| Author |
Message |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, January 30, 2009 - 5:23 pm: | |
It just occured to me, the historical perspective, to do with the kind of effect that it has on our psyche, that we should be poisoning and destroying the planet and all the things on it ... that brings us nearer to the mundane somehow: I mean nearer in imagination. I wonder to what degree this affects the artist's horizon? The apparent sense that the human imagination is useless against the wholesale material destructiveness taking place around us? It certainly has a fearsome effect on me but on the other hand isn't it irrelevent that this should be taking place? Like it seems to be with a science fiction novel about the far future written in a hut in backwoods Canada in the Fifties: the author of this novel seemed barely authorised to write about trees never mind anything else; but in that hut he established a whole new universe, tapped it out on a plastic table top covered in coffee stains. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, February 04, 2009 - 4:39 pm: | |
Hmm. Surely the invention of gods and mythologies was an attempt by the imagination to impose itself on a world that was frighteningly dangerous and random. Perhaps in that sense we should be imagining ourselves away from the products of our destructive natures. If I think about the possible end of the world, it seems no more real to me than my own death seems, in fact less so because the end of the world can't really happen, can it? It's just a big bogey-man. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Friday, February 06, 2009 - 3:17 pm: | |
Several things branch off from this in various directions.
A E Van Vogt writing in his backwoods Canadian shed; Wittgenstein working on his Tractatus in the trenches of World War One; J G Ballard changing nappies or feeding his children in the kitchen while simultanously writing far out science fiction stories. None of them provide the remotest hint of the actual circumstance in which they are working in their finished writings. The rigid serenity of the Tractatus gives no clue as to the shells falling, the mud and the unshaven unkempt face of its author. The actual surrounding world is interestingly irrelevent. As in a reverse way it is in Iggy Pop's China Girl. "I stumble into town, just like a sacred cow, plans for everyone, it's in the white of my eyes ... visions of Swastikas in my head (?) ... and my little China Girl, she says "Baby. Just you shut your mouth. Shhh!"" There is a kind of war and peace thing going on here. Peace in the midst of war.
It seems to me that there is often no linear connection between whatever role the imagination ought to serve, in helping us, ideally, and how actually it operates: how it is actually alive or real to us and so aesthetically functional. |
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