'Mind Of The Beholder'

' "Saying that cultural objects have value", Brian Eno once wrote, "is like saying that telephones have conversations."

Nearly all the cultural objects we consume arrive wrapped in inherited opinion; our preferences are always, to some extent, someone else's.

... once a thing becomes popular, it will tend to become more popular still ...

Paintings, poems and pop songs are buoyed or sunk by random events or preferences that turn into waves of influence, rippling down the generations.

...

Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia University, thinks the way we define "great" has as much to do with status anxiety as artistic worth. 

But ... a work needs a certain quality to be eligible to be swept to the top of the pile ... some stuff is simply better than other stuff ...

Over time, exposure favours the greater artist ...

Great art and mediocrity can get confused, even by experts. But that's why we need to see, and read, as much as we can. The more we're exposed to the good and the bad, the better we are at telling the difference.'

Ian Leslie
2014 The Economist Newspaper Limited

Brave Intuitive Painting

'For many years I struggled with my desire to paint for the sake of exploration, raw expression, and release. I thought my art needed to support an intellectual theory, make a political statement, or in some way change the world. Eventually I surrendered, allowing myself to paint for the purpose of painting and the joy it brings.
     After many years of following my heart, I now understand that the very act of pure expression does change the world.
     It changes the world by changing each and every person who is brave enough to pick up a paintbrush, open themselves up to the unknown, and express themselves honestly and intuitively. It is through this kind of heartfelt expression that truths are revealed, lives transform, and new worlds are born.'
Flora Bowley, 2012
Brave Intuitive Painting 
Quarry Books, USA. 

Philip Roth

'The novelist's obsession, moment by moment, is with language: finding the right next word.'
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/04/philip-roth-no-desire-write-fiction-novelist 

saying no to the creep of technology into our every waking moment

'According to research by William Duggan from Columbia University, we are most likely to get good ideas - "flashes of insight" - when our brain is relaxed. For that, think running, drifting off to sleep or taking a shower ...

According to Duggan, author of Strategic Intuition, innovative ideas often pop into our head at the most unanticipated moments. "It's an open secret that good ideas come to you as flashes of insight, often when you don't  expect them - stepping on to a train, stuck in traffic, falling asleep, swimming or brushing your teeth. Suddenly it hits you. It all comes together in your mind. You connect the dots."

But connecting the dots requires a clear mind - Duggan calls it a presence of mind - to sweep away old ideas and the tried-and-true ways that may no longer be working ...

Studies have long shown the value of a good night's sleep for restoring the brain, but important benefits are also now evident when we nap, daydream, spend time in nature or take a holiday. It turns out that when we are relaxing our brain gets a lot of essential work done. Giving our brain a break allows it to stock up on creativity and boosts our motivation and focus.

Tim Kreider, in his New York Times essay The Busy Trap writes: "The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections ... it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done."

Pressing the pause button, to allow the brain to work without our conscious involvement, is the challenge. But as the empty space in our day decreases, so may our creativity. The answer may not be 30-minute showers or month-long retreats to the beach. It may instead mean saying no to the creep of techology into our every waking moment. If we want to keep our thinking fresh and encourage innovation to flow, we had better learn to make time in our day for nothing.' 

Susan Biggar, 2014, Take a break and just wait for that breakthrough, "The Saturday Age", January 11, p. 18.

Susan Biggar's first book, The Upside of Down, will be published by Transit Lounge in September.  

Darwin on poetry

'My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.'

---

The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1809-1882 (pp. 138-139)

the therapeutic value of poetry

'I have a growing sense that through the long years of rehabilitation, it has been Jayne's poetry, her thoughts and words, which have revived and sustained us, reminding  us of her talents and skills, her promise, her capacity for humour and irony, her never-give-up attitude. No amount of ranging of limbs or other standard rehabilitation practices has come anywhere as near to bringing the new and the old Jayne together as her poetry has.'

Helen Sage, 2013, A flower between the cracks: A memoir of love, hope and disability, Affirm Press, South Melbourne.

Poetry, politics and happiness

'Poetry has a political past. It is not just that the most subversive voices going back to the Roman poet Ovid, have been writers of verse. It is that, as Confucius said, the most important act of a ruler is clarifying words. 
     Confucious, like Aristotle, wanted to put his ideas for a better society into action by advising a king. He never got to do it, but when asked what his first decree would be should he ever gain influence, he declared: "Get the language right." Unless we know what we mean, we have no chance of forging happiness, he explained.

...

... the founder of modern China, Mao Zedong ... best known for declaring that "power comes out of the barrel of a gun". But he was also a poet and launched the Cultural Revolution which killed 20 million people, because he was attacked with words, not bullets. When a playwright parodied him in the 1960s, Mao knew the game was up, and so unleashed his murderous Red Guards. This is a long way from Aristotle, who believed that politics was not just an ethical business, but the highest form of philosophy.'

Peter Ellingsen, The Age, Melbourne.

Ezra Pound 'A Retrospect'

'When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad" he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

 

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

 

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has

discovered something. He begins by learning

what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does

not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman classwork. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are "all over the shop". Is it any wonder "the public is indifferent to poetry?"

 

Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs.

Don't make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave.

Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.

 

In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.'

 

http://newpaltzcomposition.pbworks.com/f/Pound,+A+Retrospect.pdf             

"Write me as one who loves his fellow men."

Abou Ben Adhem

By Leigh Hunt

 

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:—

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"—The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

         The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.

Abou Ben Adhem by Leigh Hunt : The Poetry Foundation

J.H. Prynne

"For Prynne, the production of a poem, the production of a book, are as much part of the cycles of commercial fetishisation as the creation of the poem itself. So, it is the responsibility of the poet (and reader) to work at diminishing a degree of moral irresponsibility that overshadows the creation and production of art. Which explains why most Prynne works have been available in small print-run pamphlet forms published by presses for whom profit is not a motive." 

