>i think the great value of the occult in the arts--thinking of austin
>spare and yeats, is that they allow for a new capacity for invention, or
>as the voices told the aging yeats "we are here to give you new
>metaphors".
>even if you don't literally "believe" in the system you can still use
>it as a unifying narrative against which one works.
>blake is the great example of this.
I'd say that's the same with many poets' poetics. I.e. the chosen theory enables the poet to focus on producing their own kind of poetry even when it has little or no propositional value.
Any piece of intellectual dust can seed a perfect raindrop.
But if this could be so of any belief, the existence of the art cannot itself be used to claim value for the beliefs, can it? Or does the artistic fertility of a belief system reflexively say something good about it? Is the occult a miserable mania of troubled people, crippling in its effects, or a crucial piercing insight beyond the mind-forg'd manacles of quotidian capitalism? I seem to think that it's both.
> i would argue that emily bronte's continuation of the collective
childhood myth of angria, glasstown &c. is just such another.
Are you talking about the Gondal poems - referring to a continuation with the ultimate sources in play with tin soldiers - , or are you saying e.g. that Wuthering Heights in some sense keeps faith with the imaginative world of Gondal etc - in contrast to eg charlotte's explicit statements about saying goodbye to one aesthetic and working with another (intro to The Professor, Farewell to Angria, etc). I'm fascinated by this storm of adolescent creation.
Not sure why you pick this out as an example of a quasi-belief-system. Why isn't it just fiction? Is it because there's an intensity to youthful make-believe that would distinguish it, as a system, from e.g. Trollope's Barsetshire, Zola's Rougon-Macquart?
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