Integritas, consonantias, claritas : dimensions of beauty, according to Thomas Aquinas. In James Joyce's translation : "wholeness, harmony, radiance." Claritas : radiance, brilliance, intelligibility.
The work of art - if it's a thing of beauty, then it's a "whole" thing, an integral thing, a distinct, whole something.
Beginning, middle, end. Shape, design, coherence.
Philosophers, of course, have chewed over aesthetics forever. "Our aesthetic response is subjective, but the beauty to which we respond is universal." Or so one argument goes.
And humanity displays something called "common sense" - sensus comunis. We share sensibility (response to experience) and understanding (comprehension of same). Whether or not these are "transcendental" or somehow otherwise determined.
Philos. 101.
Why am I going on like this? I have ten minutes before I leave the building.
Poetry is one of the modes of human art-making. We make whole objects, which manifest their own integrity, their coherence, their radiance.
The poet's sense of history differs slightly, perhaps, from that of the historian or the philosopher. Because the poet responds especially strongly to the aesthetic dimension of a poem - no matter when the poem was produced. Poets, of course, may have a more or less acute critical sense (say, of the social/existential/political differences between today and 200 B.C.) - which can affect their responses to poems of past ages. But I think there is always a basic (or maybe residual) artistic response to the "poem as such". This is why they (the poems) keep getting translated anew. There is something integral which inheres in them.
I have to shut down now. So why am I going on like this? I have no general advice for writers (all those would-be poets in Seattle this weekend). But for me, the adventure of making poems has a lot to do with responding - in my own stuff - to miraculous writings of long ago (or not so long ago).
Claritas, radiance, intelligibility... there is always hope for the sensus comunis of world civilization. But maybe we need the detachment from the gamesmanship (our own, & our crowding contemporaries). We need to sense the objectivity of art, and find our own mode of detachment.
I have built a sort of stony promontory in words. It's lonesome out here. But I'm hoping it will last, after the cookie-cutter parade has passed on by.
Showing posts with label beauty2. Show all posts
Showing posts with label beauty2. Show all posts
2.28.2014
12.04.2012
Jesus Thoughts (24) : rule by thumbprint
I want to think out loud a little more about this question of dominion, God's rulership (reminded of Wallace Stevens line, "the fatal, dominant X").
Image of Stephen Dedalus, near the start of Joyce's Ulysses, wandering along the shore muttering "signatures of all things I am here to read" (or something like that). Connected with his interest in Thomas Aquinas' theory of artistic beauty as consisting of "integritas, consonantia, claritas", or "beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance." & this linked with his (Joyce's/Stephen's?) idea that the artist pays attention to the quiddity of particular things : their unique substantial particular essence, their character, their individuality. Similar to Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev's Acmeist dictum (developed about the same time, early 20th century), that the poet must evoke and celebrate the "chasteness" of things - their inherent value as "creatures", the individual value and dignity of particular things, large or small, humble or great.
We each have our irreducible personhood, our unique thumbprint. And I think somehow that the rage of Yahweh, as presented in the Bible, is the rage of a Creator speaking through his universe, his cosmos - challenging the merely human urge for domination (so evident in human history). Yahweh stands up and rages at those Pharaohs and Assyrian kings and Philistine giants who are themselves raging to impose their will on their peoples - to command and lead their cultures by sheer force & violence. The Biblical Yahweh would check them all, as He reigns in the waves of the sea, and sets their bounds.
& I think of Jesus's mysterious declaration about John the Baptist : "from the days of John until now, the Kingdom of God has come by violence, and violent men take it by force. But it shall not be so with you."
Thinking also of the righteous rage of John the Baptist : this strange, liminal preacher, who heads out to the "waste places" of the Jordan river delta, where it spreads into the Dead Sea (like other semi-wild, swampy, undeveloped delta regions - like the Mississippi Gulf, or the Danube outlet) - & from this point of wilderness & freedom, sets out to stop the time & history & culture & political order of Israel in its tracks. He is not part of the priestly orders, not even associated with the desert communities (like Qumran) : he is alone, he is a "voice crying in the wilderness". he goes to the delta of waters in the desert to preach an apocalyptic end-time warning, and to establish his baptism - a seal of the repentant soul, committed to a change of ways. And prophesying that "one greater than I is coming to judge Israel"....
