In a poem, the title of which I have forgotten, Larkin states that "life is slow dying". He offers various examples of this: "hours spent giving evidence or birth/advance equally slowly on death". Something like that. He concludes: "And saying so to some means nothing/Others it leaves nothing to be said." I have tended to be in the latter group. On the subject of the end of the world, ultimately, there is nothing to be said. That's why it's the end of the world. Much like the bit – inevitably – in the Monty Python film, where Death comes to a dinner party, and the guests complain and start to give him a piece of their mind, and he tells them to shut up, because they're dead. I think a great deal about the end of the world, but I will take all that as understood and say nothing about it (because there's nothing to be said), even though it has much to do with my theme. I may mention, however, the petite apocalypse (is apocalypse a masculine or feminine noun?), which is personal death. My theme, as my title indicates, is being 40.
I'm not sure I intended to notice the fact that I have turned 40, since noticing one's age seems a very cliched mode of behaviour to me. Nonetheless, I have noticed it, more than I have noticed turning any other age for… well, probably since my teenage years. I am told – by more than one person – that 40 is good. I am told – by more than one person – that, on the other hand, 30 is bad, and it's good to get to the former after negotiating the latter. How do I feel? I've never been convinced that feelings can really be verbalised in any direct way, but one thing I'm certainly aware of is this: I appear to be old enough that if we were living closer to what some call nature, I could very well be expected to be dead by now, and yet, I have accomplished almost entirely nothing and have no sense that my life (which should by now have ended) has even begun.
This is a peculiar state to be in and not very satisfactory.
Larkin made some other poetical observations about the passing of time, age, mortality and so on. But I'm not writing an essay on Larkin. There is one poem (perhaps two) where he talks about reaching the age where you know everything about yourself that there is to know. I've always been half-skeptical of and half-friendly towards this idea. I'm not sure that I believe it, exactly, but I can say that time makes it very clear to you if you take a path that diverges from the path or paths taken by your peers. Those other figures, who took the other paths, grow more and more distant as you progress towards your solitary destination.
I may now make a brief statement of what is obvious, immediate and unavoidable to me on my path, but which to others might seem peculiar and incomprehensible: If we do not know for a solid fact that there is a congenial afterlife then there is absolutely no justification for begetting more offspring. Surely the momentum of mere unthinking biology and tradition has run out by now, and we can actually decide, consciously. And if so, what possible grounds can there be for a conscious decision to procreate? I know there are others who simply say, "There is no justifiction for etc." My path diverges from them, too. My path has an 'if'. I am not expecting that 'if' to be resolved in a favourable way, certainly not in my lifetime. That's all. That seems to be a summation of my path and the nature of its divergence. To me, it even explains the melancholy blue of the shadows that fall upon the path from the overhanging branches and leaves. However, I know – from experience rather than deduction – that saying so to others means nothing.
From Larkin, to Dickens. Perhaps too many people quote Dickens, and perhaps too few read his works. It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. I have more friends now than I know how to give time to. I am involved in the production of mad and beautiful books, but I no longer have time for my own writing. The people who are waiting, for one reason or another, for me to get back to them, must run into triple figures. When I lie abed at night and think they are still waiting, it seems to me that it would be more pleasant altogether if I could just fade from existence and be forgotten. And then, I begin to think, who – who? – who in this world is going to get back to me? There must be someone, somewhere, who will get back to me about some wonderful and stupendous thing that will render my life charming thereafter. But no, no… whoever this obscure personage is, they are very busy with other things, and getting back to me does not occur. Bills occur, and demands, and wrangles and deadlines and duties. But nothing delightful and silky. But never mind that my attention is distracted by a stir in the curtain that I always hope must portend some living marvel about to make an entrance on the stage of my life, and never mind that it never portends anything more than someone prompting me in my lines, at most… It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. Fear of death has waned; will to live has also. I am better equipped than ever to write what might appear the work of a worldly and not-too-dim sort of person, but my energy is drained, and now that I am less despairing I see even less the point. But nonetheless, a publisher with which I am associated is producing beautiful things… but how mundane the mechanisms of commerce with which one must engage. It is easier, we are told, for the writer to find attention now… but harder to find appreciation, as illiteracy and philistinism set in, harder still to find security. I think I am by temperament a contemplative. I need time to reflect more than almost anything else. But there is hardly a minute in the day now when I have space in my thoughts for things other than deadlines and to-do lists. There are a hundred wonderful projects in which I am involved, and I feel like I might be dead before the completion of any of them.
