11. Holding the Dream: The Nature of Aesthetic Appreciation

In these lines from the Prelude Wordsworth captures the essence of aesthetic appreciation through symbolic congruence: the ‘fitting’ of the individual mind to the aesthetic object, in such a way that boundaries merge and yet the independent integrity of both partners in the drama — internal and external world — is affirmed and radiates significance. He does this without any selfconscious rhetoric relating to the ‘pathetic fallacy’; no ‘as if's’ or personifications; it is simply described as a fact, that the mind at the bottom of the lake of consciousness is pressed upon by the weight of water reflecting the sky, in such a way that it both holds and is held by this ethereal expanse of light which has taken on a quality of weight and density — sinking ‘down’ (as if like a stone) yet in fact like a ‘dream’. The alternation of down and up-movements, suggesting increase and decrease in density, confirms the sense of dissolving and reforming boundaries as mind seeks congruence in nature and through this, the experience of becoming known. Likewise, Adrian Stokes speaks of architecture as being a ‘solid dream’, in which ‘directions and alternatives and the vague character of a weighty impress’ are captured, held, integrated with ‘full cognizance of space’, until the ‘changing surfaces, in-out, smooth-rough, light-dark, up-down, all manner of trustful absorption by space, are activated further than in a dream’. And as an extension of this, Stokes describes aesthetic response in general, as recalling and holding the ‘feel’ of a dream:

Appreciation is a mode of recognition: we recognise but we

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cannot name, we cannot recall by an effort of will: the contents that reach us in the terms of aesthetic form have the ‘feel’ of a dream that is otherwise forgotten …

(‘The Lux