Journal Aesthetic Quotes

All aesthetic judgment is really cultural evaluation.

I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually—like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle.

The norms of fiction, the reader of Sleepless Nights might well conclude, are after all a constriction, or at least a superfluity: Since to live is to make fiction, what need to disguise the world as another, alternate one? At the same time strict reportage, with its prohibition against invention, imposes its own aesthetically intolerable demands. Sleepless Nights, an alchemical tour de force, reports by inventing and invents by reporting. It continues to remind us how the novel can become richer by permitting itself the resources of essay, journal, memoir, prose poem, chronicle. It is a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?

Sylvia’s inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters…….she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness.

[...] if women's journalism is sponsored by a $33-billion industry whose capital is made out of the political fear of women; then we can understand why the Iron Maiden is so thin. The thin "ideal" is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.

If I beat my grandmother to death to-morrow in the middle of Battersea Park, you may be perfectly certain that people will say everything about it except the simple and fairly obvious fact that it is wrong. Some will call it insane; that is, will accuse it of a deficiency of intelligence. This is not necessarily true at all. You could not tell whether the act was unintelligent or not unless you knew my grandmother. Some will call it vulgar, disgusting, and the rest of it; that is, they will accuse it of a lack of manners. Perhaps it does show a lack of manners; but this is scarcely its most serious disadvantage. Others will talk about the loathsome spectacle and the revolting scene; that is, they will accuse it of a deficiency of art, or æsthetic beauty. This again depends on the circumstances: in order to be quite certain that the appearance of the old lady has definitely deteriorated under the process of being beaten to death, it is necessary for the philosophical critic to be quite certain how ugly she was before. Another school of thinkers will say that the action is lacking in efficiency: that it is an uneconomic waste of a good grandmother. But that could only depend on the value, which is again an individual matter. The only real point that is worth mentioning is that the action is wicked, because your grandmother has a right not to be beaten to death. But of this simple moral explanation modern journalism has, as I say, a standing fear. It will call the action anything else—mad, bestial, vulgar, idiotic, rather than call it sinful.

Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light. Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who wilfully live in sadness - sullen in the sweet air, he says. Your 'honour' is all shame and timidity and compliance. Pure of stain! But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst. He is the agent of progress against authority. you are right to be a scholar. A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none. The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history. I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success. The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness. What would I have done in Megara!? - think what I would have missed! I awoke the imagination of the century. I banged Ruskin's and Pater's heads together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye. I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth. I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey. I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters. I lived at the turning point of the world where everything was waking up new - the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman. Where were you when all this was happening?

Now, if female fat is sexuality and reproductive power; if food is honor; if dieting is semistarvation; if women have to lose 23 percent of their body weight to fit the Iron Maiden and chronic psychological disruption sets in at a body weight loss of 25 percent; if semistarvation is physically and psychologically debilitating, and female strength, sexuality, and self-respect pose the threats explored earlier against the vested interests of society; if women’s journalism is sponsored by a $33- billion industry whose capital is made out of the political fear of women; then we can understand why the Iron Maiden is so thin. The thin “ideal” is not beautiful aesthetically; she is beautiful as a political solution.

The society I grew up in, ruled by the middle class, was and remains entirely middle-class. When I look in magazines or books, watch films or TV shows, when I talk to my colleagues and other writers and my students, there always seems to be the same handful of middle-class writers referenced. These books are referenced by the middle-class writer they read about in literary journals. And these middle-class writers write from a middle-class point of view, which is to say from a distance and, for the most part, this means not about the concrete, real world in which the majority of people live. This massive deployment of values and beliefs, aesthetics and desires, is a form of indoctrination, one we remain for the most part, unaware of. Rather than confronting the working class with their values and aesthetics, insisting we adhere to them, the middle class simply present their beliefs and aesthetics as natural, as the world.

