Acquiring Traits Through Media

[Xwing1056]

You’re describing something with the word personality that I would describe with mood. Getting pumped up has nothing to do with your personality.

I feel like there’s a big gap between mood and personality, so it might just be a semantic disagreement. For example, I’m not going to challenge the idea that music “pumps you up” or whatever, but I don’t know if I’d call that even a temporary change in personality.

I agree that mood swings do not amount to personality changes. However, as you change moods, you express yourself differently. Anger makes people speak tersely and forcefully, with less concern about tact, while amusement makes people choose more loopy and elliptical language.

If you are in a particular mood long enough, you may get in the habit of expressing yourself that way. It is not that the music brainwashes you; more like it creates an environment where you practice certain behaviors, both inward and outward. Do this long enough, and eventually, long after you have stopped listening, you retain your instinct to act that way. In my view, these acquired habits can add up to a personality change.

Arac, you said, “I don’t think listening to more grindcore is going to make me more abrasive/aggressive or whatever.” True enough, abrasive music does not necessarily make an abrasive person. The question is what mood grindcore does put you in, and how you act when you are in that mood, and–assuming you listen to grindcore often enough–what habits you pick up in the process.

[Arac]

Yeah, I just don’t think the effects are consistent enough or have enough magnitude to really make personality changes, or at least in my case. The people who you hang out with through music are more likely to have an effect; I might pick up traits from people who like grindcore, but I don’t think I’ll get much/any noticeable change from listening to it on my own. I guess it is a Yeats/Whitman thing.

[Rigmarole]

Nature vs nurture pops its ugly head once again.

[GG_Crono]

I’ve got a habit of peppering my speech with mild British profanities like “bloody” and “bugger”, mainly from absorbing a lot of Monty Python and Terry Pratchett.

[Silhouette2]

Yeats vs. Whitman is a rather imbalanced dichotomy to be setting up.

Of course one’s habits in artistic experience affect their ‘personalities.’ However, I append to that the belief that our choices in artistic experience, like our discoveries there, are for the most part random and haphazard. And the element of discovery is an extremely important one. We don’t choose the music we listen to, much less the music that reaches us, from off a shelf or in a storefront window, despite the existence of those. The closest analogue is love. It’s entirely possible to choose ‘your’ music, to use it as a projection of your own personality, perhaps, and to alter or even end it based on the opinions and advice of acquaintances and received wisdom, but it’s also possible, apparently, to never fall in love with another person.

[Arac]

So it’s really a Laclos/Richardson dichotomy, is what you’re saying.

Take your virtue, je puis dire que je suis mon ouvrage.

[Xwing1056]

Yeats vs. Whitman is a rather imbalanced dichotomy to be setting up.

Funny you should say that.

It’s a good dichotomy, and being a partisan in it, I didn’t recognize the parts we were acting out at the time.

http://agora.rpgclassics.com/showthread.php?27103-Rampant-masturbation&p=566843&viewfull=1#post566843. One of the more memorable threads.

Of course one’s habits in artistic experience affect their ‘personalities.’ . . . The closest analogue is love. It’s entirely possible to choose ‘your’ music, to use it as a projection of your own personality, perhaps, and to alter or even end it based on the opinions and advice of acquaintances and received wisdom, but it’s also possible, apparently, to never fall in love with another person.

I agree that tastes in music are roughly as tractable as tastes in love. To push the analogy further, you can stay in love when a girl is away, and it will keep affecting your personality. The way music affects you after enjoying it many times is a sort of pale reflection of that. A flawed imitation.

But we’ve been through this.

Emulating [Yeats] in writing might be a good idea (although I really don’t like a large amount of his work), but his personal life is not something to attempt to recreate . . . Disdaining reason because Yeats did is pretty much the same thing as me becoming gay because Wilde was.

The idea that one can separate an artist’s “personal life” from his art is a travesty of language. . . . The idea one can separate the subject of “the artist” (“Yeats” here) into a million different predicates is a fallacy that happens when we let the rules of language take over our thinking.

It seems, Arac, that you’re more interested in the worldly figures of literature: the ones with loads of life experience, and broad worldviews, the genial and political types. . . . You, Silhouette, seem more interested in the introverts and aesthetes, the ones who care more about the beauty of their living experience than vast social movements, the ones who spend their time musing about passions and ideas.

http://agora.rpgclassics.com/showthread.php?27103

[Silhouette2]

It’s still true that there’s no other kind of artist, at least no other kind of successful one. I didn’t go back and read the old thread, but if it’s supposed there that Whitman was some kind of worldly figure who actually was out and about doing anything in society (other than maybe his nursing duties during the civil war) whoever thinks that would be dead wrong. And in fact, Yeats, being essentially what we today call a ‘public intellectual,’ a constant writer of articles and editor of volumes, a widely traveled man with friends across the world, a senator of the nascent Irish state, ultimately the living representative of Ireland itself to the rest of the people of the globe, was a far more active and worldly man than the retiring, absolutely introverted Whitman, who spent the last 30 years of his life as a tourist destination. Although each certainly tried to give the public the wrong impression, as the requirements of his poetic stance dictated.

