Rorty valorises the study of literature and the role of the poet

Transcending philosophy Remembering Richard Rorty, pragmatist thinker, who died recently. SHELLEY WALIA The Hindu Magazine Sunday, Jul 08, 2007

Philosophy finally came to be regarded by philosophers like Rorty as modes of responding to an ever-changing world, a commentary that would take us towards a perceptive understanding of our existence, not just a critical assessment that authoritatively asserts to know all truth. An overarching grand theory of life is thus not possible, and the anti-philosophical view that Rorty generated in contemporary philosophy is one step towards the appreciation of relativity and the contingency of one’s fundamental beliefs and desires.

It is for this reason that he valorises the study of literature and the role of the poet, thereby giving this world of fiction a privileged value than philosophy. Poetry, Rorty strongly felt, was responsible for bringing about an improved world to live in where objective truths are too hegemonic for an individual who enjoys the free dance of ideas and the on-going dialogue where opposing views merely jostle against each other, but never seek any prioritisation.

Here lies Rorty’s post-philosophical juxtaposing of the beautiful and the just, of Wild Orchids and Trotsky (the title of an autobiographical narrative by Rorty), a robust dream of a world in which Rorty visualised the prevale nce of ‘love as the only law’.

Modernism and Magic Realism

20th-Century Literary Genres in a Nutshell: Part 3 George Eberhart

Britannica Blog - July 27th, 2007

Magic Realism, 1950s–1990s. Latin American writings characterized by fantastic events, circumstances, and miracles in otherwise ordinary surroundings: Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1941); Gabriel García Márquez, Cien años de soledad (1967).

Modernism, 1900s–1930s. A diverse multinational movement, with epicenters in Paris and London, that developed a new emphasis on the rhythms and internal structures of language and on the disillusioning realities of 20th-century life. It took a variety of forms at different times in various countries.
Austria and Germany, 1910s–1930s. Modernist authors uneasily accepted cosmopolitanism in a time of economic and social upheaval: Franz Kafka, Der Prozess (1915); Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924).
Denmark, 1950s–1960s. Experimentation came after World War II: Klaus Rifbjerg, Konfrontation: Digte (1960).
England and Ireland, 1910s–1930s. Modernist characteristics included requiring the reader to construct meaning out of fragments, allowing form to create content, and using imagery to fashion impressionistic collages: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922); James Joyce, Ulysses (1922); Ezra Pound, The Cantos (1917–1970); Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).
France, 1900s–1930s. French modernism was accompanied by the rise of the socialist movement, the appearance of anarchists in trade unions, and radical changes in the visual arts: Marcel Proust, A la recherché du temps perdu (1913–1927).
Italy, 1900s–1950s. Modernists rebelled against traditional sentimentality in favor of simplified language and themes: Eugenio Montale, Ossi di seppia (1916); Luigi Pirandello, Sei personaggi in cerca d’auture (1921); Ignazio Silone, Pane e vino (1937); Italo Svevo, La coscienza di Zeno (1923).
Latin America, 1880–1910s. Latin American and Spanish modernists stressed individuality of expression and used metaphorical language, mannered sentiment, and nostalgia: Rubén Darío, Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905); Juan Ramón Jiménez, Platero y yo (1914).
Russia, 1900s–1930s. Stylistic innovation was equated with revolution and the desire for a new society: Sergei Esenin, Pugachyov (1922).
Sweden, 1940s. Swedish modernists were influenced by the German expressionists and French symbolists: Gunnar Ekelöf, Sent på jorden (1932).
United States, 1910s–1930s. American modernists experimented with psychological fiction and intellectual inquiry: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929); Wallace Stevens, Ideas of Order (1935).

'Do Beegha Zameen', 'Swades', 'Motorcycle Diaries'

7 Jan 2007 12:03:23 Movies to help IIM-A bridge the great Indian divide
AHMEDABAD: It's a tale of two Indias - one that is making a lasting impression on the global arena and the other, a backyard where farmers are committing suicide.
While it is the 'shining' India that usually attracts the students of Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), it's back-to-basics for them as of now.
Students at IIM-A will study this divide between the two Indias through movies like 'Do Beegha Zameen', 'Swades', the Che Guevara-inspired 'Motorcycle Diaries' among others, and will initiate an open forum for students to discuss and suggest ways by which to bridge this divide for holistic development of India.
This effort will be a part of IIM-A's annual agri-business summit 'Amaethon', which begins here on January 19.
The film review exercise, titled 'Astitva - The Sustenance of Existence', will also involve students from 50 other top business schools across the country.
The 'Amaethon' theme is aptly titled 'The Awaited Dawn' and will feature events that would focus on finding ways to cut through the mosaic of inequality in the society.
"Films would be chosen from across genres and times, focusing on social issues and the endeavour would be to tackle the core issue of under-development in rural areas and how to become a catalyst in achieving rural growth," said Jyoti Agarwal, a student.
Various events of 'Amaethon' will explore the possibilities of development of the rural sector through social entrepreneurship and agri-businesses.
Kumar Adityendra, event co-ordinator, said, "The awaiting dawn needs to first usher in a new era of development in India's rural economy. It is unfortunate to see rural India lagging behind while our industries make international acquisitions."
Source: The Times of India

From the mortal to the immortal planes

Entertaining Research

Writing as a journey to the netherworlds and as bringing back the dead

The writer often doesn’t know, consciously, what gods she invokes or what myths she’s retelling. Orpheus is a figure of all artists, and Eurydice is his inspiration. She is what he goes into the dark to seek. He is the conscious mind, with its mastery of skill and craft, its faculty of ordering, selecting, making rational and persuasive; she is the subconscious mind, driven by disorder, fuelled by obscure desires, brimming with promises that perhaps she won’t keep, with promises of revelation, fantasies of empowerment and knowledge. What she offers is fleeting, tenuous, hard to hold. She makes us stand on the brink of the unknown with our hand stretched out into the dark. Mostly, we just touch her fingertips and she vanishes. She is the dream that seems charged with meaning, that vanishes as soon as we try to describe it. She is the unsayable thing we are always trying to say. She is the memory that slips away as you try to grasp it. Just when you’ve got it, you haven’t got it. She won’t bear the light of day. She gets to the threshold and she falters. You want her too much, and by wanting her you destroy her. As a writer, as an artist, your effects constantly elude you. You have a glimpse, an inspiration, you write a paragraph and you think it’s there, but when you read back, it’s not there. Every picture painted, every opera composed, every book that is written, is the ghost of the possibilities that were in the artist’s head. Art brings back the dead, but it also makes perpetual mourners of us all. Nothing lasts: that’s what Apollo, the father of Orpheus, sings to him in Monteverdi’s opera. In Opera North’s staging, the god took a handkerchief from his pocket, licked it, and tenderly cleaned his child’s tear-stained face. Hillary Mantel in Guardian; via Jenny Davidson.

It also reminded me the Indian equivalent of the story of Satyavan and Savitri; and, Aurobindo, in his note to his epic poem Savitri is explicit about Satyavan being the “self” and Savitri being the “Word” (not to mention that the “Word” is born of “Tapasya”):

Satyavan is the soul carrying the divine truth of being within itself but descended into the grip of death and ignorance; Savitri is the Divine Word, daughter of the Sun, goddess of the supreme Truth who comes down and is born to save; Aswapati, the Lord of the Horse, her human father, is the Lord of Tapasya, the concentrated energy of spiritual endeavour that helps us to rise from the mortal to the immortal planes …

Happy reading! This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 9:34 pm by Guru

Spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism

Spring / Summer 2007, Vol 15, No. 1 Boston University 621 Commonwealth Boston, MA 02215PH: 617-353-6480FAX: 617-353-5905 Contact Arion Advertise With Arion US Bookstores Carrying Arion EDITOR IN CHIEF Herbert Golder