And my life's work, well… it becomes more and more clear how insignificant it is. I always believed that I had been given, from an early age, some genuine grasp of some unique portion of beauty in the world's – or some other world's – soul. The things I have written that display that grasp most naturally are the things that are unpublished, farthest of all from having readers, and I wonder, too, if I shall ever finish them, and, if I do, whether they will mean anything to anyone, though for me, I hope, they will leave nothing to be said.
Karl writes:Living in Despair may often make life seem intolerable, but generally I’ve found that if any period where I feel comfortable, satisfied or ‘metaphysically fat’ goes on for too long, I’m seized with self-loathing and disgust, and am happy to return to my despair. The idea that our goal consists in being satisfied with life seems to miss the point, somehow.
” somewhere, who will get back to me about some wonderful and stupendous thing that will render my life charming thereafter.”i am only a year from completing my seventh decade. what you say is very brilliant for 40 and typical. typical i mean for a man your age who is intelligent and can contemplate. let’s say you are an early contemplative, premature maybe. you always ask good questions but none of them have answers. we won’t know until that final moment and we all hope we will be let in on the secret at last. i don’t think there is a secret. i just think there are some things which can’t be known; except theoretically, in a state of higher consciousness which everyone talks about but practically no one has experienced.my personal solution is that i act as is i am not an enigma. and i do the work i am attracted to and wait. i know that won’t help. i am just trying to ‘get back to you’ :happy:
Originally posted by I_ArtMan:we won’t know until that final moment and we all hope we will be let in on the secret at last. i don’t think there is a secret. i just think there are some things which can’t be known; except theoretically, in a state of higher consciousness which everyone talks about but practically no one has experienced.I imagine there must be more than one higher state. I’ve certainly experienced altered states, and not only as a result of direct chemical intervention. I’ve noticed, however, that these states always pass. It’s a mystery as to why they pass, since while they last they seem natural and simple. Perhaps this is similar to the mystery of the so-called ‘sex deficit’.I must admit that I find it hard to believe there isn’t a secret – something, at least, seems hidden. However, access to that secret, as you say, seems so ridiculously prohibited that one is tempted to think that it might as well not exist at all.We are forced to worry at a problem for which we have no solution. Even saying, “We have no solution” does not seem to stop the worrying.Kierkegaard (probably amongst many others) suggests that everyone, in fact, is in despair, though most people don’t realise it. If there is a secret, I feel it might be hiding somewhere behind this: If it is true that everyone is in despair, how on Earth has the human race managed to cling to life and the illusions that sustain it over so many thousands of years, and even enjoy themselves, produce works of considerable beauty, and so on, along the way?Originally posted by I_ArtMan:my personal solution is that i act as is i am not an enigma. and i do the work i am attracted to and wait. i know that won’t help. i am just trying to ‘get back to you’ Thanks. I have a notion that what is most sustaining is precisely what is least susceptible to translation/transmission. In any case, I am tired, on top of everything else, of thinking that it’s all my fault. Since I am one of those who won’t be handing on the reins, as it were, to a new generation, that burden, at least, I would like to spare myself.
