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From: Colin Leath <cleath@u.washington.edu>
Reply-To: Colin Leath <cleath@u.washington.edu>
To: green:;
Subject: art
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I just saw David downstairs, but I don't want to talk to him, I guess, so
I have come up here. I would smile, but have nothing to say,
I am trying to decide what the deal is-
Do I want to see you guys or not, or just to write
Yeah, I want to see you, but not so much to talk, just to do things.
Yeah, I forgot david at the end last time..
Its cool to see Jackson, and Zach
if I had seen any of you, except Caroline, Kyle or Hanna- I might have had
something to say to Stephanie or Jenna- and Jackson and Zach, ok to, but
David, Becca, Jenny, I would leave alone. If I saw any of you outside,
I'd stop and talk, if you were alone,
I think I like to do this most of all, and that is why. I would rather
have you come and sit around the fireplace, and you can, In June. Of all
things, now, this is the best.
It seems strange.
How was your day? I can Imagine. I really have no idea.
I woke up and read, then worked, then went to Intro to Judaism class,
walked around a block, lay down in my room, then came here.
Stephanie has a dinner to night where you bring a kids book and a dollar
and you get dinner, at her sorority.
So, I don't want to do anything, I keep myself alive and do just this-
means even more than any classwork, if I had it.
Wow, wow, wow-
Hey, there is a nice girl at the intro to judaism class- actually two,
First Adar. She's from Israel, and speaks Hebrew, and she thinks. When
she asks a question she furrows up her forehead, and her whole body asks a
question. she has a nice voice. Her lower lip is incredibly full, she
has smooth shoulder length black hair and brown eyes.
For me the question is, do I go again to shabbat dinner? I'll tell you.
The other is Lea. She is nice, has a nice voice, she has light colored,
curly hair, and maybe bluish eyes (how boring is this to you? I am just
remembering how she looks) She is short and thin and from the Midwest
(north part) I think. Says she's half Jewish..
"there's no such thing-" one guy
"what's your other half?" me, in a very nice tone of voice and a smile,
that you can't tell here,
Lea says,"Christian"
We sit there quietly, together waiting for class to start.
etc.
I'm feeling a little tired.
I could just go now and let you be,
but where would I go?
Let me read you some stuff.
I'll sing you a song..if I love the whole thing-
ANOTHER SUITCASE In Another Hall, music by A.L.W, lyrics, Tim Rice.
I don't expect my love affairs to last for long,
never fool my self that my dreams will come true.
Being used to trouble, I anticipate it,
but all the same I hate it, wouldn't you?
So what happens now? (another suitcase in another hall)
So what happens now? (take your picture off another wall)
Where am I going to..? (you'll get by, you always have before,)
Where am I going to..?-
Time and time again I've said that I don't care,
that I'm immune to gloom, that I'm hard through and through.
But everytime it matters all my words desert me,
so anyone can hurt me, and they do.
So what happens now? (another suitcase in another hall)
So what happens now? (take your picture off another wall)
Where am I going to..? (you'll get by, you always have before,)
Where am I going to..?-
Call in three months time and I'll be fine, I know
well, maybe not too fine but I'll survive anyhow.
I won't recall names and places of this sad occasion,
but that's no consolation, here and now...
So what happens now? (another suitcase in another hall)
So what happens now? (take your picture off another wall)
Where am I going to..? (you'll get by, you always have before,)
Where am I going to..?-
Don't ask any more.
----
yeah, you need the music- do you have a piano? That is from A.L.W's Evita
>From James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man":
(hey guys, give me some books to read- the ones that mean the most to you,
if there are any. Kyle said, Notes to Myself
Author: Prather, Hugh.
Title: Notes to myself: my struggle to become a person.
Pub. Info.: [Lafayette, Calif., Real People Press, 1970].
Phy Descript: 1 v. (unpaged) 24 cm.
LC Subject: Conduct-of-life.
