What does the old saying “art is in the eye of the beholder” really mean? Perhaps it owns a relationship to the theory of relativity in that time is relative to the observer. Art may be dependent on the person experiencing it. I think it is. For instance, I do not particularly enjoy comedies. If you ever came over to our house while the television was on, you would not think this was the case. You will likely hear canned laughter emanating from the speakers. The spousal unit absolutely loves this particular genre of entertainment.
My tastes run toward action, suspense, and documentaries, sprinkled with healthy amounts of horror and science-fiction. How do I know that the appreciation of art rests with the eye of the beholder? Because we all have different tastes. I do not like new country music. I love the old troubadours like Johnny Cash and Kenny Rogers. I never developed a taste for Poison during the late eighties, but I loved Metallica and Manowar. I am not a Swiftie, but I love her song Wildest Dreams.
I realized we all have different tastes in art during my time at the University of Arkansas in the Creative Writing program. This particular class attempted to teach us the appreciation for poetry. When the professor proceeded to tell us what William Wordsworth meant when the Romantic poet wrote A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal, I understood the words did not mean to me what they meant to the professor. On the surface, he was correct in that it appears to be about death. But it resonated deeper with me. To me it was about the realization that death would come.
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fear:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round with earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
Not being one inclined to blindly follow authority, I struck out on my own and stated to the professor that I felt saying the poem lamented death made it too simplistic. The words meant something much deeper to me. It reminded me of my own mother, who happened to be alive and well at the time, of my youth. He had the class write a paper on the verse of 5-8 pages in length. I did 10.
The first line was how I looked back on my childhood: as a dream. Not sequential, but more like flipping randomly through an old photo album with yellowed photographs populated by orange carpeted living rooms and green vinyl dining room chairs. The second line hit me in the feels. With my loving parents around, I indeed had nothing to fear. Even when I grew up on military bases during the Cold War where nuclear apocalypse drills and checking our cars for bombs each morning seemed normal.
But the third and fourth lines really meant something. In my mind’s eye as I flip through the album of my youth, my mother always looks the same. Unchanging. She seemed a thing that could not feel the touch of earthly years. Until I come to a point in my life when I realized that mortality existed. I was 13. Mother had her first attack of pancreatitis. Dad put her in the car, and we four children piled into the 1968 Plymouth Belvedere and reached the hospital 14 miles away in less then 10 minutes.
To me, the white space, the break in the poem, paints a picture of when we come to the realization even our mother will taste the coldness of death one day. My own mother lived another 35 years, but when we took her to the hospital, I knew without a doubt, death waited somewhere around the corner.
So, yes, art is in the eye of the beholder. Even in our own eye. Time has an odd capability of changing how we see things as it progresses. All based on the perspective.
Take care.
