[New-Poetry] Beauty by Scruton

[Anny Ballardini]

Here are my highlights. As you can see, I agree with Roger Scruton. I would
have probably chosen different authors and a different style, but he is
fundamentally speaking my own language.



At some time during the aftermath of modernism, beauty ceased to receive
those tributes.


The value of abstract art, Greenberg claimed, lay not in beauty but in
expression. [...] from the writings of Georges Bataille, Jean Genet, and
Jean-Paul Sartre to the bleak emptiness of the *nouveau roman*.

But somehow those great life-affirmers lost their position at the forefront
of modern culture.
[Stevens, Hpper, Samuel Barber]

Hence the scenes of cannibalism, dismemberment, and meaningless pain with
which contemporary cinema abounds, with directors like Quentin Tarantino
having little else in their emotional repertories.

*What do we make of this, and how do we find our way back to the thing so
many people long for, which is the vision of beauty?*

There is a great hunger for beauty in our world, a hunger that our popular
art fails to recognize and our serious art often defies.

I used the word “desecration” to describe the attitude conveyed by Bieito’s
production of *Die Entführung* and by Serrano’s lame efforts at meaning
something. What exactly does this word imply? It is connected,
etymologically and semantically, with sacrilege, and therefore with the
ideas of sanctity and the sacred.

Look at any picture by one of the great landscape painters—Poussin, Guardi,
Turner, Corot, Cézanne—and you will see that idea of beauty celebrated and
fixed in images.

Poets have expended thousands of words on this experience, which no words
seem entirely to capture. It has fueled the sense of the sacred down the
ages, reminding people as diverse as Plato and Calvino, Virgil and
Baudelaire, that sexual desire is not the simple appetite that we witness in
animals but the raw material of a longing that has no easy or worldly
satisfaction, demanding of us nothing less than a change of life.

Yes, we can neutralize the high ideals of Mozart by pushing his music into
the background so that it becomes the mere accompaniment to an inhuman
carnival of sex and death. But what do we learn from this? What do we gain,
in terms of emotional, spiritual, intellectual, or moral development?

Maybe the degeneration of beauty into kitsch comes precisely from the
postmodern loss of truthfulness, and with it the loss of moral direction.
That is the message of such early modernists as Eliot, Barber, and Stevens,
and it is a message that we need to listen to.

Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the
immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that
characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be *won*, but the work
becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—

But it is also possible to return to ordinary things in the spirit of
Wallace Stevens and Samuel Barber—to show that we are at home with them and
that they magnify and vindicate our life. Such is the overgrown path that
the early modernists once cleared for us—the *via positiva* of beauty. There
is no reason yet to think that we must abandon it.


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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