September is the cruelest month for graduate students--but we've come out of our annual move mostly intact in Bellingham, WA. After a bit of a stressful beginning, I hope to get back to writing these posts in a more timely fashion.
I've been reading Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project again--straight through for the first time. I finished convolute "N" a few days ago, which has given me a new impulse for this project. I think I'll try to make it more Arcadian--more presentation, perhaps, less commentary, certainly less retrospect. Naturally there will still be a lot of both because the blog's primary function is still as a scholar's notebook... but I'll give it a try.
"Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show... the rags, the refuse--these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them" (Benjamin 460). I'm hardly playing with refuse--but at least rags?
With that, I'll turn to Sept 1 1913.
1. "Concerning the Beautiful" By Dora Marsden? Unsigned.
"To read the history of the "Idea of the Beautiful" is the best known way of destroying respect for philosophy.... The reason is clear... [a]n effect is put up as a cause; from the supposed cause, a quality is supposedly abstracted; the supposed abstraction is given a sturdy name and then set free to roam the thin atmosphere of thoughts" ("Concerning the Beautiful, 101).
This in the context of The New Freewoman's general skepticism toward concepts and "thoughts" as opposed to realities. Calling Marsden and co. materialists may have angered them: it would domesticate them. It's worth noting that the essay moves on to figure beauty as an elusive bird, building up an extended metaphor. It also claims that beauty is "repose," a peaceful state of the soul. Like Burke and his sublime/beautiful split, I think. [I was right--see below]
After arguing that beauty is food for the soul, which becomes larger and better integrated through beauty, this gem: "As the intrinsic feature of a food is merely that it feeds, ie. that is can be used up in satisfaction of a need, so in the case of what we call the "beautiful," it is everything which overcomes disparateness in the soul, now being one thing, now another. Sometimes the same thing will fairly regularly answer to the purpose. Sometimes not. All depends on the specific character of the need. 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever,' sang Keats. Not at all." (101-102). This manages to at once dissipate the power of tastemakers on both sides--the traditionalists and avant-gardists are revealed as part of the same overall experience of soul-feeding. The twist is the NFW's characteristic hint that not all souls are equal, nor do they require the same food--which of course reestablishes their own claim to elite taste. A delicate operation with/of power and confidence.
Beauty must be "sensed, not thought," therefore "effects which primarily belong to a thought-process must be eliminated from the category" (103). The editor lists three "brands" of this ersatz "associative" beautiful: the sublime, the picturesque, and the seductive. The sublime is an "intellect-tainted substitute." The picturesque "intellectualized beauty-fake." The seductive "is merely the evidence of a suitability in the objective means to a definite objective end" (103).
The end of the article, with its catalog of fakes, never really establishes what beauty actually is. Here it seems to contradict the principle established at the start: "The intellectual malaise connected with the sublime the sentimental melancholy of the picturesque, the quickened desires... of the seductive, tend to dispersal rather than to cohesion. They may have their contribution to make to the soul's need. The casting forth of seed is as necessary as the reaping of the grain; but for the 'beautiful,' its function lies in the reaping" (104). So dispersal is admitted as a potential need. This hedging of the beautiful with the shrubbery of the picturesque (and allies) shows that the fear of dissolution is tempered by acknowledgment of its necessity. I wish Marsden(?) had followed up on that--perhaps in future essays?
[I'm afraid that the rest of the issue didn't lend itself as well to sampling with commentary--or I just fell back into my old cataloging habits. Consider the following notes as bookmarks, not finished comments.]
2. "Views and Comments."
Interesting attack on The New Age's guild-socialism, including a takedown of the concept of a "monopoly of labor-power." Followed by half-humorous linking of NA with Pankhursts, and truly Hastings isn't far off.
3. "The Poet's Eye," Ford Madox Heuffer. This is a slightly-changed reprint of the essay from August's Poetry. Transatlantic timeshifts? I'm seeing more and more reprints and arguments across my journals--looking across and inwards already ready for canonization?
4. "In Metre," Ezra Pound. Same review as from Poetry.
5. "The New School" by Imagistes. A nice selection of single poems from Aldington, H.D., Lowell, Cannell, Flint, and Williams. Flint's poem is my favorite. Williams's the best in retrospect, he's very much playing H.D. here, I wonder if the poem is for her.
6. "Domestic Studies in the Year 2000": another science fiction anecdote, this one by E. S. P. Haynes. It's about an old man about to be compulsorily euthanized and his reminisces of the 1913-present.
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