Conversations With Walter Pater

Walter Pater.

Now and then moments may arise where time is fooled and all the fragmented pieces in your busy world cease to exist. What’s left, is the possibility of experiencing the purest elements in the joy and beauty of life itself. I began a journey with the Simon Fraser University Graduate Liberal Studies program in order to know life in a different way. I wanted to break open my preconceived perceptions, challenge my capacities, and overturn what I thought I knew. One late Wednesday afternoon, before dinner and class began, I was doing just that. I had wandered into Waterfront Station about an hour earlier than the set time our group meets. Typically, I drive from Abbotsford to Vancouver and arrive within an hour and a half to spare. My routine has been to park in an underground lot, walk up to the Blenz coffee shop, order a small, black, triple Americano, and cozy-in to go over my notes and readings in preparation for the evening class. On this particular Wednesday, however, when I found myself at Waterfront Station instead, I couldn’t say  precisely what drew me there. Was I pulled by some force beyond my control? Was the elusive Genius, rumoured to follow individuals from birth to death, inspiring and illuminating magic to be harnessed, responsible for my being there? Or were my legs quite simply in need of a bit more movement before sitting in for the evening? Whatever the reason, I was there. I was really there. 

Crossing the walkway from the underground lot over the street and toward where the train lives, I watched people riding the wave with me. Some were fast and some were slow. Some spoke through cords hanging from their ears, presumably attached to a phone located somewhere on their person. Each individual had a direction from whence they came and a location they were now headed towards, and so they went on, following an invisible yet well travelled current taking them wherever it was they needed to go. I, on the other hand, had time. I moved through two open doors that stood as the gateway into the vast expanse of commotion and noise filling the high vaulted ceilings of the station, I found myself standing in the centre of the world; a fixture of the place itself, as it swirled around me. People bustled throughout the space, creating an odd stir in the air; it’s gravity pulled my gaze about the room. Not really seeing anything in particular, however, my ear bore witness to the chaos instead. First the rustling of shoes, pants, dresses, and coats stirred; they clicked and shuffled, whooshed, and brushed, as they dashed about. A BING alerted my senses, as musical notes of cards tapping at stalls saturated the air. Each BING gave permission for gates to open, allowing people to pass through in the direction of a train waiting to whisk them off to their predestined locations. BING BING BING. The stalls called to each other in a musical crescendo, adding a layered voice to the rustling and bustling of feet in coats. The Starbucks chimed in with steam and grinding coffee. A bartisa calls for Angela. Then, behind me, back through the double doors and out where the sidewalk meets the street, a beautifully melodic and ancient cry of the Ehru, a Chinese two stringed and single bowed instrument, beckoned me. Turning from the rustling, binging, steaming, and grinding calls of the station itself, I floated toward the doors entranced by the final exquisite piece that made up the beautiful experience I found myself a part of. 

I couldn’t tell you how I came to be in the doorway, or how long it took me to get there from where I stood before, but somehow I arrived. The station whispers murmured at my back as they yearned to be combined with each drawn out Erhu tear. Together, it all sang as my eyes saw the instrument being played by a man who seemed to have left another time to be there in front of me. It was all utterly entrancing. Although the man wore blue jeans and a green Costco sweater, his face and body didn’t belong to the rest of the modern world. It was as if he’d been transplanted, with no context or story to accompany him, donning a costume so as not to draw attention. He was simply there with his pure sound; the final piece to complete an experience of beauty. In a moment of utter simplicity, devoid of the chaos, complication, and noise of the rest of the world, I was transfixed, transformed, and static–– paralyzed by the moment. I could hear each piece of the orchestra chiming in–– BING, SWOOSH, CLICK, GRIND, ANGELA. I could also hear what the pieces created together; one wholy perfect pronunciation of a beautiful world. Then, “MOVE YOUR ASS! YOU CAN’T STAND THERE!” A man shouted as he rushed past me, disgusted that I would dare to stand in his way. He growled when his arm roughly rushed my shoulder as he went. Just like that, the spell was broken.

