Kent, I am not sure that I misunderstand you, though perhaps I was being
a little literal.
The place of the self in works of art has always seemed to me somewhat
contingent. There is a sense where the making and also the witnessing
of/participation in art seems to reach towards an obliteration of self -
not in a sublimatory mode, as Freud suggests, not as an act of masochism,
nor even a desire for redemption - if you want to stick in Freudian
terms, perhaps, driven by a sense of intense pleasure which perhaps
foreshadows death. This may paradoxically be the opposite of ecstatic...
a nothing which is strangely _embodied_ but also (strangely) beyond
anguish. A point perhaps of another beginning, a poised breath, a vacuum
at the point where "heaven and hell meet". At the end of all works of
art which work for me there is - an absence. Even at the end of Paradise
Regained, amid the triumphal trumpets, the Son of God "unobserv'd / Home
to his Mothers house private return'd."
This reaching towards absence (? not sure if this is the correct term,
but unsure how to couch this) seems to involve as many methods as
artists: in all cases it wrestles with the prevailing ideologies, which
change from one time to another.
>I am not saying that poets should stop using their names, and I've made this
>clear in a number of published statements; I'm saying that poetry is perhaps
>in the days of Kitty Hawk, and other forms of flight haven't begun to be
>glimpsed. There will be lots of pilots who will be immolated in tests of new
>vehicles, powered by weird fuels. It's an exciting time.
Maybe if you could show me an example of what you mean it make might some
sense to me. If you're imagining something not dissimilar to medieaval
notions of art, where the artist/artisan is an anonymous contributor to a
sublime wholeness, well maybe. Not at all sure though about the metaphor
of progress you seem to have introduced here; progress in art simply
doesn't make sense to me.
Best
Alison
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