College Boy Blues
Some days you just feel like writing something. This often happens when you have dishes or laundry to do. That's what happened to me today.
The trouble with beauty, see, is it's been done. It's been done. And I don't mean just beauty like "oh, this is beautiful," or "that's so amazing." I mean the whole beauty thing; seeing the thing and thinking it's beautiful and writing it, like, an ode or whatever. If you think about it, that's been the sort of standard response to everything -- I mean, not everything, but capital-E Everything. Artists taking in the world, they find something and exalt it like some kind of nesting instinct and build these novels and symphonies and crap from the twigs. You know what I mean?
he said, wearing his raw umber jacket and overlooking his rapidly-cooling 16 oz. flat double latte, which he had ordered extra hot just in case of a flight of coffee-shop rhetoric such as this.
Okay, so now we've seen all that stuff blown to bits, obviously, in light of everything that's gone on since the 19th century heights of romantic lyric impressionist et cetera. And I think people in the general public have pretty much given up on the old methods because of that -- the fact that it all fell apart when we needed it, I mean. You know, when things are hard in the world, people go looking to literature and they find it a wreckage, right? Like some guy who's having PTSD flashbacks to the Great War doesn't need... I mean, the last thing he needs is to open a book and having modernism staring back at him, right? Guy's already cracked, so he's precisely the guy who doesn't need to look in a cracked mirror.
A pause for self-consciousness, masked by sipping. Finally, the latte comes in handy.
And modernism is definitely connected to the older stuff in a negative kind of way. The Waste Land is a good example of that, where you've got T.S. Eliot trying to put the pieces back together after the world falls apart, which is exactly the same nesting instinct I was talking about. Very same thing, you know, granted, more cynical. Or I shouldn't say cynical, but definitely despairing. So anyway, starting with cave painting and all the way up through your more optimistic flavors of post-modernism, it all points at beauty, especially where beauty intersects with reality. What is true, what is beautiful, and maybe occasionally a poem about the dark recesses, which are kind of cracks in the same beauty-structure. And you notice that those poems and Gothic works are always stunningly beautiful themselves, right, regardless of how ugly a thing they're pointing at. They're crafted so carefully, and then the poet puts them to work pointing up all these supposedly dark topics in life. All of Gothic literature, and a lot of tragedy (for some values of "tragedy"), basically amounts to a really ornate toilet. You've got to do a dirty job, so at least you can do it prettily, right?
He's spot-searching the girl's face now. She's across the table. She's following his train of thought; she signals this through meticulously-evolved unconscious lip movements, thereby giving him permission to move on to his main point. Frantically, racing neurotransmissions navigate tortuous neuroses within our hero's curly-haired head, rushing to deliver the message. His conversational thermostat sounds a tinny click and -- comprehending neither the proximate cause nor the series of biosociomechanical events leading up to it -- he continues (with humility):
What I'm suggesting, I guess, is that that whole beauty angle is over and we've got to find a new way to think about how art actually emerges from life-in-the-world. We're really indebted to post-modernism because it finally showed us what we were doing all this time, and now we can break away from that and try a whole different method. Like, we could focus on the physics of the world instead of the objects, like going from playing video games to programming them. Or at least studying their causal structure instead of their artifice, you know, their ostensive structure. Get away from the XP treadmill and the finger training and all that and get into the ones and zeros so that we can actually, ironically, see the design decisions more clearly, and see how the treadmill operates, for example. That's kind of a weird metaphor. But it applies easily to all kinds of things. Like love, you know, there's not a more traditional or cliché subject of art than that. But instead of looking at the object... I guess the "abstract object" of love, if that makes sense... we can look at the physics. Culturally, how do the rules get set? How do they influence the course of a given relationship? What happens when you try to play with love, you know, where are the hard evolved psychological limits and where are the soft limits that we can use to manipulate our actual experience of love? I don't know if that would even produce art as a final product, but if it did, it would be more like an instruction manual, or maybe a statistical analysis? Like, creative statistics, pruning numbers and categories like bonsais however we like.
Bonsais? Bonsai? He didn't know, but he thought about it and suspected that he'd said it wrong. He always had these little nit-picky internal asides when he was talking. His mind was always wandering when he was talking. If other people paid as little attention to the words coming out of his mouth as he did, he would be very offended.
And in the end, I guess you come up with a world where the defining binary isn't good or bad, or true or false, or beautiful or unbeautiful, but instead able or unable. And those rules derived from the world of experience would not only be more useful to some people, but they would be good for art, too, because they would highlight potential instead of actual. Which, I think, that leads to stasis. And maybe instead of a series of walls busted through by successive sledge-wielding generations of thinkers, we could start building hallways, so we don't have to walk around with our sledges all the time as artists.
I don't know.
Our hero did not get the girl, but they had some laughs and hung out for a few months longer. An afterthought:
Mainly I think it's going to require a change in the audience. You can see artists trying to talk about possibility and like what I'm calling "physics" in practically all periods, but it's the overall structure of art appreciation and criticism that's insisted on sticking them into this mold of "Oh, what's this artist trying to tell us?" I saw this whole thing recently on how we should weight Nietzsche's published works, compared to his notes, when we're trying to understand Nietzsche's position on things, and it seemed so arcane to me, like, what, are we really gonna have this hierarchy with the hadith of Nietzsche and the sunnah of Nietzsche and all that? Are we clerics, here, or are we thinkers? If we're thinkers, then we gotta cut out this stuff about building an edifice of discourse and trying to fit every new thing in the world onto it like an ugly addition. Art's dead when it takes a position. Art should be out there running like hell.
