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That Beauty Thing Again, with Essays

Recently, I’ve been forwarded a couple of articles. One, Roger Scruton’s “Beauty and Desecration” in the City Journal, is about beauty and it’s place in the modern world, particularly in the arts. Jed Perl’s “Slaughterhouse” in The New Republic is, in its way, about the same subject, though it focuses on a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon at MoMA.

I have often blogged about the subject of beauty, particularly as it relates to poetry, so my sympathies with these two authors is pretty clear. I will not rehash my Wilfred Owen commentaries though. This is where Scruton’s essay is particularly interesting to me. He notes the change of value of art from beauty to expression. In essence, anti-art is valued more than “art.” Opposition to beauty is seen as necessary (at least by academics and decision-makers in arts).

For artists like Hopper, Samuel Barber, and Wallace Stevens, ostentatious transgression was mere sentimentality, a cheap way to stimulate an audience, and a betrayal of the sacred task of art, which is to magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty—as Stevens reveals the beauty of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and Barber that of Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

Of course, Scruton hits on three of my favorite artists of the 20th century in this paragraph. He continues this paragraph:

But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront of modern culture. So far as the critics and the wider culture were concerned, the pursuit of beauty was at the margins of the artistic enterprise. Qualities like disruptiveness and immorality, which previously signified aesthetic failure, became marks of success; while the pursuit of beauty became a retreat from the real task of artistic creation. This process has been so normalized as to become a critical orthodoxy, prompting the philosopher Arthur Danto to argue recently that beauty is both deceptive as a goal and in some way antipathetic to the mission of modern art. Art has acquired another status and another social role.

Barber certainly has lost his place, but I might disagree about Stevens, who seems to have only risen in poetic value. Nonetheless,  L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and oodles of gagging confessional poetry and the perceived high value of these modes of expression seem to me the very essence of pushing “beauty” to the margins, that tricks and expression are more valued. Scruton’s article also addresses how we often find beauty, which I’ve broached in my way in talking about finding “quietness” or “cinema moments.” Essentially places of stillness. So much of the world around us is ugly. Ugly is easy:

In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.

Scruton is liable to be skewered for his “romantic” fantasies of beauty, of his reaches for understanding of what beauty is, and for his frontal assault on bad art for its desire to push beauty out as a value. Jed Perl, by contrast, will probably be broiled for his unwillingness to simply accept Francis Bacon’s art as great simply because others say it is. Both Perl and Scruton are small cries in the wilderness, and I hope they are not overlooked simply because they challenge preconceived notions.

Perl’s strand really follows up on the idea of expression, that the artist is more important than the art (I think of Andy Warhol with this statement). And Perl says something extraordinarily true and so matter-of-factly that I wonder if it will be noticed at all:

The fact is that an artist’s outward behavior has no fixed relationship to the development or the value of his or her work. But to accept this fact, which really ought to be self-evident, one must accept also the freestanding value of art, an idea that today is devalued when it is not entirely rejected.

Art necessarily stands outside of the artist. We may be fascinated by artists (I am by Shakespeare, Shostakovich, and Caravaggio), but that interest is different than the value of the art. I’m led to my interest by the art (as I’m interested in Roosevelt by his actions) - without the art, I could care less.

Indiana Authors Award

The finalists for the Indiana Authors Award can be found here. Congratulations to my friend Jared Carter for the nod in the Regional category. However, that category is tragically misnamed. All writing is inevitably regional (i.e., we all come from somewhere and we write from that somewhere…that somewhere is called a region by many).

Nonetheless, Carter deserves the recognition.

An Awesome 8 Years

Today is Gina’s and my eight-year anniversary. And what a great eight years it has been. I find the words to describe how lucky I am elusive. All I know is that this amazing woman said, “Yes,” to my proposal (yes to a poet…what was she thinking!?). I’m not sure how I got so lucky. I only know that I did…and am.

The Quieted Self

Reading Jared Carter’s essay titled “The Lyric Temper,” a particular idea came through very forcefully:

I have learned the necessity of silencing my own thoughts in order to hear the brushing of their wings as they pass overhead.

