i am proud to present the cathartic discord of an unrhymed spirit

i've been thinking about art a lot.  in my own art, i have been trying to reach a certain level of universality.  you see, art can be so strange and idiosyncratic that no one can understand it or connect or relate with it, universality creates a bridge to cross into the artist's heart and feelings.  so a person may reach a high enough level of universality and allow people into their ideas, be those ideas ever so strange, and people will connect with them.  i think that is how the world of culture and politics and art work- we find people in history who are complete enigmas, but we are drawn to them because they make us feel like they are right and they make us feel normal, be they ever so strange.


i am going to use justin bieber as an example.  his music is perfectly universal and so, for me, slightly uninteresting after a couple of listens.  however, the way he came to his fame is perfectly strange, so he intrigues me.  he was a fifteen year old kid with one good song who happened to run into usher while he was working a lot harder than fifteen year olds work at getting their name out there; he was going around from city to city playing his song live for radio stations.  it is interesting and strange, and his music definitely has a universality to it, so he has the right combination to be famous- he couldn't have one without the other and make it in the world.  and he is changing the culture.  just look how he broke the boundaries of how people view children in art.  right after him there was the ark productions boom (rebecca black...) and a surge in people turning to listening to a younger generation's music.  i imagine there will now be more children artists who are listened to in the near future.

so art takes things that are universal and human, and mixes them with the strange, symbolic, obscure, and, for the sake of my topic, religious.  the universal is the bridge to the religious.

i had been thinking about this, and i have been excited about a poem i wrote, because i think it's the most universal poem i have ever written.  it's just got that feeling- one that can't seem to be cast aside or boiled down, but you can't put your finger on what it is.  i don't fully know where it came from, but i am happy to feel it here-

A nice treat for traveling boys

My eyes see more colors than kids with lips
Caught in bounded minds like prey
He saw her laying on the ground
Her back and profile talking with the empty ceiling
Condensing a month's worth of space
He laid down next to her
Ate the carpet
Turned
Facing her
Said,
"we just smile," he said
He said, smiling
It bent until it broke, entering the sky fluttering
"it was constantly changing, anyway," he said
"it's a relief to my mind, anyway. the kind of relief
when you suddenly see smudges on paper
after all those damned, perfect lines."
Outside, a cat was singing with the bounce of lights
"she's hungry,"
He said

this can be juxtaposed next to a line from dante, who not only had the universal aspect in his poetry, but a much more powerful mix of the weird/religious.

I came into a place mute of all light, Which bellows as the sea does in a tempest, If by opposing winds 't is combated. The infernal hurricane that never rests Hurtles the spirits onward in its rapine; Whirling them round, and smiting, it molests them. When they arrive before the precipice, There are the shrieks, the plaints, and the laments, There they blaspheme the puissance divine. I understood that unto such a torment The carnal malefactors were condemned, Who reason subjugate to appetite. And as the wings of starlings bear them on In the cold season in large band and full, So doth that blast the spirits maledict; It hither, thither, downward, upward, drives them; No hope doth comfort them for evermore, Not of repose, but even of lesser pain.

these lines, these thoughts, all of this built up to a Great, big question for me.  what is right?  between the religious/spiritual world and the secular/universal world, which is right?

there are distinctly two different worlds out there.  i have tried to hold both in my mind at once, and they have both felt so real to me.  the religious world is one of light and life, of spirituality and beautiful, egotistical humility; while the secular or universal world is the earthy, human world full of reverent pride that is no less alive than the religious world.  one is the world each of us knows individually and the other is a world that is constructed from culture and society.  it's all different from person to person and from culture to culture, but they can be distinctly divided.  as i held both in my mind, thinking, "which of these do i have to choose?  do i choose god or the world?  they are both so real," a profound line from harold bloom jumped into my mind:

"The Comedy, like all of the greatest canonical works, destroys the distinction between the sacred and secular writing,"

people in the world are now divided between these two sects because the secular and the religious are both so real.  all of a sudden, to limit your world to only a certain set of symbols and ideas and feelings seemed crazy to me.  the world keeps unfolding the more people come into it.  ralph waldo emerson said,

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried... The eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify of that particular ray."


the religious/irreligious/resenting gnostics try to boil the world to so many limits.  in some religious gnostics' minds, we see people with no room for anything but the Bible.  we see some who only listen to religious music or only speak on "religious" topics.  on the other hand, those other gnostics who know there is nothing of value in religion find salvation in social causes or saving the world.  but the imagination was built to be stretched!  we feel most alive when our minds are guided to make new connections- twines of the universe knitting themselves with the imaginations in our hearts; our soul thrives on feeling new things around familiar objects!


