The simple truth is that I long to be
The man beyond the tools friends say I have.
Not that I would dispute the claims of ye
But rather should I cry or should I laugh?
The lines before the lauds from m’eyes seem far
Yet ‘tween these lines and me, in truth, stirs peace
From moments abundant, cloth of the stars
That garden th’souls my blood and hers release.
Yes all of them and whom might yet become
Through making that rests far beyond our span:
From th’necessary being so fulsome,
Whose breathing animates my searching hand.
The question that returns throughout my days
Is if mine art is else besides this maze.
To mount a full riposte to the habit of desecration, we need to rediscover the affirmation and the truth to life without which artistic beauty cannot be realized. This is no easy task. If we look at the true apostles of beauty in our time—I think of composers like Henri Dutilleux and Olivier Messiaen, of poets like Derek Walcott and Charles Tomlinson, of prose writers like Italo Calvino and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—we are immediately struck by the immense hard work, the studious isolation, and the attention to detail that characterizes their craft. In art, beauty has to be won, but the work becomes harder as the sheer noise of desecration—amplified now by the Internet—drowns out the quiet voices murmuring in the heart of things.
Exactly right. I’m reminded of the story of Noah, with today’s info-explosion performing in the role of The Flood.
. . . his plays and poems . . . are the work of a writer with a classical education, not only full of local allusions to gods, goddesses, mythological figures, and the heroes of antiquity, but more deeply permeated with the techniques of the classical rhetoricians.
Which writer? Why, Shakespeare, of course. This passage (from Marlowe’s Ghost, by Daryl Pinksen, a fabulous book) underscores what can rightly be called The Shakespeare Education. And, it just so happens, The Shakespeare Education is basically a classical education, the most time-tested form of education the West has — over two millennia of culture behind it. Add to the above excerpt a healthy learning of Latin and Greek, as well as immersion the Holy Bible.
It is the view of POLYSEMY that this education should be the standard we insist upon for all Western artists from this point onward. And as it happens, a effective way to understand classical education for working artists is simply to read about the intellectual biography of Shakespeare, whether in Pinksen’s book or elsewhere. This is why the study of who actually authored Shakespeare’s works is so compelling. We find out what it takes.
“We should read none save the best authors and our reading must be almost as thorough as if we were actually transcribing what we read. Nor must we study it merely in parts, but must read through the whole work from cover to cover and then read it afresh.”
One must study works by each author that were likely written closer to the same time, as this interview explains. Then, the similarities between the two styles (actually one style in continuum, I think) becomes easier to see, and thus the claim that Marlowe authored Shakespeare’s works easier to accept.
In undergraduate English programs, students read Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth – the mature Shakespeare masterpieces. If they are required to read a Marlowe play, it will likely be Dr. Faustus, the play most associated with Marlowe. Marlowe does not fare well in the comparison. The instructor will then guide students through a “compare and contrast” of the two playwrights’ styles. Even the dullest student will easily see the differences between Shakespeare masterpieces and early Marlowe. For many students of English literature this will end their study of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and they will depart with the firm, albeit superficial, conviction that the styles of Marlowe and Shakespeare are markedly different, and proceed to ridicule anyone so blind as to suggest otherwise.
A more honest approach would lead to a very different conclusion. Dr. Faustus was written before 1588, when Marlowe was in his early 20’s. Hamlet and Lear were written after 1600, when Marlowe (and Shakespeare) were in their mid to late 30’s. A fair comparison would examine plays written closer to the same time. If students were to begin their studies with an early Shakespeare play, like Richard II, and then read a late Marlowe play, like Edward II, plays separated by only a handful of years, they would find it hard to believe that they were written by different playwrights.