This rage of the lone prophet seems to embody or transmit the rage of the Creator : a stance which transcends the flow of history and cultural violence & corruption : the coming-to-surface of that divine Personhood who says to Moses, when he asks : "Tell them I am that I am has sent you."
What I'm circling vaguely around here is this idea of a divine manifestation - an intervention of God which stops time & history in order to lift up & repair the quiddity, the dignity, of His own Creation. This, it seems to me, starts to get at, or at least approach, the deep plot of the "sacred drama" of world history : framed by the thumbprint of a mysterious Presence.... invisible, but so close... a "still, small voice" emitted through our own bones...
Stevens, again (from "The Idea of Order at Key West") :
Image of Stephen Dedalus, near the start of Joyce's Ulysses, wandering along the shore muttering "signatures of all things I am here to read" (or something like that). Connected with his interest in Thomas Aquinas' theory of artistic beauty as consisting of "integritas, consonantia, claritas", or "beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance." & this linked with his (Joyce's/Stephen's?) idea that the artist pays attention to the quiddity of particular things : their unique substantial particular essence, their character, their individuality. Similar to Russian poet Nikolai Gumilev's Acmeist dictum (developed about the same time, early 20th century), that the poet must evoke and celebrate the "chasteness" of things - their inherent value as "creatures", the individual value and dignity of particular things, large or small, humble or great.
We each have our irreducible personhood, our unique thumbprint. And I think somehow that the rage of Yahweh, as presented in the Bible, is the rage of a Creator speaking through his universe, his cosmos - challenging the merely human urge for domination (so evident in human history). Yahweh stands up and rages at those Pharaohs and Assyrian kings and Philistine giants who are themselves raging to impose their will on their peoples - to command and lead their cultures by sheer force & violence. The Biblical Yahweh would check them all, as He reigns in the waves of the sea, and sets their bounds.
& I think of Jesus's mysterious declaration about John the Baptist : "from the days of John until now, the Kingdom of God has come by violence, and violent men take it by force. But it shall not be so with you."
Thinking also of the righteous rage of John the Baptist : this strange, liminal preacher, who heads out to the "waste places" of the Jordan river delta, where it spreads into the Dead Sea (like other semi-wild, swampy, undeveloped delta regions - like the Mississippi Gulf, or the Danube outlet) - & from this point of wilderness & freedom, sets out to stop the time & history & culture & political order of Israel in its tracks. He is not part of the priestly orders, not even associated with the desert communities (like Qumran) : he is alone, he is a "voice crying in the wilderness". he goes to the delta of waters in the desert to preach an apocalyptic end-time warning, and to establish his baptism - a seal of the repentant soul, committed to a change of ways. And prophesying that "one greater than I is coming to judge Israel"....
This rage of the lone prophet seems to embody or transmit the rage of the Creator : a stance which transcends the flow of history and cultural violence & corruption : the coming-to-surface of that divine Personhood who says to Moses, when he asks : "Tell them I am that I am has sent you."
What I'm circling vaguely around here is this idea of a divine manifestation - an intervention of God which stops time & history in order to lift up & repair the quiddity, the dignity, of His own Creation. This, it seems to me, starts to get at, or at least approach, the deep plot of the "sacred drama" of world history : framed by the thumbprint of a mysterious Presence.... invisible, but so close... a "still, small voice" emitted through our own bones...
Stevens, again (from "The Idea of Order at Key West") :
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The
maker's rage to order words of the sea,
Words
of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And
of ourselves and of our origins,
In
ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
9.13.2007
9.12.2007
6.08.2007
I wrote here a few days ago about Beauty and Purpose and other capital-letter topics. The idea (taken from Christine Perkell's study of Virgil) that the poet has a particular social role, as mediator between the Iron & the Golden Age - that is, between necessity and freedom, history and paradise...
