Archive for the ‘Aesthetics’ Category
Entry 491 — Rough Sketch of Another Poem
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011
This one I call “Cursive Mathemaku No. 3.”
This is another one that, so far, I like a lot. I even think it should be popular! In any event, there’s a lot more work I have to do–color the writing (I’m pretty sure) and work out background. The latter will be a combination, I think, of what I did with my preceding poem, and what I’ve done with my other two cursive mathemaku. I’m looking forward to playing with it, but also fearing to.
Entry 457 — Off to the Hospital
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
I’ll be off to the hospital in another half hour or so. I feel good. Things should go well. If everything works out maximally well, I’ll be able to make a blog entry from the hospital tomorrow. Don’t bank on that, though.
Entry 448 — Another Terminological Change
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
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Although many of my coinages sound pretentious, I always aim for ordinariness. It’s not that easy to achieve. Hence, “xenological poetry” as one of my main categories of poetry. Well, I suddenly saw yesterday that “dislocational poetry” could takes its place. Ironically, that was the very first name I gave such poetry–surrealistic and jump-cut poetry–thirty or forty years ago. I don’t know why I dropped it. I see no reason not to use it now, though, so will.
Meanwhile, I also realized that “vaudevillic” as a term for all varieties of jump-cut poems is unfair since some of them cohere quite nicely. So I’m bringing back “jump-cut” to its previous position, and demoting “vaudevillic” to a secondary position as an adjective describing one kind of jump-cut poems, the other kind being, “convergent jump-cut poems.” Be sure to update your copies of A Preliminary Taxonomy of Poetry,” students.
I’ve made a change in what constitutes aesthetic pleasure, too: one of two things, fundaesthetic pleasure or pleasure due to fundaceptual stimuli, and anthraesthetic pleasure, or pleasure due to anthroceptual stimuli. Then there’s a sort of new word, “osmoticism,” for the ability to learn osmotically, and its antonym, “unosmoticism,” which I use to represent one of the many intellectual dysfunctions of people who don’t believe in Shakespeare.
Last, and close to least is, “lifage,” my word for anything a person uses to trade when attempting to increase the pleasure-to-pain ratio of his life. An economics term. There are two kinds of lifage, “inborn” and “acquired,” the latter of which is a person’s private property. I came up with it because I needed some such term for what one trades to another when one rents a house to the latter in return for (the lifage) of money. It’s not the lifage of the house (assuming for the sake of argument that it is as good after the rental period as it was before it) but the actual hours of life the landlord gives up, hours he could have used enjoying the house himself and which are permanently lost. In other words, the term, “unearned income,” is nonsense.
Entry 419 — Philosobumblery
Monday, April 11th, 2011
“If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know.” Louise Armstrong.
“If you can’t define something, either you are lacking in analytical ability or it doesn’t exist.” Bob Grumman.
By “define” I mean describing something not perfectly but intelligently enough for others to use your definition to find and use what you’ve defined. For instance: to say that Bob Grumman’s residence is “the house with green walls at the southeast corner of Midway Boulevard and Hayworth Road in Port Charlotte, Florida, USA,” is to define it more than sufficiently for most purposes. Ways can be found, in my view, for you to define it (or anything else) in any greater details required for whatever your purpose is. Eventually. To not yet have sufficient data to define something well does not make it undefinable.
I’m writing all this because of another stupid passage in Nordlinger’s New Criterion music review: “. . . a Carnegie Hall booklet featured an interview with James Taylor, the folk-rock-pop legend. He said, ‘A trick that I seem to have used over and over again is to juxtapose a cheerful musical style with a grave or heavy lyrical content. These things are so beyond description and analysis.’” Sure, for someone not blessed with a good reducticeptual awareness (and most people in the arts are not, although Taylor seems to me to have given a helpful, partial description of his art). I don’t fault Taylor for his off-hand remark about description and analysis, but Nordlinger for using it to support his belief in things that are beyond analysis, in this case a piece of unconventional music Nordlinger quoted a terrible attempt at an analysis of–in his mind to show, I gather, the futility of analysis, not that analysis, like anything else, can be poorly done.
