From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Text and Images
To: [email protected]
Date: Sunday, March 8, 2009, 5:33 PM
I wrote that I was about to deliver "Two somewhat
arbitrary assertions, with
no great back-up corroboration."
The first assertion was this:
"(1) An artist's or critic's
"explanation" may lead to greater
"understanding" of sorts, and
"admiration" in a contemplator, but never to an
"aesthetic
experience" -- except of a bogus sort."
Whereupon Michael pounced:
"Are you saying that someone can experience at least
two sorts of aesthetic
experience, the bogus and the non-bogus? Explain that,
please. Explain what you
have in mind when you say bogus a. experience, and by
inference, the
non-bogus a. experience."
He then quotes my description of a "bogus a.
experience":
"like the shallow awe that arose in the minds of young
readers of Eliot's
"The Wasteland" a couple of generations ago when
they read the "Notes" to the
poem."
Aw shoot, man, it's Sunday, and I said I didn't
want to corroborate anything,
I just wanted to run off at the mouth in a relaxed Sunday
kind of way. But
okay, here's what I had in mind.
I remember when I was a kid, from about eight till
nineteen, I was much of
the time an enormous phony, and there was no one I was more
a phony with than
with myself. When I read those "Notes" to
"The Wasteland", I was knocked out by
all this what I took to be palpable confirmation of the
poem's (and the
poet's) "art". I remember writing some short
fiction at the time, and putting lots
of footnotes in it, and cooing over my own "art".
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.
Michael continued to come after me. But I'll save that
for another posting.
**************
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