ART, A RUSSIAN, VERBAL JUDO

When he accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature, a ceremony he almost didn't show up for, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had some rad things to say. For one, he named art as a means of reaching “revelations such as cannot be produced by rational thinking." Meaning, I think, that there resides a truth in art that withstands all sorts of pervasive rhetoric and/or widely established ideology. What we make is sometimes more important than what we say, or even what we say we're going to make.

Knows what's up

He also made the distinction between this truth in art and the “beauty” of rhetorical arguments. While a speech may appear “elegant and smooth” (ha!), language retains the disadvantage of constantly contradicting itself.

Here is the kicker. Art, he says, “bears its own verification," as “those works of art which have scooped up the truth and presented it to us as a living force – they take hold of us, compel us, and nobody ever, not even in ages to come, will appear to refute them” (!!!). We make a thing, and then it exists!

Sometimes I just can't believe it.