On 27/10/05 8:23 AM, "MJ Walker" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Ruskin was not interested in any Arnoldian
> conflict between "Faith" and "Reason", since he experienced the Greeks'
> relation to myths as a primarily very instinctive & immediate affair
> with varying degrees of symbolic sophistication depending on historical
> & social factors, but definitely not propounded as "factual" dogma,
> either religious or scientific. Myth as experience as well as story has
> not been rendered inaccessible to a large part of the population because
> of scientific reason but, certainly in my opinion, as a result of the
> victory of convenience consumerism (as underpinned by applied science) -
> mass production with consequent loss of the feeling for the rhythms of
> nature, TV as the purveyor of frozen food for the imagination, the motor
> vehicle as modern juggernaut etc etc.
I've not read Ruskin, though he's on my list (which is very long).
It's hard to think of aesthetic creation without considering myth making.
And if you take aesthetic experience seriously, then you probably, at some
level, take myth seriously. Well, I do, anyway. It's certainly, in its
cruder manifestations, very potent - the blood and earth stuff of Fascist
Germany or the Apocalyptic triumphalism of contemporary America being
another. You can;t separate that potency from its less malignant
manifestations; perhaps you could argue that it is a corruption of what myth
is "supposed" to be, by transposing it into the literal, public sphere. But
if you take myth seriously, as illuminatory symbols or metaphors about human
existence, which can be liberating or empowering, then that probably
includes the bad as well as the good. Really, I suppose, I think that myth
at its most interesting is a way of dealing with the contradictory and
paradoxical, that which cannot be resolved by reason; but that does not make
it necessarily reasonless. The frightening thing about Nazi Germany was the
way it channelled violent social irrationalities (anti-Semitism, say); but
that was channelled with enormous political intelligence.
I'm not sure that I'd be so unsanguine though about myth being rendered
inaccessible through commercialisation. Yes, there's a lot of trash out
there, but under the cover of genre there's a lot of interesting and
intelligent stuff.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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