At 12:09 AM -0600 28/8/03, Rebecca Seiferle wrote:
>But perhaps it's not so much that "imagination be made illegal"
>as you say, but that it be made insane.
Whoa, that Hyslop quote is mightily shod with Authority, which stamps
reality in an unvarying mint, in its own image, I suppose, like God.
Given that being insane deprives one of many legal rights, perhaps
being made illegal or made insane amounts to the same thing. If he
was the best of the doctors who attended Woolf, it perhaps explains a
few things, since he clearly eschewed the "obscure" living tissue in
favour of legible bone, like those fossils in museums with
copperplate handwritten labels. Well, Thomas Mann had ironic things
to say about people like that.
I suppose I think a work of art is simultaneously artefact and
dynamic being birthed out of feeling; this seems not to be
contradictory to me, but obvious. But there are probably better ways
of thinking about this which indicates some kind of singular
struggle, rather than a dialectic of feeling and reason, or form and
content, which this idea invites. It seems to me perhaps it is not
so much as Rukeyser says in the quote, that one writes in order to
feel, but that one writes in order to know what one feels. And maybe
I would think it a bit of a problem if the only way you could feel
would be if you wrote. On the other hand, I don't doubt that a
feeling can be made through making a work of art, but nevertheless I
suspect that the feeling, which is imagined, has its seed somewhere
outside the purview of the work of art, and that if it doesn't, then
perhaps it creates the kind of art which feels tinny or
disappointing. But all this seems much more complicated than I am
capable of saying here, which feels very clumsy. Writing is for me as
much a case of formal curiosity as of feeling, so much so that
perhaps I cannot distinguish one from the other; on the other hand,
when I have "written out" a work, it often seems as if the feeling
all is burned away, and all that is left is the formality; the
feeling, if it is there, is something I can no longer experience
through the work, which is why I agree with Blanchot that it is
impossible for a writer to read his or her own work.
Anyway, I hope this is not too confused -
best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
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