How Can Art and Literature Change A Person?

Ariana Reines, Michael Clune and Jordan Castro.

Introduction

The following is an edited transcript from Cluny Institute’s 2025 METANOIA conference, which brought together speakers from across disciplines to discuss the nature of conversion. The following conversation is an exploration of the ways that art and literature can change a person.

Ariana Reines is an award-winning poet, playwright, and translator. Her newest books are The Rose (Graywolf 2025) and Wave of Blood (Divided UK 2024). A Sand Book was longlisted for the National Book Award & won the Kingsley Tufts Prize in 2020. Also in 2020, while a Divinity student at Harvard, Reines founded Invisible College, an online space for the study of poetry and sacred texts.

Michael Clune is the author of the novel Pan, the memoirs Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, and three academic books, most recently A Defense of Judgment (University of Chicago, 2023). His essays have appeared in Harper’s, Critical Inquiry, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Best American Essays, PMLA and elsewhere.

Jordan Castro is a novelist, essayist, and the Deputy Director of the Cluny Institute. He is on the board of the DiTrapano Foundation for Literature and the Arts. He is author of novel The Novelist, and the forthcoming Muscle Man.

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Conversation

Watch the entirety of Literary Conversion here.

Jordan Castro: In my early twenties, I kept having this experience where people would come up to me and say things like, This book changed my life. Or even, Your book helped me a lot. But it was not obvious, from the outside looking in, that their lives had changed at all. I was like, What are you people even talking about?

I’d like to talk about not just whether literature can change a person, but also the mechanism by which it changes a person. I wanted to start by just asking each of you how the practice of reading and writing has changed your life.

Michael Clune: When it comes to the question of transformation, I think of the medieval Buddhist philosopher Dogen—a desire for transformation is often a block to actual transformation. Dogen said that you don't need to meditate to get enlightened. You're already enlightened. Now just meditate.

Transformation is all about what the poet Keats called negative capability, which is the capacity to be open to just seeing something new.

When I was fifteen, someone gave me a translation of the French poet Rimbaud. It was like nothing I'd ever read. And yet, I would have glimpses in reading the words and strange symbols. It wasn't a glimpse of reality, or of understanding the work, but it was almost like a glimpse into the kind of mind that it would take for me to truly understand the work.

There was this phantom virtual mind that was projected by the text, and I was reaching towards it. I began to grasp the richness of the work. And it changed the way I see the world.

The transformation that literature can offer is very practical. It's the first time you look at the first page of a book and you're trying to orient yourself. You're trying to figure out, What kind of book is this? What kind of person do I need to be? What kind of call is this making on me? And being receptive to that is the challenge.

This is totally against our culture's idea that art should be “relatable”. That it should meet us where we are, rather than calling us out of ourselves into a new state of perception, a new state of being.

Ariana Reines: What's peculiar about being a poet is nobody knows what it is. It's really weird—and you can't see it.

Poetry exists in books, but that's hardly a fraction of it. Most of it is a felt experience of language. And what's bizarre about making art with something that everybody uses is there's an uncanny quality of it being both mine and not mine.

I didn't invent the language. I'm not even using it to craft a narrative. I'm doing something that's so close to my body, my sensations, and my experience—there's almost narrative happening in it—but it, it's closer to this unhomely, uncanny kind of immanence, of something that seems to be happening not only to me, but through me and with me, that language partakes of.

It's weird to make art like that, that's so close to nothing.

I don't know where to draw the line between what literature is and isn't. But what I got from Rimbaud and other initiators into the mystery is a sense of intimacy.

We are in a crisis of intimacy on the planet. We are utterly mediated. A book is a mediated product too. There are editors, people who are selling it, designers between the reader and the original vision. It turns into something different from inner experience. But what interests me the most is inner experience. And I'm able to stay close to my own by practicing poetry, which basically just means writing random shit down and not knowing why and not knowing where it will lead.

Every book changes my life, even the bad ones I’ve read.

I'm interested in that unmediated contact. I don't think it's a bad thing that people say that literature changes them, that a book changed them or that it helped them. I feel like what that means on some level is that there's something they were feeling or looking for that they were able to see reflected. And that's very enlarging to the spirit.