Religion and the Arts in America CAMILLE PAGLIA

At this moment in America, religion and politics are at a flash point. Conservative Christians deplore the left-wing bias of the mainstream media and the saturation of popular culture by sex and violence and are promoting strategies such as faith-based home-schooling to protect children from the chaotic moral relativism of a secular society. Liberals in turn condemn the meddling by Christian fundamentalists in politics, notably in regard to abortion and gay civil rights or the Mideast, where biblical assumptions, it is claimed, have shaped US policy. There is vicious mutual recrimination, with believers caricatured as paranoid, apocalyptic crusaders who view America's global mission as divinely inspired, while liberals are portrayed as narcissistic hedonists and godless elitists, relics of the unpatriotic, permissive 1960s.
A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.
I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion. Let me make my premises clear: I am a professed atheist and a pro-choice libertarian Democrat. But based on my college experiences in the 1960s, when interest in Hinduism and Buddhism was intense, I have been calling for nearly two decades for massive educational reform that would put the study of comparative religion at the center of the university curriculum. Though I shared the exasperation of my generation with the moralism and prudery of organized religion, I view each world religion, including Judeo-Christianity and Islam, as a complex symbol system, a metaphysical lens through which we can see the vastness and sublimity of the universe. Knowledge of the Bible, one of the West's foundational texts, is dangerously waning among aspiring young artists and writers. When a society becomes all-consumed in the provincial minutiae of partisan politics (as has happened in the US over the past twenty years), all perspective is lost. Great art can be made out of love for religion as well as rebellion against it. But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.
The position of the fine arts in America has rarely been secure. This is a practical, commercial nation where the arts have often been seen as wasteful, frivolous, or unmanly. In Europe, the arts are heavily subsidized by the government because art literally embodies the history of the people and the nation, whose roots are pre-modern and in some cases ancient. Even in the old Soviet Union, the Communist regime supported classical ballet. America is relatively young, and it has never had an aristocracy—the elite class that typically commissions the fine arts and dictates taste. In Europe, the Catholic Church was also a major patron of the arts from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation. Partly because of the omnipresent Greco-Roman heritage, furthermore, continental European attitudes toward nudity in art are far more relaxed. In Europe, voluptuous nudes in painting and sculpture and on public buildings, fountains, and bridges are a mundane fact of life.
Conservatives often speak of the US as a Judeo-Christian nation, a formulation that many people, including myself, find troublesome because of the absorption by our population, over the past century and a half, of so many immigrants of other faiths. The earliest colonization of America by Europeans was certainly Christian, and in New England specifically Protestant. The Spanish Catholic settlements in Florida and California, as well as the French missions in the Great Lakes and central New York, were eventually abandoned. Maryland, established in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics, was the exception, and out of it would come the dominance of the bishops of Baltimore on American Catholic doctrine.
The Puritans who arrived in New England in the early seventeenth century brought with them the Calvinist hostility or indifference to the visual arts. A motivating principle of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation was its correction of Roman Catholicism's heavy use of images in medieval churches—in statues, paintings, and stained-glass windows. The Protestant reformers reasserted the Ten Commandments' ban on graven images, idolatrous objects that seduce the soul away from the immaterial divine. The Puritans, a separatist sect that seceded from the too–Catholic Church of England, followed the Reformation imperative of putting the Bible at the center of their faith. Through direct study of the Bible, made possible by Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, believers opened a personal dialogue with God. This focus on text and close reading helped inspire the American literary tradition. Both poetry and prose, in the form of diaries, were stimulated by the Puritan practice of introspection: a Puritan had to constantly scrutinize his or her conscience and look for God's hand in the common and uncommon events of life. Oratory, embodied in Sunday sermons, was very strong. Literary historian Perry Miller identified the jeremiad or hellfire sermon as an innately American form, the most famous example of which is Jonathan Edwards' sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which was delivered in Connecticut in 1741 during the religious revival called the Great Awakening. This enthusiastic style of denunciation and call to repentance can still be heard on evangelical television programs, and it is echoed in the fulminations of politically conservative talk radio (which I have been listening to with alternating admiration and consternation for over fifteen years).
The visual arts, on the other hand, were neglected and suppressed under the Puritans. The Puritan suspicion of ornamentation is symbolized in the sober black dress of the Pilgrim Fathers depicted every year in the Thanksgiving decorations of American schools and shops. The Puritans' attitude toward art was conditioned by utilitarian principles of frugality and propriety: art had no inherent purpose except as entertainment, a distraction from duty and ethical action. The Puritans did appreciate beauty in nature, which was “read” like a book for signs of God's providence. The social environment in England from which the Puritans had emigrated to America (either directly or indirectly via the Netherlands ) was overtly iconoclastic. Destruction of church art was massive during the Reformation in Switzerland and Germany as well as England, where destruction of churches, priories, and abbeys followed Henry VIII's severance of the English church from control by the Roman Catholic hierarchy in the 1530s. Crowds smashed medieval stained-glass windows and intricately carved wooden altar screens and decapitated the statues of saints carved on church facades. Walls were whitewashed to cover sacred murals. Politically incited damage to churches was even more severe during the English Civil Wars (1642–51), when Puritan soldiers dispatched by Parliament attacked even the cathedral at Canterbury, which Richard Culmer, Cromwell's general and the leader of the ravagers, called “a stable for idols.” Puritan iconoclasm was a pointed contrast to the image mania of the contemporary Counter-Reformation, the Vatican's campaign to defeat Protestantism that would fill Southern Europe with grandiose Baroque art.
The first serious body of painting in America was eighteenth-century portraiture, documentary works commissioned to mark social status. Professional theater also began in the eighteenth century in the Southern colonies and New York City, although a vestige of the battles waged by the English Puritans against the theater world in Shakespeare's time survived in the laws prohibiting stage plays that were passed during the two decades before the American Revolution in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania. Though American drama and the visual arts may have languished in the wake of Puritanism, music was tremendously energized. The first book published in the American colonies was the Bay Psalm Book, which was released in 1640 in Massachusetts and went through twenty-seven editions. As a collection of psalms for singing in church, it belonged to a century-long line of British and Scottish psalters. Before the Reformation, hymns for the Catholic Mass were in Latin and were sung only by the clergy, not the laity. But Martin Luther, a priest and poet who admired German folk song, felt that hymns should be couched in the vernacular and should be sung by the entire congregation of worshippers. This emphasis on congregational singing is one of Protestantism's defining features—imitated in recent decades, with varying success, by American Catholic parishes. Through its defiance of medieval religious authority, Protestantism helped produce modern individualism. Yet Protestant church services also promoted community and social cohesion. The intertwining of capitalism and Protestantism since the Renaissance has been extensively studied. But perhaps the congregational esprit of church-going may also have been a factor in the Protestant success in shaping modern business practices and corporate culture.
The Protestant reformers were bitterly split, however, over the issue of music in church. Luther encouraged the composition of new hymns and was the author of a famous one—“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (“Ein' Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott”). In contrast, John Calvin, the father of American Puritanism, maintained that only the word of God should be heard in church; hence songs had to strictly follow the biblical psalms. Like his fellow reformer, Ulrich Zwingli, Calvin opposed the use of organs or any instruments in church: organs were systematically destroyed by Protestant radicals. Furthermore, Calvin condemned the complex polyphonic music endorsed by the more artistic Luther. Calvin rejected harmony or part-singing, so that the Holy Scripture could be heard with perfect clarity. Thus the American style of Protestant church song, based on Calvin's principles, was simple, slow, serious, and cast in unaccompanied unison. That intense, focused group sound has descended through the centuries and can be heard in the majestic hymns that have been adopted as stirring anthems by American civil rights groups, such as “Amazing Grace” and “We Shall Overcome.”
The Quakers, who were pivotal to the abolitionist movement against slavery, were even more restrictive about such matters: they frowned on music altogether, even at home, because they believed it encouraged thoughtlessness and frivolity. But the German and Dutch who emigrated to America from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries held the more expansive Lutheran view of church music. The German influence was especially strong in Philadelphia, to which German Pietists imported a church organ in 1694. By the start of the nineteenth century, hymn writing exploded in America. Over the next hundred years, hymns of tremendous quality poured out from both men and women writers. In many cases, they were simply lyrics—pure poetry that was attached to old melodies. A famous example from the Civil War is Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Howe wrote overnight in a fever of inspiration after visiting a Union Army camp near Washington, where she heard the soldiers singing “John Brown's Body,” a tribute to the executed abolitionist rebel. Several other songs would become political hymns to the nation, such as “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” written in 1832 by a Baptist minister, Samuel Francis Smith, and “America the Beautiful,” a lyric written by Katharine Lee Bates, a native of Massachusetts whose father was a Congregationalist pastor. Bates saw the Rockies for the first time when she taught here at Colorado College in 1893. She wrote “America the Beautiful” after a wagon trip to the top of Pike's Peak. When it was published in 1899, it became instantly famous and has often been described as America's true national anthem. The huge nineteenth-century corpus of Protestant songs became part of common American culture for people of all faiths—thus the tragic power of that final scene on the sinking Titanic in 1912, when the ship's band struck up the hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee.”
Hymnody should be viewed as a genre of the fine arts and be added to the basic college curriculum. One of the most brilliant products of American creative imagination, hym­nody has had a massive global impact through popular music. Wherever rock 'n' roll is played, a shadow of its gospel roots remains. Rock, which emerged in the 1950s from urban black rhythm and blues of the late 1940s, had several sources, including percussive West African poly­rhythms and British and Scots-Irish folk ballads. But a principal influence was the ecstatic, prophesying, body-shaking style of congregational singing in the camp meetings of religious revivalists from the late eighteenth century on. All gospel music, including Negro spirituals, descends from those extravaganzas, which drew thousands of people to open-air worship services in woods and groves.
The most influential camp meeting occurred at Cane Ridge in Bourbon County, Kentucky, in 1804. For three days and well past midnight, a crowd estimated to be between twenty and thirty thousand sang and shouted with a great noise that was heard for miles around. Worshippers transported by extreme emotion jerked, writhed, fell to the ground in convulsions or went catatonic. This Kentucky Revival, called the Second Great Awakening, spread through the inland regions of the South and eventually reached western Pennsylvania. But the movement never flourished in the North because of its harsher weather.
