“Art is about waking people up.”

This oracular proclamation appeared, as if from nowhere, on my journal page. That’s the whole entry – ka-boom! – scribbled en route to wee, in a wee hour, as if in a dream.

I often find myself thinking about art. It’s not a choice, surely no duty. Awake I’m allergic to abstractions. Any disquisitions about art or beauty, even by Santayana, leave me panting for the real deal.

Yet the mystery never quits tickling, taunting. Why is it humans, seemingly alone among species, go to unimaginable effort to create useless loveliness? How impractical! Inefficient! Maybe back in the day, art’s intent was to attract mates – those prehistoric cave-painters may have been luckier with the ladies (unless it was the ladies who did the painting) – but for at least three millennia our artistic productions have absurdly exceeded their utility. Why pyramids, the Parthenon, the Sistine ceiling or B-minor mass? To the glory of gods? How’s that again?

What distinguishes humans from all other creatures is our speculative intelligence. We can envision what we cannot see: yesterday, tomorrow, history, what might yet be. Whether our talent proves blessing or curse the jury’s still out. This idea of persons who weren’t present naturally generated writing, fortifications, engineering and, of course, art. The more we thought, the better we got at it. Other species have abler bodies, but humans win with our minds.

The problem with thought is it’s infinite and exhausting. Any human must make our way through a wilderness of information and notions, securing a few, discarding the rest. It’s hard work thinking, we tire, and retreat into truths we embrace as axioms. To retain our sanity, we must avoid thinking too much. Endless questioning is a parachute jump without a parachute.

Art nudges or jolts us awake. It beguiles us with scenes or sounds we recognize, then distorts or exaggerates so we perceive them differently, forcing us to feel. Art is a revision, that is, a seeing again, of the familiar. It’s exciting waking up – for a while – but then we crave a return to our complacencies. “Human kind,” as T.S. Eliot put it, “cannot bear very much reality.”

Art, then, strains to be both familiar and strange. The most potent art is both very familiar and very strange. It wakes us so we tingle.

The maker’s trick – this is true of any medium – is to gratify us with the familiar and unsettle us with the strange. Art that doesn’t surprise bores. From art that’s too strange we recoil. We want to be wakened – and permitted to return to our rest.

The other day, I listened to Mahler’s Second Symphony, Bernstein conducting. Though a work I know pretty well, I listened with full attention. Why was I so moved? Somehow, Mahler begins with sounds I recognize, inviting me aboard, then launches us to an unimaginable extreme, like a ball on a string, to the farthest reaches of exaltation and terror, but always with the promise of return. I was too busy feeling to think – and that thrilling respite from thought returned me to the world of thought refreshed, awake.

Writers have different tools to perform this magic. The writers I revere tweak and tug our attention with every word. They launch us onto a whirligig of sound and sense so we feel what we’re being told before he think it. Their words may be old, even threadbare, but they feel spanking new, as if invented for the occasion. AI will never touch them, for they are saying for the first time what has never quite been said.