But study of it is also a ticket to the Western world less ancient and more contemporary. As Prof. Terence Tunberg writes in Latine Doceo:
. . . [P]recisely because in the post-Roman period Latin was no one’s native tongue, but rather a common lingua franca of Europe’s educated, whatever their vernacular speech, and that Latin became the language reserved for expression of the most advanced and sophisticated thoughts, while never losing a less formal, “spontaneous”, and convivial strain, this phase of Latin is especially worthy of the attention of Latin students. Anyone who studies Latin should have some exposure to the ages when Latin was the acquired languaged of almost every educated person and Latin literature flourished as the vehicle not only for theology, philosophy, and science, but also poetry, letters, satire, fiction, and many other genres. This is a remarkable development and a fundamental element in the intellectual tradition of Europe and its offshoots.
The consequence of Tunberg’s point is that it puts to bed the claim that Latin is not worthy of study due to its “dead language-ness”. It hasn’t been a mother-tongue language for quite some time yet has been the vehicle, or medium, for ideas and perspectives among the most profound the West has offered. It should be noted that by learning Latin, one’s intimacy and thus one’s embodiment of the many Latin-based profundities is pronouncedly deeper and “first generation” (to borrow a term from live music concert bootlegging) — thus for artists, more likely to penetrate to our most generative levels of imagination, and thus influence our creative work all the more. After all, roots are, by definition, fecund.
Further, Tunberg’s view fits perfectly into a practical understanding of classical education for ourselves, today. Where the rubber meets the road, classical education for ourselves can be understood as “what educated Shakespeare”. As one writer put it, Shakespeare acquired from his study of Latin “a heightened sense of cadences and patterns” among many other acquisition. And what educated Shakespeare can, and I think should, educate us, at least in terms of the core disciplines. Err, did I say Shakespeare? I meant . . .
. . . during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times.
It is essential that, from the very first day, students feels the desire to undertake this new and fascinating study, and to gain the greatest profit from it. It is therefore obvious that the teacher’s first task is to infect students with an enthusiasm for what they are going to learn, for the possibilities of Latin will afford them, for the ever-broadening horizons it will open before them. The goal of our journey should be clear from the first day — the students should see that the knowledge of Latin will be to their great personal and intellectual enrichment. The teacher must emphasize that the study of Latin is an indispensable means of acquiring a living knowledge of the culture of ancient Rome, the foundation of western civilization. The life and ideals of the Romans, the millennial history of the empire, the literature and art which assimilated and elaborated the treasures of Greek culture — this is the spiritual heritage of one off the most glorious ages of human history, a heritage which still today leaves its indelible imprint on our world. Latin, the language of civilization, has therefore a singular importance, and it is not surprising if in the course of the centuries this language has been more studied than any other.
— from Latine Doceo, by Luigi Maraglia and C.G. Brown
If you are a man of letters, do you not appreciate the advantage of having behind you Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Corneille, Racine, La Fontaine, Pascal? If you are a philosopher, would you be without Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas of Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, Kant, Maine de Biran, Bergon? As a scientist, do you realize all that you owe to Archimedes, Euclid, Aristotle again, Galileo, Kepler, Lavoisier, Darwin, Claude Bernard, Pasteur? As a religious man think how much poorer all souls would bbe if they had not, along with St. Paul, saints Augustine, Bernard, Bonaventure, the author of the Imitation, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Teresa, Bossuet, St. Francis of Sales, Newman.
The communion of saints is the support of the mystical life; the banquet of the sages, perpetuated by our assiduous cult, is the invigoration of our intellectual life. To cultivate the faculty to admiration and because of it to keep constantly in familiar touch with illustrious thinkers, is the means, not of equalling those whom we honor, but of equalling our own best self; and that, I repeat, is the objective to be visualized and pursued.
A hundred and some years ago Rudyard Kipling wrote “The Ballad of the King’s Jest,” in which an Afghan tribesman avers: Four things greater than all things are,—Women and Horses and Power and War.
Yet this is only the beginning of what Tatum does, drawing on the vocabularies of stride, boogie and Mozart all at the same time, all driven by an overwhelming flair for the dramatic — you use words like “adventurous” and “daring” when talking about Tatum. He’s known for his damn-the-torpedoes full-speed showpieces, such as “I Know That You Know” and the hell-for-leather second chorus of his operetta update “Song of the Vagabonds.” But I actually enjoy him most on medium-fast treatments of familiar songs, where he keeps both the melody and his own variations going at the same time, as if he were spinning multiple plates on “The Ed Sullivan Show” — or playing duets with himself.