Originally posted by anonymous:Living in Despair may often make life seem intolerable, but generally I’ve found that if any period where I feel comfortable, satisfied or ‘metaphysically fat’ goes on for too long, I’m seized with self-loathing and disgust, and am happy to return to my despair. The idea that our goal consists in being satisfied with life seems to miss the point, somehow.I think the problem then comes with definitions of ‘satisfaction’. To say ‘I don’t want to be happy’ seems self-contradictory, when ‘happiness’ means ‘to have what you want’. It is easy to conclude that therefore everyone must ‘want to be happy’ by definition. Somehow, though, as you suggest, life never seems to be that simple. And if we are wilfully complicating it, it must be asked why, if it is primarily true by definition that we all want to be happy.I’m aware of any number of iterations and permutations of the idea that unhappiness, too, is needed. “You have to be in hell to see heaven,” writes (and recites) Burroughs (and a friend hearing this, immediately responded, “Do you?”). In Japan, when one has one’s fortune told at a shrine, generally it is considered better to draw ‘medium good fortune’ than ‘supreme good fortune’, as ‘supreme good fortune’ tips always into ‘supreme calamity’. William Blake divides this apparently necessary alternation of joy and sorrow between lives rather than between moments of a single life, thus acknowledging that some people truly seemed to live charmed lives, and others, well:Every night and every mornSome to misery are born,Every morn and every nightSome are born to sweet delight.Some are born to sweet delight,Some are born to endless night.However, perhaps the permutation that recently strikes me most is comes from something written by the critic Robert Warshow in his essay, ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’:In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous… The effect of the gangster film is to embody this dilemma in the person of the gangster and resolve it by his death. The dilemma is resolved beacuse it is his death, not ours. We are safe; for the moment we can acquiesce in our failure, we can choose to fail.
I’ve been reading Michel Seuphor’s biography of Mondrian and looking at the many color plates of paintings from different periods of Mondrian’s life. Paging slowly through this book, I feel as if I’m in a better world — culturally, ethically, and aesthetically at least. Perhaps the book could be criticized for being too close to hagiography, but if it is hagiography it is at least intelligently and carefully done. Would anyone write an artist’s biography in this way today? In what I’ve read so far, there is no trace of tawdry dishing or of corrosive psychoanalytic speculation. Seuphor seems to want to honor the intention of his friend Mondrian’s life and work. Kafka said a book must be an ax for the frozen sea within us, but sometimes a book can have a profound effect in a calmer and more sustaining way. I can’t follow Mondrian in his Theosophical beliefs. It does seem relevant and interesting that, according to Seuphor, Mondrian almost never mentioned Theosophy in later years of his life (though he never renounced it), and came to believe that he could only express what he was trying to express wordlessly in his art.I doubt if there’s an afterlife, but I doubt even more that we will ever know for sure (unless and until it happens). Atheists say we can and should go ahead and draw a conclusion based on what we do know. Antinatalists make strong ethical arguments against further reproduction. I can be intellectually convinced by these positions, but I can’t fully embrace them. They give me a kind of claustrophobia, as if our lives are contained in a closed room with only recirculated air. I find it hard to live in such a finite, sealed-off enclosure . . . and for the time being, I am still trying to live. I should say that I have never wanted to have children; it’s only the emotional significance of the antinatalist position that I’m reacting against. I guess I’m an agnostic (and this can be intellectually defended, despite what some say). But agnosticism is more of an epistemological position than a metaphysical one; metaphysically it feels like a non-position, and what can you do with a metaphysical non-position? Here the problem is not claustrophobia but enervation. At least agnosticism cracks open a door in that closed room. Of course, human psychological needs do not constitute a metaphysical argument (unless one takes such needs as a sign of something, but that’s just another question). I see the choice as between drawing a possibly premature and overconfident conclusion, and giving my intuition and thought a little space to breathe and look around.To change the metaphor from that of the closed room — when I was a child I was astounded by the fact that you can’t throw a ball properly unless you follow through. How could the motion of your arm after you’ve released the ball possibly affect the path the ball takes? Of course, this can be explained by the physical effect of what you’re intending to do with your arm once you’ve released the ball. Where I’m going with this is not to an argument for belief in an afterlife. There is an imaginary, as-if quality to following through while throwing a ball . . . but it really does affect your throw. That’s the best I can do. Agnosticism allows you to take seriously an imaginative dimension that atheism does not. (Or at least atheism insists that, lacking evidence, you label this imaginative dimension a fiction and not a possibility that can be entertained with any seriousness at all.)It is significant to me that Mondrian chose to express his spiritual sense of things in painting, and eventually abandoned his efforts to theorize about it. I’ve never known quite what to think about art-as-religion, except that it seems false when it is pursued in too literal or ham-handed a way. Still, I notice that some of my favorite writers and artists verged on this approach. After reading Seuphor’s biography about Mondrian’s life and work, I wonder . . . does poetry really “make nothing happen”? I was going to disagree with that, but caution made me reread Auden’s poem to be sure of what he was saying. I can’t be sure what he was saying, but it seems suggestive of something: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making where executives/Would never want to tamper, flows on south/From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/A way of happening, a mouth.” Perhaps some things can only be expressed and felt in art (possibilities only, the agnostic in me insists). But could Mondrian have lived as he did and done what he did if he had been an agnostic rather than a religious man? At least while I’m under the spell of Seuphor’s book, I feel that a different sort of life is possible, even for an agnostic, if one lives with a spacious sense of possibility.
