On Mar 8, 2009, at 6:33 PM, [email protected] wrote:
In fact I now think the "Wasteland" notes are bullshit, not
impossibly a very conscious gimmic dreamed up by Eliot or Pound.
Still, at the time they awed me, and convinced me I was in the
company of "artistic greatness". The experience was memorable,
august, I thought, the sort of thing that grips great minds -- which
I wanted to pretend to myself I had. In fact, however, it happened
long before I ever derived from a poem an experience that I have
since called "aesthetic".
There must be others on this list who can recall some time in their
youth when they were conned by cathedral-grand trappings into
feeling they were in the presence of greatness. As a kid, I didn't
have the right stuff of the kid who could see and say the emperor
was bare-ass.
In sum, what I may have thought of as an "a.e." back then I would
now call something else. Pseudo aesthetic. Bogus.
You're naming a lot of feelings that you say you included under the
rubric "aesthetic," which you later decided you would not call
"aesthetic" but mere "trappings," being "conned" by something
"memorable" and "august," ultimately something you "pretended" to
experience. Why do you disown you own feelings, rather than saying you
changed you judgment of them, actually, of their stimuli? Why don't
you just say, for example, I was caught up in it, but later when I
reread "The Wasteland," I was left feeling flat, unmoved, unimpressed,
etc.?
Your dismissal of your own youthful exuberance and reaction to "The
Wasteland" based on Eliot's Notes reminds me of how young love is
dismissed as mistaking lust for love, which older folks know is
something more substantial, something you learn later.
BTW, can one have a negative a.e., that is, an experience of a work
that does not provoke memorable feelings, rather than powerful or
uplifting? Are you using the term "a.e." as a synonym for "aesthetic
*judgment*"?
Also, you didn't answer the other question: How can the author's notes
restrict your scope?
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Michael Brady
[email protected]
