What is more precise than precision ? Illusion.
(MM)
Andrew, Goethe's studies on Light keep coming to mind: 'we cannot know the true essence of a thing, but only its characteristics'. If color and illumination are the characteristics of light, what then are the characteristics of beauty ? And from there we come back to embodiment, and the poet's imaginary garden. Circular thinking entices and conturbat me...
I'll try to sort out a few thoughts. ..
My sense is that modern artists have minimal interest in aesthetic horizon or foundation, but maintain a casual interest in beauty. This seems fitting to our high speed, cerebral age, our disinterest in silence, solitude, and thoughtfulness, and our general estrangement from nature. What Mark would call the anti-aesthetic, and what I might call the poet-as-witness age, appears to be the anti-solution to the challenge of the examined life. When looking At, examination comes as quickly and easily as our meals. When looking To, quite another undertaking. Immersion in nature is quite a different thing from gazing at the garden. The poet as witness is a very different creature from the poet of experience, or the wisdom writers, east and west, whose interests lie in Perceptions of beauty, and ultimately, Deed. From Thinker to Maker. From wonder and sensation to wisdom.
I don't feel beauty has vanished in the art, but her depths and deliriums, as in times past and times present, lie in wait for the brave ones. I suspect one cannot deeply examine, experience, or embody beauty without also knowing something of ugliness,and by this I mean not the looking at, but the looking to. This idea was at the core of what Gandhi called his experiments, and what might be called Jeffers' poetics.
' Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.' Emerson.
I have sympathy and understanding for many of Mark's arguments, but strongly disagree with his assumption of a long lost golden age, and the vulnerability of beauty. Mediocrity of thought has always existed, and appeared to prevail alongside the great thinkers and makers who did their work.
A genuine reverence for genuine sensation, an inquisitive, paradoxical mind, an evolving, manifested philosophy or aesthetic... Throughout the history of civilization, these have been the characteristics of our most beloved and penetrating artists. Or as Mozart would say, Love, love love. That is the soul of genius...
Many famous feet have trod
Sublunary paths, and famous hands have weighed
The strength they have against the strength they need;
And famous lips interrogated God
Concerning franchise in eternity;
And in many differing times and places
Truth was attained (a moment's harmony);
Yet endless mornings break on endless faces.
Gold surf of the sun, each day
Exhausted through the world, gathers and whips
Irrevocably from eclipse;
The trodden way becomes the untrodden way,
We are born each morning, shelled upon
A sheet of light that paves
The palaces of sight, and brings again
The river shining through the field of graves.
Such renewal argues down
Our unsuccessful legacies of thought,
Annals of men who fought
Untiringly to change their hearts to stone,
Or to a wafer's poverty,
Or to a flower, but never tried to learn
The difficult triple sanity
Or being wafer, stone and flower in turn.
(Larkin)
[This message has been edited by wendy v (edited August 31, 2008).]
|
Threaded Mode
