"radical uselessness"----very nice, Alison.
pondering Judy, eager to know your more thoughts
> From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2005/12/08 Thu PM 04:47:36 EST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Pinter on Blair et al.
>
> Hi all
>
> I read Pinter's speech a couple of weeks ago (a friend of mine was
> translating it and I couldn't resist asking for a preview, despite her
> swearing on stacks of bibles not to pass it on...) I've read quite a lot of
> his political addresses - in fact, published one in Masthead years ago - and
> this struck me as particularly good, and hearteningly brave, and nuanced as
> well, given Pinter's predilection for harsh statement. I suspect it might be
> a playwright thing (Brecht's thing about "crude thinking"); or in any case,
> the Pinter kind of playwright thing. George, I can't come at Pinter's
> poems: I think his poetic is profound in plays like Ashes to Ashes and
> Mountain Language, and disappointingly truncated in those blistering
> political verses he serves up. I can't but think them a misuse of poetry, of
> what poetry offers as its own specific freedom; poetry's political force may
> in part be the tracing of fracture and wounding, in a profound sense, and
> the refusal to smooth over or heal these things, but poetry's freedom -
> which is part of that - for me lies in its radical uselessness. (More to
> come when I work out what I mean...)
>
> I too disagree with Pinter - or think he is being somewhat disingenuous -
> about the distinction of truth between the writer and the citizen, or to be
> more accurate, about the ambiguities that reside in art that must be
> resisted in political life. There is a teasing something to be inferred
> about language itself under all this that Pinter evades: why is one kind of
> deception (art) "good" and others "bad"? Maybe it's as simple as Picasso's
> "art is the lie that reveals the truth"; that the deceptions of art open out
> reality in an infinity of ways, whereas the lies of politicians close it
> down, narrow it to a single "truth" hammered into our brains from above. I
> sometimes do think that the conflicts that are splitting our world at the
> moment are between ideologies of simpleness and complexity, those who claim
> the world is one reductive thing and those who claim it to be plural,
> multiple, subtle and contradictory.
>
> Anyway, that's probably enough from me -
>
> A
>
> Alison Croggon
>
> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
> Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
>
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