Or, to change the metaphor—only when the wind dies down can the bee or the butterfly land on the blossom. Genuine lyricism comes only after the self has been quieted. Not put to sleep, or—least of all—”put on hold,” in that ugly, modern phrase. Rather, shifted into another dimension. Allowed to drift, and to become something rich and strange.

Earlier today, I was watching the tree outside my window as the wind, a wind that came and went. The sun was setting, but the windows faces south, and I saw only the effects of the sunset on the leaves, the fence, etc. I just watched this scene. Focused on it. The sounds of Arvo Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel were playing. I sat and watched. Something akin to what I’ve always considered meditation to be, I drifted beyond that particular moment, but the moment was still very there. Yet, somehow, it had moved from just observing to contemplating. Hence, Carter’s statement seems most true, the erasure of self. The Buddha finds peace by denying the self (our desires, our pains, our hopes, etc.). It seems that when we let ourselves, mentally at least, to wander freely, we often allow the artistic to appear.

Just letting the mind go, ceasing to attempt to control and direct it, this abnegation of the self opens opportunities for art. Carter here lands on a provocative statement about art, about how the lyric comes about.

Oh, by the way, the rest of the essay is well worth reading.

First Road Trip

While cleaning out a bunch of stuff for our garage sale several months ago, I was hoping to come across the journal I kept of my first road trip. Fortunately, I did find it, and it was, well, what you’d expect of a 10-year old kid, but a kid enthralled with the adventure of taking a road trip.I have very find memories of that journey with my Aunt Mart, Uncle Ernie, and cousin Karole.

In reading Andrew O’Hagan’s recent article in The London Review of Books titled “A Car of One’s Own”, O’Hagan touches on some of the thrills and reasons why people, and Americans in particular, love cars. I’ll quote a bit here:

Behind all this stands the culture of driving and the fact of traffic. We love driving and we hate it, we praise it and we slate it, but our relationship with cars is a lively element in our relationship with ourselves and other people. The downturn in the industry chills us, but mainly because – and we don’t feel this way about pharmaceuticals or petrochemicals – it makes us imagine we might have to stop being who we are.

The first long drive I took after I passed my test was a kind of baptism: I put down the windows and let all life’s unreasonable demarcations fly behind the car, enjoying the illusion that I now had a friend who cared for my freedom.

In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car. There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It may seem to give you back your existential mojo.

Driving was always a covert means, more explicit in the States, of discovering the outer limits of your own character in the act of transit.

I identify with a great many of these notions. Road trips still give me a thrill in a unique way that I’ve never experienced doing anything else. The idea of a warm evening, rock music, windows down, bright sun, and on the road is delicious even to think of. While learning to drive and obtaining a driver’s license in other countries may be important, I do not get the sense (and I could be wrong) that it is quite the right of passage as in the U.S. Why? For me, it began the active exploration of myself. It got me into trouble, but it was one of the most freeing experiences I have ever had.

And I cannot help but think that my love for road trips began so many years ago in 1982. We traveled far. One moment is particularly memorable to me and it captures fully the whole sense of travel and road trips for me: Uncle Ernie drove just a little bit through North Carolina so we could say we had been to North Carolina.

What’s the Difference? Part 2

So in my last post, I contemplated why I found Zbigniew Herbert boring but Eugenio Montale (both in translation) interesting. Here’s a poem by Eugenio Montale titled “Wind and Flags”:

The gust that lifted the bitter scent
of the sea to the valley’s twists and turns
and struck you, ruffling your hair,
brief tangle on the pale sky;

the squall that glued your dress to you
and shaped you swiftly in its image,
how it’s come back, now you’re gone, to these rocks
the mountain shoulders over the abyss;

and how, now the drunken rage is spent,
the soft breath finds the garden again,
that lulled you, stretched in your hammock
among the trees, on your flights without wings.