Collections of gospel music for use in revivals were published to huge success throughout the nineteenth century—from Gospel Melodies (1821) and Spiritual Songs for Social Worship (1832) to Ira D. Sankey's volumes of Gospel Hymns and Sacred Songs (1875–91). A defining characteristic of such songs is their subjectivity—that is, their use of the first-person pronoun to assert an intimate relationship with Jesus—as in “Abide with Me,” “I Need Thee Every Hour,” “Jesus Loves Me,” “He Leadeth Me,” “I Love to Tell the Story,” or the rousing “Give Me That Old-Time Religion.” Out of this gospel tradition also came Negro spirituals, which would powerfully counter the degraded stereotypes of African Americans circulated by minstrel shows. Spirituals began on the antebellum plantations, where Bible stories were ingeniously adapted to carry coded political messages, as in “Go Down, Moses,” a dream of liberation where Pharaoh represents the white slave-owner in collusion with American law. A major addition to the gospel repertory was Slave Songs of the United States, published in 1867. In the 1870s, an African American choir, the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University in Tennessee, traveled the country performing Negro spirituals in a concert setting to help endow black educational institutions. The songs made a sensation, not only for their melodious beauty and religious fervor but for their residual African elements, such as bluesy flat notes and off-beats, the syncopation that would later surface in jazz.
The brilliant folk hymns of nineteenth-century camp meetings were inherited by modern revivals, such as the Billy Graham Crusade. In popular music, the spasmodic undulations and ecstatic cries of camp-meeting worshippers were borrowed by performers like Little Richard, Elvis Presley, and the late, great James Brown, whose career began in gospel and who became the “godfather of soul” as well as of funk, reggae, and rap. Gospel music, passionate and histrionic, with its electrifying dynamics, is America 's grand opera. The omnipresence of gospel here partly explains the weakness of rock music composed in other nations—except where there has been direct influence by American rhythm and blues, as in Great Britain and Australia. The continuing impact of gospel music on young African Americans in church may also account for the current greater vitality of hip hop as opposed to hard rock, which has been in creative crisis for well over a decade.
There was a second great confluence of religion with the arts in nineteenth-century America. The Bible, in its poetic and indeed Shakespearean King James translation rather than in today's flat, pedestrian versions, had a huge formative influence on the language, imagery, symbolism, and allegory of such major writers as James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville. The American literary renaissance was produced by the intersection of the nation's residual Calvinism with British Romanticism, which was hostile to organized religion but which had transferred its concept of spirituality to nature. Pantheism helped inspire transcendentalism, which was suffused with aspects of Hinduism by Ralph Waldo Emerson (a refugee from strict Unitarianism). This view of nature, which saw God as immanent in creation, was spectacularly embodied in the nineteenth-century Hudson River School of landscape painting. In such works as Thomas Cole's “River in the Catskills” or Frederic Church's “Niagara,” these artists showed America 's mountains and monumental cataracts glowing with the numinous.
Catholic immigration in the nineteenth century brought a radically different aesthetic to church architecture and decor. The typical American church had been in the Protestant plain style, white and rectangular with a steeple that formed the picturesque apex of countless villages—a design bequeathed by the British architects Sir Christopher Wren and James Gibbs. Originally, American churches were often simply a meeting house (a word still retained in Quaker practice). Also used for local government, the meeting house was a boxy space with exposed timbers and benches but no ornamentation—a template that was borrowed by town halls across the nation. Catholic taste was far more lavish. The influx of Irish immigrants in the 1830s and '40s—which caused anti-Catholic violence (including the burning of churches in Philadelphia)—was soon registered in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral, designed by James Renwick and constructed from 1850 to 1877. With its soaring spires, delicate stone­work, and stained-glass windows, it exemplified the current Gothic Revival—a grand style that was also adopted by Episcopalian churches in America.
Polish and Italian Catholics arrived en masse in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eastern European parish churches followed the ornate Byzantine model. Italian American churches, as was customary in the old country, installed a profusion of polychrome statuary. That flamboyant style continued until after World War II, when the German branch of the Liturgical Movement for Catholic reform introduced a stripped-down modernist design, with concrete construction, open spaces, and little imagery except for abstract crucifixes. This development (blandly formulaic at its worst) resulted in a genteel Protestantizing of American Catholicism, which erased all traces of working-class ethnicity. When aging Catholic churches were renovated in the 1950s and '60s, the saints' statues were displaced or banished altogether. I mourn this loss, which has impoverished the cultural environment for young people: my interest in the arts was first kindled in childhood by the gorgeous stained-glass windows and theatrical statuary of my baptismal church, St. Antony of Padua in Endicott, New York. Perhaps America 's rising Hispanic population will restore the great imagistic style of Latin Catholicism.
Though there was a long tradition of censorship in Roman Catholicism, typified by its voluminous Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of Prohibited Books”), American Catholics made few attempts to influence public policy during the nineteenth century. That role was taken up with gusto by the Protestant-led temperance movement, which called for a ban on the public sale of alcohol—a long campaign that finally succeeded with the ratification in 1920 of the eighteenth amendment to the US Constitution, which began thirteen years of Prohibition. Major groups in the temperance movement, which included leading feminists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were the Women's Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, which was heavily financially subsidized by Methodists and Baptists. Episcopalians, in contrast, kept their distance from the temperance crusade.
Catholic surveillance of American public life would come with the rise of Hollywood. At the start of the studio era, movies were still viewed as vulgar. In the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, there was a new rule-breaking energy and sexual adventurism in urban areas. Responding to audience demand, movies began pushing the limits with bare flesh and sexual innuendo. Small communities across the US felt they were being invaded by an alien cultural force. Resistance came from a collaboration between the Catholic Church and local Protestant women's groups, speaking from the perspective of concerned mothers. There were tinges of anti-Semitism in this protest, because so many of Hollywood's early producers and financiers were Jewish. A series of guidelines was instituted in moviemaking throughout the 1920s, but compliance remained uneven. The Motion Picture Production Code, written by a Jesuit priest, was adopted by Hollywood in 1930 but laxly enforced by the Hays Office. Finally, in 1933, a conference of US bishops created the Catholic League of Decency (later renamed the National League of Decency) and threatened a nationwide boycott. Hollywood responded by appointing a tough Irish Catholic, Joseph Ignatius Breen, to administer the Code, which he did through the Breen Office for the next twenty years. The Code, which wasn't officially abandoned until 1967, required scripts to follow a moral formula: crime had to be punished and marriage respected, with homosexuality and miscegenation forbidden.
Though long disbanded, the Legion of Decency lingers on today in our lettered rating system for movies—G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17. The Legion attached descending grades of A, B, or C to each film released in the US. When I was a child, the group was still a formidable force. After Mass one Sunday, I was transfixed by the official list, posted in the church foyer, that showed the Legion of Decency had slapped a C on the 1956 film, Baby Doll, meaning it was “Condemned” and that no Catholic could see it without pain of sin. The title, Baby Doll, seemed inscribed in smoking, red-hot letters from hell! The film, based on an over-the-top Tennessee Williams tale about Southern decadence, was being provocatively advertised by kiddy-porn images of blonde Carroll Baker lounging in a nightie and sucking her thumb. It was forty years before I finally had a chance to see Baby Doll on cable TV in the 1990s. It still retains its mythic, subversive significance for me. Indeed, Baby Doll is emblematic of the quarrel between religion and the arts in America.
As avant-garde modernism triumphed in the first half of the twentieth century, it was only the movies that addressed or expressed the religious convictions of the mass audience. With few exceptions, most modern artists and intellectuals were agnostics or atheists, above all in Europe, where anti-clericalism has raged since the Enlightenment. In its search for ticket sales, Hollywood returned again and again to the spectacular bible epic, one of my favorite genres. Cecil B. DeMille, for example, made The Ten Commandments twice, in 1923 as a silent film and then as a wide-screen Technicolor extravaganza released in 1956. The latter is regularly broadcast on religious holidays and remains a masterpiece of heroic narrative and archaeological recreation of upper-class Egyptian life. The best-selling American religious novel of the nineteenth century was General Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, published in 1880 and widely imitated. Ben-Hur was also made into two films, the first a 1925 silent and the second yet another wide-screen masterpiece, released in 1959. The dynamic star of both The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur was Charlton Heston, who afterward became a conservative activist and president of the National Rifle Association.
Because of the divergence between religion and the prestige fine arts in the twentieth century, overtly religious art became weaker and weaker. One of the most disseminated images of the twentieth century was William Sallman's Head of Christ, a 1940 American oil painting inspired by Victorian precedents that showed a long-haired Jesus bathed in light and gazing raptly toward heaven. In his intriguing 1996 book, Icons of American Protestantism, David Morgan notes that Head of Christ was reproduced five hundred million times over the next four decades. The image was beloved among evangelicals but not mainline Protestants. Many critics, even believers, rejected the painting as sentimental kitsch and denounced its portrayal of Christ as “effeminate” as well as overly Nordic Caucasian. (Sallman was in fact the son of Scandinavian immigrants.) Head of Christ shows Jesus as the gentle, benevolent Good Shepherd—the forgiving friend with whom born-again Christians, such as President Jimmy Carter, claim to walk and talk.
If there were few open conflicts in America between religion and the fine arts through most of the twentieth century, it was simply because the two realms rarely overlapped. But that uneasy truce ended with the culture wars of the 1980s and '90s. Under the conservative presidencies of Ronald Reagan, whose goal was to reduce big government, there was close scrutiny of cultural agencies. Considerable impetus came from William Bennett, the new director of the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose budget he cut; when Bennett was appointed Secretary of Education, he was succeeded as Director of the NEH by Lynne Cheney, wife of the future Vice President, Richard B. Cheney. She targeted deconstruction on campus and liberal bias in government-funded public broadcasting programs. A focus of controversy soon became the National Endowment for the Arts, whose authorization was approved in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson but which had to struggle for congressional funding from the start, with vehement opposition even to its creation coming from Strom Thurmond, the conservative senator from South Carolina.