Just about to go to bed, but thought I’d venture a brief reply. Recently I read somewhere someone claiming to be a philosophical but not an attitudinal pessimist. I thought about this. I suppose this distinction may work for some people, but it doesn’t seem to work for me. Whenever I incline towards philosophical pessimism, I also fall into attitudinal pessimism. I can’t, as it were, follow through in such a position.I feel that I understand why Mondrian would wish to stop talking about things (beliefs, etc.). I have similar feelings myself. I never feel that I have managed to make myself clear – only that I have managed to falsify myself in some way. Fiction seems the best form of expression of which I am capable, since it can be true and false as the same time, which suits me perfectly.Somewhere Cioran writes, I believe, that Greek philosophy is a disappointment; Greek philosophy seeks only truth, whereas Indian philosophy seeks salvation. This struck a chord with me. One of very many things that have, of course. I don’t consider myself any of these things:AtheistAgnosticAntinatalistPessimistIn fact, I can’t think of any label I’d seriously like to apply to myself. (‘Writer’ seems fine as it’s verifiable as something I do – if I allow myself to optimistically assume that I do still write – and, in itself, I hope, is fairly neutral.)I always have a strange feeling when I express opinions that I know can easily fall into any of the above ‘ism’s. It makes me think, “Is this really my opinion?” Perhaps it is, but it feels like I’ve set my foot in a snare, and at any moment the owner of that particular ism is going to tug and capture me.But all of this, really, can be an unnecessary downer. I sometimes wonder why that’s so, and I suppose there is still a great deal of something like territorial nervousness about these labels for historical reasons. It seems like almost any YouTube video that I watch, however unrelated it may be on the surface to such controversies, will have somewhere in the comments: “You Christians are all idiots!” “You atheists are all arrogant clods!” (Obviously, that’s not a realistic reproduction of the language used.) Etc. I wish there weren’t such a sense of territory and border patrols and so on about these terms and positions, as I feel no loyalty to any of them and would like to simply pass through and explore.The question of whether art makes anything happen is one I’ve been discussing with someone else recently, after watching this (or perhaps this was referenced after the conversation began):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSIgMVgId6EIt's a nice little expression of something, I feel, that interview. Do I agree? Still not sure. There’s certainly something to it.
Karl writes:I can only offer my total agreeement with gveranon. Previously I would have regarded myself as a hardcore atheist, but over the past year or so I found that attitude had led me to such an airless, unbreathable place that I simply couldn’t continue living there. Through gradual degrees I prised open a few cracks in the wall to let the air in, so that I’m now happy to discuss the idea of god, faith and all the rest of it without having any firm positions myself. It also enabled me to start reading fiction again, something I found impossible previously. Atheism is not fecundatary (or not for me anyway), whereas a form of agnosticism allows the imagination to breathe and not feel guilty about it. As for antinatalism, I guess I am one but I’m somewhat tired of talking about it. Heck, I even allowed myself the pleasure of popping into a Greek Orthodox service a while back and thoroughly enjoyed the air of theatre, mystery and magic. And while I’m on the topic of soul food here’s a beautiful piece of music that’s haunted me since I stumbled across it a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxKqg0Fwsro
Cioran said somewhere that he came closest to believing in God when he was listening to Bach. I could say something similar about Arvo Part, whose music affects me more than Bach’s does (although I’ve been listening more and more to Bach in the last couple of years).I’d far rather say “Art makes nothing happen” than “Art is propaganda” or “Art is a tool.” Saying “Art makes nothing happen” can be a way of protecting art from those who want to use it, or to reduce it to something else, or to talk about it cluelessly as I’m probably doing. . . . But I do wonder when I hear someone say they are just making a pattern and there is no point to it. It seems to me that a very small percentage of artists have ever been pure formalists. Even Mondrian was working in a context of ideas and concerns that were not simply about visual form. Elliott Smith’s music doesn’t strike me as pure form for the sake of pure form. It’s probably true that only people who are concerned with form can make good art, and that aiming for thematic explicitness turns art into something else (poetry can’t be paraphrased, as someone said). I myself tend to prefer more formalism rather than less (it’s weird to me that I seem to be arguing against formalism here!). . . . But there usually seems to be something ulterior (in a non-pejorative sense) that is used by the artist in some way; and this ulterior something usually isn’t arbitrary; it has to do with non-artistic concerns and interests of the artist. And art can affect people in various ways, sometimes profoundly; it seems odd to say nothing is happening here. These things are hard to talk about.
