Oh it certainly is. But "yearning" for meaning, and for a glimpse of the fathomless depths of existence, are not necessarily "pains." There is a hint of sorrow in there, I suppose. But this is, at least for me, an overwhelmingly positive feeling - characterized by a combination of curiosity, inner peace, creativity, awe and humility in the face of the sublime and sometimes terrifying universe.
But I agree. Without this "yearning" for meaning, that I believe is shared by all human beings, there would be no art or science! There would simply be flat-lined "contentedness." A world of Xanex-people, wearing listless grins and shuffling about aimlessly.
Should we separate the author from the work?
That's quite a declarative sentence you got right there, mr. axordil. You sure about that? Always?axordil wrote: Beauty moves us as it does is because of the insatiable yearning humans feel for anything we cannot have.
Al, to actually answer your question... no. No, I cannot cleanly separate the artist from the art. If, as Prim says, someone uses my revenue to contribute to a political party, even if it is not my party, I do not worry much about that. Some personal facts don't matter much.
However, once I read the interview with Sean Connery where he said he didn't see much of a problem with hitting women (and it was different than hitting men
), I have never watched him act again without cringing. Which is heartbreaking, because I love his character in Indiana Jones.I prefer not to know too much personally about artists, actually. Head in the sand, some would say, and they would be right.
"What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asked.
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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axordil
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Yep.anthriel wrote:That's quite a declarative sentence you got right there, mr. axordil. You sure about that? Always?axordil wrote: Beauty moves us as it does is because of the insatiable yearning humans feel for anything we cannot have.
See that sunset? That glorious sunset? The one with the crashing surf and salt breeze and the cry of the gulls? You can have it for a minute or two, and then it's gone, and there is no promise you will live to see another one that equals it. You can remember it of course, but memory is a hollow echo of the moment, and eventually even it fades.
Beauty is precious because it is uncommon and fleeting. We want to hold on to the perfect moment, the perfect chord, the perfect sunset--but if we could, how long might we appreciate it? And at some level we know that, and we wish the world were different, and we wish we were different, and the gap remains unbridgeable nonetheless.
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Voronwë the Faithful
- At the intersection of here and now
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I disagree. Some forms of beauty are enduring. A beautiful painting, a recording of beautiful music, most of all, a beautiful love.
"Spirits in the shape of hawks and eagles flew ever to and from his halls; and their eyes could see to the depths of the seas, and pierce the hidden caverns beneath the world."
No....that's one reason beauty can be precious. As I said earlier - beauty moves us as it does is because of lots of reasons, many of them very complex, some very simple, and most of them very different for different people.Beauty is precious because it is uncommon and fleeting.
Soooo...beautiful art?Some forms of beauty are enduring. A beautiful painting, a recording of beautiful music....
Since V-dude brought up love it occurred to me......to say "a perfect person won't need art" strikes me with the same baffling, discordant wrongness that saying "a perfect person won't need love". You might as well tell me they won't need air.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
Well, then, I must most humbly disagree with you, my dear mr. axordil. And, as is commonly the case, echo my dear friend Sir V.
I don't find that experiencing beauty is at all about yearning. I am quite ready to accept that I am the aberration, here, as I oft am in any group, but the thought that beauty has anything to do with what one CANNOT have is simply a new concept to me.
Beauty to me is about... it's just about that moment, somehow. That one moment.
I do find beauty in odd things; not just in "art" (although I do find going to museums to be exhausting, the emotional drain is profound), but mostly just around me. The turn of a leaf as it rustles in the wind, the face of a child as she eats an ice cream cone, the happy smile of my dog as she bounds across the green grass to greet me... and yes, that perfect sunset. But for me the overwhelming feeling is not that the moment will be gone, but that it was there just then, and I catch my breath with the joy that such beauty exists at all.
It is about suddenly knowing, viewing, experiencing, a heartbeat in time where things are very, very right. Where the wretched constant background noise of fear and doubt and worry and pain goes suddenly blank, and all I can see and think of and know is that all is right. Just then. Just for that moment.