A variety of groups mobilized outside government in the 1980s to counter what was perceived as a moral degeneration in the media environment. These included Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family, the Rev. Louis Sheldon's Coalition for Traditional Values, and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition. In 1985, the Parents Music Resource Center, led by Tipper Gore (wife of then-Senator Al Gore of Tennessee ), lobbied in Senate hearings for content labeling of popular music because of concerns about sex and violence. In 1985, evangelical Protestant organizations, led by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, and the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the National Federation for Decency (renamed the American Family Association), allied with anti-pornography feminists (whom I strongly opposed) to pressure 7-11 and other national chains of convenience stores, to ban the sale of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. That effort succeeded but may have been a pyrrhic victory insofar as it immediately stimulated the market for pornographic videos, introduced into homes by the then-new technology of the VCR. In 1988, Wildmon's lobbying led to the introduction in the US House of Representatives of a resolution (sponsored by conservative Southern California Congressman William E. Dannemeyer) calling for Universal Stu­dios to cancel the release of Martin Scorsese's “morally objectionable” film, The Last Temptation of Christ. The resolution was referred to committee and never reached the floor for a vote.
Wildmon's activities expanded to the fine arts when, in 1989, his group publicized an apparent example of blasphemy in an exhibition that had been partly funded (in the amount of seventy thousand dollars) by the National Endowment for the Arts. The show had opened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in conservative Senator Jesse Helms' home state, and after a short tour closed in Richmond, Virginia. The point of contention was New York artist Andres Serrano's “Piss Christ”—a five-foot-high blow-up of a misty photograph of a back-lit plastic crucifix immersed in a Plexiglas vat of the artist's urine. Without that slangy and perhaps gratuitously confrontational title, of course, no one would have known how the photo's golden glow had been produced. The outcry over “Piss Christ” began with local letters to the editor and spread to Congress, where New York Senator Alphonse D'Amato called Serrano's photo “filth” and “garbage” and punctuated his remarks by tearing up the exhibit catalog and flinging the pieces to the Senate floor.
Another bitter controversy broke out that year over an exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe's openly gay and sadomaso­chistic photographs: this show was assembled by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and was partly funded (in the amount of thirty thousand dollars) by the National Endowment for the Arts. There were no problems in Phil­adelphia, but negative publicity exploded just before the Mapplethorpe show was to open in Washington 's venerable Corcoran Gallery of Art, located only a block from the White House. The director preemptively cancelled the exhibit, an arbitrary move that caused outrage in the art world (she resigned under fire by the end of the year). The Mapplethorpe show was quickly taken by a local progressive venue, the Washington Project for the Arts, where it drew huge crowds. When it moved to the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, however, there were serious repercussions: police entered the gallery, and the director was charged with obscenity. He was put on trial but later acquitted by a jury.
Political activism on the left was unusually intense in the 1980s because of the AIDS epidemic, which the Reagan administration was accused of having initially ignored. Mapplethorpe, who had died of AIDS at age forty-two in 1989, was viewed as an apostle of sexual liberation. As an admirer of Mapplethorpe, I argued at the time that this was a sentimental misreading of his work, whose dark, punitive hierarchies were partly a residue of his childhood Catholicism. Another seething ex-Catholic, Madonna, was also challenging taboos at the time: in 1989, her music video for “Like a Prayer,” which showed her receiving the stigmata, making love to the animated statue of a black saint, and dancing in her slip in front of a field of burning crosses, caused Pepsi-Cola to cancel her five million dollar endorsement contract.
Though work offensive to organized religion constituted only a fraction of the projects annually supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, conservative demands for the total abolition of that agency escalated. The NEA's administrators and peer-review panels were denounced for left-wing bias and anti-Americanism. As a career teacher at arts colleges, I was very concerned about the stereotyping of artists as parasitic nihilists that was beginning to take hold in the popular mind in America. While most people in the arts community viewed the Serrano and Mapplethorpe controversies as assaults on free speech, I saw them as primarily an argument about public funding. I feel that no genuinely avant-garde artist should be taking money from the government—a view also expressed at the time by the legendary Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (another Italian American). Mapplethorpe, certainly, was no struggling artist—he was rich and famous by the time of his death. And I would question whether Mapplethorpe's cool, elegant torture and mutilation scenarios were an ideal advertisement for gay male life.
After acrimonious Congressional debate, the National Endowment for the Arts managed to survive, but it was now regulated by an obscenity clause; grants to individual artists also decreased. Though controversy has subsided, the NEA disturbingly remains at the top of every list of government agencies that many citizens across the nation want abolished. What I found agonizing about the Serrano-Mapplethorpe episodes was that they ruined any prospect for vastly increased federal support for the arts in this country and furthermore that they would inevitably undermine arts funding at the state and local levels, where budgets are limited. Dance companies are particularly vulnerable, because they require high-quality rehearsal space and depend on a sustained continuity of teacher and student.
Almost a decade passed in America without a major conflict between government and the arts. In 1999, however, the Brooklyn Museum of Art mounted an exhibit called “Sensation: Emerging British Artists from the Saatchi Collection.” When this show had appeared two years earlier at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, controversy had mainly focused on a large image of an infamous child murderess, which was vandalized with ink and eggs. The work that caused trouble in the US, however, was the British-Nigerian artist Chris Ofili's mixed-media painting, “The Holy Virgin Mary”: it depicted a black-skinned Madonna with a protruding breast sculpted of lacquered elephant dung from the London zoo; two other lumps of dung supported the painting's base. In England, no one objected to the Ofili work. But in New York City, with its huge constituency of ethnic Catholics, there was an immediate reaction, fomented by the New York–based Catholic League for Religious and Civil Liberties, whose vocal president is William A. Donohue. Yet another Italian American Catholic politician, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, expressed outrage—before the show had even opened. At a fiery press conference, Giuliani, who had not yet seen the Ofili painting, called it “sick” and “disgusting.” The mayor unilaterally impounded the Brooklyn Museum 's city funding and threatened to evict it from its century-old lease. This extreme political intrusion diverted the discussion from one of art to that of censorship.
While the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, wrote a New York Times op-ed criticizing the handling of the show by Arnold Lehman, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, most people in the arts community instantly rallied to the latter's side. But unease remained, especially after Lehman openly lied to the press about the pivotal financial role played in the show by Charles Saatchi, a British advertising executive notorious for his speculation in the art market. A direct intervention was made at the Brooklyn Museum by a seventy-two-year-old devout Catholic, who evaded security guards to squeeze washable white paint all over Ofili's painting—an act that some viewed as racist but that oddly paralleled the whitewashing of Catholic images by early Protestant iconoclasts. The man, who told police he had attacked the painting because it was “blasphemous,” was charged with violating the city's ordinance against graffiti.
When the controversy first erupted, I publicly questioned the double standard operative in the art world in regard to artists' manipulation of religious iconography: desecration of Catholic symbols was tolerated in American museums in ways that would never be permitted if the themes were Jewish or Muslim. Second, I denounced the total failure of curatorial support of “Sensation” at the Brooklyn Museum, which simply passively mounted the London show. Much of the misunderstanding of the Ofili painting might have been avoided if the museum had framed it with historical context about, first, African Christian and particularly Ethiopian art; second, tribal African fertility cults; third, the Catholic doctrine of the Virgin Birth; and fourth, the long Southern European tradition of black Madonnas. Commentary by the tabloid press and furious conservatives who had never seen the painting referred to dung being “thrown” or “flung” at the Madonna, which was completely false. But with all candor, no defense of this painting could have totally exonerated it from scandal, since Ofili had provocatively pasted around Mary a cloud of small cutouts of female genitalia culled from pornography magazines. From a distance, they looked like butterflies or hovering angels, emissaries of nature rather than the Christian God. That there was indeed unprofessional indifference to curatorship in this case would be confirmed just last year [in 2006] when Arnold Lehman shockingly demoted his principal curators in a reorganization of the Brooklyn Museum that demonstrated the unscholarly diversion of the institution from public education toward commercial buzz.
The automatic defense of the Brooklyn Museum during the “Sensation” imbroglio sometimes betrayed a dismaying snobbery by liberal middle-class professionals who were openly disdainful of the religious values of the working class whom liberals always claim to protect. Supporters of the arts who gleefully cheer when a religious symbol is maltreated act as if that response authenticates their avant-garde credentials. But here's the bad news: the avant-garde is dead. It was killed over forty years ago by Pop Art and by one of my heroes, Andy Warhol, a decadent Catholic. The era of vigorous oppositional art inaugurated two hundred years ago by Romanticism is long gone. The controversies over Andres Serrano, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Chris Ofili were just fading sparks of an old cause. It is presumptuous and even delusional to imagine that goading a squawk out of the Catholic League permits anyone to borrow the glory of the great avant-garde rebels of the past, whose transgressions were personally costly. It's time to move on.
For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent. The New Age movement, to which I belong, was a distillation of the 1960s' multicultural attraction to world religions, but it has failed thus far to produce important work in the visual arts.1 The search for spiritual meaning has been registering in popular culture instead through science fiction, as in George Lucas' six-film Star Wars saga, with its evocative master myth of the “Force.” But technology for its own sake is never enough. It will always require supplementation through cultivation in the arts.
To fully appreciate world art, one must learn how to respond to religious expression in all its forms. Art began as religion in prehistory. It does not require belief to be moved by a sacred shrine, icon, or scripture. Hence art lovers, even when as citizens they stoutly defend democratic institutions against religious intrusion, should always speak with respect of religion. Conservatives, on the other hand, need to expand their parched and narrow view of culture. Every vibrant civilization welcomes and nurtures the arts.
Progressives must start recognizing the spiritual poverty of contemporary secular humanism and reexamine the way that liberalism too often now automatically defines human aspiration and human happiness in reductively economic terms. If conservatives are serious about educational standards, they must support the teaching of art history in primary school—which means conservatives have to get over their phobia about the nude, which has been a symbol of Western art and Western individualism and freedom since the Greeks invented democracy. Without compromise, we are heading for a soulless future. But when set against the vast historical panorama, religion and art—whether in marriage or divorce—can reinvigorate American culture.
Note :
1. See Camille Paglia, “Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious ­Vision in the American 1960 s,” Arion 10.3 (Winter 2003), 57–111.
A lecture delivered on 6 February 2007 as the 2007 Cornerstone Arts Lecture at Colorado College. It was videotaped by C-SPAN and broadcast on its American Perspectives series on 3 March 2007.
Arion is a member of The Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Return to the Homepage