hamlet said to his friend,


"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."


the only philosophy that could be true would have to encompass all parts of the universe.


i thus return to exploring the idea of the agnostic approach of reading dante.  according to harold bloom, dante was a gnostic, but he was purely a gnostic of a knowing that he created himself.  he took parts of the Bible and bent them how he needed them; similarly he took myth and legend and places and bent them to fit his own world.  however, because he took so much of the world around him, he had a universality about him that people are drawn to.  explaining this, harold bloom said,


"Everything that is vital and original in Dante is arbitrary and personal, yet it is presented as the truth, consonant with tradition, faith, and rationality.  Almost inevitably, it is misread until it blends with the normative, and at last we are confronted by a success Dante could not have welcomed.  The theological Dante of modern American scholarship is a blend of Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and their companions.  This is a doctrinal Dante, so abstrusely learned and so amazingly pious that he can be fully appreciated only by his American professors."

do you see?  he is so encompassing of the entire world around him that even though he is terribly strange, people are able to take what he says as truth; when in fact, what he has done to their entire belief system is filter and warp it through his own knowing.

he blends the secular so, so perfectly with the religious that the distinctions become lost and it becomes grounds for whoever wants a piece of dante.  if a religious gnostic wants to see a religious dante, they see a religious dante.

an agnostic who "wants to read the Comedy as an allegory of the theologians, starts with the only theologian who truly mattered to Dante: Dante himself."  it would seem that whatever approach one takes, in an agnostic sense, one will find that the world that dante lived in was warped by his own knowing, not straightened by a religious path of ideals, which makes it almost infinitely interesting to explore and wonder about.

it seems that we can say that we do not need to take the world to pieces and then choose just one piece of the world to live on, when it comes to the religious or the secular sense.  god, the universe, it is all in both.  you cannot have the one without the other.  is it not all real and a part of reality?

in conclusion to this small discussion of agnosticism vs. gnosticism, i say that gnostics build limits around life and the universe and their feelings and their minds and ideas.  on the other hand, agnostics are, as i have seen, careful to be able to bend, to expand and to grow- to enjoy life in all its varieties.  i don't care what religion or non-religion you are, you can be a boxed-in gnostic.

the agnostic is open to the idea that there is a universality out there that may lead them to new, often strange feelings and ideas and a constantly expanding spirituality, but that that is the most desirable part of life.  those religious and spiritual feelings are grounded by the universal- making both alive.  you cannot, in all actuality, feel alive without both, neither one without the other.

And and and and tell us Stephen, how is uncle Si?

"Know, whoever asks my name, that I am Leah, and I go plying my fair hands here and there to make me a garland; to please me at the glass I here adorn myself, but my sister Rachel never leaves her mirror and sits all day.  She is fain to see her own fair eyes as I to adorn me with my hands.  She with seeing, and I with doing am satisfied."
-Dante

i keep feeling like i need to engage an audience, and i keep trying to start, but i always keep feeling like there is a better way that i haven't found yet.  so, i will just start with "hello," here.  hello.

there are two words i would like to talk about.  one is gnostic, and the other is agnostic.

agnosticism, for some reason, seems easier to understand than its antonym.  it's simply someone who does not believe that any one person can have a complete knowledge of any given subject in this life.  this extends from the existence of god to philosophies on life.  agnostics simply claim that they don't know everything and there is a lot they are definitely not sure of- this doesn't mean they don't believe, they merely don't know.

on the other hand, gnosticism is knowing.  it's that simple.  gnostics know.

to see a little how gnostics approach life, i would like to talk about harold bloom's discussion about dante's divine comedy.  dante, the pilgrim, saw, in a vision, all the cantos of hell and was guided through the layers of purgatory and saw, finally, the beatific heavens in all their glory,  meeting a few of the souls who resided in each layer of the afterlife.  to say nothing of its influence as a poem and dante's influence as a poet, the divine comedy is big.  dante essentially created a third testament, after the new and the old, for many christians.

gnostics approach literature in a very determined way.  what they bring to everything they do or read is their own philosophy and ideas on life and religion.  they bring their theology with them wherever they go.  as gnostics read or engage with art, they have an agenda in front of their eyes; whatever they are looking at or doing, be it reading, watching a movie, talking to someone, etc.  as they read, any part of the text that does not comply with what they know is simply passed off as irrelevant or wrong or, depending on how much controversy or conflict said reading engenders, is fought.  (see: the struggle of christians in the united states to ban harry potter for its propagation of the practice of dark arts.)  so to a gnostic, good art is simply what fits inside what they already believe or know.

