Lovin’ it. Tab’s wriggling in his chair – another morose philosopher against the world poem! but i love it. — ehhhh, i was wrong.
Take two. Art fighting philosophy? Logic or art? You screamin’ and pleadin’ for soup? If that’s what it is, I hear you. The lietuenents, the reasonable army, in art’s service? Or is it something else that makes soup? Perhaps some strange primordial unity at the heart of the world as Nietzsche puts it, and the litunenents marching along to the orders of the heart? Sorry, it’s just I always played with my soup. Then again, who’s to say that the soup is art? Could be emotions. So much swirling in that bowl now I’m not sure what to pull out (but I like it to be art).
It’s just . . . there needs . . . to be a balance, a type of harmony between the sloppiness and the linear modes of discourse. Music can’t completely replace the dialectic, and a dialectic devoid of music will break down the nerves of another Mill. What’s the purpose of art or the dialectic anyway? Not only to bring one toward some ‘truth,’ but to convince and change another through that truth, among other things. Art and the dialectic are both political in that sense. Unless there’s something more to the soup, but you can’t be just pleading and screaming without desiring to change something, can you?
TUM, thanks. Your comments are actually more interesting than the poem!
Yes, a balance. I think the narrator of this one is stuck, though, on the linear and can’t get off of it. He’s all talk about art and creativity and being “out there” but he needs his structure. He needs his rules. Not always, maybe. Sometimes he can probably let go of the hand rails and that’s why he even knows about the possibilities of what’s behind the “real.” But deep down, does he really want what he’s screaming for?
Thou shalt not take Tab’s name in vain.
This is true. Not to get overly deep about it, but there is no such thing as true conceptual originality. Only a serendipitous outcome during the combination of pre-existant elements.
A “Whatever colour it turns out, it will always be a painting” kinda thing.
Picasso or Pollock, sublime or splurge - largely a question of probability.
Hmm…on the one hand I’m tempted, as something of a Platonist, to agree with this assessment, if, by concepts we’re talking about ideals. On the other hand, how are we to regard the “serendipitous outcomes”? Certainly something completely new and unique is created with the “combination of pre-existent elements.” A Picasso painting might always be just a painting, but if it provokes a response, then it has been actively creative, has it not? Hasn’t, then, something been produced beyond the painting itself?
Yes, but no-one invented red, green or blue, nor the canvas they were applied to, nor the model that posed, nor the range of poses the form of the model could arrange itself into, nor the options of geometric system the painter could have employed nor the underlying principles they were based on…
…Nor the sensory apparatus the viewer used to appreciate the finished painting, nor the emotional suite upon which its invocations played.
And yet - it took the painter to set all of those things in motion. The prerequisites seem, to me, to be nothing more than theoretical without something, or somebody, to come along and make them manifest, observable, accessible, useable. Maybe the artist needs the structure, maybe the artist needs the rules. But the structure also needs the artist. This is the grand partnership of things. Art becomes not so much invention as discovery. The uncovering - perhaps this is what creativity is.
You say these things as if the latter is any different from those that come prior. Does the driver do anything that is not dictated by the parameters of his vehicle, and the surface upon which it travels…?
Well I could say that the driver is the animated wildcard in the equation, but I suspect in the end we’re going to be headed towards that perennial free will versus determinism debate, something I had more interest in back in the days when I actively discussed philosophy, and found it enjoyable to do so. We’ll have to agree to disagree.
No, we redux to the “everyone thinks they are a better than average driver” debate.
Anyway. Agreed.
Oh rat’s ass. Too cordial gentlemen. I’ll mend you both, soft-determinism. Now let’s all agree and dance the hockey pockey until we fall down. But I’m gonna trance, rainey can swing with Hepburn–that bastard–and tab can just stand in one place as his wife belly dances around him in patriarchal, geometric jiggles.