radical aesthetic

I like Blake. I didn't know what he was really like. In high school we studied his poetry, and it was all those short poems that are so kind of....I don't know what word to use....limp, twee...but then much later, when I studied English at uni, I found his epic hundreds of pages long poems that represent a whole reality/ system that Blake devised, and it's so complex and deep and strong, that I really appreciate it but have never been able to have much of an understandng of it. A useful book - and a book that will give you a good sense of the wildness of Blake's whole system - is A Blake Dictionary (1988) by S Foster Damon and Morris Eaves. It's one of the very few alphabetically arranged books that I really like, because it's fascinating and gives you a way in, or some help towards a way in, to Blake, if you also put in a lot of work.

Harold Bloom also wrote a lot about Blake and loved his poetry from a young age...by the age of 9 or 10 he had copied Blake's long poems out into notebooks so that he would still have access to them whenever he had to return the book of them to the library. Another of my favourite literary critics and favourite works of literary criticism is Fearful Symmetry by Northrop Frye, in which he teaches us how to read Blake. He suggests that Blake never intended his work to be obscure or esoteric, but the problem we have with it is that we can no longer read allegory. Learning to understand allegory is, according to Frye, the key to understanding Blake's poetry. And that's one of the purposes of his book - to teach us about that. The thing is though, Frye's book and the task of learning to read allegory are basically as complex and difficult as any other way of approaching Blake's poetry, so it's not like 'Blake for Dummies'....it's more like, if you can handle this mental work out, it will help to equip you for the further cognitive challenge represented by Blake. 

We think of these great Romantic poets as being part of the literary establishment - like they're the Romantic poets: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron - but the reason why we see them like that now is because of how transgressive they were. Wordsworth changed poetry. In his 'Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems' (1802) Wordsworth writes about how he wants to do something new, and he's critical of the contemporary trends in poetry writing, and he explains his agenda because, as he says, if he just published the poems he was going to publish with no explanation, people wouldn't even recognise them as poetry. It's always truly impressive - and it's happened a few times in literary history - when a writer has the audacity to express some kind of radical vision, without having yet achieved it, and then they achieve it, and that's what Wordsworth did. He redefined poetry. 

life and poetry

 In The American Canon (2019) Harold Bloom writes: 

Of all poets writing in English in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I judge Emily Dickinson to present us with the most authentic cognitive difficulties.

This is a recurring theme. Generally when Bloom writes about Dickinson he comments on how difficult she is. This, from a scholar who, at the height of his powers, could read 1000 pages an hour, and who had committed whole novels and hundreds of pages of poetry to memory and accurately quoted from those works in his writing and speaking, had taught himself to read three languages - Yiddish, Hebrew and English - by the age of six, was captivated by the poetry of William Blake and Hart Crane before the age of 8, and went on to become one of the greatest literary criticics of the 20th century. 

So, when Bloom says that someone's poetry is difficult, I don't even know what that means. What does cognitive difficulty mean for someone with preternatural cognitive abilities? It's a metadifficulty....a difficulty that is difficult to understand. 

My difficulty with Dickinson is much less interesting than Bloom's. It's basically incomprehension. That's what I don't get about Bloom, though. Like, how does he find difficulty in it? But then, if poetry was easy, Bloom wouldn't be so passionate about it. He even calls good literature a 'difficult pleasure'. I don't think Bloom invented that term, but it's a good expression of the value he sees in the best literature. 

I've never really taken to poetry but I appreciate it. I have books of poetry - Dickinson's complete poems, the Norton Anthology of poetry, all 6 of the major English Romantic poets - Shelley, Keats, Byron, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge - Yeats, Elizabeth Bishop, Wallace Stevens, the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, Paradise Lost and other poems by John Milton, The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Wislawa Szymborska, Alexander Pope, John Dryden, John Clare, Emily Brontё, the other Brontёs, The Best Poems of the English Language (with commentary) edited by Harold Bloom, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Dante's Divine Comedy, Judith Wright, Emerson, The Oxford Anthology of English Poetry (Volume 2), Chaucer's The Canturbury tales, book 1 and 2 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Sad Toys by Takuboku Ishikawa....

