Kyriakos
05-11-2012, 01:44 PM
What are the prerequisites that should be met so that one may be frightened by a piece of art?
Fear is, as is known, one of the most powerfull emotions. An emotion which has effects both somatic (one can sweat, lose one's breath, be hypersensitive and so on) and psychological. But are there any parameters which have to be set in order for one to feel this emotion towards something which is understood as a piece of art?
Moreover, can something frighten IF it is primarily seen as art? Or does one have to view it as distanced from fiction, as part of reality, so as to experience the general alarm that is fear?
I recall first reading HP Lovecraft when i was 17, and feeling uneasy after a few pages. Granted the phenomenon soon wore off, and have never felt afraid of it since, however it was very real the time i experienced it, so much so that it instantly made me want to produce writing, and have the effect on readers which amounts to strong emotion.
Even before that, though, i was frightened by bits and pieces of information which was channeled through artistic means.
For example i remember vivibly one afternoon when i was in the middle of elementary school. It probably was my birthday, or some occasion on which i was given a present, since i returned to my room with a copy of the illustrated Odyssey.
I was turning the pages and looking at the images, without any care, until i happened to see something that horrified me. It was the likeness of the Cyclops Polyphemos.
Now one might claim that for a small child the horrible image of a monster would be sufficient to cause a scare. But the thing is that this is a very general statement. As a writer i am interested in the particular ways in which one constructs a web of language that acts as a trap for emotions, or has the analogous effect on one's psyche that a march of soldiers can have on a bridge: it may cause it to pulsate and even collapse...
I have thought of why i was scared by that image of Polyphemos. He was a one-eyed man, and having one-eye symbolically meant that he was blind to half of reality, or half of experience. Now that it acted symbolically on me was not something i was aware of in that age, but it did not matter, since in deeper strata of my mind those connections were very existent.
A one-eyed being can symbolize many things, from idiocy ("half-witted" has a parallelism to half-eyed, or one-eyed) to extreme focus on part of the image (introversion or extroversion), to violence (it is argued that people who are very violent are so out of some sort of atrophy of part of their consciousness; this metaphorically is an atrophy of the eye that glances at that mental characteristics, and total atrophy would be equated with dissappearence of the one eye).
So, in conclusion, and in anticipation of discussion if it happens, i can say that i think that it is very positive for one to feel frightened by art, since it shows they have not forcibly closed the corridors of the mind in which such connections become sensed. Of course it is a problem if one does not go beyond the original fear, into examination of it, but if one does then surely there is a wealth of thoughts to be found in this field as well.
And i leave you with a nice painting of a Cyclops (what else? ;) )
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Redon.cyclops.jpg/220px-Redon.cyclops.jpg
Fear is, as is known, one of the most powerfull emotions. An emotion which has effects both somatic (one can sweat, lose one's breath, be hypersensitive and so on) and psychological. But are there any parameters which have to be set in order for one to feel this emotion towards something which is understood as a piece of art?
Moreover, can something frighten IF it is primarily seen as art? Or does one have to view it as distanced from fiction, as part of reality, so as to experience the general alarm that is fear?
I recall first reading HP Lovecraft when i was 17, and feeling uneasy after a few pages. Granted the phenomenon soon wore off, and have never felt afraid of it since, however it was very real the time i experienced it, so much so that it instantly made me want to produce writing, and have the effect on readers which amounts to strong emotion.
Even before that, though, i was frightened by bits and pieces of information which was channeled through artistic means.
For example i remember vivibly one afternoon when i was in the middle of elementary school. It probably was my birthday, or some occasion on which i was given a present, since i returned to my room with a copy of the illustrated Odyssey.
I was turning the pages and looking at the images, without any care, until i happened to see something that horrified me. It was the likeness of the Cyclops Polyphemos.
Now one might claim that for a small child the horrible image of a monster would be sufficient to cause a scare. But the thing is that this is a very general statement. As a writer i am interested in the particular ways in which one constructs a web of language that acts as a trap for emotions, or has the analogous effect on one's psyche that a march of soldiers can have on a bridge: it may cause it to pulsate and even collapse...
I have thought of why i was scared by that image of Polyphemos. He was a one-eyed man, and having one-eye symbolically meant that he was blind to half of reality, or half of experience. Now that it acted symbolically on me was not something i was aware of in that age, but it did not matter, since in deeper strata of my mind those connections were very existent.
A one-eyed being can symbolize many things, from idiocy ("half-witted" has a parallelism to half-eyed, or one-eyed) to extreme focus on part of the image (introversion or extroversion), to violence (it is argued that people who are very violent are so out of some sort of atrophy of part of their consciousness; this metaphorically is an atrophy of the eye that glances at that mental characteristics, and total atrophy would be equated with dissappearence of the one eye).
So, in conclusion, and in anticipation of discussion if it happens, i can say that i think that it is very positive for one to feel frightened by art, since it shows they have not forcibly closed the corridors of the mind in which such connections become sensed. Of course it is a problem if one does not go beyond the original fear, into examination of it, but if one does then surely there is a wealth of thoughts to be found in this field as well.
And i leave you with a nice painting of a Cyclops (what else? ;) )
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e9/Redon.cyclops.jpg/220px-Redon.cyclops.jpg