John Kinsella: on the poem Rich in Vitamin C by J.H. Prynne

http://jacketmagazine.com/06/pryn-kins.html 

Sigmund Freud

“Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me."


“Poets are masters of us ordinary men, in knowledge of the mind,
because they drink at streams which we have not yet made accessible to science.”

 

wounded storyteller

"Through storytelling the wounded are transformed from those who are cared for into those who care for others. They become potent healers. The wounded recover their voice through the difficult act of storytelling. The whole body speaks. Eventually everyone becomes a wounded storyteller. 'It is our promise and responsibility, our calamity and dignity.'

To tell a good enough story, we must go deep enough: this is storytelling as archaeology. We should experience the pull of the future: this is storytelling as eschatology. We should seek a story aesthetically ripe and set in the midst of stories larger than our own: this is storytelling as poetry and myth-making." 

Donald Heinz, 1998, The last passage: Recovering a death of our own, Oxford University Press.
 

Charles Blackman

"In drawing thought unfolds, whereas in painting you speak of an image: they are two entirely different things."

"Rainforest and Cathedral" Charles Blackman

from Rainforest, Charles Blackman, 1988
Text by Al Alvarez, Macmillan, Australia.

Plagiarism

"Yet isn’t it the case that all this says something that nobody wants to admit? These current scandals in poetry confirm that people worldwide still desperately care about poetry despite its absolutely essential irrelevance to any economic indicator you might mention, and that – despite the crazy uproar surrounding the instances of plagiarism – this shows that poetry will continue to enjoy a glorious future yet."
by Justin Clemens, 16.Sep.13
‘“Of borrow’d plumes I take the sin”’: plagiarism and poetry
Overland
https://overland.org.au/2013/09/of-borrowd-plumes-i-take-the-sin/ 

Jeff Sparrow, editor, 'Overland'

"We need, instead, to create new audiences, to build communities for whom information matters. In a previous Overland Rjurik Davidson described this in terms of creating a counter hegemonic public sphere, a counterculture of writers and readers, thinkers and activists, publications and campaigns, and an infrastructure that allows people to make news rather than merely consume it.

To put the matter another way, it's not enough for nonfiction writers to simply describe the world. The point, as always, is to change it."

Jeff Sparrow on Truth, Politics and Nonfiction
"Cats are out, sloths are in"
Overland, Issue 214, Autumn 2014
http://overland.org.au/ 

Schopenhauer as Educator

"People are more slothful than timid. Their greatest fear is the heavy burden that uncompromising honesty and nakedness of speech and action would lay on them.

It is only artists who hate this lazy wandering in borrowed manner and ill-fitting opinions. They discover the guilty secret of the bad conscience: the disowned truth that each human being is a unique marvel."

Nietzsche, "Schopenhauer as Educator"

John Armstrong, 2013, Life lessons from Nietzsche, Macmillan, London.

http://www.johnarmstrong.com.au/ 

Courage

Courage - Conference on Freedom of Expression, a photo by Bergen Offentlige Bibliotek on Flickr.

" ... there are always people who dare to seek on the margin of society, who are not dependent on social acceptance, not dependent on social routine, and prefer a kind of free-floating existence under a state of risk. And among these people, if they are faithful to their own calling, to their own vocation ... communication on the deepest level is possible."

from a talk given by Thomas Merton, 10 December, 1968 

http://www.soundstrue.com/shop/Choosing-to-Love-the-World/113.pd 

more from 'Freeing your inner tortoise'

Jane Sullivan,2014, "Freeing your inner tortoise", The Saturday Age (Life & Style), 11 January, p. 24. 

" ... but there is a much grander, more operatic perspective, where the creative mind is not so much a tortoise as a tortured soul."


Eminent creators have been depicted as "locked in a Faustian bargain, where they must sacrifice their personal life to fulfil their vision.
     In the rarefied height of this creativity, nothing is achieved without punishingly hard work, failure, isolation and rejection in the creator's field. As Nietzsche believed, the truly original creator must destroy old systems of thought and break from the status quo. That's bound to be painful."

"So what can help the writer? Which image comes closer to the creative mind: the tortoise or the tortured soul? I like to think of creativity as a spectrum. At one end, a handful of gifted, brave and almost superhumanly dedicated people make extraordinary breakthroughs. At the other end, where most of us labour, breakthroughs may mean little in the grand scheme of things, but everything on a personal level.
     Even a little breakthrough may require great patience, hard work and sacrifice. It may also require the kind of inspiration that comes when the mind is working without our conscious knowledge."

"We may not have the musical genius of Stravinsky or the comic genius of Cleese, but we can all learn more creative ways to use our minds."  

"Freeing your inner tortoise"

"John Cleese says that the creative part of the mind is like a tortoise. It's a nervous little creature that needs an enclosure before it can be sure that it's safe to come out.

So, to create, we need to make our own tortoise enclosure, with boundaries of space and time. The dangerous thing is to be interrupted, because it can take a long time to get back into that creative state, and ideas won't come if we're rushing around all day."

Jane Sullivan,2014, "Freeing your inner tortoise", The Saturday Age (Life & Style), 11 January, p. 24. 

Notes on Ekphrasis by Alfred Corn

" ... The result is then not merely a verbal 'photocopy' of the original painting, sculpture, or photograph, but instead a grounded instance of seeing, shaped by forces outside the artwork. In such poems, description of the original work remains partial, but authors add to it aspects drawn from their own experience - the fact, reflections, and feelings that arise at the confluence of a work of visual art and the life of the poet."

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19939