Daily Office (week two day one)

"I...love to clothe this false self...and I wind experiences around myself with pleasures and glory like bandages in order to make myself visible to myself and to the world, as if I were an invisible body that could only become visible when something visible covered its surface. but there is no substance under the things with which I am clothed. I am hollow...And when they are gone there will be nothing left of me but my own nakedness and emptiness and hollowness..."

Thomas Merton

Lord may I live from this day onward in a way that is your will and not the will of others and their unattainable expectations.

Beauty is between limit and the infinite

"By means of beauty sensuous man is led to form and thought; by means of beauty spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense."

Beauty is necessary to tug at each instance, but it must not be considered a "middle state."

it links the two opposite realms (form and thought), yet there is absolutely no middle term.

they are diametrically opposed and can never become one.
Their union can only come about through their destruction

through the frame of the sensuous, beauty is thought of as it actually behaves, whereas through the frame of reason beauty behaves as it is actually thought.

"...Both are bound to miss the truth: the former because they would make the limitations of discursive understanding vie with the infinity of nature; the latter because they would limit the infinity of nature according to the laws of discursive understanding."

genuine art

I read a post today on the corporazation of art. How art and culture is going to be a new section in the Wall Street Journel (because now culture is capital). the writer for Art Talk, Chicago goes on to claim that she is trying to 'make peace' with this direction and yet still has hope for 'sincere' and 'genuine' art saying something along the lines of:

"..even if art has to move underground it will still survive somewhere."

I get frustrated at these statements because I want to believe in them, but I just don't. I don't believe in genuine art in the way the world believes in it (at least to some extent). My continual battle with proposals like this is the following:

How could we possibly have 'genuine' or 'sincere,' when the insides have been gutted, the framework has been stripped bare and the foundation has cracked. There are no absolutes. There is no standard. If you want to measure genuine, you have to measure it in comparison to all else...which by definition of the word comes from no place at all.

"Genuine: (2) actually produced by or proceeding from the alleged source or author."

When art comes from above and not from below.
When art comes from grace and not from gravity.
When art comes from God alone.
The only absolute.

Then, I would say, art is Genuine.

barbarian and the savage

beauty lies between our sensuous drive and our formal drive. As such, the aesthetic experience must exist so that we do not fall the the extremes at either end; the former being savagery and the latter barbarianism.

savage: when feeling predominates over principle
barbarian: when principle destroys feeling

sense pluse drive ought to equal play

sphere of knowledge
Material Drive:: concerned with reality
Formal Drive: concerned with necessity of things

sphere of action
Material Drive: preservation of life
Formal Drive: maintenance of dignity

both drives aim towards truth and perfection

According to this explanation, if such it be, then the term beauty is neither extended to cover the whole realm of living things nor is it merely confined to this realm. A block of marble, though it is and remains lifeless, can nevertheless, thanks to the architect or the sculptor, become living form; and a human being, though he may live and have form, is far from being on that acount a living form. In order to be so, his form would have to be life, and his life form. As long as we merely think about his form , it is lifeless, a mere abstraction; as long as we merely feel his life, it is formless, a mere impression . Only when his form lives in our feeling and his life takes on form in our understanding, does he become living form; and this will always be the case whenever we adujdge him beautiful.

But because we know how to specify the elements that when combinde produce beauty, this does not mean that its genesis has as yet in any way beene xplained; for that would require us to understand the actual manner of theri combining, and this, like all reciprocalaction between finite and infinite, remains for ever inaccessible to our probing.

Schiller moves on to explain that without the combining of these two drives (form and material) human nature is incomplete and gives rise to limitation within it.

But how there can be beauty, and how humanity is possible, neither reason nore experience can tell us.

Play: everything that is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent, and yet imposes no kind of constraint either from within or from without.

man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays.

can art change the world?

output births input and input births output. We are moving, changing, evolving and art extends this change. all things are affected in the equation of "world," - the question is can art change the worold in a positive way, to which I would respond:

If we allow it to.

"Artists and poets are the raw nerve ends of humanity. By themselves they can do little to save humanity. Without them there would be little worth saving." - Jimmy Ernst's gravestone

poetry as metaphor

it excites me to think about the metaphor as a space that is in itself a non-objective space where our minds are unhinged from conditional precepts and rest upon potential alone.