This thread might be on the way down the page, but before it disappears I wanted to add one more posting.
It has to do with ideas of beauty. What is artistic beauty for? is related to the question, What is poetry for? We work at the craft so that our poems will be well made. To what end? Is it just for diversion (nothing wrong with that!), or is it also, at times anyway, for something larger than that, something longer lasting?
What kind of knowledge is aesthetic knowledge? Emotional, obviously. And sensual. Is it also cognitive or intellectual? The Platonists talk about "intellectual beauty": what's that? What poems have it and which don't?
I've come up with a few pretty good quotations on this issue, and wonder what other Sphereans make of it.
"The Greek original of the word 'aesthetic' means perception by the senses, especially by feeling. Aesthetic experience is a facutly that we share with animals and vegetables, and is irrational. The 'aesthetic soul' is that part of our psychic makeup that 'senses' things and reacts to them: in other words, the 'sentimental' part of us. To identify our approach to art with the pursuit of these reactions is not to make art 'fine' but to apply it only to the life of pleasure and to disconnect it from the active and contemplative lives." --Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "A Figure of Speech or a Figure of Thought?"
"It is commonplace today to speak of a 'civilization of the image' (thinking of our magazines, cinema, and television). But one wonders whether, like all commonplaces, this does not conceal a radical misunderstanding, a complete error, For instead of the image being elevated to the level of a world that would be proper to it, instead of it appearing invested with a symbolic function, leading to an internal sense, there is above all a reduction of the image to the level of sensory perception pure and simple, and thus a definitive degradation of the image. Should it not be said, therefore, that the more successful this reduction is, the more the sense of the imaginal is lost, and the more we are condemned to producing only the imaginary?" --Henry Corbin, "Mundus Imaginalis"
"Art is not talent, it is knowledge. Beauty is a form of cognition. And when beauty is debased from cognition to sensation the next step is to perversion. The perversion of this experience of beauty in our civilization is a clear fact. . . . there is nothing to remind us of a destiny which transcends our small personal life. Hence our feeling of loneliness. Hence our sense of alienation." --Cecil Collins (English painter, 1908-89)
"Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God,
Make him fill the cradles right.
"Measurement began our might:
Forms a stark Egyptian thought,
Forms that gentler phidias wrought.
Michael Angelo left a proof
On the Sistine Chapel roof,
Where but half-awakened Adam
Can disturb globe-trotting Madam
Till her bowels are in heat,
proof that there's a purpose set
Before the secret working mind:
Profane perfection of mankind.
"Quattrocento put in paint
On backgrounds for a God or Saint
Gardens where a soul's at ease;
Where everything that meets the eye,
Flowers and grass and cloudless sky,
Resemble forms that are or seem
When sleepers wake and yet still dream.
And when it's vanished still declare,
With only bed and bedstead there,
That heavens had opened.
Gyres run on;
When that greater dream had gone
Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
Prepared a rest for the people of God,
Palmer's phrase, but after that
Confusion fell upon our thought."
--Yeats, from "Under Ben Bulben"
[This message has been edited by Andrew Frisardi (edited August 31, 2008).]
|