Originally posted by anonymous:And while I’m on the topic of soul food here’s a beautiful piece of music that’s haunted me since I stumbled across it a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxKqg0Fwsro
Arvo Part is one of the few ‘classical’ composers (I use inverted commas because I’m told the term refers properly to a period rather than a style as such), whose music I feel I can relate to. I’ve noticed something curious – I find it hard to relate to pre-twentieth century classical music. I have no idea why. However, a friend who has for a long time being trying to educate me in such matters has managed to score a hit with Schubert’s B-Flat Sonata and other piano music (played by Arthur Rubinstein). On the question of art for art’s sake, I have been instructed not to try and work out what it’s ‘about’, as it’s ‘not about anything’. Again, I cautiously put those terms in inverted commas.
Originally posted by gveranon: Elliott Smith’s music doesn’t strike me as pure form for the sake of pure form.
No, and this is perhaps the interesting point. I feel I know what he means, though, or why he expresses himself as he does on this question.
Here’s another interview in which he kind of approaches the same area in a different way:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnqjZzMscFo
Basically, just the bit near the beginning where he’s talking about a photo of New York.
Playing some Smith recently, I noticed these lyrics:
I’m a policeman directing traffic
Keeping everything moving, everything static.
I’m the hitchhiker you recognise passing
On your way to some everlasting.
This, also, could be read as a comment on the same question. This is how I (perhaps idiosyncratically) read it: the policeman is one view of the artist. Basically he’s constructing a ‘perpetual motion’ model – a world he hopes is self-sustaining. “Everything moving, everything static”, however, has a feel of tension about it – like trying to keep plates spinning. Anyway, this is the view of the artist who ‘says nothing’ but is interested in the forms of creativity ‘for it’s own sake’, or for a sake that is not up for discussion. The policeman is at the centre, and all things are relative to that.
The hitchhiker is the same artist, but from another point of view. You could say the hitchhiker is the policeman as seen from the window of one of the moving cars. He is actually trying to get somewhere and is no longer the centre of things. He is situated, and, being situated, he has ‘things to say’.
But what he has to say is something that you merely “recognise passing”. That’s the interest you have in the artist. He is acknowledging here that he has something to say, that he is situated, as New York is situated, but it almost seems like he’s saying that’s just something you can’t help. New York can’t help being New York.
Etc.
Of course this is not all that there is to say on the subject, but it’s an interesting point of view.
I’m much more in agreement with Elliott Smith’s comments in the second interview you linked to. Saying that he isn’t trying to get everybody to feel like he does implies (I think) that there is something (at least a feeling) in or behind his songs, but that they are their own kind of thing (songs), and that listeners will make of them what they will. Like a picture of New York or a hitchhiker (who, as you say, is “situated”), there is an ontological richness here that can’t be reduced to a particular meaning; it can only be experienced.This seems different to me from saying the artist is only making a form that has no point to it. And it seems different from saying that art makes nothing happen. Maybe the differences are only in my reactions to these ways of speaking. Talk of pure form implies to me that art is only something like a curlicue or a whirligig contraption. I seldom find those sorts of things to be anything more than interesting, or maybe briefly amazing, but my appreciation of the arts involves far more than this, I feel, even if it’s difficult to say what.I do respond to form, of course, and this is for me a necessary part of artistic appreciation. My interest in Mondrian began a few years ago when I was in a bookstore looking through a large book of prints of his paintings. Turning pages, I became more and more enthralled by . . . what? The variations and subtleties of his compositions within such severe constraints? Imbalances that are somehow balanced? Proportions and combinations that seem just right, although I couldn’t explain why? Something like that. But this gave me a kind of satisfaction, a cognitive frisson, that felt like it was something more than just appreciation of form. At that time I knew nothing of Mondrian’s interest in theosophy, and I don’t think I was feeling any metaphysical intimations. But it wasn’t only a visual thing; it was a “mind’s eye” thing. Maybe it was just appreciation of form after all, although I couldn’t help but feel that it somehow had more meaning than that. Puzzling.