Chaucer was doing something like this in the Canterbury Tales & other writings. Poetry here has a social-ethical aspect, interpreting and judging the mores of society.
There has been great resistance, since the end of the Victorian period at least, to the notion of didacticism in poetry. Poetry is either too detached (Symbolism) or revolutionary (Futurism) or autotelic (Modernism) to serve as a medium for ethical counsel or social critique.
It's not hard to think of many exceptions to this rule, of course. 20th-cent. poets from Yeats to our contemporaries have addressed social-political issues. But there is an understandable hesitation, on the poets' part anyway, to assign any ulterior purpose to art. Beauty exists for its own sake; the forms of art are self-generated and self-sustaining, growing out of the inherent dynamism of beauty and invention.
Here's how I resolve this dilemma (this morning, anyway) : the harmonious character of beauty (expressed in art) is indeed self-sustaining & self-contained, like a gyroscope floating on a string - and this is precisely what is "revolutionary" (disturbing to the world's business-as-usual) about it.
The poet as social interpreter, counselor & critic is simply the poet who has become conscious of the exile/dislocation/estrangement which is already rooted and inherent in the relation between beauty and the world's turmoil : and who takes responsibility for the consequences.
*
Addendum : of course, Virgil & the other ancient writers didn't leave it at that. That is, the relation between Beauty and the world's trouble (say, History) is not static and a-historical. The key, again as Perkell points out, is this dual notion of beauty (Aristotle), one part of which takes into account the object's purpose or telos. Because humankind also has a telos - a spiritual goal, adumbrated (very basically) by the perennial reality (under many guises) of Beauty/Truth/Goodness - the manifestation of Beauty in art somehow serves that spiritual telos. Suddenly we no longer have a static reality, but a world-in-development, as an expression of essential human aims (philosophers & theologians can argue about the divine vs. human vs. natural origins of those aims).
This gets me, anyway, back to Joachim of Fiore. According to the theologian formerly known as Ratzinger, 13th-cent. Joachim (revised & corrected by Bonaventure) played a pivotal role in a shift in Christian theology - away from Augustine's more static vision of the Two Cities (Earthly & Heavenly, temporal and eternal), toward a kind of quasi-prophetic perspective, which looks to the historical future for a concrete expression of spiritual harmony on earth (call it Peace, or the Kingdom of God, or the Jubilee, etc.).
*
The poet, then, stands midway between Iron and Gold - "representing" (making representations of) Beauty - in Mandelstam's figure, playing the flute, or the fife... showing signs of things to come... "quickening" (Eliot's term) at the sound...
*
An illustration (from the King James Bible, Gospel of Luke, ch. 7):
"24 And when the messengers of John were departed, he began to speak unto the people concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?
25 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.
26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.
27 This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John.
30 But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him.
31 And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like?
32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.
33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.
34 The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!
35 But wisdom is justified of all her children."
*
- of the "fife", that is :
32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.
Chaucer was doing something like this in the Canterbury Tales & other writings. Poetry here has a social-ethical aspect, interpreting and judging the mores of society.
There has been great resistance, since the end of the Victorian period at least, to the notion of didacticism in poetry. Poetry is either too detached (Symbolism) or revolutionary (Futurism) or autotelic (Modernism) to serve as a medium for ethical counsel or social critique.
It's not hard to think of many exceptions to this rule, of course. 20th-cent. poets from Yeats to our contemporaries have addressed social-political issues. But there is an understandable hesitation, on the poets' part anyway, to assign any ulterior purpose to art. Beauty exists for its own sake; the forms of art are self-generated and self-sustaining, growing out of the inherent dynamism of beauty and invention.
Here's how I resolve this dilemma (this morning, anyway) : the harmonious character of beauty (expressed in art) is indeed self-sustaining & self-contained, like a gyroscope floating on a string - and this is precisely what is "revolutionary" (disturbing to the world's business-as-usual) about it.
