There is a song called Have You Seen Me Lately, recorded and placed on the Counting Crows album Across A Wire. Every time the acoustic music starts I remember heading further and further west than I'd ever been in my life. I remember the endless deserts and rock formations of New Mexico and Arizona. I remember being in San Francisco staring at the top bunk in the hostel thinking about everything I'd seen and done that week and playing the song as the cool San Francisco air crept through the open windows to toss the curtains. This morning when I heard the track I could almost taste the pacific air at sunset and the fog which rolled in to blanket the hills in the distance. I remember so much just by playing the song, and today it got me thinking again.

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I started a new book this week called Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds. It is a book which explores views by Lewis' and the influence imagination had on his thinking and writing pre and post conversion to Christianity. In the first chapter the author describes one of Lewis' views on art. Lewis perceived there to be two kinds of imaginative engagement when it came to art. These are "using" and "receiving."

The book explains that "using" is how most people approach the arts. This method makes art very subjective and selective to the viewer and details of the work serve as a "self-starter for certain imaginative and emotional activities or your own." When I read this I instantly could see how much I am a user of art. How I pick pieces out of art and run with it, disregarding all the rest. The author mentions how this neglects the work as a whole. It is hard to see what the artwork actually is and what it is trying to say when it is "used."

Lewis describes himself as a user of the arts as well. The book has a passage from a letter written by Lewis in which he admits, "I ... suspect that most of my enjoyment [of music] is emotion produced out of my own imagination at rather slight hints." The author writes that, "using is an imaginative response to art, but a very limited level of response: it is a self-absorbed re-creation, or re-experiencing, of what is already in the person's imagination." He goes on to say, "There is no openness to a new and larger experience."

In the chapter, "Receiving" is described by the author as, "a much deeper, richer imaginative response." It is a state where the viewer receives profound and powerful meanings given by the work itself. A state with greater concentration on the work and less on the self. Lewis said, "When we 'receive' it we exert our senses and imagination and various other powers according to a pattern invented by the artist." We are told to lay aside our preconceptions, self absorbed expectations, and personal needs or cravings, making room for the work itself. To get ourselves out of the way, as Lewis described it.

This takes us to the point where we surrender to the work itself. In the visual arts we surrender to the elements like line and color. In writing we surrender to the style and the form of the text. We are to be captured temporality inside the world of the art and dwell inside the realm created more by the work than by our self. Only then can we "get it," as the term is used so often by people.

Reading this has made me think about art even more in recent days than I have in the last few weeks. I think the best would be to find a middle ground between the aspects. Most who know me will know that I have always been deeply fascinated with what art means versus what we perceive of it. The book has allowed me to further my thoughts on the subject. Right now I feel like we should never fully disregard the "using" aspect, but we should move closer to "receiving" than most of us are. I feel that to perceive a work of art as from the artist and not from the altered version coming from inside us is a valuable tool to understanding art itself.

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In conclusion I will note that Have You Seen Me Lately is a song which Adam Duritz wrote to describe how he felt after his first album and tour. How all of the sudden he could hardly walk down the street without people seeing him. How strange it was to hear his own music on the radio and how much all of this was changing him. It's almost a plea to anyone that has seen him lately to tell him one thing they remember about how he was before all this change. He mentioned in an interview that he thinks almost every well known artist has a work like this in which they deal with the aspect of huge fame. To understand the music on this level changes it a lot for me, but not enough to stifle the feeling it gives me inside. To "receive" the art is not to destroy the "using" aspect of it, but to enhance it.