not. Even inside a same musical piece, the structural layers of repetitions and contrasts contribute to our feelings of familiarity, which often comes with more receptiveness, or unfamiliarity, which, as we have seen, may cause both fascination and new emotions or momentary rejection. Art either deepens (when familiar) or broadens (when unfamiliar) our experience of the world around us.
Usually when I read a book, I am eager to move forward and finish it. In Proust, on the contrary, and certainly more as when listening to a musical piece, I want to savor it: I found myself reading the same passages again and again, as incantations. In music, listening to the same piece many times is necessary to understand it. Each new listening, or reading, as this applies to both arts, brings up new nuances, while other elements, now assimilated, are anticipated. In addition, working through a passage to a point where it is known by heart, as if possible to "play it mentally" is still not the same as having the passage "played aloud", specially in music, where, to me at least, it mentally sounds as an inferior, faded version. I can never have this full mental grasp of a musical piece. As process in time, it isn't possible to have an instantaneous representation of a reading or listening. This implies that the overall impression is made of a continuous succession of feelings, but it is more than their sums; it is less an effect of their addition than their harmony and arrangement.

Once, in my sixth grade art class, I had to "draw" a poem: create a poem and integrate it in a drawing. My classmate wrote a suite of nice-sounding but almost meaningless syllables and associated each with a color, while I, instead, was concerned with the words and their meanings. I was confronted with new ideas. What makes a good poem? Is it content, the "what" [is it represented or expressed]? Or is it form, the "how"? And then, how do you relate a poem to an image? Do you relate images to feelings expressed or to sounds? How does the image change or adjust the impression of the poem, and vice versa? And finally, how does the integration of both, the whole is better than the sum of its parts?
At the time, I believed the quality of an artwork was solely in its meaning, and my classmate solely in its apparent beauty. But the last question revealed by my sixth grade exercise should have hinted to me that a great artwork is not only about form nor only about content, especially in music where they seem indistinguishable; it's about the appropriateness of one to another, or more generally about the use of all the possible elements of a medium to conjure to the author's intention.

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