Rilke, like his Russian idols, is bathed in realism

Book Review: Letters to a Young Poet by Ranier Maria Rilke (trans. by Stephen Mitchell) July 24, 2007 Vivek Sharma desicritics.org

Rilke is the Rumi, Kabir, Gibran of the German language. As a poet, as a seeker, he explored the limits of his knowledge and belief. He translated his solitary thoughts into poetry which has music, meaning and agelessness. What this prose, these letters contain is a faithful, forthright, candid and very modest, searching, guiding voice of Rilke. In these letters, written to a younger poet, who sought Rilke's guidance, Rilke chalks out his whole ideology of what poetry must be, and how a poet must reach above, beyond and deep within himself, to arrive at the inevitable verse, which is both timely and timeless, not only for himself but also for the reader.

As a craft, poetry is full of solitary devotion. The premium and investment in terms of poet's emotional and intellectual effort is seldom rewarded. A poet lives on the edge, and always runs the danger of tipping into the pits of self-pity, destruction and death-like poverty. The world seldom honors a poet in his prime, rather the best of the best poets compose their work in spite of the social, political and economic obligations they need to fulfill, obligations that motivate poetry, as well as impede the writing of it.

Sheer talent is not enough, mere vocabulary does not quite make you one, rhyming words and dedication are mere abilities, knowledge of published works is important, and yet what Rilke strove for, what Rilke achieved and what he advises the readers/poets to seek is a state where all these attributes synchronize to produce a poem that is at once lyrical and philosophical, understated yet powerful, terse yet tactful, and most importantly, honest and heartfelt.

There are very few books that have touched the poet in me thus. Maugham's Of Human Bondage and Tolstoy's War and Peace come to my mind when I think of effectiveness of Rilke's prose. Yet Rilke, like his Russian idols, is bathed in realism, he seeks for life outside cities and savors spirituality that he most probably carried within him. Selected Poems of Rilke translated by Robert Bly is a recommended resource, as is The Book of Hours (whose new translation is only couple of years old).

I will encourage every writer, who takes his vocation with seriousness to read Rilke. Like Neruda, Shakespeare, Kalidasa, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, Goethe, Tagore, Pushkin, Ghalib, Hafez, Basho, Dinkar, Tulsidas, Homer, Milton and Lorca, Rilke is a must read poet for everyone interested in poetry and life.

This book is a collection of letters, so is not to be confused with Poetry Handbooks or Guides that are available everywhere. These letters are personal admissions and advice of Rilke to a younger poet. Rilke started writing these when he was in late twenties, and was still groping for his voice, his intention, his ability. The letters are moving and touching. They are like streams of thought that will shape the terrain they flow through, assuage the thirst of ones who arrive at them and if you let yourself go, carry you to the ocean of consciousness.