Status: Suzzallo General Stacks
BF637.C5 P7 DUE 06-07-96
Undergraduate General Stacks
BF637.C5 P7 CHECK THE SHELVES
BF637.C5 P7 CHECK THE SHELVES
I looked at it when I was still in Monterey, but The guy, Hugh, didn't
seem to be my kind of person, I guess we have similar concerns, but
different questions. ...)
Oh, I can email you the text of this book (portrait), if you want it.. its
about half a meg..
--
He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life.
He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of
wild air and brackish waters and the sea-harvest of shells and tangle and
veiled grey sunlight and gayclad lightclad figures of children and girls
and voices childish and girlish in the air.
A girl stood before him in midstream, alone and still, gazing out to sea.
She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange
and beautiful seabird. Her long slender bare legs were delecate as a
crane's and pure save where an emerald trail of seaweed had fashoned
itself as a sign upon the flesh. Her thighs, fuller and soft-hued as
ivory, were bared almost to the hips, where the white fringes of her
drawers were like feathering of soft white down. Her slate-blue skirts
were kilted boldly about her waist and dovetailed behind her. Her bosom
was as a bird's, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some
dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and
touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.
She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence
and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of
his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze
and then quietly withdrew her eyes from his and bent them towards the
stream, gently stirring the water with her foot hither and thither. The
first faint noise of gently moving water broke the silence, low and faint
and whispering, faint as the bells of sleep; hither and thither, hither
and thither; and a faint flame trembled on her cheek.
-- Heavenly God! cried Stephen's soul, in an outburst of profane joy.
He turned away from her suddenly and set off across the strand. His
cheeks were aflame; his body was aglow; his limbs were trembling. On and
on and on and on he strode, far out over the sands, singing wildly to the
sea, crying to greet the advent of the life that had cried to him.
Her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the
holy silence of his ecstasy. Her eyes had called him and his soul had
leaped at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate
life out of life! A wild angel had appeared to him, the angel of mortal
youth and beauty, an envoy from the fair courts of life, to throw open
before him in an instant of ecstasy the gates of all the ways of error and
glory. On and on and on and on!
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he
walked? What hour was it?
--
stop and think about it now if you like, cause I'm going to say
something..
I guess guys might think about this differently than girls- what do women
think when they read things like this? Of the books you have read, what
parts do you remeber, like I remember this one?
Of course you miss all that Stephen has done before, and have little idea
of who he is- I don't remember well- I think he's just renouncing the
religion that has troubled him- I think..
here, a little before:
His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on
high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the
call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties
and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service
of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of
triumph which his lips witheld cleft his brain.
...
His soul had arisn from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes.
Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of
his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new
and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.
--
he calls his soul- 'she' his name is Stephen Dedalus
the question for me is, why did he go on?...why did he go on
he visited a whore earlier..and had later confessed his sin (he's in
Ireland)
the soul is a given to him..
What does the girl think, what was she thinking?
here is the art part I was talking about (stuff cut):
-- Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have.
-- Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of
whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it
with the human sufferer.
Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind
in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human
sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.
-- A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She
was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many
years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the
window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the
shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The
reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror
and pity according to the terms of my definitions.
-- The tragic emotion, in fact, is a face looking two ways, towards
terror and towards pity, both of which are phases of it. You see I use
the word arrest. I mean that the tragic emotion is static. Or rather
the dramatic emotion is. The feelings excited by improper art are
kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to
something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The
arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore
improper arts. The esthetic emotion (I used the general term) is
therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and
loathing.
di.dac.tic(adj)(1658)<didaktikos, >fr. ><didaskein >to teach>
1a: designed or intended to teach
1b: intended to convey instruction and information as well as pleasure
and entertainment
2: making moral observations
-- You say that art must not excite desire, said Lynch. I told you
that one day I wrote my name in pencil on the backside of the Venus of
Praxiteles in the Museum. Was that not desire?
-- I speak of normal natures, said Stephen...
Stephen turned towards his companion and looked at him for a moment
boldly in the eyes. Lynch, recovering from his laughter, answered his
look from his humbled eyes. The long slender flattened skull beneath
the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a
hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze.
Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by
one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and
self-embittered.
-- As for that, Stephen said in polite parenthesis, we are all
animals. I also am an animal.