Only initial premises are beyond analysis, and they are very few, one of mine being “The Universe is an eternal collection of matter and at least one urwareness occupying infinite space.” (An “urwareness” is a person’s final eternal conscious-of-existence self; I know I have one and have no way of knowing whether anyone else does or not.) My final definition of matter, if I had one, would be my only other unanalyzable premise, I believe. My definition of space is simply “everywhere that matter isn’t.” I recognize that this definition is considered obsolete by certified scientists, but hold to it, anyway. Indeed, I recognize that I’m not saying anything certain philosophers now considered hopelessly out of it weren’t saying 200 or more years ago.
Entry 418 — How Philistines Think
Sunday, April 10th, 2011
Here’s Jay Nordlinger, the music critic I think must be the world’s worst, in his latest column for The New Criterion: “Shortly before he left the music directorship of the New York Philharmonic, I did an interview with Lorin Maazel. I asked him about conducting very familiar music. Take Tchaikovsky’s Fifth: Was it still glorious and thrilling to him? He said ‘It’s as glorious and thrilling as the day it was written.’ And ‘if you become jaded because of overexposure, the problem is yours, not the composer’s.’”
It’s a variation on one of the few stupid things Keats said, “A thing of beauty is a joy forever,” that Philistines, particularly in music, use to defend their resistance to anything unfamiliar. But even the worst mediocrities don’t perform Tchaikovsky’s fifth three times during one concert. Boredom with the over-familiar is what keeps a species from extinction. Performances of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies (which I loved when I first heard them in my teens) should be banned until 2040.
Entry 405 — Happy St. Patrick’s Day
Thursday, March 17th, 2011
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Because I’m one-quarter Irish (due in part to the O’Meara family of County Cork), one of whom came here to fight in the Civil War.
I’m not really back. I just thought of a summa of my thinking about art and science that I thought I should make public in case I drop dead before my vacation from my blog is over.
A verosopher’s duty is to attain as good a systematic understanding of existence as he can, and then express it as clearly as he can, which is by far the harder job. An artist’s duty is to attain as good a systematic understanding of existence as he can, and then express it as unclearly as he can so long as he is just clear enough for his most serious engagents to connect to.
I’m not saying anything I haven’t been saying for fifty years, just saying it better, maybe.
Oh, I have an announcement, too: Jake Berry has been kind enough to use six of my poems to inaugarate the Otherstream Unlimited Blog here. They’ve all been here before, except the last. I happen to consider them all major, even the one at the top, which I rate that high because of its cheerful accessibility. Really, in some ways it’s as good as anything I’ve done.
Okay, only the pair just below the top one are major. (I really can’t understand how I was able to make such terrific poems. They sum up just about everything I’ve managed to master of infraverbal, visual and mathematical poetry over the years.) The others are pretty damned good, though.
Entry 251 — “Homage to Shakespeare”
Monday, October 11th, 2010
I keep directing my Shakespeare authorship friends and enemies to this poem, but none has commented on it, that I recall. I tend to think Shakespeare fans rarely are much interested in newer forms of poetry. I made it around twenty years ago. It was the first of my visual poems to get accepted for Kaldron, the leading American visual poetry magazine of the time (but international in scope). Unfortu- nately, I can’t show it large enough for the small print to be visible her.
Here’s an annotated detail of it showing what the small print says.
Entry 250 — Going in Reverse
Monday, October 11th, 2010
I now know more about pleasure and pain than I understand. My problem, I think, is that what I know seems right, but I can’t organize it into any kind of neat, accessible package. The thing bothering me is what beauty is. I once pegged it as simply the right ratio of pleasure to pain a stimulus produces. Then I remembered something obvious to almost everyone but me: that there are stimuli that are automatically perceived by healthy minds as beautiful. Nothing wrong with two kinds of beauty, but the two seemed to me too different from one another to share a name. Next thing you know, I’d have to accept an elegant mathematical proof as beautiful. Okay in bull sessions, but not if one is concerned with useful serious communication since a term loses its linguistic value to the degree that it can be applied to significantly different things.