About me: mostly a poet, often a scientist; an aspiring author; passionate reader of English, Hindi and Sanskrit literature; in love with all forms of music esp Rock and Old Hindi Films; avid movie goer (both Bollywood and Hollywood), CRICKET enthusiast, and equally enthusiastic about physics and research! The Desicritics Team » Become A Desicritic

A Tribute To Akshaya Mohanty

From: "OriyaCD Sales" sales@oriyacd.com To: tusarnmohapatra@mail.com CC: Subject: Oriya CD Released - A Tribute To Akshaya Mohanty Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 19:59:56 -0400 A New Oriya CD Released [ A Tribute To Akshaya Mohanty - Part 2 ] . TO LEARN MORE , CALL US - 848-248-4201 ( USA & Canada )

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The use of clichés and archaisms, to this day disfigures so much Indian prose in English

Indeed, the Cambridge-educated Nehru was among a handful of Indian writers, among which Gandhi and Tagore were also prominent, who found a way to domesticate what for most other Indians born in the nineteenth century was an alien and colonial tongue, a language that could of course be learnt, as did many young people desirous of making good under the Raj, but could never be used with the same vigour or pliability...

Although he sometimes chose a romantic and elevated tone that could grow monotonous, there is never in Nehru's work that tendency towards vagueness and bombast, the use of clichés and archaisms, that to this day disfigures so much Indian prose in English. Indeed, Nehru deserves to be seen, independently of the political man, as one of the best Indian prose writers of the twentieth century. from The Middle Stage by Chandrahas

Recently I saw young Asif Hyder’s magnificent play Kafka

A Ghashiram Kotwal for our time Mohan Maharishi Indian Express Home > Op-Ed > Story Posted online: Tuesday, July 03, 2007 Why are new and original plays not being written in the Indian languages? Why are we still nostalgic about the ‘Golden Sixties’?

Recently Vijay Tendulkar’s Ghashiram Kotwal, a contemporary classic, was staged in Delhi and the response of the theatregoers was overwhelming. People are still enamoured by scheming, lecherous Nana and the transformation of Ghashiram from a simple, small town boy into a lusty monster. More importantly, the content and the form of the play mingle, become indistinguishable from each other and a space is created where the magic of the theatre becomes a distinct possibility. Age-old traditions of Marathi folk theatre, confronted with a modern sensibility, create a work of crystalline originality. Vijay Tendulkar, apart from being a hard-working and highly talented playwright, is a courageous man. He has the courage to create.

Tendulkar was certainly not alone. He had peers. Girish Karnad, Badal Sarkar, Mohan Rakesh and not to forget the grand old man of Kannada theatre, Adya Rangacharya — they were all writing meaningful plays in new, innovative forms, which immediately captivated the imagination of young actors and directors and, through them the audiences. And thus a theatre was created, which creatively responded to the melancholic mood of the disillusioned India of the sixties. These individuals formed the peaks in the landscape, but there were others too, though much less known, creating little gems of theatrical writings of their own. But what happened after that? A deluge?

In seminar after seminar, theatrepersons bemoan the complete absence of new and original plays in Indian languages and the golden sixties are remembered with nostalgia. The reasons for the decline, they say, are many. Lack of financial resources, absence of professional and semi-professional theatre groups devoted to good theatre, bad unusable theatre spaces and irrational theatre education, are some of the reasons commonly cited. Those who wish to make a more profound statement blame the shifting trends in post-modern theatre.

Undeniably, these laments are valid. Haphazard policies, combined with an acute lack of awareness have resulted in dilution and dissipation of energy in the Indian theatre movement. On an even more serious note, there is a complete absence of vision at various levels. Does it mean that after the stalwarts, there has been no meaningful play-writing in post-Independence India? No. That should not be the inference. Satish Alekar’s Begum Barve has a remarkable sweep and complexity. (Oddly, nothing of substance has come from this talented playwright subsequently.)

Girish Karnad continues to write very good plays. His latest, Broken Images, has an odd, intriguing intensity about it. In this one-actor play, the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’ interact to create levels of tension rarely experienced in a theatre hall. Recently I saw young Asif Hyder’s magnificent play Kafka, a wholly indigenous effort of the NSD Repertory Company. So, beautiful things are happening. The problem is, efforts such as these are few and far between and the overall situation remains unsatisfactory.

The flip side of globalisation, which has profound cultural implications, is that it invariably has a dilapidating influence on indigenous cultures. The rich regional cultures, in both tangible and intangible forms, have unfortunately become a victim. Many regional languages of India have their own vibrancy and richness, which remains completely unutilised in weaving a unique national cultural fabric due to lack of creative interaction, which incidentally was the hallmark of the theatre of the sixties. Plays from regional languages were quickly translated in many others.

Who has erred? Is it the government? Is it the corporate sector? Is it the media? Or is it the artistic and intellectual community itself, which has failed to define the cultural space in which we and our children ought to breathe? My verdict is: All! I am aware that such a conclusion means nothing. For, it blames and absolves all of us at the same time.

The real need is to form a National Cultural Council with adequate representation of the government on one hand and the corporate sector and media on the other. Of course, the spine of such a council should be the artists and intellectuals themselves. Such a concerted effort should hopefully bring forth desired ideas and policies which will then need to be implemented with utmost urgency and vigour. But the question is, who will bell the cat. The writer is an actor, director, and playwright. He is former director of the National School of Drama

Passion narratives creatively developed

An Alternate History of the New Testament Literature
from An und für sich by Adam

The gospels belong to James’s “popularizing” tradition, and James is the so-called “Q source” of the synoptic gospels. Mark gives us a good old fashioned adventure story, and Matthew adds back in more of the wisdom literature stuff. Luke-Acts represents an attempt to “mediate” between the traditions of James-Mark-Matthew and the pseudo-Pauline/Petrine literature.

If this scheme holds, then the old move of contrasting the (nice, liberal) synoptic gospels with (mean old) Paul won’t hold; Paul’s teachings directly inform (but do not exhaustively determine) the Jesus we get in the gospels. We know that Paul knew nothing of Jesus except his death and resurrection, and in this historical scheme, we can’t claim that Paul somehow “removed” the teachings of Jesus — rather, Paul’s minimal historical claims provided the kernel around which the gospels (often called “passion narratives with introductions”) creatively developed.

The Golden Ratio is the founding lie of the West

Tusar N. Mohapatra Says: July 8th, 2007 at 4:57 am [Here’s a historical description of music as the basis for Pythagorean-Taoist shamanism. In fact the historical origin of music in China is equivalent to Pythagorean theory as noted by scholar J. A. Van Aalst, who also documents the important structural connection between the fourth/fifth and yin/yang relations…

The Golden Ratio is the founding lie of the West because it formalizes the “alpha and omega” technospirituality or gematria of one-to-one symmetric correspondence between letter and number. The “music logarithmic spiral” of the actual Matrix Plan converges to the Golden Ratio but the equiangular Golden Ratio spiral can be approximated through the sine-waves of the Law of Pythagoras which diverges. (John Sharp, “Spirals and the Golden Section,” Nexus Network Journal, Vol., Number 1 / February, 2002)

http://mothershiplanding.blogspot.com/2007/07/when-mothership-lands.html]

A passion for empire-building?

Niranjan Mohanty in his reflections on the current scenario has raised certain vital issues that must be debated before it is too late. I agree with his view: “At times I feel that the colonial, deconstructionist and postcolonial discourses have elusively alluded to the construction of a passion for empire-building, for erecting boundaries, for perpetuating the dialectical, often subvertive relationship between the center and the periphery, between the privileged and the marginalized.” INDIAN ENGLISH WRITING: POLITICS OF REJECTION? Published by R.K. SINGH April 2nd, 2007 in Poetry Discussion and Poetry India.

For those of us born after Independence, postcolonialism should have ended in fifty-five years of romance with democracy. With the current politics of empowerment of the socially and economically deprived and too much Hindu and Muslim, or majority and minority, only the signs of a new colonialism are visible. At national and international level, after the fall of the USSR and the rise of the processes of globalization, the postcolonial societies everywhere have been experiencing a new dominance under the control of the USA. It seems to me that postcolonialism is not devoid of colonialism. It is rather continuation of colonialism with certain added features to suit the perpetrators of colonialism, be it art, culture, commerce, or politics. Or, we are heading back to colonialism by not resisting the politics of tyranny of a handful of zealots who have virtually consolidated their brutal power and are now out to obliterate the “marginalized”.