~~~

In reading Walter Pater’s “The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry”, I am reminded of this moment at Waterfront Station with its crescendo of sound. I recall how I perceived it as a perfect snapshot, capturing a momentary beauty in both its entirety and in seeing that beauty for each individual piece that collaborated in making up the experience. Pater expresses that “beauty… is relative.” While one may find, as perhaps my ungentlemanly friend did, a train station as an unremarkable means to an end that one must cross through to get to wherever they need to go, I saw it instead as a work of art. The building itself, although nowhere near containing the character of other buildings around the world, has a kind of charm and personality that I find entrancing. If you let them, the high ceilings with their curved architecture may coax your eye up to feel the romantic expanse of the space. The visual of the station in its entirety is entrancing. All the same, each unique and solitary element that make up the whole act “as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations” (Pater. Preface) that are valuable as they exist and interact with each other in their own particular way. The young man who yelled at me, his hair perfectly quaffed, with a long wool coat draping a smart grey suit, and a pair of beautifully shined Oxfords, giving off an air of professional success, presumably did not see the world as I did in that moment. He was clearly beautiful, but so was the space he was travelling through. Did he not see it? This begs the question, that I imagine Pater would have asked: who decides what beauty is? What exactly is it that is “producing pleasurable sensations”? (Pater. Preface). How can we learn to see through the business, the dirt, the noise, and overstimulation of a world obsessed with doing more, going farther, working harder, and progressing faster? How do we get to a place where we can savour each moment and each element for its purity? Can we truly remove the clutter surrounding every moment of every day in this modern and chaotic world to reveal ecstasy lying dormant within? I often wonder how I was able to experience such an off-planet experience while my vocal compatriot did not. Did he not see the beauty at all? Could he not appreciate the ideal majesty? Pater believed, that we should perhaps make an “effort to tranquilise and sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments.” This is something that comes naturally to me, at times to a fault, as when I purchased a white enamel stove made in 1950 because of the quaint look it would give my home only to discover that the wires were faulty and the oven stopped working, causing me to do my cooking in a toaster oven. It’s true that I often attempt to sweeten life through ideals such as this, which may help me when I stop to feel what the train station is offering, but may not help me logically progress and make wise choices throughout my life.Yet perhaps that stove, as other perceived elements of sweetness in this life, has a purpose in its beauty alone. If it brings me joy, was it really a waste when it is unable to fully function? No. It remains a favourite  piece in my home, simply because it is beautiful. Perhaps one day it will work. 

While one may find the ideal to be a foolish venture, not based in reality, and a notion which may in fact steer us away from what is important and necessary to make progress, it may also be true that without the ideal, what in fact is there to progress through life for? Moments of beauty, where I am struck frozen, or where excitement fills every sense to a point where I can hardly remember what I did or said, are the keys to this question. Such manic moments are those times where the ideal is worth it, because a joy filling your body through the pursuit of that ideal is incomparable. Those who have experienced this can attest to its wonder. Pater discusses “sight experience [that] seems to bury us under a  flood of external objects… But when reflection begins to play… these objects are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like some trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions –– colour, odor, texture––” (Pater. Conclusion). Here, I understand that it is through the reflection of life events; of the moments of tension and beauty, where I began years ago to see art and magic in life. Just as Pater knew that “...in aesthetic criticism, the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is…” I could see Waterfront station for what it really was; made up by wondrous elements creating a cohesive vision because I had an impression of my own reality. I knew who I was in that moment, where I came from, where I was going. I had time in the moment to let it all envelop me as I learned to understand the train station as well as I understood myself, and to see it in its most beautiful light. Pater discussed an object or thing that one can perhaps see, touch, and hold, but the argument can be made that the way we see an object based on whether or not we see ourselves clearly, can be translated to perceiving a moment in its purity only if we can clearly see ourselves in the moment as well. The question here is, whether or not in my retelling of my outlandish station experience I am able to pare back the excess, see myself standing at the centre of it all, and recreate each piece in a clear, concise, and perfectly beautiful way, so the observer of my experience may have the luxury of seeing the beauty for themselves. 

In retelling tales of my life, I have a tendency to over-explain. I retell stories like the one at Waterfront Station, as if I am still overwhelmed by the senses, taking in all the details that came together so perfectly to make up such a visceral experience. Quite often, however, the consequences of this excitement results in a delivery similar to that of a lost chicken in distress; feathers everywhere and not a story to be seen. I was struck by Pater’s understanding of this when he captures the life of Italian Renaissance artist, Michelangelo in explaining that “[Michelangelo]secures that ideality of expression… by an incompleteness… and trusts the spectator to complete the half-emergent form” (The Poetry of Michelangelo). In this way, the artist’s job is not to tell or explain what the observer should think or experience, they are simply to show what is there and allow the other to make up their own mind –– a lesson of removing a perceived control that I still must practice.  Art, however, is not about the control. Beauty is more beautiful when it breaks down the walls. Art is subjective. It is a different experience for everyone. My struggle for simplicity and my incessant need to overindulge and overcomplicate, perhaps comes from a deep seated uncertainty in myself, and in my ability to adequately capture visions of awe for anyone outside of me to understand. In over-trying –– though I feel I am doing a favour ––– I am in fact muddying the waters.  I should instead, take heed of what Pater is describing in Michelangelo as his ability to create “the brooding spirit of life itself” (The Poetry of Michelangelo) by taking on a  less is more strategy–– to embrace the imbalance, imperfection, and incompleteness in my work and use precisely that to perfect what I describe. Even in Michelangelo’s poetry, Pater explains that it was often scribbled in the margins of notebooks where various other sketches and ideas were formed. They are an expression, and in their perceived chaos and incompleteness are actually saying more in what they are not saying, allowing for a work of art that “shall excite or surprise [and] shall give pleasure and exert charm… a lovely strangeness” (Pater. The Poetry of Michelangelo). That is not to say that one should not edit and revise to produce a clean description, but should instead get it down madly and organically before cleaning it up and pairing back the excess to reveal the core at its finest.  It is my desire to learn from Michelangelo in his ability to capture and carve beauty through a serious exactness. As a result, through clarity and the pursuit of pure beauty, I can learn to express much more by saying much less. In this exploration I can perhaps begin to acquire a certain mindfulness not only in the way I perceive the world, but also in how I capture and express the beauty that exists within it and that which I feel so deeply. By extension, perhaps, I will become what Pater describes as an aesthetic critic.

