An interesting post Jim. What an immense subject though.
I've been on this planet for quite a while now and I still don't know
what people really mean by 'spiritual'. I tend to think of it as being
deep feeling but that never seems to be enough for the religious -
they always want to attach such 'deep feeling' to an outside agent.
What I do know though is the affect that such a thing as 'spiritual
belief' has on our use of language in poetry, or, to put it the right
way round historically, the affect on our poetry of losing spiritual
belief. I think there is, in most cases where the writer is
consciously theist or atheist, a noticeable difference in their
relationship to language. I would hazard the notion that that
difference first became manifest in Baudelaire.
Tim A.
On 5 Jul 2009, at 20:40, Jim Andrews wrote:
> it is commonly observed that a great deal of contemporary art/
> writing involves a double sense of 'the material'. the term is
> understood to refer not only to the subject matter (the 'standard'
> understanding in writing) but also the matter of the media in the
> piece, the material embodiment of the piece. it's also commonly
> observed that the latter awareness of and approach to composition
> not solely by ideation, meditation on the subject matter, but also
> through operation on the material embodiment, has come to be much
> more widely understood as a part of reading than it was a generation
> ago. when we encounter work that does not follow the grammars and
> approaches traditionally associated with work, we inquire into the
> methods of composition, the approach to materiality, and look for
> relations between those methods and approaches and the subject
> matter, or look for the subject matter in the light of those things.
> and so read differently, thereby. and in this way, we now read some
> literary work in ways that are closer to how we approach a great
> deal of visual art.
>
> but what i want to get at is something that isn't so commonly
> observed, at the moment, but may be in the next generation. and
> that's the relation of awareness of the materiality of writing/art
> to our ideas of who and what we are. that's erm awkwardly stated.
> what i'm trying to get at is this. the whole emphasis on materiality
> is involved in a larger movement to explore how things like
> ideation, imagination, the spiritual, beauty, truth, goodness,
> justice--all our ideals and things normally associated with the
> immaterial--operate in the material world.
>
> in this sense, we might say that the whole contemporary awareness of
> materiality in art is part of a larger ah spiritual materialism. i
> googled that term, after it occurred to me, and i assure you i'm
> using it in a different sense than chögyam trungpa, who uses it "to
> describe mistakes spiritual seekers commit which turn the pursuit of
> spiritualism into an ego building and confusion creating
> endeavor" (wikipedia). instead, i'm refering to a relatively common
> sort of philosophy in which the material substrate of ideation and
> even the spiritual is affirmed and its relations with even the
> flightiest of fancies are explored. not to denigrate or dismiss
> things like spirituality but to explore how they operate materially.
>
> perhaps more evidently, now, this is also related to philosophies of
> mind in which the materiality of thought itself is affirmed--as a
> chemical and informational process, however emergent--and the brain
> and the mind that emerge from its processes are conceived as fully
> embodied in the material. so that the idea of being able to create
> thinking machines (however unlike us) becomes a real possibility.
> and we are conceptualized as nature's (near?) ultimate machines. and
> machines are conceptualized not as the simple things we once thought
> they must be but as often very complex biological creatures that,
> nonetheless, are embodied in the material world and are, therefore,
> subject to the constraints and possibilities of machines in the
> material world.
>
> to wrap it up, we now see the relation between contemporary artistic
> emphasis on the materiality of writing/art and the larger moment of
> 'spiritual materialism'.
>
> ja
> http://vispo.com
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