I feel a kind of reverence for poetry. I remember when I first read Wuthering Heights and loved it, and I ended up focusing on Emily Brontё in a lot of my studies (and ultimately writing my honours thesis about her). Out of all the Brontёs, she's the one who is most respected as a poet. Anne and Charlotte were great novelists, but not that great as poets, but Emily....she's a poet. And that fits so well with her novel. I read a few biographies of Emily, including the one by Winifred Gérin, which was probably my favourite, and I found that they all fit together so well - the novel, the life, and the poems. 

In reading the biographies and some of the literary criticism and the poems, there's a nice sense of getting to spend a bit longer in the world evoked by Wuthering Heights. 

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i've tidied up my desk and switched up to my medium intuos from the small. the small one was too small, i found, because the drawing surface on the tablet represents the whole screen (so you can use the pen as a mouse as well as a drawing implement)....so, because my screen isn't super big anyway, and the image takes up maybe 2/3 of the screen, the amount of tablet space I have to work with is very small. also, I'm right handed and I found that it was difficult to work on parts of the image towards the right - especially the lower right. It felt really cramped. I think it's because I didn't have much space. I cleared a space just big enough for the tablet, but as I worked towards the right of the image, things got really cramped. Like, say if I'm working on part of the image at the far bottom right, I need to have some space to rest my hand on the desk, not on the tablet (because the nib of the pen is near the bottom right of the tablet) and I didn't have that. but I don't think it's just an issue of desk-space. I had heard that - just as a general piece of advice - it's better not to use the small size tablet at all, because it forces your hand into a cramped position that makes it difficult to draw and can strain your muscles...I don't know....I only know that I heard that after getting my small intuos, and that's why I bought a medium size one soon after /// then, with all my great equipment, I....didn't do anything and ended up putting my drawing tablet away all together, because the dual challenge of learning art and learning the tablet was too daunting, as I was writing about in my last post. but yes - when I was actually using the small one, I did have problems working towards the right, especially bottom right. 

anyway, now I have my medium intuos with space around it, and I also cleared away a lot of the stuff I had on my desk and the shelf above my desk, and I put my 7 pencil cups in that space, so I can take a lot of my pencils, pens, etc out of my draw and have them ready to use where I can see them. 

this is probably a very boring blog post. I'm just taking it easy today. I finished a work project yesterday and I'm starting another one...today or tomorrow. 

so, for now I'm just doing some writing and working on some pics with fire alpaca and sorting out my art supplies. These are my main supplies (besides the digital art stuff which I've already written about):