-- You are, said Lynch.
-- But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The
desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really not
esthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but
also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from
what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a
purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before
we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye.
-- In the same way, said Stephen, your flesh responded to the stimulus
of a naked statue, but it was, I say, simply a reflex action of the
nerves. Beauty expressed by the artist cannot awaken in us an emotion
which is kinetic or a sensation which is purely physical. It awakens,
or ought to awaken, or induces, or ought to induce, an esthetic
stasis, an ideal pity or an ideal terror, a stasis called forth,
prolonged, and at last dissolved by what I call the rhythm of beauty.
{**it gets worse.. I think this is the most important part:}
--We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these
things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood
it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out
again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and
shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of
the beauty we have come to understand - that is art.
-- But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art?
What is the beauty it expresses?
-- Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or
intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and
forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly.
Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said:
-- If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least
another cigarette. I don't care about it. I don't even care about
women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a
year. You can't get me one.
When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I
require a new terminology and a new personal experience.
-- Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his
intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about
the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry
up and finish the first part.
-- To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria
{Just got David's email, good is happening, let me finish this}
I'm not going to try to cut this, just take it all.., its hell reading.. I
know.. skim through, print it out, read it later, how does it relate to
what Wilde says (from 'int' on web page) here it is incase you don't want
to go (no password any more, and btw, no more posting by putting 'love' in
the subject, I've just made it so that whatever I recieve that is to
whatever I am choosing to call the list ('green', today) gets copied to
the top of 'end')
a dream, was herself dreaming <that's from the excerpt from frank norris'
"the octopus" on my web page, click 'life' then 'vanamee', I think)
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by
Oscar Wilde
THE PREFACE
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and
conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into
another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of
autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are
corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the
cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom
beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are
well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban
seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of
Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms
part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists
in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist ever desires to
prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has
ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable
mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express
everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virture are to the artist materials for an art. From the point
of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.
From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art
is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the
spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion
about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital. When
critics disagree, the artist is in accord with herself. We can forgive
a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The
only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.
OSCAR WILDE
{I guess he doesn't touch beauty though}
here's Joyce continued:
--We are right, he said, and the others are wrong. To speak of these
things and to try to understand their nature and, having understood
it, to try slowly and humbly and constantly to express, to press out
again, from the gross earth or what it brings forth, from sound and
shape and colour which are the prison gates of our soul, an image of
the beauty we have come to understand - that is art.
They had reached the canal bridge and, turning from their course, went
on by the trees. A crude grey light, mirrored in the sluggish water
and a smell of wet branches over their heads seemed to war against the
course of Stephen's thought.
-- But you have not answered my question, said Lynch. What is art?
What is the beauty it expresses?
-- That was the first definition I gave you, you sleepy-headed wretch,
said Stephen, when I began to try to think out the matter for myself.
Do you remember the night? Cranly lost his temper and began to talk
about Wicklow bacon.
-- I remember, said Lynch. He told us about them flaming fat devils of
pigs.
-- Art, said Stephen, is the human disposition of sensible or
intelligible matter for an esthetic end. You remember the pigs and
forget that. You are a distressing pair, you and Cranly.
Lynch made a grimace at the raw grey sky and said:
-- If I am to listen to your esthetic philosophy give me at least
another cigarette. I don't care about it. I don't even care about
women. Damn you and damn everything. I want a job of five hundred a
year. You can't get me one.
Stephen handed him the packet of cigarettes. Lynch took the last one
that remained, saying simply:
-- Proceed!
-- Aquinas, said Stephen, says that is beautiful the apprehension of
which pleases.
Lynch nodded.
-- I remember that, he said, Pulcra sunt quae visa placent. - He uses
the word visa, said Stephen, to cover esthetic apprehensions of all
kinds, whether through sight or hearing or through any other avenue of
apprehension. This word, though it is vague, is clear enough to keep
away good and evil which excite desire and loathing. It means
certainly a stasis and not a kinesis. How about the true? It produces
also a stasis of the mind. You would not write your name in pencil
across the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle.