Alas, time never orders its grains
the same way twice. And there’s hope in this:
for, if it happens, along with nature
our fable will go up in a flash.

Flow that doesn’t quicken - and now brings alive
a group of dwellings laid out to the eye
on the flank of a hill,
bedecked with banners and festoons.

The world exists…Amazement halts
the heart that surrenders to straying ghosts,
heralds of evening: and won’t believe
starved men are celebrating.

I find much to admire in this poem: it’s supple shifts of tone, its striking imagery (”ruffling your hair;/brief tangle on the pale sky”). The abstractions in Montale create interest despite the fact that I’m reading this in translation. I find similar effects in 20th-century Greek poetry.

W.S. Graham frequently commented in his letters that he strove to push language (specifically English in his case) into new territories, to attempt to create new limits of meaning (putting nouns into verbs, a common technique of Shakespeare, for example). I think a similar concept can be gained by using imagery to push boundaries of meaning. The extension of meaning still happens within the context of language (think of Hart Crane’s “adagio of islands” - its mix of musical terminology with a physical landscape to create an impression of languid islands or of a leisurely sail through islands…both ideas work together to create the overall impression). I agree with Graham’s desire to see poetry push language to achieve effects outside of normal speech (even those poets who which to use every day speech still create effects with imagery, rhymes, etc. - think Robert Frost here). Translations of Herbert fail to give me that sense in English (though I fully imagine that those effects are apparent in the original Polish). Translations of Montale tend to become, in English, poems that succeed in adding to the language.

What’s the Difference? Part 1

I recently completed Zbigniew Herbert’s collected poems (translated by Alissa Valles). According to the vast majority of criticism and other commentaries I have read, Herbert is consider a substantial 20th-century poet. Alas, I found the work mostly boring, which I am sure will bother some people. After some consideration, I must admit that I find other “giants” of Eastern European poetry rather boring: Milosz, Brodsky, Seifert, Szymborska (the earlier 20th-century Russian poets seem to be an exception: Mayakovsky, Akhamtova, Pasternak). Now I could say that it’s just the fact that it is poetry in translation, but that cannot be all of it for modern Greek and Italian poetry I find remarkable in translation (Seferis, Cavafy, Elytis, Montale, Ungaretti) in addition to the earlier Russian poets and other poets in translation.

So what is it? I’ve been re-reading a bit of Montale and Elytis, and it seems to me to be the type of poetry it is. Montale and Elytis seem to be more, well, abstract and symbolist while Herbert and Seifert seem too literal and too concrete. Hence, Herbert in translation (and let’s be fair, I’m only reading them in translation and this should not, in the end, indicate any valuation of their poetry in their native language) comes off as prosy and flat. Montale, however, leaps off the page in imaginative fireworks. The abstraction and symbolism become the main focus of the poetry and carry my interest. I’d rather read Milosz’s Captive Mind than most of his poetry (and Milosz I find most agreeable of the Eastern European poets I mention here).

Here’s some of a Herbert poem titled “Mr. Cogito and the Imagination”:

Mr. Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination
the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him

he didn’t appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors of dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were not his home

he would rarely soar
on the wings of metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

At first blush, this may seem abstract and contradictory to my statements, what with its “without mirrors of dialectics,” but I do not find a spark in this language. It remains flat on the page and fails, interestingly, to elicit an imaginative response. In a future post, I’ll look at a Montale poem and comment further on these ideas.

The Wrestler

I have just watched this film by Darren Aronofsky. As I have never been shy about saying, I am a big fan of Aronofsky’s work, which include Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, the last of which is perhaps one of the finest movies I have ever seen. The Wrestler is a more conventional film for Aronfsky (by that I mean more of a traditional narrative), but it is still very much feels like an Aronofsky film. The Wrestler is a whoppingly good film.

