Art no competition

[alice wellintown]

If I could read the statement in the language it was written in
(Spanish?), I might take issue with the translator; the use of the
word *regret* seems odd, for it is not a word much used in this kind
of statement or in Spanish generally. The word *lament* is more common
but does not seem right either, so I assume that Borges used some
other word and that the translator dealt with it as best she could. In
any event, it seems Borges does not like the common practice of the
formalists or the traditionalists, the kind of critic we have come to
admire, one who can trace what Eliot famously describes as the
individual talent and its tradition, though we might even apply
something more Freudian like Bloom~s Anxiety & Influence, since this
approach would bring us closer to what Nietzsche, and later Ludwig
Wittenstein called family resemblance, since the critics task is not
merely a search for Waldos and palimpests illimuminated or a paranoid
game of seek and find the allusions, conscious and unconscious. The
terrifying truth, it seems, must be the sublime, a romantic concept,
and the fact that it is accidental is, again, as romantic as Keats~s
Grecian Ode, where he  famously pronounces that truth is beauty and,as
Eternal as  the later and late Romantic Yeats~s song when he assumed a
form out of nature and hammered himself with words into something
Grecian metal workers make to set before the lords and ladies of
Byzantium, no country for old men. BUT, that it is not tethered to
Eternity, must give us flux and pause. For what is passed, passing,
and to come,  has no telos. This rejection of a Platonic Form, of an
Eternal Beauty, can mean only that Art is, as Hamlet directs his
Players, a mirror held up to Nature, and not to Heaven. And Nature is
an accident, a scatterbrain beauty. The song, the song Yeats sets to
sing out of Nature, is an Orphic one that can not transcend her own
beauty.


> More Borges: "I have observed with regret that any man, by merely perusing
> many volumes in order to judge them (and the critic's task is nothing else)
> can become a geneaologist of styles and detective of influences. He inhabits
> this terrifying and almost inexpressible truth: Beauty in literature is
> accidental, depending on the harmony or discord of the words manipulated by
> the writer, and is not tied to eternity."
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:27 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance, 1970
>>
>>
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJX9Qy9mZdA&list=UUvm73QJ8COAJCdHO1oFyR3g&index=6&feature=plcp
>>
>> James Fox "Why don`t you play us a tune"
>> Mick Jagger "I don`t like music"
>> James Fox "Comical little geezer. You'll look funny when you're fifty"
>>
>> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 7:26 AM,  <bandwraith at aol.com> wrote:
>> > Good tune. If we could only teach the Taliban to sing...
>
>
>
>
> --
> www.innergroovemusic.com