• a set of Jasart coloured pencils. these are kind of mid range - a bit more expensive than the basic ones, but cheaper than a lot of the other artist quality ones. They're pretty good, I find. 
• a set of Derwent artists' pencils. These are pretty good quality and quite expensive. 
• a set of 48 prismacolor premier coloured pencils. I bought these because I heard that they're really good and I was interested to see whether they would actually be better than the Derwent pencils. I had my doubts that they would be because I just thought...well, how can you improve a coloured pencil? But I did notice a big difference and I would definitely say the prismacolours are better. A big part of their secret is that they're wax based, so they're really smooth and soft. You can apply them thickly and make really vibrant, bold lines and shapes, or lightly shade and the result is nice and evenly textured. I've since heard that the Faber-Castell Polychromos Colour Pencils are even better than prismacolor, at least according to some people, so I'm keen to try those at some stage, but I'll probably wait a while because they're expensive. What will be interesting is that the Polychromos are harder because they are oil based, so it will be interesting to see what they bring to the table because it won't be what the prismacolors bring. Apparently they're both really good at layering and mixing, which is interesting and intriguing because I would have thought that the hardness would have diminished that quality. I think where the Faber-Castells are going to have the advantage is drawing fine details. To be honest, as someone who is still learning about art, I had always associated Faber-Castell with the kind of cheap coloured pencils that mostly kids use. That doesn't prejudice me against them \\\ I'm not averse to using cheap art supplies...it just means that I wouldn't put them in the same class as artist quality pencils, but apparently they cover that niche very well. 
• an interesting point about prismacolor vs polychromos is that it's prismacolor and the polychromos are colour pencils ||| so it's USA vs UK. 
• A lot of the rest of the supplies on this list illustrate my point about not being averse to cheap art supplies, although there are one or two pens that were on the more expensive side. I'm not a big fan of cheap ball point pens. I love pens that make a thick (but not too thick, like a marker) bold line and flow very smoothly but don't blotch. 
• Also on the topic of price, I never really got into copic markers - partly because I get the impression that you have to be good at art to use them, but also because of how expensive they are...just not something that's worth it for me. maybe one day. 
• Some of the cheaper stuff I've got includes:
• A set of watercolour pencils from 'The Craft Stall'
• 20 Faber Castell connector pens (this is an example of what I mean about thinking Faber Castell just makes cheap stuff, coz it seems like whenever you see coloured pencils and other art supplies at shops like K Mart and Big W, Faber Castell is one of the main brands). 
• A set of 29 Fine Line 0.8 mm coloured markers....I just realised that there are about 3 or 4 actual good quality, proper artist's fineliners mixed in with the others. I think the others came in a pack and they were quite cheap. One indicator of that is that there's no brand name on them - just: FINE LINE MARKER 0.8mm. This, to me, is a good example of cheap art materials being pretty good. I'm not an expert or professional artist - maybe not even a real artist at all - but I really like these fine liners, and I was a little disappointed by the professional ones. I suppose it was to do with expectations. Like, when you pay the same amount for 3 or 4 markers as you pay for 25 of another brand, you expect a bid difference in quality. Like, when I bought the good ones (from an art supplies shop) I took them home and I thought, these are gonna be the bomb, and they didn't really impress me that much. I think it's because I'm not a fine-liner kind of person. As I said earlier, I like a fairly thick, bold line. Proper fineliner's are too fine. That's probably why I like the cheap ones - the lines are pretty strong /// which probably makes them not good fineliners, but makes me like them. I don't even really use them anyway, to be honest.
• a set of 9 different coloured sharpies
• 12 different coloured twist crayons. I like twist crayons coz of how simple they are...no sharpening, no real nuance or variation in texture - just crayon
• next cup has 3 different cheap things in it: 
• 8 lead pencils 
• 3 mechanical pencils
• 8 different coloured ball point pens (with really weird colours like pink and orange, as well as more normal ones like black and green). These didn't work that well when I first got them, so I didn't use them that much, but I tested them just now and they work OK. They don't flow very smoothly though - that's the problem. You have to scribble a bit to get it flowing, so you wouldn't want to be relying on a line to appear when you draw or write with it. 

some more fairly expensive stuff: 

• a cup with 17 good drawing/ writing pens/ fine-liners. I really like good pens ||| like I said: bold line with smooth flow. 
• 6 different coloured stabilo boss highlighters. I think there were more originally. are these expensive? I can't remember ⇉ all I know is that, after using others, this is the only brand I will use. 

And then I also have a couple of hardback sketchbooks, and some ringbinder ones. I much prefer hardback to ringbinders. 

As I've been writing this, I've been working on a picture in fire alpaca, and I think I'll just keep working on it until I like it enough to add it to this post. 

something else interesting....as I was writing this post, my computer was running slower and slower....so I reconfigured the restore point, freed up diskspace from the control panel, then restarted and then - phew, now it's running pretty fast again. 

anyway....working on the fire alpaca image.....

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i've been quite pleased with how I've been able to start using my drawing tablet and fire alpaca and actually creating with it. 

the challenge of learning how to do real art seems so daunting. I think the key is to do your own thing. learn from others but do what you want to do. 

using my tablet was doubly daunting. not only can I not draw and paint, but using the tablet makes drawing and painting even harder. 