Of all the things I could have ended up doing, in pursuit of the most honest, I ended up in the most corrupt business around in the United States: writing. The most corrupt because in this country the least is at stake. I feel like I know a little of what it must have felt like to be a writer in the Stalinist thirties, during the purges, during the heyday of socialist realism. I’m living the past as the future, when I thought I was going to find my way to the actual future. But given this pervasive corruption, what can you do? I’ve stressed one point again and again, which is, community based on equality, not insecurity and desperate yearning to be recognized. The way to real community might ironically be to give in to behaviors which seem to be its antithesis. One always has the choice to end the waste of time implicated in mutual flattery, which halts the progress of one’s art, and instead congregate around an aesthetic vision among equals, by creating a press, or starting a journal or reading series, or simply getting together to talk about writing.

The hunt for more dramatic (as they’re often described) images drives the photographic enterprise, and is part of the normality of a culture in which shock has become a leading stimulus of consumption and source of value. “Beauty will be convulsive, or it will not be,” proclaimed André Breton. He called this aesthetic ideal “surrealist,” but in a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values, to ask the images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense. How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art? How else to make a dent when there is incessant exposure to images, and overexposure to a handful of images seen again and again? The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.

As a Caribbean born, I understand the self as a multi geometric entropic process always connected with the communal self. I do not seek history as a way to find points of origins, but to articulate historical locations in a traveling interconnected knowledge system that provides solutions for my subjective migrant experience. In a deeper process, the encounter with these places of interceptions, the crossroads, could become turning points to return, do depart, to convey, and to arrive to the present. African Aesthetics still nurtures contemporary artistic practices in the Caribbean, as well as in Africana Americana Diaspora and the US/Latino Diaspora. Writing the Decolonial Mariposa Ancestral Memory CARIBBEAN INTRANSIT ARTS JOURNAL VOL. 1 | ISSUE 4 | SPRING 2013

As a Caribbean born, I understand the self as a multi geometric entropic process always connected with the communal self. I do not seek history as a way to find points of origins, but to articulate historical locations in a traveling interconnected knowledge system that provides solutions for my subjective migrant experience. In a deeper process, the encounter with these places of interceptions, the crossroads, could become turning points to return, do depart, to convey, and to arrive to the present. African Aesthetics still nurtures contemporary artistic practices in the Caribbean, as well as in Africana Americana Diaspora and the US/Latino Diaspora. Writing the Decolonial Mariposa Ancestral Memory CARIBBEAN INTRANSIT ARTS JOURNAL VOL. 1 | ISSUE 4 | SPRING 2013

The "truth" of journalism and surveillance cameras and articulated propositions might not be the most interesting or most important sort of truth. What I know to be true through a novel or poem might be more significant than the litany of true "facts" that can be endlessly Googled. The truth of art---the truth of the aesthetic aspect of our existence---does not reduce to mere representation or correspondence.

As a Caribbean-born, I understand the self as a multi-geometric entropic process always connected with the communal self. I do not seek history as a way to find points of origin, but to articulate historical locations in a traveling interconnected knowledge system that provides solutions for my subjective migrant experience. In a deeper process, the encounter with these places of intersection, the crossroads, could become turning points to return, to depart, to convey, and to arrive to the present. African Aesthetics still nurtures contemporary artistic practices in the Caribbean, as well as in the African Americana Diaspora and the US Latino Diaspora. Writing the Decolonial Mariposa Ancestral Memory CARIBBEAN INTRANSIT ART JOURNAL Vol. 1, Issue 4, Spring 2013.