I think it makes sense to talk in terms of revival of colonialism after post-colonialism. And this is what we face in the first three years of the 21st century: the totalitarian morality of Information Technology, the manipulated fear of war/disaster/doom through globalization, multi-national capitalism, corporate economy, WTO, environmental concerns, various rights, war on terrorism, etc.; through political orthodoxy in the name of democracy, religious fanaticism, ethnic dominance, and repression of the liberals and the simple, and through the new processes of fossilization of the precolonial/colonial/postcolonial that may render many of us irrelevant. I wonder if we are not terribly dislocated in our world divided into North/South and First/Third world today, just as many postcolonial writers, settled abroad, have been communicating with a colonized mind/subjectivity and getting media recognition.

A new colonialism of the right wing, the American and the British, is taking its hold in developing countries, which have become a playground for long-term exploitation by the newly empowered colonialists within. A process of re-colonization is going on in the name of decolonization, as evident from post-September 11 developments, especially in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Against such a perspective, new writers and poets, be it in India or in any other country need a positive mediation on the basis of equality rather than “us vs. them” treatment which is geared to separate or ignore talents that await discovery and recognition. With empathy, recognition, and responsiveness, the literary scholastic orthodoxies of the earlier decades can be replaced with fresh contexts, unaffected by monopolistic approaches. Instead of pronouncing the demise of Indian English Writing or lamenting over its poor quality, if academic critics could demonstrate professional dedication and commitment, they would be able to locate good poets/fiction writers, and playwrights besides fostering the art, harnessing the taste, and developing the talent. –R.K. SINGH

REFERENCES Niranjan Mohanty. 2003. Sirs/Madams, This is the Indian Poetry in English Scenario for you. The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Vol.31, No.1, p.12-17. M. K. Naik and Shyamala A. Narayan. 2001. Indian English Literature: 1980-2000.Delhi: Pencraft International, p.183.

Intuitive discrimination is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence

The soul of beauty in us identifies itself with the soul of beauty in the thing created and feels in appreciation the same divine intoxication and uplifting which the artist felt in creation. Criticism reaches its highest point when it becomes the record, account, right description of this response; it must become itself inspired, intuitive, revealing. In other words, the action of the intuitive mind must complete the action of the rational intelligence and it may even wholly replace it and do more powerfully the peculiar and proper work of the intellect itself; it may explain more intimately to us the secret of the form, the strands of the process, the inner cause, essence, mechanism of the defects and limitations of the work as well as of its qualities.

For the intuitive intelligence when it has been sufficiently trained and developed, can take up always the work of the intellect and do it with a power and light and insight greater and surer than the power and light of the intellectual judgment in its widest scope. There is an intuitive discrimination which is more keen and precise in its sight than the reasoning intelligence.

What has been said of great creative art, that being the form in which normally our highest and intensest aesthetic satisfaction is achieved, applies to all beauty, beauty in Nature, beauty in life as well as beauty in art. We find that in the end the place of reason and the limits of its achievement are precisely of the same kind in regard to beauty as in regard to religion. It helps to enlighten and purify the aesthetic instincts and impulses, but it cannot give them their highest satisfaction or guide them to a complete insight. It shapes and fulfils to a certain extent the aesthetic intelligence, but it cannot justly pretend to give the definitive law for the creation of beauty or for the appreciation and enjoyment of beauty. It can only lead the aesthetic instinct, impulse, intelligence towards a greatest possible conscious satisfaction, but not to it; it has in the end to hand them over to a higher faculty which is in direct touch with the supra rational and in its nature and workings exceeds the intellect.

And for the same reason, because that which we are seeking through beauty is in the end that which we are seeking through religion, the Absolute, the Divine. The search for beauty is only in its beginning a satisfaction in the beauty of form, the beauty which appeals to the physical senses and the vital impressions, impulsions, desires. It is only in the middle a satisfaction in the beauty of the ideas seized, the emotions aroused, the perception of perfect process and harmonious combination. Behind them the soul of beauty in us desires the contact, the revelation, the uplifting delight of an absolute beauty in all things which it feels to be present, but which neither the senses and instincts by themselves can give, though they may be its channels, - for it is suprasensuous, - nor the reason and intelligence, though they too are a channel, - for it is suprarational, supra-intellectual, - but to which through all these veils the soul itself seeks to arrive.

When it can get the touch of this universal, absolute beauty, this soul of beauty, this sense of its revelation in any slightest or greatest thing, the beauty of a flower, a form, the beauty and power of a character, an action, an event, a human life, an idea, a stroke of the brush or the chisel or a scintillation of the mind, the colours of a sunset or the grandeur of the tempest, it is then that the sense of beauty in us is really, powerfully, entirely satisfied. It is in truth seeking, as in religion, for the Divine, the All-Beautiful in man, in nature, in life, in thought, in art; for God is Beauty and Delight hidden in the variation of his masks and forms.

When, fulfilled in our growing sense and knowledge of beauty and delight in beauty and our power for beauty, we are able to identify our Selves in soul with this Absolute and Divine in all the forms and activities of the world and shape an image of our inner and our outer life in the highest image we can perceive and embody of the All-Beautiful, then the aesthetic being in us who was born for this end, has fulfilled himself and risen to his divine consummation. To find highest beauty is to find God; to reveal, to embody, to create, as we say, highest beauty is to bring out of our souls the living image and power of God. Page-135, Document: Home > E-Library > Works Of Sri Aurobindo > Social And Political Thought Volume-15 > The Suprarational Beauty

Focus on sharing art rather than selling art

Jewish Musicism By: Doni Joszef 5tjt.com Published: Friday, June 22, 2007

There is a concrete divide between the worlds of “Jewish Music” and “Secular Music,” and when presented with the two options, many of us tend to cling to art that touches us in a deeply meaningful way. We want to be moved, inspired, and excited. The art of music can open the heart in a uniquely Divine way. Music has a key to the inner chambers of our souls. This truth does not have to be proved or developed—personal experience with the power of music speaks for itself. Indeed, Rebbe Akiva compares the Kodesh HaKedoshim to the book of Shir HaShirim—“Song of Songs” (Mishnah, Yadayim 3:5 ).

We can explain the comparison to teach us—just as the Kodesh HaKedoshim was the innermost domain of the Beis HaMikdash, so does the power of shir—song—dwell in our innermost essence. And, so, we look to fill this inner realm with the song that taps into that personal spot. The tastes, styles, and genres of music vary—each appealing to a different personality—but they all have a common spark of creativity that triggers something within...

Our desire remains constant—to share our art. An artist who uses his creativity to sell himself sabotages his talents and stunts the natural flow of creative expression. This challenge—to focus on sharing art rather than selling art—is a significant nisayon for every musician. As the velt says, “Never become a sell-out!” That is, share from the heart rather than from the internal desire to please the outside world. Any writer, musician, artist, lecturer, etc. is surely in touch with these nisyonos.

Music is the “soul’s art.” Many have termed it the language of the soul. Experience has taught us that we can only flourish when our intent is to naturally share what has sprouted from the accumulated seeds of the jam sessions. From Pinny’s basement, to the Danbury Lake, to my garage, to Shaya’s upstate cabin, to Matt’s studio, we have accumulated hundreds of hours of jamming and have finally turned potential into actual at Eitan Kantor’s Hyperstudio.

The search for a deeper, fresher, more sincere musical experience presents itself to a large majority of our communities’ youth. Although this inner struggle may not pertain to everyone, the underlying principles and roots of the issue certainly touch the core of who we are and how our souls seek the sparks of creativity to guide us in our spiritual journey. The essence of this matter is quite relevant to us all...

Does this struggle represent a sense of corruption? Has our exposure to the evil forces of secular music polluted, defiled, and mutated our Jewish minds to the extent that Jewish music no longer stimulates the Yiddeshe neshamah? Perhaps.

Such is certainly the case with regard to certain secular philosophies. For instance, a century ago, the deceptive lures of Communism took captive thousands of Jewish souls. These individuals were so enamored by the ideas of revolution that Toras Hashem no longer penetrated into their hearts. Interestingly, the Vilna Gaon (Biyur HaGra, Yoreh Deah, 179:13) actually accuses the Rambam of being pulled too deep into secular philosophy that he became misguided in certain Midrashic explanations. (If this strikes you as controversial, you’ll have to consult with the Vilna Gaon).

So, maybe the fact that some secular songs touch us in a deeply meaningful way is just an unfortunate result of modernization and unhealthy exposure. Maybe Jewish music is inherently perfect, while English music is inherently evil, and it is we who have the problem.

