The Dance of Shiva
An addendum to my reading of Coomaraswamy, and some thoughts on artistic inspiration
In the night of Brahma, Nature is inert, and cannot dance till Shiva wills it: He rises from his Rupture, and dancing sends through inert matter pulsing waves of awakening sound, and lo! Matter also dances appearing as a glory round about Him. Dancing He sustains its manifold phenomena. In the fulness of time, still dancing, he destroys all forms and names by fire and gives new rest.
- Ananda K. Commeraswamy, The Dance of Shiva
In the iconography of the Dance of Shiva, the sum of ancient Indian aesthetic philosophical thought is represented. Shiva is (as is often mentioned) the destroyer of worlds, the bringer of death and destruction. Yet through this destruction follows also the creation of all things anew. The significance of the dance is threefold; firstly, its rhythmic play is the source of all movement within the cosmos (represented by the arch); secondly, the purpose of the dance is to release men from the snare of illusions; and thirdly, the place where the dance takes place, the centre of the universe, is said to be within the heart itself. For Coomaraswamy, the Dance of Shiva – at the same time both poetry and science – affords us
an image of reality, a key to the complex tissue of life, a theory of nature, not merely satisfactory to a single clique or race, nor acceptable to the thinkers of one century only, but universal in its appeal to the philosopher, the lover, and the artist of all ages and all countries.
Apropos to Coomaraswamy I became aware of another little synchronicity, aside from the passing family resemblance. The day of his death, the 8th of September 1947, is a combination of my son’s birthday and my father's birth year. This fact, in addition to the interesting messages with friends which the last essay occasioned, have prompted some disparate reflections of my own regarding artistic inspiration.
The nature of inspiration is something that I’ve given more thought to than perhaps anything else over the years, particularly during certain fallow, solipsistic, periods of my youth when it was scarce. At times I’ve regretted that it has admittedly become an overly intellectual fixation. On reflection, I think this was the result of a change in my attempted means of artistic expression. Making music was the only thing I’ve ever felt strongly drawn to in life; where my artistic impulses were entirely intuitive and untrained (since I know nothing about music theory and never had any music lessons). I liked playing in bands and being around other musicians, and when it came time to move in other artistic directions I found it intensely difficult to adapt. Like many people I know, I never made a conscious decision to stop playing music, more so that it became impractical over time when everyone began to drift towards more isolated ways of creating music. I also tried doing this for many years, but I don’t think I was ever happy with the results. I still prefer any amount of time playing live and loud (preferably with a drummer) to sitting alone recording and re-recording music in front of a computer.
With writing it was a similar dislike of isolation that made it hard to adapt. Though I can’t think of anything I prefer doing more than simply reading - writing is another thing entirely. I felt by taking up writing I was being forced to trade my more vital, unrefined impulses for ones which are (often by necessity perhaps) over-wrought. I think I made the additional mistake of entering academia in the naïve belief that it was still in some ways an intellectual vocation, as opposed to a wholly bureaucratic one. My thinking was ‘inspired’ by a throw-away comment by Vladimir Nabokov (of which he had many), that academia is the ideal occupation for a writer since it provides access to libraries, intellectual conversation and lots of free time to write. He was, of course, wrong in this as he was in much else. It’s unlikely that he believed it himself since he quit his position at Cornell immediately upon becoming a best-selling novelist.
Yet even if Nabokov wasn’t entirely sincere in his belief in the sanctity of an academic career, I was predisposed to believe him because of his more convincing description of artistic motivations, in which I grudgingly sensed some commonality:
I have no purpose at all when composing my stuff except to compose it. I work hard, I work long, on a body of words until it grants me complete possession and pleasure.
The above has served as a staid inspiration to many misguided writers of a distinctly bourgeois l’art pour l’art variety, but for me, it was memorable simply because I found it so annoying to my idealistic worldview. The annoyance was strong, in retrospect, because on an intuitive level, I agreed with the sentiment but was unwilling to admit to it because it was so at odds with my then ideological preoccupations. This ambivalence was part of the reason why I decided to spend 5 years writing a PhD, later a book, on ideology and aesthetics in Nabokov's early novels. What I found was that Nabokov - completely discounting his narcissistic publicist tendencies, and his playing to the willingness of the American reading public to embrace him as a liberal (anti-Communist) demi-urge – had a remarkably consistent artistic ethos. The art of ‘social intent’ and the ‘literature of ideas’ were viscerally alien to him because of his wealthy aristocratic background. But long after he had ceased to be an actual aristocrat, he remained one spiritually till the end. In retrospect, this speaks to an artistic inspiration that transcended material concerns. His ode to this distinct ethos of inspiration is best expressed in The Gift, his last novel in Russian, and for me, his finest.