In Allston, as generous as he was with his praise and encouragement, Sophia had come face-to-face with the male art establishment and its aesthetic. She had encountered it before when she was hustled out of Thomas Doughty’s studio while a men’s painting class was in session. More recently, at a gathering in the Reverend Channing’s parlor, she had been stunned when the minister had quoted the influential British artist Henry Fuseli’s sneering observation that there was “no fist” in women’s painting—and then demanded Sophia’s response. Flustered, Sophia had “sunk away into my shell,” unable to speak, she confided in her journal. She had enough trouble summoning the confidence to paint each day, let alone defend women artists as a class. Channing’s question struck to the heart of Sophia’s ambivalence about taking the initiative to create original works of art. Virtually

This is new territory; a bridge between the conservative and conventional lit mag tradition and those colourful speculation-driven pamphlets that you find in stacks by the coffee-shop door, full of zombies and vampires and crashing space ships. This is a serious journal with a wide aesthetic.

The path dips down to Gal Vihara: a wide, quiet, hollow, surrounded with trees. A low outcrop of rock, with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. The vicar general, shying away from "paganism." hangs back and sits under a tree reading the guidebook. I am able to approach the Buddhas barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. Then the silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, that has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity of the figures, the clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into the rock shape and landscape, figure, rock and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures. Looking at these figures I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The queer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded (much more "imperative" than Da Vinci's Mona Lisa because completely simple and straightforward). The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, and really no "mystery." All problems are resolved and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya... everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don't know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual validity running together in one aesthetic illumination. Surely, with Mahabalipuram and Polonnaruwa my Asian pilgrimage has come clear and purified itself. I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don't know what else remains but I have now seen and have pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise. This is Asia in its purity, not covered over with garbage, Asian or European or American, and it is clear, pure, complete. It says everything: it needs nothing. And because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we, Asians included, who need to discover it. The whole thing is very much a Zen Garden, a span of bareness and openness and evidence, and the great figures, motionless, yet with the lines in full movement, waves of vesture and bodily form, a beautiful and holy vision. The rest of the "city", the old palace complex, I had no time for. We just drove around the roads and saw the ruined shapes, and started on the long drive home to Kandy.

The sooner we can face the bizarre fact that we make our past in the process of finding it, and find it in the process of making it, the sooner our attitude can become one of care for our Long Self in the block universe. Dream journaling with an eye to precognition—precognitive dreamwork—is the first step. But you may find, as you build up a corpus of precognitive dreams and come face to face with the reality of that Long Self on a daily or near-daily basis, that mapping out those dream connections and reexploring what may have seemed like dead-and-gone territory—your past life, however meandering it may have seemed at the time, however traumatic it may have been, even—starts to brings even more amazing rewards and insights than just identifying discrete precognitive dream hits. This is because even if we can’t change the past or future, precognition (and the retrocausation it implies) changes everything we thought we knew about both. It is redemptive. We see our past and future selves unclearly and obliquely. But in fact, the distance between you now and you decades from now, or decades ago, may be just a wrinkled piece of cellophane. When we realize that our major upheavals in the second half of life may actually have been the billiard balls deflecting us when we were younger, it compels a new kind of sympathy and understanding for that immature being we once were—and by extension, a new kind of loyalty to the person we will become. The Long Self is truly an epic composition, and you are the one composing it. Like a writer of your soul, your aesthetic decisions now turn out to have shaped yourself long in the past, and your decisions in your future are shaping your experience now. Tobi characterizes it this way: “I believe we are involved in creating the already-written lives that we enact.” To consciously manifest and realize this amazing fact, you must build habits of self-care. Recognize that care for yourself at other ages is not just an attitude but has a real effect, a real outcome in the past—and via the past, in your future. “This is the part of the route without a short cut,” Tobi insists. “You must do the tasks, you must care.” Tobi wrote in another email: “It delights me to think that all those times I wished aloud to my family that I could go back and assure my younger self and the younger selves of my family members that we got through that time, that all would be well, that we survived, that I actually was doing that.

It is almost impossible to get a novel printed in an English journal unless it is warranted to contain nothing at all to which anybody, however narrow, could possibly object, on any ground whatever, religious, political, social, moral or aesthetic. The romance that appeals to your average editor must say or hint at nothing at all which is not universally believed and received by everybody, everywhere in this realm of Britain.