It is all but impossible to take seriously an art of rebellion crafted by pensioners of the state.
Quote number two:
The NEA, if it is to make art a sustainable enterprise in American communities and not merely a bureaucratic fetish, should make the recovery of the civic focal point central to its mission. Rocco Landesman, with his Broadway experience of unsubsidized forms of art, might possibly be interested in an alternative to the worm-eaten Romanticism of the NEA. But even if he were to take up the cause of reform, it is unlikely that he would get very far. Were a sustainable art on the Parthenon-Chartres model to be reborn, the NEA would lose its raison d’être, and bureaucracies are by instinct loath to solve the problems that keep them in funds.
There are several meanings of the term “creativity”. Below I run thought the common meanings, for the purpose of being clear about what we mean when we use the word.
Creativity is exhibited by a certain skill in problem solving.
Creativity is the ability to take existing objects, feelings, and concepts and combine them in different ways for novel and innovative purposes. Creativity is available to any one no matter where he is at in life, whether infant or elderly or somewhere in between. Creativity can produce things (technically, “artifacts”) of any kind or nature, which means accountants, librarians, lawyers, housewives, middle managers, janitors, CEOs, presidents, artists, and anyone can be creative, and of course are every day.
Creativity is what artists do.
The exhibition and usage of creativity is strictly what artists do. They are able to see new combinations, new grammars, new ideas, new horizons. That ability is creativity. Artists use creativity to make and embed signs in artwork that can relate to ways of feeling and sensing the world. Their work ‘creates’ a world of perception. Creativity is what artists seek to cultivate and sustain in their artist practice or study. Creativity is like yeast; it lives and dies in the process of artistry; it is taken from to produce work, and the work then replicates it for others, through its inspiration. Not all artists are truly creative, but it is what all artists seek to be.
Creativity is a learned attribute.
Creativity is equivalent to mastery, achieved through training, commitment, and extended study. Here the term relates to “originality” in the sense of “going back to the origins”; this relation leads inevitably to a kind of “classical education”, and the person trained in this way can push the leading edge and demonstrate creativity at a very high level, entirely afforded by his study of traditions. Creativity is very elite, and a reaction to deep immersion in traditions as well as deep apprenticeship within a given discipline. Creativity is a stable level of personal development (involving education, skill/craftsmanship) and endures as a trait of the person.
Creativity is a stateof consciousness.
As a temporary altered mode of feeling, creativity is the exhibition of impulses that arise in a person, and then die down, to be experienced spontaneously at some later point. Creativity comes about from nowhere, stays awhile as a heightened awareness or impulsive drive, and then leaves, to return without reason or rhyme. Creativity is akin to pure inspiration, and the momentum that comes from it — a temporary feeling. Tools and routines, both healthy and unhealthy in nature, are often used to stimulate and trigger creativity.
Creativity is the fabric of the Kosmos.
The kosmos — a short term for all of consciousness, or (more poetically) the total weave of interior and exterior wool — creativity is what that wool is made of. It is the mother of consciousness, and so it is programmed into deepest codes of human existence. Thus there isn’t a single thing, action, thought, exchange, or mode of being/knowing that does not exhibit creativity, or is not creativity at its core. As the primary drive of existence, in the manifest and unmanifest realms, creativity is inevitable, inescapeable, and the primary condition of life. Creativity comes through us, driven by God. One cannot avoid creativity, just as one cannot avoid birth, life, and death. One can simply accept creativity, in is vast, unqualified “I Am-ness” or “is-ness”, and as the always already symphony of everything. In this sense, even breathing is creative.
“In the drama category, “Small Comforts” by Hannah Dallman took first place . . .
“Small Comforts” used animation to help tell the touching story of a young girl who saved her money and her single mother’s tips from a waitress job to buy a small sofa for their home.”
