« the characteristic of heroism | Main | a bright halo »
December 16, 2007
the encounter with the aesthetic
Any thesis that would, either theoretically or practically, put literature and the arts beyond good and evil is spurious. The archaic in Rilke’s famous poem says to us: “change your life”. So do any poem, novel, play, painting, musical composition worth meeting. The voice of intelligible form, of the needs of direct address from which such forms springs, asks: ‘What do you feel, what do you think of the possibilities of life, of the alternative shapes of being which are implicit in your experience of me, in our encounter?’ The indiscretion of serious art and literature and music is total. It requires the last privacies of our existence. This interrogation, like the winding of the sudden horn at the dark tower in Browning’s emblematic text of the seeking out of being by art, is no abstract dialectic. It purposes change. Early Greek thought identified the Muses with the arts and wonder of persuasion. As the act of the poet is met, as it enters the precincts, special and temporal. Mental and physical, of our being, it brings with it a radical calling towards change. The waking, the enrichment, the complication, the darkening, the unsettling of sensibility and understanding which follow on our experience of art are incipient with action. Form is the root of performance. In a wholly fundamental, pragmatic sense, the poem, the statue, the sonata are not so much read, viewed or heard as they are lived. The encounter with the aesthetic is, together wit certain modes of religious and of metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive’, transformative summons available to human experiencing.
George Steiner - Real Presences
Posted by amin at December 16, 2007 5:29 PM