So, how about calling the stimulus with the proper familiarity to unfamiliarity ratio . . . ? I can’t think of anything. There’s the beauty our instincts are sensitive to, and the truth our instincts about what contradicts, what harmonizes, are sensitive to. Empathy would be what our instincts derive pleasure from when interacting with others–that which is anthroceptually pleasurable, in terms of knowlecular psychology. There’s good, too, or the pleasure–instinctive in many cases–we feel when we, or others, act in a manner we consider moral.
Okay, folks, I have to turn to neologization, again. “Assimlatry.” That is now my term for any stimulus causes that has the right r/f ratio (or “resolution/frustration” ratio, resolution being what happens when a psychevent leads to the familiar, frustration being what happens when it leads to unfamiliarity). “Assimlatrous” is the adjectival form. Yes, grotesque terms, but naming is the first step toward understanding, and essential.
There’s also the need for the instinctive pleasure one feels when achieving a goal. “Triumph” may be sufficient. No, I think “success” better. And “resolution” for “assimilatry.” No, no” “comprehension” is the perfect name for it! So, I have the following pairing on my list of kinds of pleasure and pain (with which of my theory’s awareness’s is involved in each case):
instinct-based evaluception
beauty/ ugliness: fundaceptual evaluception
empathy/ hostility: personal anthroceptual evaluception
good/ bad: moral anthroceptual evaluception
success/ failure: sagaceptual evaluception
logic-based evaluception
truth/ error: reducticeptual evaluception
experience-based evaluception
comprehension/ perplexity: combiceptual evaluception
I think I may be getting somewhere, after all. And, wow, a list of terms none of which is a coinage! (I mean aside from the names of my awarenesses.)
Entry 247 — Still Trying to Get Terms Right
Saturday, October 9th, 2010
I now propose that the three human emotional responses are instinct-based, assimilation-based and logic-based. And I’m back to naming the three evaluceptual (or emotion-evaluational) types dionysian, apollonian and hermesian, with the claim that dionysian and apollonian have much in common with Nietzsche’s two personality types but aren’t identical to them. It’s true that when introducing my theory I have to spend time explaining my types, but that would be the case whatever I named them. So why not go with interesting names?
In any case, the dionysian’s primary emotional reaction to stimuli will be on the basis of his innate instinctive evaluation of them as painful, pleasurable or neutral. A wound will be painful, a smiling face pleasurable, a nondescript meadow neutral. Near-universal direct emotional responses to commonplace realities. He will thus generally be one of the crowd, and instinctively enjoy the feeling of oneness with others that fusing with a crowd can give one, as is true of Nietzsche’s dionysian. His enjoyments will be mainly sensual, unreflective.
The apollonian’s primary emotional reaction to stimuli will be on the basis of his evaluation of them, mostly instinctive, as to whether or not they lead to contradictions. If they harmonize with his other relevant understandings, he will find them pleasurable. If they contradict those understandings, they will pain him to the degree that they contradict them. If they lead to neither significant agreements or disagreements, as will most often be the case, they will cause no emotional reaction. The apollonian’s enjoyments will tend to be abstract, austere, thoughtful. He will feel himself above the masses, as is the case with Nietzsche’s apollonian.
The hermesian’s emotional reaction is similar to the apollonian’s inasmuch as it is determined in the cerebrum rather than coming already tagged the way the dionysian’s does. However, whereas the apollonian is concerned with unchanging contradictions, the hermesian is concerned with how familiar a situation comes about, which is constantly in flux. That is, if a psychevent leads to contradiction X, it will always cause pain, but if a psychevent leads to situation Y, the result may be pain on Tuesday but pleasure on Thursday, or even later on Tuesday, since what is familiar is a matter of one’s constantly growing knownledge of existence, while what is contradictory will always be contradictory.
Ergo, the hermesian’s response will tend to be the most sophisticated of the three. It will be due to the hermesian’s long-term, cummulative experience of life, whereas the apollonian’s will be due to his innate, permanent sense of consistency, and the dionysian’s to his unchanging instinctive attraction-to/repulsion-from his immediate experience of life.
Still, the dionysian response will be the most natural, the generally most rich. the most unarguably valid of the emotional responses. The apollonian’s the most scorned but probably the one most important for establishing the final value of an artwork, with the hermesian’s irrelevant if concerned with stimuli of not instinctual resonance or logic.
Okay, I’m still fumbling for my take. I’m getting close to it, though.