To my mind, great works can only be born within the history of their art and as participants in that history. It is only inside history that we can see what is new and what is repetitive, what is discovery and what is imitation; in other words, only inside history can a work exist as a value capable of being discerned and judged. Nothing seems to me worse for art than to fall outside its own history, for it is a fall into the chaos where aesthetic values can no longer be perceived.
Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed . Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.
That's it, just two quotes. Oh and an unusual envoi. This is Katalin Koltai playing "The Night's Music" from Out of Doors by Bartók. On guitar. With some very unusual custom capos.
UPDATE: Here is another quote from Kundera about composition:
The art of complex and rigorous composition did not become a commanding need until the first half of the nineteenth century. The novel’s form as it came into being then, with its action concentrated in a narrow time span, at a crossroads where many stories of many characters intersect, demanded a minutely calculated scheme of the plot lines and scenes: before beginning to write, the novelist therefore drafted and redrafted the scheme of the novel, calculated and recalculated it, designed and redesigned as that had never been done before. One need only leaf through Dostoyevsky’s notes for The Possessed: in the seven notebooks that take up 400 pages of the Pléiade edition (the novel itself takes up 750), motifs look for characters, characters look for motifs, characters vie for the status of protagonist; Stavrogin should be married, but “to whom?” wonders Dostoyevsky, and he tries to marry him successively to three women; and so on. (A paradox that only seems one: the more calculated the construction machinery, the more real and natural the characters. The prejudice against constructional thinking as a “nonartistic” element that mutilates the “living” quality of characters is just sentimental naïveté from people who have never understood art.)
Kundera, Milan; Kundera, Milan. Testaments Betrayed . Faber & Faber. Kindle Edition.
Over the years I increasingly "think" that a lot of our cognition is somatic at many levels, and thus much "calculation" occurs outside our relatively small and flickering concentrated deliberate thought. Dreaming might be a particularly local (brain) example of somatic function simultaneously administering our integration of experiences and memories and scenarios while also bringing some of that work fleetingly to our conscious attention. Much of the genius in an artist possibly lies in tapping into all that "intuitive" zeitgeist while also having the kind of carefully honed skills and study of their art and it's subjects, the expert and deliberate composition of every detail into an organic unity or authenticity or perfection or other desired quality --all done in a way informed by those intuitive if not somatic foundations of the inspirations in the artist.
ReplyDeleteWow, Will, that is a truly brilliant perception.
ReplyDelete