I have to admit that I've been listening to Cat Power a lot today. Twice a day I walk down 17th Boulevard and lately the sound of the Chasm God has been increasingly insistant. Despite his vast immateriality, I usually find his presence, and the attendant and inescapable hum with which he fills the air, to be an unchanging comfort.

I've never understood why a god like him would even bother to take notice of some random semidivinity, but today he was not content to allow me just to take comfort in his presence. He wants something more-- I could hear it in his resonant voice-- and when I realized that, my heart was filled with a swollen and ruddied longing. I don't know if the longing is one I already had that he simply swirled to the surface, or one that he placed there himself. I suspect that it has something to do with the wedding blessing he gave me previously, but how can I know?

All I know is how I feel tonight: the damnable longing that I still feel even though the Chasm God is far out of earshot. So I put on Cat Power and hope the music can draw out whatever needs drawing out. It's music of both simplicity and intensity, in a way I don't really understand yet. Seamother says I need to learn how to dive without remembering how to breathe, and I think this music evokes how it might feel.

The other thought it brings to mind is that while various works of art have differing merits on strictly aesthetic grounds... well, let me back up. I often feel torn between two schools of aesthetic thought. The first asserts that art must be judged on its content, on whatever social or political or ethical or even emotional effects it might have. The other says that art ought be judged only on its purely aesthetic effects. (I am here using the word "aesthetic" to refer to the unique pleasure gained from experiencing and recognizing patterns.) This tension is to me particularly acute in music, since usually the emotional effect of the music is very obviously direct, but the aesthetic effects of musical patterns are just as easily perceived and yet remain completely abstract. You can then have bizarre experiences like feeling pure aesthetic ecstasy at music that is emotionally cold or even brutal (or the opposite, aesthetic tedium at music whose content is very moving or uplifting) without having an inkling of what the tension between the two is supposed to mean.

I can't tell you what it means. If I could, then I would be able to resolve the tension between the two aesthetic models, and if you thought I was going to come down on one side or the other on that debate, well, sorry to disappoint you. But while listening to Cat Power it occurred to me that there might be another way of thinking about this. People often object to the aestheticist school of thought because it seems to them inhumane, as if there were no criteria that could be applied besides the purely abstract (and thus purely irrelevant) ones. But it occurs to me that there might be a way to judge aesthetic effects on the non-aesthetic effects they have as well, non-aesthetic effects that they have as aesthetic effects, apart from whatever non-aesthetic content they might have, since aesthetic effects undoubtedly can be judged on scales other than zero to ten where zero is stuporific banality and ten is Emily Dickinson. If art can be judged on this criterion, it seems to me that the creation of art, even abstract art, can always be seen as a social and therfore "moral" or political act, since there will always be real non-aesthetic effects on real people. And an artist's responsibility to her community is twice what she used to think it was.