Where to begin? First, let’s begin with Mickey Rourke, who plays Randy “The Ram,” an aging wrestler whose famous days are two decades in his past. Still, he slogs through life wrestling at Legions and schools to a small crowd of thrill seekers. One of the ways this film works its magic is that it plays to stereotypes but makes them real and human. The Ram has put his body through pain year after year and it is wearing on him. He scripts the match (not in depth, but in the general outlines). As one follows Ram through the movie and as becomes explicitly clear later on, the crowd (no matter how small) provides as much life to Ram as he knows it’s his job to provide entertainment to the crowd. Why would he suffer through a match as he gets stapled with a staple gun and thrown into barb-wire fencing? One may be tempted to view Rourke’s performance through the prism of his wrestling moves and stunts and willingness to express pain, but where I find Rourke’s performance mesmerizing is in the quiet moments. Ram home alone or playing a Nintendo (very old version) with a local boy, or the emotion he launches through his eyes. The Ram is also a tragic character, and I mean that in the classical sense: The Ram comes to recognize his flaws and that they will bring about his doom and that they are caused by his own actions. We watch this unfold, we watch the Ram come to this understanding and we too understand that what happens must happen.

Marisa Tomei plays Pam “Cassidy,” an aging stripper. She too slogs through life continuing to dance for men who dismiss her because she is older. Only the Ram seems a willing paying customer. Cassidy too is a stereotype that has a human core. She cannot and will not cross the line of interacting with customers outside the strip joint. But (this is one a piece of magic in the movie that I cannot figure out how it is accomplished) Cassidy and the Ram clearly feel more for each other than a straight customer/stripper relationship.

OK, I’m leaving out a ton…the relationship between the Ram and his estranged daughter, the parallels and symbols, etc., because as with any Aronofsky film, it is too rich, too full to adequately discuss. His films make me want to discuss them, to interact with people to spend hours on the construction, script, etc. The thing I want to mention the most, however, is what makes this movie so real, so amazing is that the characters have a life onscreen, they extend beyond the celluloid. All have a past and a future unknown to the viewer but that informs their actions and motivations and thoughts, and we as the viewer understand that.

It’s really sad to know that Aronofsky had such a difficult time funding a film of this quality.

Tone and Color

Two of my favorite pop songs are by U2: “One” and “Kite.” Both of these songs have melancholic tones (as I would call them) to them, but they are substantially different in what they conjure to my mind. When I hear “One,” I often seen a rain in an urban landscape. With “Kite,” I see an almost monochrome…or “two-chrome”…image, usually on the beach with the ocean. A strong wind with striking blue seas and skies and a nearly impossibly bright sandy beach.

Pop music, of course, uses both text and sound to create these moods, but I find the difference between the two striking. I think poetry can create these elements as well. The rhythm, the theme, the sounds contribute to this tone or mood. Poems can have color without relying on explicit color imagery, but of course, they can use that imagery. Wallace Stevens “Of Mere Being” uses images and colors to create a tone while retaining an element of abstraction, which is perhaps what I admire most about Stevens’s poetry: His ability to reside comfortably in the abstract imagination while providing a sense of concreteness to the poem.

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Remembering Poets

I just recently finished Donald Hall’s Remembering Poets: Reminiscences and Opinions. I have not been a fan of Hall’s poetry. I do not find it bad. Just boring — which means bad by another name I guess. So I was surprised to find myself so drawn into this book of prose. Hall has had the fortune of going on a road trip with Dylan Thomas, having Robert Frost chase him down, witness T. S. Eliot’s courteous cutting insults, and encounter the ups and downs of Ezra Pound. The book is full of delightful insights (Thomas screaming for a particular tie, Eliot dissing Oscar Williams, etc.), but interestingly some of the more valuable aspects of the book are the reflections on the writing of poetry and poets.

Several of these quotes found real resonance with me, seemed to speak a truth. Here are a few quotes from the book that I found interesting:

But the great poets as they turn older look past the Muse…to pursue vision.

If we devote our lives to poetry, and take our lives seriously, we must praise and denounce with equal ferocity. People who follow the notion that praise is requisite…should sell cars.

For me, poetry is first of all sounds.

Poetry exists to extend human consciousness, to bring materials and insights from the unconscious dark into the light of language.