Beauty is precious because it is uncommon and fleeting. But glimpsing it is exhilarating to me, and fills me with joy that it exists at all. Surely a world is not utterly lost if such things exist at all.
I don't find that experiencing beauty is at all about yearning. I am quite ready to accept that I am the aberration, here, as I oft am in any group, but the thought that beauty has anything to do with what one CANNOT have is simply a new concept to me.
Beauty to me is about... it's just about that moment, somehow. That one moment.
I do find beauty in odd things; not just in "art" (although I do find going to museums to be exhausting, the emotional drain is profound), but mostly just around me. The turn of a leaf as it rustles in the wind, the face of a child as she eats an ice cream cone, the happy smile of my dog as she bounds across the green grass to greet me... and yes, that perfect sunset. But for me the overwhelming feeling is not that the moment will be gone, but that it was there just then, and I catch my breath with the joy that such beauty exists at all.
It is about suddenly knowing, viewing, experiencing, a heartbeat in time where things are very, very right. Where the wretched constant background noise of fear and doubt and worry and pain goes suddenly blank, and all I can see and think of and know is that all is right. Just then. Just for that moment.
Beauty is precious because it is uncommon and fleeting. But glimpsing it is exhilarating to me, and fills me with joy that it exists at all. Surely a world is not utterly lost if such things exist at all.
"What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asked.
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Beauty is Truth, Truth is Beauty. And Art tries to hold it still for a bit so you can look at it.anthriel wrote:It is about suddenly knowing, viewing, experiencing, a heartbeat in time where things are very, very right.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
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narya
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I'll agree to that. Having lived in Alaska for 30 years, and most of it depressed, I now live in the beautiful Bay Area. I can be enthralled by what others around me would call "another crummy day in paradise". When people tell me "It's going to be beautiful weather this weekend," I remind them that it is always beautiful here. They get a funny look but hesitantly agree with me.anthriel wrote:
Beauty is precious because it is uncommon and fleeting. But glimpsing it is exhilarating to me, and fills me with joy that it exists at all. Surely a world is not utterly lost if such things exist at all.
And back to the question of the thread - all art is made by imperfect people, and it can still be compelling, thrillingly, or breathtaking despite that.
In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. ~ Albert Camus
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axordil
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Unless one does nothing but look at the painting or listen to the music, the sensations are still fleeting, and I would argue the sensations are where beauty exists. Beauty is not an inherent quality, but an act of interpretation. When the act stops, the beauty ceases to be active and becomes memory. The world's greatest art museum has meaning at all--including beauty--only because people go there and see its contents. Without people a Rembrandt might as well be a mildew stain.Voronwë the Faithful wrote:I disagree. Some forms of beauty are enduring. A beautiful painting, a recording of beautiful music, most of all, a beautiful love.
I will leave the topic of love for another day.
Anthriel--we seek to say much the same thing in different ways, I suspect. I yearn for the rightness of those moments because of that joy, but joy, like a tremolo, can only be sustained so long.
yov--it is difficult to speak in cases where we are doomed to the purely hypothetical. But to me perfection implies wanting for nothing. Perhaps we need to define perfection.
As I've said, given the topic, we're discussing moral perfection and it's IMO fairly absurd to call desire or love a moral failing. Even in the Buddhist thinking I don't think it's considered a moral failing to desire so much as the default state of humans.
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
-
Primula Baggins
- Living in hope
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There is constant beauty—relative to being fleeting, I mean. There are places where you can sit and look for hours at something constantly changing but constantly beautiful. Waterfalls, the ocean, a sleeping child. And generally you know you'll be able to see it again. The starry sky! Even a sunset—yes, fleeting, but in most circumstances of life you know there will be other sunsets.
Even the plain beauty of climbing every night into the same comfortable bed, in the same peaceful room, with someone you love. Not everyone has that, alas, but it's not rare.
Or are things not beautiful if they're that accessible?
And is something fleeting necessarily unattainable ever after? I still remember what it felt like to set my hand on one of the stones at Stonehenge, in the late afternoon of a sunny summer day in 1974. To stand in the porch of the Parthenon looking out over Athens on a summer morning in 1969. To hear a beloved conductor finish his last performance, as music director of a festival in my city, of Bach's B minor Mass, last July. To look down into my newborn children's eyes, years ago.