A Kunstleroman set in Berlin, The Gift follows Nabokov’s most heavily autobiographical protagonist Fyodor Konstantinovitch Cherdyntsev. It recounts in rich impressionistic detail the protagonist’s literary bildung among the sizeable White Russian émigré community who were the young author Vladimir Sirin’s first audience. The most prominent influence in The Gift is the Russian Silver Age, which was the earliest and perhaps strongest on Nabokov. He champions this little-known tradition – exemplified in my opinion by the magisterial novel Petersberg by Andrei Bely - as the best embodiment of a noble Russian literary tradition corrupted by the revolution, pitting it against the emergent Socialist Realist mode then ascendent in the Soviet Union. There are some well-concealed parodic elements of this latter contemporary form, but the most overt reference Nabokov uses – as the progenitor of the hated Soviet style – is that of Nikolai Chernyshevky, whom the protagonist is obsessively fixated with, seemingly out of pure contempt for his literary philistinism.
Nabokov was undoubtedly motivated by an aristocratic scorn for the mob in his wholesale dismissal of any art emanating from the Soviet Union, but his views on artistic inspiration are perhaps not entirely elitist in the same manner. What imbues The Gift with such poignancy, for me at least, is its languid portrayal of the artist (impoverished materially but possessing powerful spiritual resources) seeking inspiration amidst the tedium of the everyday. Within this portrayal is something of an admission; that inspiration – like much else – comes from a certain studied indolence, which is also a highly disciplined form of work, nonetheless. Education is not irrelevant to such discipline, but it is very far from essential. Formal education is, if anything, a hindrance – because it crowds out the development of a unique subjective vision with unwelcome intrusions; stale forms, well-trodden paths, oft-pronounced opinions etc, and the nagging doubts that plague the general run. Above all else, however, it is an admission that the artist acts out of a strong necessity to create.
A good writer, for Nabokov, is a good reader over and above anything else. I often think about the retired welder who used to work in the shipyards that I briefly chatted with in a pub in Glasgow. He was the first to recommend Nabokov to me when I was in my first year at Uni. Brandishing a copy of the collected stories in one hand, and a pint of 80 shilling in the other, I still remember everything he said about Nabokov’s prose and style, far more lucidly than the alembicated scholarly work I would later come to read (and write) over many years.
This accords with Coomaraswamy’s view (through Classical Indian philosophy) on the symbiotic relationship between genuine artists and critics, and between readers and writers:
The true critic (raiska) perceives beauty of which the artist has exhibited signs. It is not necessary that the critic should appreciate the artist’s meaning – every work of art is a kamadhenu yielding many meanings – for he knows without reasoning whether or not the work is beautiful, before the mind begins to question what it is ‘about.’ […] The poet is born, not made; but so also is the raiska, whose genius differs in degree, not in kind, from that of the original artist. […] When I say that works of art are reminders, and the activity of the critic is one of reproduction, I suggest that the vision of even the original artist may be rather a discovery than a creation. If beauty awaits discovery everywhere, that is to say that it waits upon our recollection (in the Sufi sense and in Wordsworth’s): in aesthetic contemplation as in love and knowledge, we momentarily recover the unity of our being released from individuality.
For my part, I know that – after Nabokov – I only sought to become a ‘critic’ out of a misguided expediency. I’ve always been aware that my instincts are primarily artistic, and it was only to preserve and nurture them that I have lackadaisically pursued an academic career. I’ve never been particularly invested in the need to know everything about the lives of the artists whose work I’ve admired, nor had any interest in obsessive fandom of any kind. Ultimately for me, the import of any work of art is not to be found in its subject but in the necessity felt by the artist in representing it – not because I’m overly interested in the specific circumstances that caused it, but because the necessity itself is something that I myself have felt acutely, many times, before.
Vienna, May 2024