I am now attending a poetry class at a small Buddhist University in Colorado. As a non-degree seeker it was shockingly affordable (which resolved something I have been struggling with in regard to the university and liberal arts for some time.)
It’s library dedicated to Allen Ginsberg bares the quote by Blake “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." The school, not without it’s problems, is at a minimum a community for outsiders. Here romanticism never died, though by varying degree has been interspersed with a push toward experimentation, queer, and racial theory.
One of the first gallery exhibits here was termed dharma arts where the school’s founder brought various plants, branches, and nature into a gallery setting.
It was also here where Ram Das learned from Ginsberg and went the opposite direction of Kingsnorth and realized faith and activism were not separate. Your following beautiful phrase; “not to get stuck in a ghost-modernism where we are haunted by their failure, but to laugh and climb down from the big ex cathedra chair and rejoin everyone else telling stories around the fire” maps to one of Das’ more well known phrases which was recently used by British musician Jon Hopkins
Robert Bly was here and I strongly suspect experienced dissonances that formed some of his later foundational ideas on the shadow (I say this in relation to Shaw showing up in the Dark Mountain story.)
It is also perhaps noteworthy that the writing school is named after the person who inspired Brian Eno to become an artist and through various offshoots and cultural tendrils inspired the founder of the campaign to show the first image of earth from space, who then created the Whole Earth catalog, which rather ironically seeded much of what became Silicon Valley, and more recently was integral to starting the Long Now Foundation with Eno. Together they helped in creating the 10,000 year clock which is being funded by and located on land owned by Jeff Bezos of all people…. The clock was conceived of in 1989 William Hillis and was first displayed as a prototype in London in 2005 which has been ticking away the seconds in the background since then as more and more people start to talk and think in terms of deep time. One quote about the clock was that it would be a “modern day Stonehenge to remind those in the future of the past.”
Like the two poles you mention between you and Paul, I write this just to offer a mirror of activity and the strange continental leaps of ideas that seem to be going back and forth whether acknowledged or not.
Thank you for the many quotes, ideas, shared thoughts on beauty and your insistence on community as an underpinning necessity and virtue.
A few thoughts about progress and the past triggered by the essay. I was in art school in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. This was at the peak of America's (or New York's) absolute Modernist hegemony. The previous 20 years had seen breakthrough after breakthrough, building on and consummating the achievements of the European Modernists. But instead of each breakthrough--from Pollack's drip paintings to conceptualism's disembodiment of the art object--adding a new room to the mansion of art, each new development ushered the enterprise of advanced art into a new room, yes, but closed and locked the door behind. So that all the previous rooms in the mansion became galleries in a museum, a place you might visit, but not draw inspiration from. All the possibilities locked in those rooms were moribund and foreclosed to anybody who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. The only way out was forward, into the next room. To adapt Caroline's metaphor, each new room was one flight down from the last, the ultimate goal to get to the rock bottom of Art. Of course, that final room would have no exit and would reveal itself to be a dungeon.
Fortunately for us all, the dead end nature of this Hegelian quest for final solutions was understood by many of my generation of artists, who proceeded in the 80s to dance on the grave of Painting by... what else?, making paintings.
Somewhere in this tale of the microcosm of the Art World is some sort of reflection of the microcosm of Progress as an overarching ideology shaping the modern world and its relationship to the past. I think it's becoming more and more clear to more and more people that Progress has ushered us into the anteroom of the dungeon..... (Please excuse the Romantic imagery.)
Marvelous, Dougald! I had a similar experience in the French department with theory, and now all I can think of is Billy Collins whose students want to tie a poem to a chair and torture a confession out of it. Ouf.
I just walked through Iain McGilchrist’s argument for romanticism in Master and His Emissary and found it super compelling. Your piece just piles it on for me.
Oh yes indeed "another way to touch the world than gripping it" strange to say what rules out the ecstasies of hard bop trumpet in a way, but in a sstack seeking to characterize my feeling of agency, it was that we apprehend the world with the grip of a dragonfly. And in the same moments that everything touches us, if the question of our autonomy comes up, we verifiably are as reactive as any beast, so that we only might get away with steering intermittently. Clay Eshleman was funny about this. For advance forgiveness of those who despair of thinking he asks " was mother's apple that rich?". Which is egg which is Rimbaud's "alive, and donot care" we all value as permission to carry on, but that jewel in our father' eyes is there and then a remainder. An outcome to be wished that we make something bright because we were that jewel where the old man gave himself over to the wordless world. Sleepy Us, what is the Shakespeare? Was sleep the outcome greatly to be wished?