I think what enabled me to break through that barrier and start actually creating with my tablet and the software is to think more about what I can do rather than about what I can't....to be honest, I don't even necessarily want to do what I see some of the art youtubers doing. Their work is good and I want to learn from them, but I don't want to do the same things as they do. 

when you focus on what you can do it makes it a lot easier. I may not be able to draw a character or an animal, but I can draw a line, I can draw a shape, I can select a pen, pencil or brush and then select a colour and then apply that colour - maybe to fill in the shape. as I draw on the tablet and see the results on the screen, my sense of being able to control the stylus and get it to do what I want, grows. and there are different tools to explore that have different effects. I think fire alpaca is one of the simpler art softwares - that's why I started with it. I'm planning to build up to using Krita as well, and then maybe Clip Studio Paint. 

reactions

I was thinking about Humphry Davy's way of describing chemistry and science in Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812):

The foundations of chemical philosophy, are observation, experiment, and analogy. By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed on the mind. By analogy, similar facts are connected. By experiment, new facts are discovered; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth.

and I was thinking about how that's how our minds work and how we develop a sense of ourselves. We tell ourselves stories over and over until they become our truth. 

Maybe I can revise my story. No one knows my story - my story about myself, I mean. 

I'd like to write something in a castle at night with candles, and books, and maybe the ocean outside. 

I have this heavy sense that the story that defines me is already written, as if I couldn't write something new. 

Jan Golinski wrote a book about Humphry Davy called, The Experimental Self , in which he writes about how Davy was a scientist (although he was other things too, like a poet) before such a thing existed, so he had to forge his own identity in a lifelong process of 'experiments in selfhood'. Golinski - who is a professor of history and humanities - has also written some very good books about the constructivist approach to science, which sees its development as a human/ social/ cultural process rather than just a process of apprehending objective truths. This builds on the work of Thomas Kuhn, especially in his important book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he suggests that subjectivity and group dynamics play an important part in scientific progress. 

Is it possible to represent truth when any form of representation is also an act of creation? I can write about myself and my thoughts but what I write is a text about those things, not some kind of conveyance of the things themselves. What I express is more of a reaction to what's in my mind than an expression of it. 

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I wonder why it is that, over time, a lot of words take on a meaning that is pretty much the opposite of their original meaning. 

two of my favourite examples are 'fantastic' and 'nice'. 'fantastic', like the word 'fantasy', used to denote something that isn't true - a product of the imagination. So, it's actually an insult when something good happens or someone does something good and you say, that's fantastic! You're actually saying, that's ridiculous - it couldn't possibly be true. According to the online etymological dictionary, 'fantastic' began to be used in its new sense from 1938. 

'nice' has changed even more than I thought. I knew that, a couple of hundred years ago or more, it related to precision and intellectual penetration. Like, a nice point or argument would be one that uses some kind of fine distinction to good effect. Now, 'nice' is quite a vague term of praise or approval. but there's way more, as I found out from the online etymological dictionary ￫￫ 

definitions of 'nice':

12th century ||| "careless, clumsy; weak; poor, needy; simple, stupid, silly, foolish," 

Late 14th century ||| "fussy, fastidious"

1400 ||| "dainty, delicate"

1500s ||| "precise, careful" (this is the one I mentioned)

1769 ||| "agreeable, delightful" 

1830 ||| "kind, thoughtful" 

Another interesting one that I found when I was looking up 'nice' is 'pretty' - In old English it meant cunning and skilful. Then, by 1400, it meant 'manly and gallant' (amazing, eh?), which is kind of the opposite of what it means now. 

This relates in an interesting way to issues of translation. I've been thinking and researching a lot lately about Bible translation, and I've been adding to my collection of different translations and reading and comparing them. 

There are two general approaches to translating the Bible from the original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into English or other languages: formal equivalence or 'word for word' translation, which prioritises the individual words and grammatical structures, and dynamic equivalence or 'thought for thought' translation, which focuses more on the overall meaning. No translation is fully one or the other. It's like a spectrum. At the very far extreme of 'thought for thought', the edition ceases to be a translation and becomes a paraphrase. 

