When art puts us under its spell
“The enchanted life is ‘intuitive, embraces wonder and fully engages the creative imagination but it is also deeply embodied, ecological, grounded in place and community ... It understands the myths we live by; thrives on poetry, song and dance. Above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again.”
Art moves us
According to psychologist Ellen Winner, when people say art affects them emotionally, they tend to mean that they feel moved. I think this is why I find sound to be so enchanting. Think how music or a song can grab you and put you under its spell. After all, ‘enchantment’ comes from the French, ‘encantement’, meaning ‘magical spell’ derived from the Latin ‘cantare’, meaning to sing.
This is why I also enjoy the power of narrative- a gripping novel or captivating film- to transport us to other worlds.
“We’re wired for story. We’re a storytelling and consuming people and we remember better and we’re moved more by narrative than we are by information or argument … I think changing minds has to work at all levels. You know, it has to work at the intellectual level, it has to work at the emotional level, and at even probably subliminal levels, and story does that”
The problem of suffering
“Every sufferer instinctively seeks a cause for his suffering; ... in short, some living thing on which, in response to some pretext or other, he can discharge his affects in deed or in effigy: for the discharge of affect is the sufferer’s greatest attempt at relief, namely at anesthetization- his involuntarily craved narcotic against torment of any kind ... One wishes, by means of a more vehement emotion of any kind ... to put it out of consciousness- for this one needs an affect, as wild an affect as possible and, for its excitation, the first best pretext. ”
For Ellen Winner, ‘feeling moved’ arises from our imagination when we become distracted and escape from our suffering problems and troubles. This reminds me of the problem of existential suffering. Or at least not suffering per se; rather if we lack a meaning for it.
For philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, meaning makes suffering bearable because it arouses our feelings and emotions (‘affects’) that have anaesthetic effects and put our suffering ‘out of consciousness’. For him, aesthetic experiences provide the greatest anaesthetic because they intensely excite our affects- ‘as wild an affect as possible’.
Rooted in intoxication, this excitation leads to life affirming feelings of ‘fullness and increasing strength’ that are so powerful that we forget our suffering:
“Without intoxication to intensify the excitability of the whole machine, there can be no art ... Above all, the intoxication of sexual excitement, the most ancient and original form of intoxication. There is also an intoxication that comes in the wake of all great desires, all strong affects; an intoxication of the festival, the contest, of the bravura of performance ... The essential thing about intoxication is the feeling of fullness and increasing strength.”
Perhaps this intoxication lies behind Sharon Blackie’s conclusion that ‘above all, to live an enchanted life is to fall in love with the world all over again’.