fervent years
the final manifesto from last quarter that you asked to see. maybe it will help with the aesthetics paper? at least to give you an idea of questions to ask me, things to challenge me on...:
The World Has Made Me, and I Remake the World
I am still a child, often overwhelmed by things that grow around me. Birds!: animals to live in the sky. Grass: carpet for the outdoors. Or even horrible things: maggots eating out the eyes of a newborn puppy.
When I see something beautiful, I want to see it over and over--or replicate the experience of it. The horrible things attract me, too: Why do I look at photos of Holocaust concentration camps when I know that they scare me?
There is an attracting strength in polarities. Is it a kinship? I mean, do we recognize a pattern we understand in ourselves?
The world is based on a recurring set of compromises, between good and bad, the grand and the insignificant, animal and the divine. Earth itself is dependent upon the struggle between gravity and nuclear fusion: the stars and planets exist in a delicate state of hydrostatic equilibrium. Nature is a war with rules, built on physical laws that dictate chaos.
And on a smaller scale, I experience my life as an individual. I am always alone with my thoughts; I have never been on a car ride when I wasn't one of the passengers. But I am also aware of my humanity, as another person in a history of many others. I feel both these things at once, and they are not in competition, or, perhaps they are, but neither wins, and it does not feel unnatural.
Great art speaks to both these parts--humanity and the human--simultaneously. I can distinguish between multiple voices, but I understand them as complements.
Great art makes me revere the artist. And when I remember that the artist is a person like me, I feel the power of my own potential to develop complete, self-referential thoughts.
Great art functions dialectically, just as the mind of the artist who creates it, the society that studies it, and the nature that affords its physicality. It synthesizes form and content. It comments on the universal order of things through a specific model.
Yes, our best art is a reflection humans, made by humans. Humans are part of the world, yet also reflective of its patterns. The world is a small universe in a grand universe. I am thinking about the process of thinking and understanding it by engaging in the act of thinking.
The World Has Made Me, and I Remake the World
I am still a child, often overwhelmed by things that grow around me. Birds!: animals to live in the sky. Grass: carpet for the outdoors. Or even horrible things: maggots eating out the eyes of a newborn puppy.
When I see something beautiful, I want to see it over and over--or replicate the experience of it. The horrible things attract me, too: Why do I look at photos of Holocaust concentration camps when I know that they scare me?
There is an attracting strength in polarities. Is it a kinship? I mean, do we recognize a pattern we understand in ourselves?
The world is based on a recurring set of compromises, between good and bad, the grand and the insignificant, animal and the divine. Earth itself is dependent upon the struggle between gravity and nuclear fusion: the stars and planets exist in a delicate state of hydrostatic equilibrium. Nature is a war with rules, built on physical laws that dictate chaos.
And on a smaller scale, I experience my life as an individual. I am always alone with my thoughts; I have never been on a car ride when I wasn't one of the passengers. But I am also aware of my humanity, as another person in a history of many others. I feel both these things at once, and they are not in competition, or, perhaps they are, but neither wins, and it does not feel unnatural.
Great art speaks to both these parts--humanity and the human--simultaneously. I can distinguish between multiple voices, but I understand them as complements.
Great art makes me revere the artist. And when I remember that the artist is a person like me, I feel the power of my own potential to develop complete, self-referential thoughts.
Great art functions dialectically, just as the mind of the artist who creates it, the society that studies it, and the nature that affords its physicality. It synthesizes form and content. It comments on the universal order of things through a specific model.
Yes, our best art is a reflection humans, made by humans. Humans are part of the world, yet also reflective of its patterns. The world is a small universe in a grand universe. I am thinking about the process of thinking and understanding it by engaging in the act of thinking.
posted by jkeenan at 1:17 PM
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