Martin wrote:
> if you read one book about that time, then this,
>straight from the inferno by a man who knew what beauty involved (love,
>truthfulness, realization, relatedness) & noticed everything.
>Heartbreaking to think of the Germany that was, with all its faults...
I'll look out for it, Martin...
You pre-empted me on Dix, whom I find an extraordinary and destabilising
painter - Josephine's advice to stay away from him comes too late (and
what are you doing in the corner, Josephine?) Of course he gives you
nightmares, but the reality he paints is a nightmare. Should that
reality be fenced off from the world of art?
But what I wanted to argue with was Josephine's (implicit) claim that
aesthetic pleasure does not encompass these kinds of experiences - those
that offer up to the witness the contemplation of realities which are
horrifying or cruel or shocking, but no less real for that. No, I'm not
talking about shock effect, which is not the point but rather a side
effect: rather the desire of the artist to look honestly on the anguish
of mortality, freed from the cant which obcures it - religious,
nationalistic, egoistic, whatever. A particular kind of art is fired by
anger: Dix does that, and I also think of Goya's Disasters of War. But
in other ways, poetries like those of Trakl and Celan grapple with these
things. And Douglas OIiver, one of the great voices of conscience of
contemporary English poetry, only he goes beyond anger. To eschew these
experiences because they are not "pleasant" strikes me an awful
impoverishment of art, in the end reducing it to mere commodity and
decoration (of course art can be these things as well, but not merely).
Pleasure is also a complex thing, and to my mind entirely impossible
without the experience of pain. No, I'm not a masochist: but it seems to
me that to open the psyche to experience requires the risk of both, and
to shut oneself off from one is to deny the other. One thing that
bothers me immensely about our present anaesthetic society, where pain
almost amounts to a crime.
Continue with your guts, Josephine - it's fun. Or it's supposed to be.
Best
Alison
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