Intellectual love

The pulse quickens, the breaths shorten, the hands begin to shake; there is a churning in the pit of the stomach. Your attention becomes focused, you can think of only one thing, nothing else matters. It is clearly love. But love of a special kind: intellectual love.

It is the love we feel before a masterwork we know so well, but which we also know with a certainty will thrill us when we return, and will reveal ever more beauties and depths the more we return. It is the love we feel for rich and complete worlds of the spirit like Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu.

Intellectual love may also occur for the ephemeral, something that comes round with a comforting regularity designed to serve for a limited time, but which manages to remain fresh, constantly exciting and surprisingly durable despite its origins.  In this class fall collective works of genius like the weekly Village Voice.  In it we find a brilliant kaleidoscopic stream of ideas and opinions that never fail to test our own mettle and demand that we respond with our own thinking.

Other works we love in this way may be part of a finite series, the gradual building of which induces a sense of expectation and even of climax tinged with the inevitable disappointment which will follow completion. For example the Hyperion Schubert series, the complete lieder sung by diverse singers accompanied by the incomparable Graham Johnson, and released in thematic groups devised by him which lend a coherence and intellectual rhythm to the project over and above its larger structure.

A different kind of finitude is offered by the works of a living artist.  As we await for the next opus in the growing sequence, we must also suffer the fear that it will not come, for one day we know that death will cut off that series. And so it is for geniuses like the fearsome Peter Greenaway, each of whose films is individually exciting but is also contaminated with the frisson-inducing thought at once terrible and delicious - that the latest work we now watch could be his absolute last. 

A rather strange but wonderful category of artists who can provoke this intellectual swooning are those who are already dead, and thus unable to add to their oeuvre, and yet whose output is so immense that we are constantly surprised by new and wonderful works. Perhaps the prime example here is Picasso, who at various stages in his life was creating several canvases a day.  In exhibition after exhibition we come across yet more astounding works from him, as if somehow he were breaking all the rules again and smuggling works down from Parnassus.

Perhaps, too, we feel an additional joy in meeting Picasso's works for the first time because they mostly date from his huge old age, and in their constant searching and sense of artistic enquiry they offer us the sight of pure intellectual energy sustaining the creator almost despite the body.  It is this death-defying energy we love when we read Proust or the Village Voice, listen to some of Hyperion's 600 Schubert songs, watch a Greenaway film or gaze enraptured at another Picasso masterpiece.

(8.2.92)

See also Moody Sonnets - Watching Water Wrackets

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