Michael: Proust said that one of the basic causes of suffering is habit, which is neurobiological. Our sensorium is designed to economize perception. It takes a lot of energy to really see something. After you’re familiar with it, you no longer really see it. This involves the erasure of the world.

Think of the house you live in. Compare the first time you went there to the 1000th time. Now that you’ve lived there for a couple years, you don't even really see anything. You just register it.

Art is a technology for defeating this problem. Art overcomes habit. We think of an artwork as an object. We say “art object,” but it's wrong. We should say art subject, because it's a matrix of subjectivity—it allows you to see the world through someone else's eyes. And through their eyes, the world becomes new. It’s like when a piece of music you love becomes dull—but then you introduce a friend to it and it makes it new for you too.

Novelty is life. Newness is new life. The stakes are as high as they can possibly be. This is not just some imaginary thing. Literature actually does this.

Ariana: This otherness you're talking about, the encounter with the other through art, enlarges my soul. It also causes me to have empathy with aspects of my own experience that I might not have had a road into. It's not just that it turns me toward the world and toward others, but in this kind of mysterious way, it makes me visible or accessible to a kind of divine witness.

“Here there is no place that does not see you / You must change your life”— that’s Rilke’s famous sonnet “The Archaic Torso of Apollo.” He’s not talking about looking at art, or a historical artifact. He’s talking about being utterly seen by it, by the depths of time, even by God. The true artwork sees YOU.

And it doesn’t stop changing you. It doesn’t just happen one time. I think this is what I'm living for.

Jordan: I want to ask you both about the practice of judgement.

Micheal: The enemy of transformation—and the enemy of great literature—is basically the ethos of our society, which is: We're going to respond to what you already like.

It’s pseudo-egalitarian; it transfers the belief in the equality of persons to the equality of consumer preferences. So the idea that there might be some desires that are better than other desires, or some values that are better than other values, is controversial. It goes against the whole consumerist ethos of our culture.

The ground of transformation is dissatisfaction with what I already like. With what I want. With who I am.

Negativity has to come first. You have to cultivate negativity.

I grew up an immigrant, working-class, first-generation college student, living in a suburb in Chicago—and I gradually got the feeling: This all sucks. Everything sucks. This culture sucks. Everything is just a world of gray, flat crap. And that was powerful, because it was like—wow, this literature stuff, this is something different.

And not just different in an “everything’s equal, everyone likes different things” kind of way. Generations of people have testified to the greatness of William Blake, or Milton, or Emily Dickinson. And that was the faith I needed. I would go to the “classics” section in the bookstore and just feel a call on me. It was a call to say that there is something higher and better than this flat landscape, constantly addressing my existing preferences.

Ariana: It's very peculiar to be living in times that are so pious. What's strange about language is it doesn't belong to us. Words are being turned into terms—and the term-ification of language is changing its character.

OK I feel like it may seem strange to say in a Catholic university that we are living in pious times when things are clearly so godless and cruel these days. But what I mean by pious is there are just words I can't say in public. If I say them, or broach certain topics, I will mark myself as unclean. For some reason our piety—and I don’t think this is a good thing—is living in language right now. I was grateful that the Pope's phone calls to Palestine were mentioned earlier today.

Those of us who have a sense for language, who are conscious that we’re feeling it, aren't more connected to it than people who feel nothing about it. We’re all in language, yet some of us feel it so deeply. Isn’t that strange? This flow of language moves between us, through us. It's historical, actual, immanent, everything—but it also bursts out and occasionally seems to take on a life of its own.

There’s a psychoanalytic quality to letting things come out—good and bad. Freedom of speech is a mystical idea—not only politically, but in your notebook, in your own inner dialogue and contemplation.

There's something about not knowing where language will go that is mystical. I think it's what William Carlos Williams was writing about in Spring and All. I think a lot of American modernism was trying to get at this sense of the now. Trying to pull British english out of old books and make poetry sound like what the language was actually doing in this strange new culture. Digital speech is still marked by that.

Art has something to do with bearing witness to how consciousness is changing through us. There's something scary and dangerous about it. What I mean by piety—I'm riffing on something my friend, the poet Rodrigo Toscano, said about political art.

He said a political poem isn't merely standing up and stating its beliefs in defiance of some injustice. That, he says, is just piety. It's not art. It’s fine it has its place. But to him, truly activating political art makes ideas and senses and realities interact in a truly new way, one that makes you feel more alive to the dynamic of the situation than you did by simply repeating what you already know you think.