-- No, said Lynch, give me the hypotenuse of the Venus of Praxiteles.
-- Static therefore, said Stephen. Plato, I believe, said that beauty
is the splendour of truth. I don't think that it has a meaning, but
the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is beheld by the intellect
which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the
intelligible; beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by
the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the
direction of truth is to understand the frame and scope of the
intellect itself, to comprehend the act itself of intellection.
Aristotle's entire system of philosophy rests upon his book of
psychology and that, I think, rests on his statement that the same
attribute cannot at the same time and in the same connexion belong to
and not belong to the same subject. The first step in the direction of
beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to
comprehend the act itself of esthetic apprehension. Is that clear?
-- But what is beauty? asked Lynch impatiently. Out with another
definition. Something we see and like! Is that the best you and
Aquinas can do?
-- Let us take woman, said Stephen. -- Let us take her! said Lynch
fervently. -- The Greek, the Turk, the Chinese, the Copt, the
Hottentot, said Stephen, all admire a different type of female beauty.
That seems to be a maze out of which we cannot escape. I see, however,
two ways out. One is this hypothesis: that every physical quality
admired by men in women is in direct connexion with the manifold
functions of women for the propagation of the species. It may be so.
The world, it seems, is drearier than even you, Lynch, imagined. For
my part I dislike that way out. It leads to eugenics rather than to
esthetic. It leads you out of the maze into a new gaudy lecture-room
where MacCann, with one hand on The Origen of Species and the other
hand on the new testament, tells you that you admired the great flanks
of Venus because you felt that she would bear you burly offspring and
admired her great breasts because you felt that she would give good
milk to her children and yours.
-- Then MacCann is a sulphur-yellow liar, said Lynch energetically.
-- There remains another way out, said Stephen, laughing.
-- To wit? said Lynch.
-- This hypothesis, Stephen began.
-- This hypothesis, Stephen repeated, is the other way out: that,
though the same object may not seem beautiful to all people, all
people who admire a beautiful object find in it certain relations
which satisfy and coincide with the stages themselves of all esthetic
apprehension. These relations of the sensible, visible to you through
one form and to me through another, must be therefore the necessary
qualities of beauty. Now, we can return to our old friend saint Thomas
for another pennyworth of wisdom.
Lynch laughed.
-- It amuses me vastly, he said, to hear you quoting him time after
time like a jolly round friar. Are you laughing in your sleeve?
-- MacAlister, answered Stephen, would call my esthetic theory applied
Aquinas. So far as this side of esthetic philosophy extends, Aquinas
will carry me all along the line. When we come to the phenomena of
artistic conception, artistic gestation, and artistic reproduction I
require a new terminology and a new personal experience.
-- Of course, said Lynch. After all Aquinas, in spite of his
intellect, was exactly a good round friar. But you will tell me about
the new personal experience and new terminology some other day. Hurry
up and finish the first part.
-- Who knows? said Stephen, smiling. Perhaps Aquinas would understand
me better than you. He was a poet himself. He wrote a hymn for Maundy
Thursday. It begins with the words Pange lingua gloriosi. They say it
is the highest glory of the hymnal. It is an intricate and soothing
hymn. I like it; but there is no hymn that can be put beside that
mournful and majestic processional song, the Vexilla Regis of
Venantius Fortunatus.
Lynch began to sing softly and solemnly in a deep bass voice:
Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine
Dicendo nationibus
Regnavit a ligno Deus.
-- That's great! he said, well pleased. Great music!
They turned their faces towards Merrion Square and went for a little
in silence.
-- To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most
satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the
necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the
qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: Ad pulcritudinem tria
requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas. I translate it so:
Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance.
Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?
-- Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious
intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.
Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted
on his head.
-- Look at that basket, he said.
-- I see it, said Lynch.
-- In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all
separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is
not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line
drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is
presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is
presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But,
temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously
apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable
background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as one
thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is
integritas.
-- Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.
-- Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal
lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its
limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the
synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of
apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that
it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible,
separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their
sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.
-- Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas
and you win the cigar.
-- The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas
uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time.
It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or
idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other
world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of
which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is
the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in
anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic
image a' universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But
that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended
that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its
form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which
is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that
thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks
in the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme
quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first
conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant
Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that
supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image,
is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its
wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis
of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac
condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase
almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.
Stephen paused and, though his companion did not speak, felt that his
words had called up around them a thought-enchanted silence.
-- What I have said, he began again, refers to beauty in the wider
sense of the word, in the sense which the word has in the literary
tradition. In the marketplace it has another sense. When we speak of
beauty in the second sense of the term our judgement is influenced in
the first place by the art itself and by the form of that art. The
image, it is clear, must be set between the mind or senses of the
artist himself and the mind or senses of others. If you bear this in
memory you will see that art necessarily divides itself into three
forms progressing from one to the next. These forms are: the lyrical
form, the form wherein the artist presents his image in immediate
relation to himself; the epical form, the form wherein he presents his
image in mediate relation to himself and to others; the dramatic form,
the form wherein he presents his image in immediate relation to
others.
-- That you told me a few nights ago, said Lynch, and we began the
famous discussion.
-- I have a book at home, said Stephen, in which I have written down
questions which are more amusing than yours were. In finding the
answers to them I found the theory of esthetic which I am trying to
explain. Here are some questions I set myself: Is a chair finely made
tragic or comic? Is the portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see
it? If not, why not?
-- Why not, indeed? said Lynch, laughing.
-- If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued,
make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not,
why not?
-- That's a lovely one, said Lynch, laughing again. That has the true
scholastic stink.
-- Lessing, said Stephen, should not have taken a group of statues to
write of. The art, being inferior, does not present the forms I spoke
of distinguished clearly one from another. Even in literature, the
highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused. The
lyrical form is in fact the simplest verbal vesture of an instant of
emotion a rhythmical cry such as ages ago cheered on the man who
pulled at the oar or dragged stones up a slope. He who utters it is
more conscious of the instant of emotion than of himself as feeling
emotion. The simplest epical form is seen emerging out of lyrical
literature when the artist prolongs and broods upon himself as the
centre of an epical event and this form progresses till the centre of
emotional gravity is equidistant from the artist himself and from
others. The narrative is no longer purely personal. The personality of
the artist passes into the narration itself, flowing round and round
the persons and the action like a vital sea. This progress you will
see easily in that old English ballad Turpin Hero which begins in the
first person and ends in the third person. The dramatic form is
reached when the vitality which has flowed and eddied round each
person fills every person with such vital force that he or she assumes
a proper and intangible esthetic life. The personality of the artist,
at first a cry or a cadence or a mood and then a fluid and lambent
narrative, finally refines itself out of existence, impersonalizes
itself, so to speak. The esthetic image in the dramatic form is life
purified in and reprojected from the human imagination. The mystery of
esthetic, like that of material creation, is accomplished. The artist,
like the God of creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent,
paring his fingernails.
-- Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.
A fine rain began to fall from the high veiled sky and they turned
into the duke's lawn to reach the national library before the shower
came.
-- What do you mean, Lynch asked surlily, by prating about beauty and
the imagination in this miserable Godforsaken island? No wonder the
artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having perpetrated
this country.
The rain fell faster. When they passed through the passage beside
Kildare house they found many students sheltering under the arcade of
the library. Cranly, leaning against a pillar, was picking his teeth
with a sharpened match, listening to some companions. Some girls stood
near the entrance door. Lynch whispered to Stephen:
-- Your beloved is here.
Stephen took his place silently on the step below the group of
students, heedless of the rain which fell fast, turning his eyes
towards her from time to time. She too stood silently among her
companions. She has no priest to flirt with, he thought with conscious
bitterness, remembering how he had seen her last. Lynch was right. His
mind emptied of theory and courage, lapsed back into a listless peace.
Try to think (see) the difference between his 'static' and 'dynamic'
emotion or whatever.
How do his three forms compare to Wilde's
G-d is it really that complicated?... no
let's come back to this later
.