Chiasmi

 

 

Chiasmus: a rhetorical or literary figure in which words, grammatical constructions, or concepts are repeated in reverse order, in the same or a modified form; e.g. ‘Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.’.

A riff on a diary entry 8/18/2005:

Social commentary works in art only when a majority of the opposition is willing to change their minds. (This happened in the Vietnam War when the carnage reached the tipping point).

8/18/2024

A willingness to change one’s mind is evidence that we do have free will because we know there is another way of thinking–a ”free willingness”. As regards the effect of art on changing minds I am of two minds (as a chiasmus): Either a changed mind changes the art that an artist makes, or the new ideas and ways of thinking and working changes their mind. 

A good word to describe an experience that is transformative is “galvanized” (to stimulate or excite as if by an electric shock) which can happen at the individual and collective levels. A common one from the 60s was seeing the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show. It’s commonly mentioned in interviews with musicians who were teenagers then. The next day they knew it was something they wanted to pursue. Their minds were quickly changed, and perhaps you’d see changes in the brain in an MRI. The Beatles weren’t (initially) social commentary but became that by 1966 because of the shock of the Vietnam War, among other changes happening in the world at that time. In terms of the Turnings (as in The Fourth Turning), it was the Second Turning, "The Awakening". It changed the way they made music. It changed the way music was made. But behind all of that is a willingness–or perhaps it isn’t at all. It could be that there is something behind those decisions that we aren’t aware of which could simply be physiological in nature and related to the function or malfunction of neurotransmitters. That would be the “black box” of what we see as free will. You might have been galvanized by something or were in a state that could be more easily galvanized.

Artists’ political positions are very often important to people in their teens and 20s because they’re looking for a way to be in the world, and they emulate them. An example in music is the musical hero, where you want the instruments they play, for example. I had to have a Rickenbacker 4001 bass because I was a Rush fan in 1977--and if you’re interested in writing, they are the inspiration for it. It makes you who you will become, until your mind is changed again and you make adjustments accordingly because you were changing your mind. For artists, it’s easy to make those shifts after being shocked by something because it’s not really a traumatic event. “Sea changes” can work well collectively for a common good, as opposed to “paradigm shifts” which seems to suggest an unwillingness by a segment of the population that the ground will be shifted under their feet.