The poet as social interpreter, counselor & critic is simply the poet who has become conscious of the exile/dislocation/estrangement which is already rooted and inherent in the relation between beauty and the world's turmoil : and who takes responsibility for the consequences.
*
Addendum : of course, Virgil & the other ancient writers didn't leave it at that. That is, the relation between Beauty and the world's trouble (say, History) is not static and a-historical. The key, again as Perkell points out, is this dual notion of beauty (Aristotle), one part of which takes into account the object's purpose or telos. Because humankind also has a telos - a spiritual goal, adumbrated (very basically) by the perennial reality (under many guises) of Beauty/Truth/Goodness - the manifestation of Beauty in art somehow serves that spiritual telos. Suddenly we no longer have a static reality, but a world-in-development, as an expression of essential human aims (philosophers & theologians can argue about the divine vs. human vs. natural origins of those aims).
This gets me, anyway, back to Joachim of Fiore. According to the theologian formerly known as Ratzinger, 13th-cent. Joachim (revised & corrected by Bonaventure) played a pivotal role in a shift in Christian theology - away from Augustine's more static vision of the Two Cities (Earthly & Heavenly, temporal and eternal), toward a kind of quasi-prophetic perspective, which looks to the historical future for a concrete expression of spiritual harmony on earth (call it Peace, or the Kingdom of God, or the Jubilee, etc.).
*
The poet, then, stands midway between Iron and Gold - "representing" (making representations of) Beauty - in Mandelstam's figure, playing the flute, or the fife... showing signs of things to come... "quickening" (Eliot's term) at the sound...
*
An illustration (from the King James Bible, Gospel of Luke, ch. 7):
"24 And when the messengers of John were departed, he began to speak unto the people concerning John, What went ye out into the wilderness for to see? A reed shaken with the wind?
25 But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed in soft raiment? Behold, they which are gorgeously apparelled, and live delicately, are in kings' courts.
26 But what went ye out for to see? A prophet? Yea, I say unto you, and much more than a prophet.
27 This is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee.
28 For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.
29 And all the people that heard him, and the publicans, justified God, being baptized with the baptism of John.
30 But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the counsel of God against themselves, being not baptized of him.
31 And the Lord said, Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation? and to what are they like?
32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.
33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine; and ye say, He hath a devil.
34 The Son of man is come eating and drinking; and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man, and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners!
35 But wisdom is justified of all her children."
*
- of the "fife", that is :
32 They are like unto children sitting in the marketplace, and calling one to another, and saying, We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced; we have mourned to you, and ye have not wept.
6.01.2007
Poetry : speech made beautiful.
But then, how do you define "beauty"?
Umberto Eco on Joyce on Aquinas on Aristotle...
Eco sheds clear light on an oscillation between Symbolism/Modernism, Symbolism/Acmeism, Plato/Aristotle, idealism/materialism... the halves of these binaries overlap.
More later, hopefully. Must get coffee.
*
J. Latta quoting Kundera today. Want to read that book, too. Though Kundera seems to have developed a fiction vs. poetry polemic. He condescends to the poets. A worthy antagonist, I guess.
*
My post of yesterday, on the duplex perplexity of it all (verbal toy or compelling vision?) is what got me asking myself about Beauty.
Joyce (see Eco link, above) follows the general materialist trend of the 20th century, when he tweaks Aquinas' 3rd of the three aspects of Beauty (integritas, consonantia (proportion), claritas) - claritas - toward the radiant actuality of the thing-in-itself. The artist's "epiphany" is a recognition of this unique and particular radiance - the essence of the thing itself - its quiddity.
Joyce's attitude paralleled the Russian Acmeist revolt against Symbolism (at the same period - around 1910 - roughly, birth of Modernism). The Acmeists aimed to praise and celebrate this world (not the cloudy otherworld of the Symbolists) - mirrored in the autotelic craftsmanship of the Modernist art-work.