Originally posted by gveranon:This seems different to me from saying the artist is only making a form that has no point to it. And it seems different from saying that art makes nothing happen. Maybe the differences are only in my reactions to these ways of speaking. I can’t really give a full answer at the moment, if I can at all, but today I have read from The Glass Bead Game (my main leisure reading matter at present), and also from this:http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Christian_and_Oriental_Philosophy_of_Art.html?id=wH_rz5fzEbQC&redir_esc=yThe former is a… I’m tempted to say “brilliant synthesis”, as it is all about synthesis, but “brilliant synthesis” is just a stock phrase. Anyway, it explores the dangers of the separation of ‘mind’ and ‘body’, or, to put it another way, of separating the abstract life from the actual life.The essay I read part of in the latter book describes exactly this condition as the one current at the time of writing (of course, it continues). When there is no such separation, Coomarasmay suggests, there is also no division between ‘functional’ art and ‘fine’ and ‘meaningless’ art. In other words, in a world where the spiritual life is not separated from the actual life, no art is merely functional and no art, either, is merely aesthetic. I’m not sure that I can agree with all he seems to be saying, but I found much of it very compelling, and he writes with a very clear force of intellect that is certainly unusual.
And here’s the essay:http://www.studiesincomparativereligion.com/public/articles/Why_Exhibit_Works_of_Art-by_Ananda_Coomaraswamy.aspx
Addendum:I wondered if reading Coomaraswamy might change my mind on some things, and it’s still possible that it will, but after having read a whole essay, I find myself in the hands of the enemy!The essay in question is ‘Why Exhibit Works of Art?’ There are parts of it that I like very much:A natural effect of the Museum exhibition will be to lead the public to enquire why it is that objects of “museum quality” are to be found only in Museums and are not in daily use and readily obtainable. For the Museum objects, on the whole, were not originally “treasures” made to be seen in glass cases, but rather common objects of the market place that could have been bought and used by anyone. What underlies the deterioration in the quality of our environment?Etc.However, this is his conclusion, which leads me to deduce a strong and inflexible bias:It is for the museum militant to maintain with Plato that “we cannot give the name of art to anything irrational.”So much the worse for art, in this case. I actually think this is one-sided. Coomaraswamy claims that art is not aesthetic, by which he appears to mean, it is not sensual and of the body, but of the mind. He also claims it is not properly a form of self-expression (even though it should be, he says, a true vocation and what the artist loves most to do).Perhaps he’s right, but if so, that leaves us with no human activity that is legitimately the free realm of aesthetic awareness and self-expression. There may indeed be degenerations in art and society, but he shows not the slightest inclination to view things in more complex terms, and allow that the penchant for ‘self-expression’ might also be a development and an interesting addition to what art means and is used for.Moreover, I noticed from the first page that this was something written by an academic and not an actual artist:It is unnecessary for Museums to exhibit the works of living artists, which are not in imminent danger of destruction; or at least, if such works are exhibited, it should be clearly understood that the Museum is really advertising the artist and acting on behalf of the art dealer or middleman whose business it is to find a market for the artist; the only difference being that while the Museum does the same sort of work as the dealer, it makes no profit. On the other hand, that a living artist should wish to be “hung” or “shown” in a Museum can be only due to his need or his vanity.Museums may be non-profit, but I bet Mr Coomaraswamy was paid a good wage by Boston Museum of Fine Arts. I actually find his attitude here pretty disgusting: “Die first, and be dead for several hundred years, then I’ll take an interest in you.” If the artists whose works were exhibited in Boston Museum had only the likes of Coomaraswamy to rely on while they were alive there would have been nothing for the museum to exhibit at all.
