when only words are left
I just finished reading “No longer human” by Osamu Dazai – the book is problematic because of its misogynistic themes but also representative of its times, published in 1948. I picked up…
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I just finished reading “No longer human” by Osamu Dazai – the book is problematic because of its misogynistic themes but also representative of its times, published in 1948. I picked up…
As noted a while ago I went into a deep rabbit hole after wondering if the Apple lightning to 3.5mm dongle affects audio quality. So there is a chip inside the small…
Since as far as I can remember I have been feeling lonely. I was so lonely that for long periods of my life it was tempting to believe I was an alien…
Sometime last week someone tweeted that people make the mistake of writing things that are interesting to themselves – they should write stuff that people want to read. I think that is…
There is an image in the Upanishads of the original, concentrated energy which was the big bang of creation that set forth the world, consigning all things to the fragmentation of time. But to see through the fragments of time to the full power of original being—that is a function of art.
There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime.
Joyce says that you put a frame around it and see it first as one thing, and that, in seeing it as one thing, you then become aware of the relationship of part to part, each part to the whole, and the whole to each of its parts. This is the essential, aesthetic factor—rhythm, the harmonious rhythm of relationships. And when a fortunate rhythm has been struck by the artist, you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. That is the epiphany.
Joyce’s formula for the aesthetic experience is that it does not move you to want to possess the object. A work of art that moves you to possess the object depicted, he calls pornography.
The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the “radiance” of all things, as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth.
The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time.