[lit-ideas] A Spirit of Intellectualism
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2006 12:48:34 -0400
Judy: now back to not bothering
Here's Joseph Brodsky, the master of not bothering, from his
Nobel Prize acceptance speech. (The last time I saw Brodsky,
less than a year before his death, was in a small gallery
space in SoHo, maybe six people and Brodsky. Flaunting the
no smoking sign, and also flaunting the obviously prescribed
choice of Merit UltraLight filter cigarettes, Brodsky would
periodically produce a cigarette, rip off its filter, and
light up. I mean, why bother?)
Language and, presumably, literature are things that are
more ancient and inevitable, more durable than any form of
social organization. The revulsion, irony, or indifference
often expressed by literature towards the state is
essentially a reaction of the permanent — better yet, the
infinite — against the temporary, against the finite. To
say the least, as long as the state permits itself to
interfere with the affairs of literature, literature has the
right to interfere with the affairs of the state. A
political system, a form of social organization, as any
system in general, is by definition a form of the past tense
that aspires to impose itself upon the present (and often on
the future as well); and a man whose profession is language
is the last one who can afford to forget this. The real
danger for a writer is not so much the possibility (and
often the certainty) of persecution on the part of the
state, as it is the possibility of finding oneself
mesmerized by the state's features, which, whether monstrous
or undergoing changes for the better, are always temporary.
The philosophy of the state, its ethics — not to mention its
aesthetics — are always "yesterday." Language and
literature are always "today," and often — particularly in
the case where a political system is orthodox — they may
even constitute "tomorrow." One of literature's merits is
precisely that it helps a person to make the time of his
existence more specific, to distinguish himself from the
crowd of his predecessors as well as his like numbers, to
avoid tautology — that is, the fate otherwise known by the
honorific term, "victim of history." What makes art in
general, and literature in particular, remarkable, what
distinguishes them from life, is precisely that they abhor
repetition. In everyday life you can tell the same joke
thrice and, thrice getting a laugh, become the life of the
party. In art, though, this sort of conduct is called "cliché.
Art is a recoilless weapon, and its development is
determined not by the individuality of the artist, but by
the dynamics and the logic of the material itself, by the
previous fate of the means that each time demand (or
suggest) a qualitatively new aesthetic solution. Possessing
its own genealogy, dynamics, logic, and future, art is not
synonymous with, but at best parallel to history; and the
manner by which it exists is by continually creating a new
aesthetic reality. That is why it is often found "ahead of
progress," ahead of history, whose main instrument is —
should we not, once more, improve upon Marx — precisely the
cliché.
Nowadays, there exists a rather widely held view,
postulating that in his work a writer, in particular a poet,
should make use of the language of the street, the language
of the crowd. For all its democratic appearance, and its
palpable advantages for a writer, this assertion is quite
absurd and represents an attempt to subordinate art, in this
case, literature, to history. It is only if we have
resolved that it is time for Homo sapiens to come to a halt
in his development that literature should speak the language
of the people. Otherwise, it is the people who should speak
the language of literature.
On the whole, every new aesthetic reality makes man's
ethical reality more precise. For aesthetics is the mother
of ethics; The categories of "good" and "bad" are, first and
foremost, aesthetic ones, at least etymologically preceding
the categories of "good" and "evil." If in ethics not "all
is permitted," it is precisely because not "all is
permitted" in aesthetics, because the number of colors in
the spectrum is limited. The tender babe who cries and
rejects the stranger or who, on the contrary, reaches out to
him, does so instinctively, making an aesthetic choice, not
a moral one.
Aesthetic choice is a highly individual matter, and
aesthetic experience is always a private one. Every new
aesthetic reality makes one's experience even more private;
and this kind of privacy, assuming at times the guise of
literary (or some other) taste, can in itself turn out to
be, if not as guarantee, then a form of defense against
enslavement. For a man with taste, particularly literary
taste, is less susceptible to the refrains and the
rhythmical incantations peculiar to any version of political
demagogy. The point is not so much that virtue does not
constitute a guarantee for producing a masterpiece, as that
evil, especially political evil, is always a bad stylist.
The more substantial an individual's aesthetic experience
is, the sounder his taste, the sharper his moral focus, the
freer — though not necessarily the happier — he is.
full lecture at: http://davar.net/EXTRACTS/MISCL/BRODNOBL.HTM
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