In the hands of the enemy! Darn, I already have that Coomaraswamy book on order.I’ve sometimes been attracted by the Platonic view of art, as expounded not so much by Plato himself as by other authors. George Panichas comes to mind, but I’m forgetting some names. Jacques Maritain, too, although he was a Thomist rather than a pure Platonist. This notion of rationality — pre-modern, noetic — seems attractive as an ideal, but for me it’s just an intuitive notion. I don’t actually know what the noetic is; how could I know? Maybe there are some elect, mystic knowers, and I’m simply not one of them. But I can’t quite believe that art is created by some kind of impersonal melding with universal Mind. And whatever its intuitive transcendental appeal, Platonic rationality seems sterile, frozen, and somehow beside the point. Much as I like abstraction at least to a degree, and aesthetic refinement or ascesis, and philosophical conservatism, “docents” like Coomeraswamy make me aware of just how incorrigibly modernist and romantic I am. This is unavoidable. “Here I stand; I can do no other.” I very much agree with your paragraph that begins “Perhaps he’s right, but if so . . .”Living artists don’t necessarily need “museums” (with their archeological and historical connotations, and pious, self-important curators and docents). But artists do need exhibitions, and for at least the last century or so the primary exhibition spaces for living artists have been museums. If you consider the vital role that museums played in the careers of the greatest artists during Coomaraswamy’s lifetime (1877-1947), his remarks are especially staggering. Perhaps he hated even the best of the modernist painters.
I will – or I intend to – finish the book, anyway. He does write well, and he knows his subject, obviously, and I expect to learn something, even if I find some of his views a bit dogmatic.Originally posted by gveranon:This notion of rationality — pre-modern, noetic — seems attractive as an ideal, but for me it’s just an intuitive notion. I don’t actually know what the noetic is; how could I know? Maybe there are some elect, mystic knowers, and I’m simply not one of them.There are a number of things I’ve been wondering about since reading this essay. He redefines certain words, or, reverts to their original definitions. (There’s value in this, of course, but if ‘aestheticism’ only originally meant biological irritability then in this case our vocabulary has become richer with it meaning something else, since we now have the concepts of biological irritability plus aestheticism.) This made me wonder about some of the words he uses but doesn’t bother to define. What, actually, is irrationality? Does this merely mean the work should not be interpreted as ‘irrational’, however it might have been made, or does it mean that all art must conform to a fixed algebra? If so, how large is the algebra, who fixed it, and can it never grow? His attitude becomes decidedly conservative, it seems to me, when he says that new songs are fine, but new kinds of song are always a danger to civilisation. If only I produced art that was a ‘danger to civilisation’ – how empowered I would feel. This seems like an accidental form of praise, in fact. Of course, he is acting as interpreter for past cultures, but he makes it clear he considers them unequivocally superior. In any case, I am still not entirely sure what is meant by irrational, except that I am currently reading about horror comics from the 50s, and wondering if this is the kind of ‘danger to civilisation’ that he means. Oscar Wilde said that the artist is never morbid, but can express anything (this is another position again, it seems); I begin to wonder whether (or to rediscover the fact that) I am significantly interested in what might be called morbid art, either because it is grotesque and exaggerated, so that what Coomaraswamy would call its form (and others its essence?) is in some way asymmetrical, or because it is sentimental/trashy, etc., to the same effect. I have an inkling that in Mr C’s view, all of this, artistically speaking, is ‘the damned’. Even so, what, exactly, is ‘irrational’ about it? If it expresses something, and that something is understood by an audience, then it is, anyway, coherent, and to that extent rational, even if only ‘intuitively’ rational. Also, I’m not convinced that his dichotomy between modern empty individualism and ancient functional/spiritual art holds good universally. I can’t remember the exact period now, but the hermit painters of China fit fairly well into the individualist/fine art type, but I wonder if he would find it as easy to criticise them as the moderns with whom they seem to share the same attitude to art.Originally posted by gveranon: Perhaps he hated even the best of the modernist painters.I wondered about this. Wikipedia informs me that he was friendly, or anyway, significantly social, with a number of artists of the time. I would be interested to know more about how they related to each other.