I think if we took Aquinas' triform definition as a starting-point today, we might bend it slightly differently.
Poetry : speech made beautiful.
Beautiful : and beauty is a kind of end-in-itself. The existence of a work of art is justified by its beauty.
But what is beauty? Joyce's equation relating to the 3rd aspect (clarity = radiance = object's quiddity) - perhaps, for us, falls slightly short.
Today we might relate claritas to intelligibility.
Radiance is not merely self-contained in the object, autotelic, self-generated. Claritas (as well as integritas or wholeness and consonantia or proportion) interpenetrates, transcends its own borders, surpasses itself. The harmony of these aspects is both 1) reflected in the perceiving mind, and 2) echoed & magnified in general experience or reality as a whole. Thus the object is radiant with its own quiddity, but only in the context of universal wholeness or integrity.
This is a shift I guess slightly away from Aristotelian analytics toward Platonic synthesis. But both Aristotle and Aquinas can show a continuum or relation (which Modernism downplayed) between the object's quiddity and universality. Eco's comments (see link above) point the way.
In Aristotle, art understood as craft shows a duplex beauty. An axe can be both 1) beautiful to look at, and 2) beautiful or fitting in fulfilling its purpose, its end (telos). The axe is designed so as to chop wood beautifully. The ship is beautiful in fulfillment of its practical purpose - it sails well.
As Eco notes, for the ancients and the medievals, humankind's existence was understood as having a spiritual purpose or telos. Inasmuch as art serves that end, it is beautiful in Aristotle's second sense. Beauty, Goodness and Truth coalesce in that spiritual telos. Here is where Plato unites with Aristotle.
The radiance of intelligibility is a measure of an art work's integration with universal human purposes. Truth, vision, wisdom... this is the range toward which art can rise, by way of claritas-intelligibility.
Can you see where I'm tending with this?
I'm going back to the issues raised yesterday, with reference to Virgil and the mystery of the poet. The "audacity" of the poet is a spiritual audacity : the willingness to stand at the border between "Iron Age" and "Golden Age". Between humanity's universal purposes, and more short-term (seemingly practical) aims and desires.
In this sense the poet is only a more acute representation of the writer in general or the artist in general, just as the writer or artist is only a "signifier" for Everyman and Everywoman, for humanity in general. That is, the contradictions at the heart of human experience - between now and forever, earth and heaven, self and other, universal and particular - are signified - emblematized - by the artist.
It's this inward contradiction which accounts for the "outsiderness" of the artist - again, perhaps most acutely represented by the poet. In the context of practical America, consider the unique (& very personal, very idiosyncratic) estrangements at the core of the lives of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Bishop... etc. et al.
Because the oscillation between Iron and Gold, earth and heaven, body and soul has both psychological and political - personal and social - ramifications.
"I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J."
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
*
p.s. of course the 20th-cent. Moderns illustrated their own forms of "spirituality". There's a spiritual-scientific aspect to the artist's personal renunciation in pursuit of the "objective correlative" or the Joycean epiphany. Yeats's "profane perfection of Mankind".
But then, how do you define "beauty"?
Umberto Eco on Joyce on Aquinas on Aristotle...
Eco sheds clear light on an oscillation between Symbolism/Modernism, Symbolism/Acmeism, Plato/Aristotle, idealism/materialism... the halves of these binaries overlap.
More later, hopefully. Must get coffee.
*
J. Latta quoting Kundera today. Want to read that book, too. Though Kundera seems to have developed a fiction vs. poetry polemic. He condescends to the poets. A worthy antagonist, I guess.
*
My post of yesterday, on the duplex perplexity of it all (verbal toy or compelling vision?) is what got me asking myself about Beauty.
Joyce (see Eco link, above) follows the general materialist trend of the 20th century, when he tweaks Aquinas' 3rd of the three aspects of Beauty (integritas, consonantia (proportion), claritas) - claritas - toward the radiant actuality of the thing-in-itself. The artist's "epiphany" is a recognition of this unique and particular radiance - the essence of the thing itself - its quiddity.