The trouble with beauty, see, is it's been done. It's been done. And I don't mean just beauty like "oh, this is beautiful," or "that's so amazing." I mean the whole beauty thing; seeing the thing and thinking it's beautiful and writing it, like, an ode or whatever. If you think about it, that's been the sort of standard response to everything -- I mean, not everything, but capital-E Everything. Artists taking in the world, they find something and exalt it like some kind of nesting instinct and build these novels and symphonies and crap from the twigs. You know what I mean?
he said, wearing his raw umber jacket and overlooking his rapidly-cooling 16 oz. flat double latte, which he had ordered extra hot just in case of a flight of coffee-shop rhetoric such as this.
Okay, so now we've seen all that stuff blown to bits, obviously, in light of everything that's gone on since the 19th century heights of romantic lyric impressionist et cetera. And I think people in the general public have pretty much given up on the old methods because of that -- the fact that it all fell apart when we needed it, I mean. You know, when things are hard in the world, people go looking to literature and they find it a wreckage, right? Like some guy who's having PTSD flashbacks to the Great War doesn't need... I mean, the last thing he needs is to open a book and having modernism staring back at him, right? Guy's already cracked, so he's precisely the guy who doesn't need to look in a cracked mirror.
A pause for self-consciousness, masked by sipping. Finally, the latte comes in handy.
And modernism is definitely connected to the older stuff in a negative kind of way. The Waste Land is a good example of that, where you've got T.S. Eliot trying to put the pieces back together after the world falls apart, which is exactly the same nesting instinct I was talking about. Very same thing, you know, granted, more cynical. Or I shouldn't say cynical, but definitely despairing. So anyway, starting with cave painting and all the way up through your more optimistic flavors of post-modernism, it all points at beauty, especially where beauty intersects with reality. What is true, what is beautiful, and maybe occasionally a poem about the dark recesses, which are kind of cracks in the same beauty-structure. And you notice that those poems and Gothic works are always stunningly beautiful themselves, right, regardless of how ugly a thing they're pointing at. They're crafted so carefully, and then the poet puts them to work pointing up all these supposedly dark topics in life. All of Gothic literature, and a lot of tragedy (for some values of "tragedy"), basically amounts to a really ornate toilet. You've got to do a dirty job, so at least you can do it prettily, right?
He's spot-searching the girl's face now. She's across the table. She's following his train of thought; she signals this through meticulously-evolved unconscious lip movements, thereby giving him permission to move on to his main point. Frantically, racing neurotransmissions navigate tortuous neuroses within our hero's curly-haired head, rushing to deliver the message. His conversational thermostat sounds a tinny click and -- comprehending neither the proximate cause nor the series of biosociomechanical events leading up to it -- he continues (with humility):
What I'm suggesting, I guess, is that that whole beauty angle is over and we've got to find a new way to think about how art actually emerges from life-in-the-world. We're really indebted to post-modernism because it finally showed us what we were doing all this time, and now we can break away from that and try a whole different method. Like, we could focus on the physics of the world instead of the objects, like going from playing video games to programming them. Or at least studying their causal structure instead of their artifice, you know, their ostensive structure. Get away from the XP treadmill and the finger training and all that and get into the ones and zeros so that we can actually, ironically, see the design decisions more clearly, and see how the treadmill operates, for example. That's kind of a weird metaphor. But it applies easily to all kinds of things. Like love, you know, there's not a more traditional or cliché subject of art than that. But instead of looking at the object... I guess the "abstract object" of love, if that makes sense... we can look at the physics. Culturally, how do the rules get set? How do they influence the course of a given relationship? What happens when you try to play with love, you know, where are the hard evolved psychological limits and where are the soft limits that we can use to manipulate our actual experience of love? I don't know if that would even produce art as a final product, but if it did, it would be more like an instruction manual, or maybe a statistical analysis? Like, creative statistics, pruning numbers and categories like bonsais however we like.
Bonsais? Bonsai? He didn't know, but he thought about it and suspected that he'd said it wrong. He always had these little nit-picky internal asides when he was talking. His mind was always wandering when he was talking. If other people paid as little attention to the words coming out of his mouth as he did, he would be very offended.
And in the end, I guess you come up with a world where the defining binary isn't good or bad, or true or false, or beautiful or unbeautiful, but instead able or unable. And those rules derived from the world of experience would not only be more useful to some people, but they would be good for art, too, because they would highlight potential instead of actual. Which, I think, that leads to stasis. And maybe instead of a series of walls busted through by successive sledge-wielding generations of thinkers, we could start building hallways, so we don't have to walk around with our sledges all the time as artists.
I don't know.
Our hero did not get the girl, but they had some laughs and hung out for a few months longer. An afterthought:
Mainly I think it's going to require a change in the audience. You can see artists trying to talk about possibility and like what I'm calling "physics" in practically all periods, but it's the overall structure of art appreciation and criticism that's insisted on sticking them into this mold of "Oh, what's this artist trying to tell us?" I saw this whole thing recently on how we should weight Nietzsche's published works, compared to his notes, when we're trying to understand Nietzsche's position on things, and it seemed so arcane to me, like, what, are we really gonna have this hierarchy with the hadith of Nietzsche and the sunnah of Nietzsche and all that? Are we clerics, here, or are we thinkers? If we're thinkers, then we gotta cut out this stuff about building an edifice of discourse and trying to fit every new thing in the world onto it like an ugly addition. Art's dead when it takes a position. Art should be out there running like hell.