"And from where I stood, perhaps the Romantics had been searching for a new covenant between head and heart, but what they came to stand for was heart-against-head, a revolt against the Age of Reason which was caught inside the logic of dissociation."
NO! (In thunder). They sought to fuse (or keep in harmony, or productive tension) the two without one overwhelming the other. Matthew Arnold called it imaginative reason. Harold Bloom, as always, puts it best, "The great enemy of Romantic poetry has never been reason, but rather those premature modes of conceptualization that masquerade as the final accounts of reason in every age. It is not reason that menaces the shaping spirit, but the high priests of rationalization."
Nevertheless, beautifully written essay. And I wonder how the leitmotif of walking is not the epitome of romanticism?
I also wonder the extent to which the "theory hole" idea misleads. Wouldn't anyone who teaches deconstruction as some kind of method to be applied already show their hand? Were you in business class rather than first? One must live in the margins.
I came to Derrida and his generation prior to reading the Romantics. I remember when a teacher of mine scolded me for my inability to "appreciate differance." What I eventually came to recognize, vis a vis conversations with said teacher, was a line in Derrida, from his essay on Kafka, that has been most important to me (and I think that essay, any of his essays on literature are his best). After his mistaken arrest, the officer tells him: "Don't take it too tragically. Live it as a literary experience." Maybe, contra the idea of method, experience is the heart of theory? The experience of life in modern conditions? The sword of Damocles? To live life happy in each moment by virtue of the absurd? A truly first class education should throw you in steerage.
Ok but can someone explain what deconstructionism actually is? I am a zoomer and throughout my entire academic career in literary studies I never once actually read anything by Derrida. My profs never even said his name. He's like a boogey-man fiigure I only see online, like Jordan Peterson or Tung tung tung sahur.
I am now attending a poetry class at a small Buddhist University in Colorado. As a non-degree seeker it was shockingly affordable (which resolved something I have been struggling with in regard to the university and liberal arts for some time.)
It’s library dedicated to Allen Ginsberg bares the quote by Blake “To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour." The school, not without it’s problems, is at a minimum a community for outsiders. Here romanticism never died, though by varying degree has been interspersed with a push toward experimentation, queer, and racial theory.
One of the first gallery exhibits here was termed dharma arts where the school’s founder brought various plants, branches, and nature into a gallery setting.
It was also here where Ram Das learned from Ginsberg and went the opposite direction of Kingsnorth and realized faith and activism were not separate. Your following beautiful phrase; “not to get stuck in a ghost-modernism where we are haunted by their failure, but to laugh and climb down from the big ex cathedra chair and rejoin everyone else telling stories around the fire” maps to one of Das’ more well known phrases which was recently used by British musician Jon Hopkins
Robert Bly was here and I strongly suspect experienced dissonances that formed some of his later foundational ideas on the shadow (I say this in relation to Shaw showing up in the Dark Mountain story.)
It is also perhaps noteworthy that the writing school is named after the person who inspired Brian Eno to become an artist and through various offshoots and cultural tendrils inspired the founder of the campaign to show the first image of earth from space, who then created the Whole Earth catalog, which rather ironically seeded much of what became Silicon Valley, and more recently was integral to starting the Long Now Foundation with Eno. Together they helped in creating the 10,000 year clock which is being funded by and located on land owned by Jeff Bezos of all people…. The clock was conceived of in 1989 William Hillis and was first displayed as a prototype in London in 2005 which has been ticking away the seconds in the background since then as more and more people start to talk and think in terms of deep time. One quote about the clock was that it would be a “modern day Stonehenge to remind those in the future of the past.”
Like the two poles you mention between you and Paul, I write this just to offer a mirror of activity and the strange continental leaps of ideas that seem to be going back and forth whether acknowledged or not.
Thank you for the many quotes, ideas, shared thoughts on beauty and your insistence on community as an underpinning necessity and virtue.
