redemption

art is not about redemption.

redemption means somehow atoning for and overcoming sin or pain--paying it off and then making a profit that allows you to continue on. redemption is just another kind of bailout for something that doesn't merit it. grace, i suppose.

but it's also a mistake to criticize 'redemptive' artists like mahler and say that we're better off with beckett and feldman. beckett and feldman don't just refuse to redeem the irredeemable, like grocery clerks turning down expired coupons--they emphasize life's irredeemability to the point that you just want it to end ('oh, all to end...'). this is like the grocery clerk rejecting your coupon so adamantly that you become unspeakably depressed, leave your ice cream at the checkout, and walk out of the store with nothing to eat.

art should have exactly the opposite effect. if someone is depressed and ready for suicide, a great art work ought to persuade him to wait just a few minutes, three minutes maybe--until the song is done. and for that three minutes, by whatever means, there should be life. with luck, you can keep stringing three minutes together, one after another. if a novel doesn't make you feel alive until the last page, you're better off leaving it in the library--or even worse, giving it to the nobel prize committee.

this isn't asking that art be redemptive. three minutes of life does nothing to redeem the hours of drudgery and stupidity outside of it. life is not a totality that needs to be accepted or rejected as a whole, that can be redeemed by a few moments (the false solution of nietzsche's experience of the eternal return). if it could be, it could also just as easily be condemned by a few moments. but if three minutes of life doesn't redeem the hours of drudgery, it is still three minutes of life, and that is already something. and something hard enough to find.