For purposes of study and teaching, there's no doubt (I think) that it's better to use a translation that sits more on the 'word for word' side of the spectrum. But then, the examples I gave above about how the meaning of words changes so drastically over time, represents a good argument for the use of translations that are more on the dynamic equivalence side of the spectrum because a strongly literal translation could actually convey the opposite meaning of what was originally intended. There's also idiom to take into account. An example I heard is, imagine if I said or wrote, 'it's raining cats and dogs' (meaning that it's raining heavily). In 200 years, that idiom may have fallen out of fashion, so someone who translated my statement in a literal way is going to be saying that dogs and cats were falling from the sky, which has nothing at all to do with the meaning of the original statement. So, I like the idea of using a variety of translations of the Bible. 

what's surprising and interesting to me as a student of literature in general as well as the Bible, is the way that, despite the inherent instability of language, meaning is communicated very effectively through written texts. The world of the past, including its use of language, is, in so many ways, a foreign place - a different place - to the modern world. And yet, the profoundest of meanings is communicated between those different worlds. 

It's something truly extraordinary - the way that great literature can speak to us so personally. 

John Macarthur said something interesting in a youtube video I watched recently - something that relates to the debate about critical theory, post-modernism, cultural marxism, social justice - all that stuff. I've been really interested in a lot of what John Macarthur has been saying lately. He strongly believes in just using one translation of the Bible for everything - reading, writing, studying, preaching, teaching, counselling - and he uses the NASB (New American Standard Bible), which is very much on the 'word for word' side of the spectrum. He made a really good point that, as a minister and a leader in the church, but also just as a Christian, he wants the language of the Bible to be his language and he wants it to be consistent. That's why, as he is assured that the NASB is a very good translation, he wants to use it for everything. He wants to really get to know it and make it part of him and using a single translation better facilitates that kind of deep engagement than reading from lots of different versions.  But the interesting thing that he said was that he, and others in his circles, rejected the Revised Standard Version (RSV) and Today's New International Version (TNIV) because those translations had been influenced by liberal ideology. I have no idea what he means here about the RSV, but I have some idea about what he means with the TNIV, and it's actually a feature that I really like. I actually prefer the TNIV to the NIV because of this change. There are probably other changes that John Macarthur has in mind, but the one I'm aware of is that they've made the Bible less patriarchal. Like, for example, it's common in the Bible, when someone is addressing a group, to just refer to the males in the group....so, someone will say or write something like 'brothers, don't worship idols'. It's understood that women are being addressed as well, because the writer or speaker will be addressing a church or other group, but older translations just translate it as 'brothers.....'. But the TNIV will translate that as 'brothers and sisters'. So, to me, that's a very good example of dynamic equivalence. It was culturally appropriate to address groups by just referring to the males, at the time when the Bible was written, but it's no longer appropriate. What worries John Macarthur though is that this could be a slippery slope.....we start adjusting the Bible more and more to suit our culture and we end up losing the rich and central message of the Bible. The way John Macarthur, very eloquently, put it is that we ought to be adjusting ourselves and our culture to suit the Bible - because of its authority as God's word - rather than adjusting the Bible to suit our culture. 

And it's true, I think, that we need to be careful with this. Like, for example, both Peter and Paul, in their letters in the New Testament, talked about braided hair as being something unseemly and worldly. By the standards of modern culture that makes no sense. If anything, braided hair is conservative. But when we read those passages, we realise that and we do a kind of mental dynamic equivalence translation. We figure out what they are getting at by reading the whole sentence and the whole paragraph. It's not hard to do that. 

.....I was going to say that we wouldn't want Bible translators to be thinking, OK,what is the modern equivalent of braided hair? and then putting that in the passage, but when I looked at a couple of the Bibles that are more on the side of dynamic equivalence (the NIV and NLT), that is kind of what they do. They talk about not having elaborate hairstyles (NIV) or not 'fixing' your hair as a way of attracting attention. (NLT) The idea is that the kind of attractiveness we should aspire to is attractiveness of the soul and the character. The translations that are more on the literal/ formal equivalence side, like the New English Translation (NET Bible) and the NASB still have 'braided hair'. Interestingly, out of all of those translations, the NET Bible is the most recent - it came out in 2005 - but it's because it's a more literal translation that it has the 'older' wording. 

