[New-Poetry] Beauty by Scruton

[Mark Weiss]

Yup, we disagree. I'm not out to "magnify and 
vindicate our life," but to question and explore.

Mark

At 03:51 PM 6/11/2009, you wrote:
>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://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
>http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
><http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078>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
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>New-Poetry mailing list
>New-Poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
>http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/new-poetry