It is the rose that conquers

Re: 14: This Outbreak of Perfection's Law by RY Deshpande on Tue 19 Jun 2007 04:10 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link Rose of God

We shall conclude the present set of postings on the Outbreak of Perfection's Law with Sri Aurobindo’s Rose of God. The poem was written on 31 December 1934 and, in response to Parichanda’s query, he wrote a letter on 2 January 1935; in those days Parichanda was looking after the gardens in the Ashram. A typed copy must have been kept in the Reading Room where he must have read it and asked Sri Aurobindo about the significance of the flower: “Does the rose of all flowers most perfectly and aptly express the divine ecstasies or has it any symbolic allusion in the Veda or the Upanishad?”

Sri Aurobindo answered: “There were no roses in those times in India—roses came with the Mahomedans from Persia. The rose is usually taken by us as the symbol of surrender, love, etc. But here it is not used in that sense, but as the most intense of all flowers it is used as symbolic of the divine intensities—Bliss, Light, Love, etc.” It is remarkable that Sri Aurobindo had written the poem in one go and no further corrections were made afterwards. A part of the poem in his own handwriting can be seen in slide 5 at

http://www.searchforlight.org/Flash8/CollectedPoems/RoseofGod_poem.html

Bliss-Light-Power-Life-Love, Ananda-Prakasha-Shakti-Jivan-Prema, are the five divine intensities mentioned in the stately incantatory Rose of God. About the technical aspects: Rose of God is written in pure stress metre. In it quantity and accent are subordinate and it is the emphasis which gives the force to the rhythmic success. Each line in the poem has six stresses and the arrangement of feet varies freely to suit the movement of thought and feeling, as the poet-critic tells us. The whole poem is built of five stanzas, each containing four lines...

Sri Aurobindo himself had given the example by marking stresses in the third stanza. The poet is definite that there are only six stresses in each line and any attempt from the point of view of melody or singing or any other consideration to make departures by stressing all the three syllables in the repetitive phrase “Rose of God” will amount to ignoring the demands of his poetry. It might make the invocation effective and living, as is claimed, appealing also perhaps but it will be more dramatic than natural.

One must bear in mind that, this poem is based purely on hexametric form with six stresses in each line. Therefore, putting stress on “of” of the phrase will make half of the composition with seven stresses and the other with six. I am not inclined to accept this, stressing of “of” also. Surely, Sri Aurobindo’s ear sees everywhere six stresses and this is important, his aesthetic perception in terms of sound value too. Very likely, we will be missing something subtle if we have the hybrid 7-6 stress-combinations...

Rose of God is the symbol of perfection and, full-blown, it must bloom here, manifest itself here upon our sorrowful and transient earth, Reality take possession of the Phenomenon. “Rose of God, damask force of Infinity”—Sword of Damask steel is unbreakable; also, damask rose is a bluish-red variety of rose. It is the rose that conquers, makes possible for the Law of Perfection prevail in every circumstance. Let us live in it, in its perfection, in the Rose of God. RYD

Imagination can make even the Unknowable tangible, true, graspable, knowable

Re: 14: This Outbreak of Perfection's Law by RY Deshpande on Fri 08 Jun 2007 07:13 AM PDT Profile Permanent Link The magical spell of imagination

If over there, in the perfection’s house, in the House of the Spirit, mind is a sun of vision’s rays and if it can shape substance by the sheer brilliance of its thoughts, imagination has the power to cast its spell on the unknown and make it dwell in it. Under its gainful charm truth wears rich and bright colours of the rainbow; or else it sings dream-notes and brings closer to us all that is far, makes all that is inaccessible proximate, known, makes the Real familiar. The wonder is, the power of imagination can make even the Unknowable tangible, true, graspable, knowable. It builds a temple wherein the One as the single deity of all can be installed and worshipped. Countless aspects of this God in his mood of manifestation are brought into play, the aspects of the Supreme himself.

That indeed is something remarkable of imagination’s power, to make the potent the actual. Its speech voices the ineffable, its ray reveals the hidden presence, its forms disclose the formless, its ideas hold the Idea of the Infinite, divine in the house of the divine, it is the Word which has the mantric supremacy to usher the divine experience, to set things in its rhythm and movement, set all that is ready en rapport with the Law of the Truth in the strength of its Time, in the Dynamics of Ritam... RYD

Irrigate these energies so that others share in the sensations

« The grammar of art « Home » Great Artistry Posted by Matthew

Great Artistry requires the ground of disciplinary study. In my case, for example, Great Artistry begins when I commit deeply to my discipline of music composition. It is traditional to use the organizing principle of the Trivium to understand disciplinary study. The Trivium consists of Grammar (the rules), Dialectic (the relationships) and Rhetoric (the representation). So for the discipline of music composition, there exists the Grammar of tone, the Dialectic of harmony, and the Rhetoric of orchestration.

Every discipline can be seen as working on these three levels — of Grammar, Dialectic, and Rhetoric, and successful disciplinary creation, where the artist cuts his teeth, integrates the three into a whole work of art, which provides a mimesis (or full experience) for the audience.

Art from an interdisciplinary point of view anchors study in the transferring of methods or practices from one discipline to another. For example, the method of “jump cutting” in film can be transferred to music (such as artfully changing tonal center, dramatically but persuasively), creating a analogue mimesis in this different art discipline. In this way, disciplines learn from one another by allowing new methods to shine new or deeper perspectives on ways to accomplish the making of the art object.

There remains the dimension of transdisciplinary to round out Great Artistry. The transdisciplinary aspect of artistry requires rigorous training in a discipline, and requires the capacity to accrue methods and perspectives from an interdisciplinary approach, learning in a community of artists in other mediums. Transdisciplinary artistry goes further, to involve the expanse of the “great conversation” of “great ideas”, “great themes”, “great sensations”, “great myths”, and so on, that one finds in the body of the greatest works of art and thought, both literary and non-literary. All that makes the deep subjects of the Humanities are a part of a flowing continuum, of oceans to rivers and back again. The Humanities, which I organize as the arts, languages, history, theology, and philosophy (including natural philosophy), comprise a vast treasure of perspectives on the human condition deemed inspirational, insightful, and intuitive.

The point is not merely to make, say, a piece of music that works as music, in the normal, conventional expectation. That is a good goal, of course. And an interdisciplinary perspective can raise the work of music beyond conventional expectation and be clever, innovative, or novel. But to make timeless art, that speaks in many ways, many times over and thus is inexhaustible, to make art that offers full and enriched experiences, even when returning time and time again — this is what the transdisciplinary dimension offers because it offers to the artist content: the source material, as, for example, the Geneva Bible was for Shakespeare, or as Hildegard von Bingen plainchant was for Bach, or Rembrandt was for Picasso, and so on. It is about swimming through the rivers into the ocean of our tradition of cultural achievement that is the Humanities, and then building one’s own boat to sail its waters based in part on the models of the greats, using what they found, seeking what they sought.

Inspiration, insight, and intuition flow. The artist not merely submits to these, but also seeks to irrigate these energies so that others share in the sensations of these, themselves. The artist, rigorously disciplinary and interdisciplinary, and having developed her relationship with the great works of art, those that unmistakably evoke the great conversation, has received inspiration, insight, and intuition from these works of art, and in making their sailing vessel that is their own original object of art, pass on these three levels of energy to their audience, and future generations of artists.

Thus Great Artistry is holonic — making art objects both whole in experience evoked, and a part of tradition, and a part of what makes future works of art. Great Artistry incorporates disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary attitudes and practices. It is inherently a means of sustainability in the world of art. And it is, I believe, the only authentic means of genuine aesthetic originality, because originality means not merely novelty of style or character, but having traced back to the origins, plumbing the depths to ultimately return to the surface to share the transformation that can be shared in no other way than to make this electric object. Originality is a reaction, born of learned immersion.

Great Artistry is not limited to mere self-expression. Which, don’t misunderstand, is important and valuable, something all ought (and do) participate in, in some capacity. But, make no mistake, mere self-expression without transformation from the bathing in greatness probably won’t be timeless, classic, or an example of sustainability. For these qualities are not given to every person, but deserved by anyone who does, and thus evokes, the great work, the great elaboration, the great exploration of the common ground of the human condition. This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Art. HomeThe WoodshedElegant Thorn ReviewThe Bookshelf About the Authors Great Quotes