V-2nd C4 The Search for Bridey Murphy

[alice wellintown]

Freud is quite a great reader of art; his reading of The David and the
Moses of Michalangelo is profound and original and, as far as I know,
the only correct reading of the moment of crisis the artist captures
in stone. Reading Frazer on the veneration of trees, a text that
continues to influence the works of P (VL) long after V., where young
P only lifts and twists from the masters like Freud, I am reminded how
much we've learned since those big heads of the modern epoch took on
god and the death of god, uncertainty , relativity, incomplete,
indeterminate ...the list goes on...evolution, entropy, then war war
war by machine and markets and intangable assets and frontiers deeper
in the unconscious than were even known to exist before they were men
and women. The idea that humans are not rational or that the actions,
thoughts, passions of humans are not rational or not driven by a
divine acrhitectual design or in the image of some humanistic model
that distinguished humans from fish, and that human volition or choice
or free will and so on...that man amde god and the gods in his own
image because of irrational fears of death and nature ....this Freud
does not have exclusive claim to, but he articulated these and other
ideas within a system of thought that changed the way we look at
ourselves, the world, and our creations.

On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 3:39 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> Your first paragraph below is a nice description of changing
> "zeitgeists(?)."  Irritation at stasis is a fun way of describing the
> evolution (or is it devolution?) of the arts.  But I think it hits on
> your central point that the artist often doesn't know where he's
> going, or even what he's done.  And that irritation is usually shared
> by a great number of people, and usually more than a few reach similar
> breakthroughs toward the next thing(s).
>
> But you animus toward Freud is a little more than biased.  Your
> opinions of him are not universal.  No opinions in psychology are
> anywhere close to universal.  Freud was much more than a source of
> scornful fun for Pynchon.  It is pretty commonly known that GR was
> profoundly influenced by N.O.Brown's "Life Against Death," (I'm
> assuming you've read it) a very deep reconsideration of Freud, and by
> no means a repudiation.  Nobody's perfect, and Freud may have been
> pretty arrogant, but he was clearly a majorly important step forward.
>
> David Morris
>
> On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 12:47 PM, Ian Livingston
> <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:>
>>
>> I think the artist is often the one who leads the way by subconsciously synthesizing concepts to produce new ideas that eventually work their way into academic reasoning. [...]people get irritated by stasis and express their irritation in artistic form, or in some kind of acting out, before they know the real cause of their discontent. Thus P., among others, prefiguring much of what was to come in the academies.
>>
>> As to Freud, well, those who take him seriously deserve the confusion they inherit. For some reason, he remains a stale part of the literary canon. P. pokes grand fun at him, as do students of psychology. Even so, I stand by the assertion that no one is smart enough to be wrong all the time, so even Dr. Freud screwed up and got a couple of things right where he borrowed from literature.
>>
>