"Knowledge Must Bow Before Spirit"

Isn't that Glenn Beck's credo?

Knowledge Must Bow to Spirit

Right, I did read that, but it didn't register that it was a credo, i.e. creed.

It seemed to me to be one of those intellectually unclear things that can mean anything, but, hey, what do I know?

Crossposted with Jan D.

Oh, I think it's clear as a bell, Janice. It's what we have to do.

Jan--I never saw they guy's paintings. Actually, from what I've seen of the him, I think he is preponderantly cerebral. He hasn't got much to work with brainwise, but there seems to be none of what George I. would call Spirit.

Think about it. Inness is basically advising the artist to surrender to nature before sweating the technique. Me Likee.

And congrats Jan!

RM

The arts are of course peppered with such warnings:

God guard me from those thoughts men think
in the mind alone;
He who sings a lasting song
Sings from the marrow bone

(Yeats)

Love, love, love. That is the soul of genius. (Michelangelo)

The Spirit is the Conscious Ear…

For other Services—as Sound—
There hangs a smaller Ear
Outside the Castle—that Contain—
The other—only—Hear—

(Dickinson)

For all this help of head and brain,
How happily instinctive we remain….(Frost)

Etc.

The intellect is assumed. It's a powerful force. It’s no secret that it wants to rule the kingdom, wants to rule each and every poem. Thus all these warnings from the masters, or so it seems to me. It isn’t easy to bring such elusve concepts forward in a workshop environment. Imagination, intuition, impressionism, bah ! People seen to take really serious offense. But it’s not as if the subject is scandalous, or new to the arts.

I love the Inness.

Lear: How do you see the world?

Gloucester: I see it feelingly.

Now that's a short poem!

I love the Michelangelo one, Wendy. Love.

Amen.

Nemo

You can't read anything without the primacy of the Intellect. The intellect interprets the sensate (in this case optical/aural) experience into something intelligible/understandable. Otherwise words are meaningless marks and not intelligible symbols: signs and symbols are based in the Human Intellect. All subsequent emotions are the result of the intellect’s process of translating the symbols/signs into an interior encounter which mimics (or, if you dare, makes spiritually present) the thing itself and not its signifier.

No primacy (first place) of the intellect=no emotions from symbols=no poetry. Emotions are literally secondary as they are a result of the intellect operating on an optical/aural encounter with the symbols/signifiers we call letters that are used to construct the symbols/signifiers we call words. Emotions don’t feel words; they feel what words signify.

Umberto Echo is a famous novelist, but he is also the worlds leading professor of semiotics and is worth reading in that field, especially by philologists, writers and those weird artistic writers called poets.

Fr. RP

"Knowledge Must Bow to Spirit."

Depends what knowledge, whose spirit. There's no one knowledge, no one spirit.

Could mean your knowledge and your spirit, and again it would have to depend on the individual.

Knowledge without wisdom is just a compendium of facts adding up to almost anything, really. It doesn't take much to trump knowledge.

But a bankrupt spirit is still a bankrupt spirit.

Love, yes. Love is the answer. But to most of us I think, "spirit" does not automatically suggest "love."

Edit:

Caveat: This post is about the above quotation only. All present company excluded, of course.

Well

Rick and I have exchanged PMs and he's promised to cancel the "hit" on me...

Interestingly, participating in this thread helped me to finish a poem I've fiddled with for 17 years by abandoning the idea of making strict narrative sense.

Fr. Pecotte is right, and states the case in a more eloquent way than I did. On the other hand, of course there is a point to the credo "Knowledge must bow before spirit" in visual art. Rule 1, Page 1 even in strictly representational painting is "Paint what you see, not what you know is there" - the intellect can get in the way. What one sees (inwardly) is always informed by other things, including emotions.

But thanks to Rick for unsticking me, and also for cancelling the "hit" (a noble gesture, since those guys like to be paid 50% up front and don't give refunds, even if you ask nicely).

Philip

Now Philip is teasing, folks. I thoroughly enjoyed the exchange in this thread. We did exchange PMs, but there were no prior calls to my brother-in-law Carmine.

Rick