What if I say something triggering or awful? Right now? We have terrible anxiety about the fact that we might be misinterpreted.

This godly gift of speech and language and writing—this ability to produce these sophisticated expressions of consciousness together—I think there’s terrible dread in the collective about that right now. We're scared of using language wrong.

Michael: I completely agree and share your sense, Ariana, but I’m not sure this is new. I think about Plato—he’d kick all of us out of the Republic. He had good reasons for that. Why let people rock the boat? He said poets are crazy. He’d take what you're saying as evidence.

The relationship between the writer and the social world has always been fraught.

I want to talk about the idea of inspiration. It’s ancient, but completely real. When I’m writing, I know it’s good when I feel possessed—literally possessed.

I get frustrated with the advice to “know your audience.” That’s terrible advice for an ambitious writer. The whole point is to write without knowing who your audience is.

Shakespeare wrote with total confidence: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this…” and he was right. He wrote for people 500 years later, people he knew nothing about.

You can’t plan for that. You can’t calculate it. It involves a receptivity to something coming through you, in the way you describe so well, Ariana.

Ariana: I like to study what happens when people feel like they're falling in love and they need to send a certain kind of text message. I’m very interested in that charge. That charge grips people in language—when they feel like communication is really important, when something has to pass through language that is bigger than language.

The experience of love and desire is spiritual. It grips ordinary people, and suddenly they’re poets. Or they’re writing gospels. They feel something profound that they must share.

The mystics in every tradition have had overwhelming experiences they had to testify to, experiences they did not feel equal to. Mohammed couldn’t read or write but he had to communicate what happened to him. Love is like that too. These things are overwhelming.

Whatever literature and art is—somehow connected, but also free from religion—it always bears witness to the divine, even when it denies it. I think the divine is still speaking. People are still being gripped by it, and people still need to bear witness to how they have changed.

Jordan: My experience is that when I feel gripped while writing, I often come back later and think, What even is this?

René Girard talks about novelistic conversion: Great novelists write a first draft, look at it, and see all the self-justification. They’re scapegoating someone, or something, but then they learn to describe “the evil of the Other from within.” In my writing, when I'm fired up, I often come back to it and realize—this is total cope.

Then I have to confront myself.

Ariana: You’re describing a mirror you have to build for yourself—the kind that shows you all the ways you’re ridiculous and wrong.

Language is a mirror. It clouds over easily.

Michael: I’ve always been suspicious of theories of creative work. Mystery is intrinsic to it.

There are writers who destroy their lives through the mirroring process, imagining a moral transformation of their aesthetic work.

Nikolai Gogol is a great example. He was a genius, but his genius was a dark comic genius. Then he became convinced that he had to make it moral. That God wanted him to reform. He tried to write a second part of Dead Souls with moral exemplars. It was terrible.

I’m reluctant to theorize about how cognition interacts with inspiration.

There are constraints on speech and thought today. Some call it political, but I think it's moral: The idea that I must make my writing morally correct. But morality is not always spiritual.

Plato’s objection to art is intelligent and coherent. Art places tension between the moral and the spiritual.

Ariana: That’s something we talk about a lot in Invisible College—how moral truth and great art aren't always the same. There’s boring wisdom poetry. There's no shortage of moralizing. But artists don’t always get to write the moral tract they want. You have to be the artist you are.

That level of honesty—if you don’t have it, the work won’t land. It’s deeper than “write what you know.” Somehow, your art must partake of what you really are—not just what you long to be.

Michael: When you say it must be who you are—my experience is that when I feel inspiration, it’s not me.

That’s why I respect it. I had a professor in college, Alan Grossman, who said: When you’re reading Milton or Dickinson silently, whose voice do you hear?

Your own.

You’re discovering unknown possibilities of your own voice.

Silent reading activates a different quality of solitude.

It’s me, but it’s not really me.

Audience Member: Why do you think artists are such effective catalysts of change and inspiration, while being such messes themselves?

Jordan: I don't know what you're talking about—I’m a perfect person.