so gnostics, especially christians, bring their knowing to dante's divine comedy.  they bring the gospel according to thomas aquinas (as i understand it, the catholic philosophy) to the text and make dante a saint.  they make everything that dante says fit into their own ideology and theology.  and, yes, dante can be read that way- he can be read as a visionary saint who is above all pious and humble, a true follower of God.  what dante says can be read like doctrine.  the christian idea of hell and purgatory and heaven can be read in the divine comedy.

but this idea of gnosticism brings up some interesting questions to ask.  how does one know something?  at what point can you know that you know something?  what or who taught you what knowing is?  is knowing a feeling?  there are a lot of feelings (outside of happy, sad, mad...), what is the role of feelings?  does everyone, even people inside of the same faith, know differently?

another interesting part of gnosticism is that, in general, love tends to be the universal drive and agenda in art- it is the ultimate goal to be obtained, and if a work of art is lacking that, it cannot truly be worth anything.  on the other hand, others praise art for adhering to nature and reality.  dr. samuel johnson said this about shakespeare, whom johnson praised as being the best imitator of true nature:

"but love is only one of many passions, and as it has no great influence upon the sum of life, it has little operation in the dramas of a poet, who caught his ideas from the living world, and exhibited only what he saw before him.  he knew, that any other passion, as it was regular or exorbitant, was a cause of happiness or calamity."

gnostics know.  they bring that knowing to everything they do, and they make everything bend to fit inside their philosophy.  but what do they rely on to know that they know?  is what they bring to art true to reality?  does it need to be to be considered good art?

on the next post, i will talk about the agnostic approach or, at least, what appears to be the agnostic approach to life/art.  it may shed new light on gnostics, as well, when an agnostic's approach to the divine comedy is discussed.

flowers in my mouth

“That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” - Nietzsche

i am back, trying this thing again.  blogging is something with nearly unlimited possibilities, but on my first blog, i couldn't seem to break from the idea that blogs are soapboxes.  i used a blog to spout opinions until i was blue, purple, and orange-ish in the face.

there wasn't even any satisfaction in relating what i thought i had learned that i was trying to convey in my rants.  moments and ideas in my cognitive processes make me really excited, and i really want to share them.  however, i get to the blank page and start writing them down, and i feel miserable.  what i feel is akin to being excited to eat something that took hours to cook only to find it's flat and not delicious.  thus, the quote at the beginning of the blog from nietzsche.  there is a kind of contempt in writing and speaking.  words are just empty vessels falling from our brains, because our brains already digested whatever was palpable and good in the vessels.  see?  our brains are eating and feeding the best parts of us.  it's all in there.

so what i want to do with this blog is use it mostly as a tool of criticism for literature; i have been reading harold bloom.  harold bloom has a mind with cognitive powers way beyond my own and most people's.  he also retains the things he reads and so has the power to hold onto the works of many artists and can compare them to each other.  his mind and writings are really exciting to engage, and he has brought fresh life to my own.  i trust him a lot to teach me about aesthetics and true greatness because of his ability to retain what he reads in literature.  a person like that can probably tell me what literature is better than someone who can barely remember the book he read last month, right?  bloom has shown me a lot of things, but what i want to do with this blog is try to apply what he has shown me about what you can do with psychology in literature.

literature, especially the very best of it, or at least the most influential of it, is a kind of cognitive memory.  if one spends their time reading the main authors and poets of each period of time, it is easier to see where we came from.

before i went to college, i knew about walt whitman, and i even knew that i liked his poetry.  there is an accessible power to his work that needs no context.  however, as i have gone through school and taken survey courses that span the history of western literature from b.c. 400 to today, i see why walt whitman happened.  i can understand that america, at the time of whitman, did not have a foothold in any of the arts of the day.  there was no true "american" art.  so ralph waldo emerson saw the need and sent out a call for a Great american presence.  whitman filled the role.  so whitman is an answer and a result of needing an american art, and he is, but it's so much more than that, too, because it's history, and it's elusive because it just keeps on getting deeper and deeper as much as it gets broader and broader.  even so, one can get their foot in the door, and it's exciting to see the way that culture and needs and learning climate and artists all interact and produce art.  that is the cognitive memory that literature provides, and that is what i want to explore with this blog.  i also want to explore how people interact with each other.  i also want to become a better writer.  the hope is that i can find an idea that clicks with me as i read and share it in the blog, and before the words are overly dead in my heart, write some spontaneous things that connect from what i read and think as i'm writing.  that has happened before.

so i'm back, and i'm trying to read a lot this summer, and i want to show something for the reading i do.

read my blog and tell me how cool i am, because it's way better when i know i'm cool because i told you to tell me i'm cool.