To be honest, my personal preference is definitely for the more literal translations. The text just seems richer and more meaningful. It allows for a deeper engagement and study. 

These translation issues remind me of the dilemma faced when editing the juvenilia of famous authors. A lot of the charm of the original text - a lot of its character and verve - comes from roughness of style within which the treasure of precocious talent resides. So, the question is always how much you should 'correct' the text to make it readable and worthy of publication.

vision

history cannot be accurately represented by words on a page. when we study or teach history or just talk about it, or whatever, our focus is on the reading and writing and speaking of a story that we create. We can't access what it was actually like, because that would require us to be there, and if we were there, our experience would be very particular and contextual and nothing like what someone would read about the events we are experiencing, in the future. 

a couple of books I read said some interesting things about this idea. I can't remember the exact details - author, title, exact wording - so I will just paraphrase. 

one book was about scientific discovery and the other book was about writing. In the one about writing, the author made the point that, for any classic text, the complete difference in context between when the book was written and now means that, it's not enough just to say that the contemporary (to the text) audience would interpret the text differently // instead, we can say that they were effectively reading a different text. 

I actually figured out which book the one about scientific discovery was ⇨ It's What Galileo Saw: Imagining the Scientific Revolution (2014) by Lawrence Lipking. I don't have access to the full book - only the preview on Amazon - but I really like the subject of this book, so I might buy it at some stage. Using his telescope, Galileo was able to see the moon, stars and planets, and even some moons of some other planets. The fascinating concept underlying the book is that what Galileo actually saw is different from our idea of what he saw. We accept as common knowledge details about the universe such as, for example, that the moon is basically a globe just like the earth and that it has topographical features which we perceive as shadows and spots. Galileo, in many ways, began the journey of discovery that we're still on with regard to the universe. We have a mental image of the solar system that Galileo didn't have, and this book (I think) is about the mental process whereby raw data (e.g. the visual data take in by Galileo's eyes) is converted into useful information, and the way that imagination plays a part in that process. 

In Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812), Humphry Davy says/ writes, this: 

The foundations of chemical philosophy, are observation, experiment, and analogy. By observation, facts are distinctly and minutely impressed on the mind. By analogy, similar facts are connected. By experiment, new facts are discovered; and, in the progression of knowledge, observation, guided by analogy, leads to experiment, and analogy confirmed by experiment, becomes scientific truth. 

Analogy is central to the process of scientific discovery. Analogy guides observation, and enables the connection of facts - the conversion of raw data into useful information - and leads to further experiment to confirm the analogy and that confirmation converts the analogy into scientific truth. 

To my mind (and I'm probably biased), analogy seems like a concept that is more related to creativity and imagination than it is to science. But when I look up the etymology of the word, I find that it does have a history of use in mathematics and logic. But still....if you break it down to its Greek roots, you find something interesting ⇨ ana - "upon, according to" & logos, which means ratio, word, speech, reckoning. In old medical prescriptions, the term 'ana' meant 'equal amounts of each'. So that makes sense /// analogy is about correspondence and something in a different context that is somehow similar or equal to something else. 

 Douglas R. Hofstadter has suggested that analogy is the 'life-blood' of human thought. With regard to cognition, Hofstadter writes that analogy is 'everything, or very nearly so, in my view.' (from Analogy as the Core of Cognition) 

I agree. I think analogy is central to all learning. We can only learn anything new if it relates to something we already know. If there is no link to something we already know, we can't make sense of what we're perceiving. That's why, to make sense of what he was seeing through his telescope, Galileo would have had to evoke or develop some kind of analogy - to establish a link between what he already knew and what he was seeing. 

There is a progression....any new thing we observe will correspond in some ways, but not in others, to a schema/ idea / conception in our mind. When we observe something, we comprehend it by matching it with something that we already know about. Once we are sure about that match, we can then add the differences to our existing concept - we can enrich our existing idea and make it more complex. That seems to be the kind of process that Davy was talking about.