It doesn't matter that I'll never do these things again. They're there in my mind. They're not unattainable. They didn't only exist in the moment I experienced them. I'm sentient and I remember. In fact I'll never forget. I don't yearn for them; I treasure them. Does that mean they weren't actually beautiful?
Even the plain beauty of climbing every night into the same comfortable bed, in the same peaceful room, with someone you love. Not everyone has that, alas, but it's not rare.
Or are things not beautiful if they're that accessible?
And is something fleeting necessarily unattainable ever after? I still remember what it felt like to set my hand on one of the stones at Stonehenge, in the late afternoon of a sunny summer day in 1974. To stand in the porch of the Parthenon looking out over Athens on a summer morning in 1969. To hear a beloved conductor finish his last performance, as music director of a festival in my city, of Bach's B minor Mass, last July. To look down into my newborn children's eyes, years ago.
It doesn't matter that I'll never do these things again. They're there in my mind. They're not unattainable. They didn't only exist in the moment I experienced them. I'm sentient and I remember. In fact I'll never forget. I don't yearn for them; I treasure them. Does that mean they weren't actually beautiful?
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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WampusCat
- Creature of the night
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When I think of yearning in relation to true beauty, it is not yearning to recapture that perfect moment. It is yearning for an existence that fully embodies that moment. It is yearning for that transcendent experience of living beyond limits, when the entire cosmos exists in a falling leaf or an infant's eyes. It is yearning for what always lies just out of reach: an all-encompassing beauty that makes even the shoddiest corners of existence glow.
It is the yearning I feel when a sip of eternity wakes a thirst so strong that I would gladly dive into its depths.
It is the yearning I feel when a sip of eternity wakes a thirst so strong that I would gladly dive into its depths.
Take my hand, my friend. We are here to walk one another home.
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Avatar from Fractal_OpenArtGroup
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Passdagas the Brown
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Exactly. Well said.WampusCat wrote:When I think of yearning in relation to true beauty, it is not yearning to recapture that perfect moment. It is yearning for an existence that fully embodies that moment. It is yearning for that transcendent experience of living beyond limits, when the entire cosmos exists in a falling leaf or an infant's eyes. It is yearning for what always lies just out of reach: an all-encompassing beauty that makes even the shoddiest corners of existence glow.
It is the yearning I feel when a sip of eternity wakes a thirst so strong that I would gladly dive into its depths.
[written with voice recognition software; please excuse any errors I missed]
[it is extremely rare that I write a post this long these days so you damn well better appreciate it
]
Desire is neither virtue our vice, weakness our strength, good or bad. It's what you do with your desire that matters. And I would contend that our desires, both small and big, on the whole do more good for us then bad.
It's easy and perhaps tempting to see the peaceful, contended monk who spends his life meditating by the babbling brooks as a more "perfect" person than the rest of us with all are striving and struggling and worrying and fretting. but in the real terms of actually making the world a better place - and morality is all about making the world a better place -as strivers are coming out well ahead of the contented monk.
Last year, I developed a new a interest in men's fashion. I desired dress better. I desired nicer clothes. I looked around for a way to attain my desire and decided it might be get to learn a sew. Because of that I've learned a thing oats, attained some new skills, at some new experiences - all quite good things that I would not have been pushed towards without this new desire. And what's more, if I had decided to pursue this with enough passion and hard work and skill, this new desire could lead to ways I could contribute to to those around me in ways that I couldn't before. Pushed far enough, I could be giving something to people worldwide.
And of course, this has been the course of human history. Desire, not contentedness, has pushed us to create better food, shelter, clothing, medicine, two wills, transportation, communication, and yes - batter art. The flip side is - better weapons, cheats, dictators. better destruction. I am not arguing that our desire is innately good after all, only that it pushes us. Whether it pushes us to create or destroy, do good or evil, is out to each of us. But the simple act that you're reading this on a computer or hundreds of miles away - and astonishing modern marvel - shows how much our desires lead to creation far more often than destruction. If they didn't, we would have won ourselves apart before we even learn to forge a sword. Tearing down is so much easier and building of and yet here we are.