Michael: There’s a myth that great art comes from messed-up people. My experience is the opposite. I didn’t write anything good while I was on drugs—just complete crap. The more you look into that myth, the more you see that serious drug or alcohol problems often start when the work begins to decline.

Writers like Emily Dickinson or Keats—they were weird, sure. But not messed up in that way.

That classical idea of divine intoxication is real. But that’s different from just being intoxicated.

Ariana: For me, art has been something of a hospital. I have a kind of pharmaceutical relationship to it.

Maybe artists are just as messed up as everyone else, but they have this gift that really shines. There's a tension inside that can create this glowing energy space.

And yes, don’t look to how artists live—it's usually a mess. A lot of people get into art because something's wrong, and they’re trying to find a way to get somewhere better.

Also, I like keeping a little bit of that “crazy artist” trope—it gives me some privacy. Everything feels so surveilled and managed now. I’m constantly trying to be healthier, more moral, better—but I still want that little veil of mystery.

Culturally, we’re not comfortable with mystery. That little bit of chaos gives you privacy.

Audience: Ariana, I’m an architect, and I was intrigued by your statement that poetry is making art out of something everyone is using—language. That’s also how I think of architecture: Making art out of something everyone is using. This room is a work of art—there are flowers on the ceiling. So, how does this radical encounter between the ordinary and the extraordinary speak to today’s theme of metanoia—of transformation, repentance, turning back?

Ariana: I'm going to misquote Rilke, but in one of his letters, he says something like: We used to build buildings testifying to our inner experience. Now we only build to display wealth, power, the accumulation of money. Our visible structures no longer point inward, or heavenward, as the cathedrals did. But, he said, when a person experiences inner transformation—stars are born.

Audience Member: Would you be willing to share a concrete experience of how writing has personally transformed you?

Jordan: My experience maps onto Girard's idea of novelistic conversion. It’s a humbling thing. You think you know something; you think you are a certain way. My next novel, Muscle Man, is coming out in September. Everyone can preorder it right now.

When I started writing it, my wife was in grad school, and I was on the edges of academic life. I was getting emails every day from Clune about the problems in higher ed. And I was like, I know what’s wrong with society. I wanted to write a novel that was a defense of certain values.

I wrote the whole thing over years. Then I got busy, put it away. When I came back to it—it was unreadable. Just ugly and ridiculous.

Then I had to do the work of editing, radically changing it—until it felt true and real.

That process mirrors basically every spiritual experience I’ve had. You get humbled. And then you have to decide: Am I going to grow, or keep beating my head against the wall?

Audience Member: A lot of people don’t read anymore. Most encounter art through TV and film. Do you think screenwriters are engaging with the kinds of ideas you’ve been talking about?

Michael: I don’t think this kind of artistic experience needs to be accessible to everyone. I know that’s controversial. But the art that moves and transforms me is the kind that calls me out of myself, out of what I already like. In TV and media, that’s exactly what you’re not supposed to do. Of course, there are exceptions. 1990s rap, for instance, had huge aesthetic power and broad appeal.

But often, the greatest work doesn’t meet people where they are—it transforms them.

Wordsworth said: The true writer creates the taste by which he is to be appreciated. Emily Dickinson’s work wasn’t even printed properly for a century. The kind of work we do—we just sit down and do it. But to make a film, you need massive money.

So yes, there are brilliant filmmakers and video artists. But the commercial model often doesn’t allow for the same kind of risk.

Ariana: I actually think popular entertainment has gotten much more literary and philosophically complex. Many of the people making this stuff are spiritually intense and deeply cultivated. There’s a lot buried in these shows. I think the aesthetic terms and standards for what counts as a masterpiece are shifting. Yes, people want safety and money. But tastes change. People get bored and want something new.

And when something touches them in a deep, mysterious way—even if they don’t understand it—they move toward it.

So the question becomes: What kind of art should we make? What should we build?

Something that leaves space for people to have an inner encounter with what's happening outside them.

Bad metaphor to close on, but: I have curly hair, and I’ve had so many bad haircuts because people don’t understand that curly hair spirals.

Consciousness spirals too.

We need to leave people space to gather fuel in vacant lots, as T.S. Eliot said.

There’s a turning that needs to happen in the spirit, and we have to leave room for that—whether we’re building buildings, artworks, or platforms for change.

Watch the full video of Literary Conversion here.