A few thoughts about progress and the past triggered by the essay. I was in art school in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. This was at the peak of America's (or New York's) absolute Modernist hegemony. The previous 20 years had seen breakthrough after breakthrough, building on and consummating the achievements of the European Modernists. But instead of each breakthrough--from Pollack's drip paintings to conceptualism's disembodiment of the art object--adding a new room to the mansion of art, each new development ushered the enterprise of advanced art into a new room, yes, but closed and locked the door behind. So that all the previous rooms in the mansion became galleries in a museum, a place you might visit, but not draw inspiration from. All the possibilities locked in those rooms were moribund and foreclosed to anybody who wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. The only way out was forward, into the next room. To adapt Caroline's metaphor, each new room was one flight down from the last, the ultimate goal to get to the rock bottom of Art. Of course, that final room would have no exit and would reveal itself to be a dungeon.
Fortunately for us all, the dead end nature of this Hegelian quest for final solutions was understood by many of my generation of artists, who proceeded in the 80s to dance on the grave of Painting by... what else?, making paintings.
Somewhere in this tale of the microcosm of the Art World is some sort of reflection of the microcosm of Progress as an overarching ideology shaping the modern world and its relationship to the past. I think it's becoming more and more clear to more and more people that Progress has ushered us into the anteroom of the dungeon..... (Please excuse the Romantic imagery.)
Maybe the dream hath no bottom... but still, it wiggles...!
Marvelous, Dougald! I had a similar experience in the French department with theory, and now all I can think of is Billy Collins whose students want to tie a poem to a chair and torture a confession out of it. Ouf.
I just walked through Iain McGilchrist’s argument for romanticism in Master and His Emissary and found it super compelling. Your piece just piles it on for me.
Oh yes indeed "another way to touch the world than gripping it" strange to say what rules out the ecstasies of hard bop trumpet in a way, but in a sstack seeking to characterize my feeling of agency, it was that we apprehend the world with the grip of a dragonfly. And in the same moments that everything touches us, if the question of our autonomy comes up, we verifiably are as reactive as any beast, so that we only might get away with steering intermittently. Clay Eshleman was funny about this. For advance forgiveness of those who despair of thinking he asks " was mother's apple that rich?". Which is egg which is Rimbaud's "alive, and donot care" we all value as permission to carry on, but that jewel in our father' eyes is there and then a remainder. An outcome to be wished that we make something bright because we were that jewel where the old man gave himself over to the wordless world. Sleepy Us, what is the Shakespeare? Was sleep the outcome greatly to be wished?
"And from where I stood, perhaps the Romantics had been searching for a new covenant between head and heart, but what they came to stand for was heart-against-head, a revolt against the Age of Reason which was caught inside the logic of dissociation."
NO! (In thunder). They sought to fuse (or keep in harmony, or productive tension) the two without one overwhelming the other. Matthew Arnold called it imaginative reason. Harold Bloom, as always, puts it best, "The great enemy of Romantic poetry has never been reason, but rather those premature modes of conceptualization that masquerade as the final accounts of reason in every age. It is not reason that menaces the shaping spirit, but the high priests of rationalization."
Nevertheless, beautifully written essay. And I wonder how the leitmotif of walking is not the epitome of romanticism?
I also wonder the extent to which the "theory hole" idea misleads. Wouldn't anyone who teaches deconstruction as some kind of method to be applied already show their hand? Were you in business class rather than first? One must live in the margins.
I came to Derrida and his generation prior to reading the Romantics. I remember when a teacher of mine scolded me for my inability to "appreciate differance." What I eventually came to recognize, vis a vis conversations with said teacher, was a line in Derrida, from his essay on Kafka, that has been most important to me (and I think that essay, any of his essays on literature are his best). After his mistaken arrest, the officer tells him: "Don't take it too tragically. Live it as a literary experience." Maybe, contra the idea of method, experience is the heart of theory? The experience of life in modern conditions? The sword of Damocles? To live life happy in each moment by virtue of the absurd? A truly first class education should throw you in steerage.
Ok but can someone explain what deconstructionism actually is? I am a zoomer and throughout my entire academic career in literary studies I never once actually read anything by Derrida. My profs never even said his name. He's like a boogey-man fiigure I only see online, like Jordan Peterson or Tung tung tung sahur.