I would argue that often eat even our desires that might be considered petty or crass- like pure materialism for its own sake - tends to push us in positive directions. Desire for more money pushes people towards better education, more important work, or simply to be better at a work that but they do. At least that's true if one has a decent moral compass - and even that's likely starts from our young selves selfish desires for approval and appreciate and recognition.
As I recall, the buddha, upon reaching enlightenment, chose to stay amongst humanity to share is message. Might he not have desired for ways to spread his teachings are widely? Wouldn't the world be better if he had? Aren't those who envision, desire, and a strive for a better world truly the most morally good people of all?
[it is extremely rare that I write a post this long these days so you damn well better appreciate it
]Desire is neither virtue our vice, weakness our strength, good or bad. It's what you do with your desire that matters. And I would contend that our desires, both small and big, on the whole do more good for us then bad.
It's easy and perhaps tempting to see the peaceful, contended monk who spends his life meditating by the babbling brooks as a more "perfect" person than the rest of us with all are striving and struggling and worrying and fretting. but in the real terms of actually making the world a better place - and morality is all about making the world a better place -as strivers are coming out well ahead of the contented monk.
Last year, I developed a new a interest in men's fashion. I desired dress better. I desired nicer clothes. I looked around for a way to attain my desire and decided it might be get to learn a sew. Because of that I've learned a thing oats, attained some new skills, at some new experiences - all quite good things that I would not have been pushed towards without this new desire. And what's more, if I had decided to pursue this with enough passion and hard work and skill, this new desire could lead to ways I could contribute to to those around me in ways that I couldn't before. Pushed far enough, I could be giving something to people worldwide.
And of course, this has been the course of human history. Desire, not contentedness, has pushed us to create better food, shelter, clothing, medicine, two wills, transportation, communication, and yes - batter art. The flip side is - better weapons, cheats, dictators. better destruction. I am not arguing that our desire is innately good after all, only that it pushes us. Whether it pushes us to create or destroy, do good or evil, is out to each of us. But the simple act that you're reading this on a computer or hundreds of miles away - and astonishing modern marvel - shows how much our desires lead to creation far more often than destruction. If they didn't, we would have won ourselves apart before we even learn to forge a sword. Tearing down is so much easier and building of and yet here we are.
I would argue that often eat even our desires that might be considered petty or crass- like pure materialism for its own sake - tends to push us in positive directions. Desire for more money pushes people towards better education, more important work, or simply to be better at a work that but they do. At least that's true if one has a decent moral compass - and even that's likely starts from our young selves selfish desires for approval and appreciate and recognition.
As I recall, the buddha, upon reaching enlightenment, chose to stay amongst humanity to share is message. Might he not have desired for ways to spread his teachings are widely? Wouldn't the world be better if he had? Aren't those who envision, desire, and a strive for a better world truly the most morally good people of all?
I wanna love somebody but I don't know how
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
I wanna throw my body in the river and drown
-The Decemberists
-
Passdagas the Brown
- Posts: 3154
- Joined: Fri Jun 28, 2013 9:31 pm
But that's just one type of monk representing one stage in the life-path. In Buddhism, the real heroes are the Brahmins who first get enlightened through silent contemplation, and then go back out into the world to enlighten (and help) others.It's easy and perhaps tempting to see the peaceful, contended monk who spends his life meditating by the babbling brooks as a more "perfect" person than the rest of us with all are striving and struggling and worrying and fretting. but in the real terms of actually making the world a better place - and morality is all about making the world a better place -as strivers are coming out well ahead of the contented monk.
What are you sorry about, ax? Your comments generated one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking exchanges I've experienced in Lasto for a long time.axordil wrote:*looks back at thread*
So that's what I'm like when I'm sleep-deprived. Sorry.
Non-partisan, as well, which is a relief.
Everyone understands beauty, in their own way."What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asked.
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