Pater explains that “the function of the aesthetic critic is to distinguish, to analyse and separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a picture, a landscape… produces this special impression of beauty or pleasure” (Pater. Preface). The critic will have succeeded only when that virtue is extracted and noted cleanly and specifically. The only way, perhaps to do this well is through  a sense of self awareness. By knowing how I experience the world, how I internalize it, and how it affects me, I am able to be transparent in the way I recount and describe my perceptions to others. In this way, I will have practiced awareness of myself and my interaction in the world and will then become a cleaner reteller of exquisite events. We must be ready and learn to do this because, “art comes to [us] proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality of [our] moments as they pass, and simply for those moment’s sake” (Pater. Conclusion). Watching for those moments, and knowing what to do with them as they arrive and pass by, is how we become Pater’s aesthetic critic.

Mindfulness–– a notion I discovered quite by accident after one of my states of experience and reflection–– is something I hold close to my heart. It is perhaps the reason I am able to have such strong moments of seeing the beauty throughout my life; feeling the breath in a train station, hearing the silence on a mountain top, waltzing through an  autumn forest,  or strolling past a rose and stopping to take in every curve of its aroma. The more I practice mindfulness in my experiences, the more I am able to see them in real time out in the world. The ungentleman who yelled at me to “move my ass”, was certainly not in a state of mindfulness, and not prepared to be open to the art that may slap him across the face without him feeling a thing.  I cannot say whether or not he had experienced something similar, at another time, to what I was so entranced with,  but if he could practice slowing down, taking in the sights and sounds, and making a conscious effort to be more mindful, he may appreciate these notions that Pater and I connect with. He may not have yelled at me so aggressively in my state of pure pleasure. Yet, in a world where progress is the goal, and where a certain level of chaos constantly vibrates in a life filled with distraction, can I really blame him? What would Pater say to him? It is due to the unravelling madness out in the streets today that perhaps we need more than ever to listen to Pater. We must learn to practice Pater’s understanding of cutting out the excess, leaving us with only the essence of what life has to offer and seeing it–– truly seeing it. The artist or observer then takes that essence and begins to “work quite cleanly, casting off all the debris, and leaving us only what the heat of their imagination wholly fused and transformed” (Pater. Introduction). The result is in the transition into an embodiment of the aesthetic critic, as Pater would have us be, allowing ourselves to be in the moment, to live life in its purest form, and to slow down, removing the offscourings to reveal this incredible frenzied world as a sensational work of art. Just as Michelangelo was able to remove the excess stone to reveal the David, we too can “burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain ecstacy…” (Pater. Conclusion); within that ecstacy is the nectar of life for us to observe, enjoy, and capture in all its glory. Thus in the end, those of us who practice life in this way, may understand beauty as it truly is, and as we see it–– relative, precise, and personal to our human experience. It is here, where I continue to learn to be precise in describing the beauty I see, in hopes that I might be able to accurately emanate “the brooding spirit of life itself” (Pater. The Poetry of Michelangelo) that does exist at Waterfront Station. The question is, will I be able to cast off distractions? Can I learn to carve out the excess to reveal what lies within? Will I be self aware enough to not only experience the magic but also to capture and express it in its purest form? I suppose time, practice, mindfulness, and a few more conversations with Walter Horacio Pater is the only way to tell. 

Works Cited

"Preface By Walter Horatio Pater." Victorianweb.org. N. p., 2001. Web. 13 Oct. 2019.

"The Poetry Of Michelangelo By Walter Horatio Pater." Victorianweb.org. N. p., 2001. Web. 13 Oct. 2019.

"Conclusion." Victorianweb.org. N. p., 2001. Web. 13 Oct. 2019.