However, no artist ever lasted based on his worldly pursuits, successful or not. The closest thing we have is probably… I can’t think of an artist who is well-known to us the quality of whose actions overshadows the art. Although if you were to asked Yeats, he would say Oscar Wilde, whom he saw as a frustrated man of action, who had to resort to writing (in fact, so would have Wilde, who said ‘I saved my art for life’ when asked why he hadn’t written a masterpiece [of course he had, in addition to his brilliant critical writings]). Cases like Byron and Hemingway don’t hold, because the stories of their doings are 1.) largely self-mythologizing and 2.) aren’t better than their art.

This doesn’t mean that the great artists were all wilting violets, but they’ve almost entirely been basically sedentary types who are intensely focused on their art. Take Hemingway for example, who for all the bravado, ended his life as a cat lady, rising early and ascending a tower to assemble minutiae.

[Xwing1056]

Frankly, I think most discussion of Whitman’s personality is speculative. True, he didn’t write many letters, but that says nothing about how much he chatted in person. There’s no evidence he had any romantic relationships, but that’s hardly proof they didn’t happen. Our records on Yeats are better, but the fact that he was a “smiling public man” who gave lectures and wrote articles still doesn’t convey what he was like in person.

It’s also a huge exaggeration to say great artists have “almost entirely been basically sedentary types.” How about Christopher Marlowe (spy for Queen Elizabeth), Goethe (chief adviser to a grand duke), Philip Sydney (courtier and soldier), John Donne (shameless playboy, then bishop), John Milton (revolutionary and Secretary in the English Commonwealth), Voltaire (exiled criminal), and Percy Shelley (well-traveled revolutionary infamous for his atheism)?

Anyway, I didn’t mean to start a discussion of historical figures. My point was that, in 2006 just as now, you (a Yeats fan) saw connections between art and personality, and Arac (a Whitman fan) thought those connections were fanciful nonsense. Yeats trained his poetic eye on an inner world and Whitman focused on the outside world. Hence, my suspicion that Yeats fans would be more receptive to discussions about emotional-artistic cause and effect.

[Arac]

Again, just to clarify, nonsense is a little strong. I would just say it’s a matter of correlation, not causation, or that if there’s any causal relationship, its magnitude is very limited. I was more saying that being a reason-hating, politically-spastic, supernationalist freakshow doesn’t mean you’ll write good poetry just because Yeats was and he did. A lot of great writers are reason-hating, politically-spastic freakshows, but that isn’t what makes them great, by any means.

[Sinistral]

So what?

[Xwing1056]

So what?

I find the idea that art can affect personality much more interesting than a scientific discovery that might extend my life by a few months or a new law that will increase my tax burden by a few hundred dollars. More important too.

[Sinistral]

Oh I don’t dispute how art can influence people. I steal lines from books, movies, games I like. While a lot of people rely on the outside world to tell them what they are, the true usefulness is to have it serve as a medium to better express yourself. The other way around is cheap and vulgar.

My so what was thus not directed at the purpose of the thread, but the general sub discussion of arac vs silhouette. Its a lot of foreplay that seeks to get around a point about the substance of the individuals, which you alluded to, but without actually getting to the core of it.

[The_984]

Its a lot of foreplay that seeks to get around a point about the substance of the individuals, which you alluded to, but without actually getting to the core of it.

Yep, that’s foreplay alright. A whole bunch of dicking around without, well, dicking.

[Arac]

I’m gonna be honest, I am really not sure what Sin’s sentence meant, like, at all.

[Xwing1056]

While a lot of people rely on the outside world to tell them what they are, the true usefulness is to have it serve as a medium to better express yourself.

Agreed. And I think for every time you’re aware of art influencing your speech, it happens countless times unconsciously. Usually in subtle ways that are hard to trace back to their source.

[Silhouette2]

Yes, but a government consultant, a courtier, a bishop, and a secretary make up rather sedentary company, despite their distance from poetry. Bless Philip Sydney, dead in battle, but he is the exception and not the rule. I too am an admirer of Whitman (you’d be an idiot not to be), and despite that the child went forth and what he touched he became, I adhere to the general critical principle that the thing any poem is most like is another poem.

I also think though that Whitman’s eye, in his best work at least, was also firmly trained on the subject of ‘Song of Myself.’

[Arac]

I adhere to the general critical principle that the thing any poem is most like is another poem.

A pretty girl is like a pretty girl.

[Silhouette2]

Yes, unfortunately it bears repeating against those who might say it most resembles a political tract or a fist against a woman’s face. Or even something as innocent as a painting.

[Arac]

Or a violent crime; if you do it wrong, you could do time, but if you do it right it’s just sublime.