[New-Poetry] Beauty by Scruton

[Anny Ballardini]

I also question, explore, fall flat under disappointments, turn desperately
from one side to the other for a solution, get irremediably lost in
nothingness, suffocate in the grip of times, live with anxiety perpetual and
continuous loss, stare speechless at the gruesome movies in front of my
eyes, contemplate with sadness the mad and pernicious behavior of man, the
overflowing attitude towards destruction, the lingering scream which is my
scream from the depths within

but I can also see beauty and for a moment get lost in it.


On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:53 PM, Mark Weiss <junction at earthlink.net> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
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>
>
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-- 
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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