I’m struggling through Rowan Williams’ The Edge of Words at the moment. He can be guaranteed to be thought-provoking, although I have to admit that I do find him very difficult. His theme is the multiplicity of subtle and complex ways in which language works. So far so good! It is when he ventures beyond this into metaphysics that I find my eyes crossing. Every now and then, however, there are sentences which I understand with sufficient clarity to agree with them. Here’s one.
“The work of the artist, …., is thus not an eccentricity in the human world, but an intensifying of what human beings as such characteristically do.” (p. 121)
I think that this puts the situation every well, and corrects the idea one often encounters that to be an artist implies that one possesses some kind of mysterious “aura”, setting us off from normal people. If people could get away from that they would understand more readily what it is that we are trying to do. How often, when you encounter statements such as, “Oh! I’m afraid that I don’t understand art”, can you be confident that the speaker has defined themselves out of the attempt to appreciate art because they believe that they have not been blessed with “it”?
Reading Williams made me aware of a curious feature of intellectual culture in this country I have not thought of before, and that is the specificity of Welsh culture. Welsh writers (of course Williams is one such) have a tendency to cite other Welsh writers who ware normally ignored by the English. Williams quotes the work of David Jones, of which I am very fond.* I only came across Jones’ work when my attention was drawn to it by a Welsh friend.
*As regular readers of this blog might have noticed.