Joyce's attitude paralleled the Russian Acmeist revolt against Symbolism (at the same period - around 1910 - roughly, birth of Modernism). The Acmeists aimed to praise and celebrate this world (not the cloudy otherworld of the Symbolists) - mirrored in the autotelic craftsmanship of the Modernist art-work.
I think if we took Aquinas' triform definition as a starting-point today, we might bend it slightly differently.
Poetry : speech made beautiful.
Beautiful : and beauty is a kind of end-in-itself. The existence of a work of art is justified by its beauty.
But what is beauty? Joyce's equation relating to the 3rd aspect (clarity = radiance = object's quiddity) - perhaps, for us, falls slightly short.
Today we might relate claritas to intelligibility.
Radiance is not merely self-contained in the object, autotelic, self-generated. Claritas (as well as integritas or wholeness and consonantia or proportion) interpenetrates, transcends its own borders, surpasses itself. The harmony of these aspects is both 1) reflected in the perceiving mind, and 2) echoed & magnified in general experience or reality as a whole. Thus the object is radiant with its own quiddity, but only in the context of universal wholeness or integrity.
This is a shift I guess slightly away from Aristotelian analytics toward Platonic synthesis. But both Aristotle and Aquinas can show a continuum or relation (which Modernism downplayed) between the object's quiddity and universality. Eco's comments (see link above) point the way.
In Aristotle, art understood as craft shows a duplex beauty. An axe can be both 1) beautiful to look at, and 2) beautiful or fitting in fulfilling its purpose, its end (telos). The axe is designed so as to chop wood beautifully. The ship is beautiful in fulfillment of its practical purpose - it sails well.
As Eco notes, for the ancients and the medievals, humankind's existence was understood as having a spiritual purpose or telos. Inasmuch as art serves that end, it is beautiful in Aristotle's second sense. Beauty, Goodness and Truth coalesce in that spiritual telos. Here is where Plato unites with Aristotle.
The radiance of intelligibility is a measure of an art work's integration with universal human purposes. Truth, vision, wisdom... this is the range toward which art can rise, by way of claritas-intelligibility.
Can you see where I'm tending with this?
I'm going back to the issues raised yesterday, with reference to Virgil and the mystery of the poet. The "audacity" of the poet is a spiritual audacity : the willingness to stand at the border between "Iron Age" and "Golden Age". Between humanity's universal purposes, and more short-term (seemingly practical) aims and desires.
In this sense the poet is only a more acute representation of the writer in general or the artist in general, just as the writer or artist is only a "signifier" for Everyman and Everywoman, for humanity in general. That is, the contradictions at the heart of human experience - between now and forever, earth and heaven, self and other, universal and particular - are signified - emblematized - by the artist.
It's this inward contradiction which accounts for the "outsiderness" of the artist - again, perhaps most acutely represented by the poet. In the context of practical America, consider the unique (& very personal, very idiosyncratic) estrangements at the core of the lives of Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, Poe, Pound, Eliot, Crane, Bishop... etc. et al.
Because the oscillation between Iron and Gold, earth and heaven, body and soul has both psychological and political - personal and social - ramifications.
"I had come to hear that great things might be true. This I was told on the Christopher Street ferry. Marvelous gestures had to be made and Humboldt made them. He told me that poets ought to figure out how to get around pragmatic America. He poured it on for me that day. And there I was, having raptures, gotten up as a Fuller Brush salesman in a smothering wool suit, a hand-me down from Julius. The pants were big in the waist and the shirt ballooned out, for my brother Julius had a fat chest. I wiped my sweat with a handkerchief stitched with a J."
- Saul Bellow, Humboldt's Gift
*
p.s. of course the 20th-cent. Moderns illustrated their own forms of "spirituality". There's a spiritual-scientific aspect to the artist's personal renunciation in pursuit of the "objective correlative" or the Joycean epiphany. Yeats's "profane perfection of Mankind".
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