Post by johnbc on Aug 25, 2020 22:11:43 GMT
Increasingly visiting the Universal High Literature and having contact with the greatest poets and writers in history — who are the people with the greatest capacity to name, describe, narrate and explain our impressions of ourselves and the world where we are subjects and objects — , I see some admirable patterns and constants in this process that establishes the foundations for any development of intelligence and, through the imaginative and symbolic accumulation, of our own wisdom, morality and spirituality.
Language, for these magnanimous masters of Poetics, is something that deeply means and that establishes, expands and improves communication, expression, imagination, simplification, awareness, explanation and association beyond the mere sensitive perceptions already filed in raw memories and that became our retained primitive intelligible perceptions. The nominative, descriptive and expressive symbolic improvement through mainly the Language creates, filters, polishes and improves the existing symbolic libraries — and yet to be worked on more — , thus serving as new, superior and powerful standards for the highest and most complex impressions, imaginations, interpretations, assumptions, reasoning and insights that we can have.
In the texts of the great writers of High Literature (especially speaking of Poetics, which is a linguistic and discursive layer in which man names and describes the world and through which he expresses his interior to everyone, whether in prose or poetic style), each word, each punctuation and, countless times, each sound and each pause has a purpose, an intention of reaction, either for clarification or camouflage, either to produce certainty or to raise doubts, or to appease or terrify, or to like or detest, or to laugh or to cry.
The order of the words, the form of the sentences, the style of the paragraph, the chaining of the texts, the narrative of comedies and tragedies are works of engineering, architecture, music, psychology, hermeneutics, creation and stylistics, they are treated of transferring personalities and mnemonic intelligences in a linguistic code. It is as if the genetic codes of great literatures were transposed through ordered alphabetical codes.
No wonder, every great writer (as well as every great musician, painter, sculptor, playwright, filmmaker) can easily be recognized for his own art. Even though his works are being read centuries or millennia after he died, by people who have no idea what the author was like. Firstly, for his genius and personality that already set him apart from other people; then for his mastery and ability in the greatest, and which is the queen of expressive arts and human knowledge: Literature. He remains alive among us for his works.
“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibitions with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like an exhibition of cats, but the range of articulated human imagination, which extends from the height of the imaginative sky to the depth of imaginative hell”.
- Northrop Frye
From the Liberal Arts, Literature is the most fundamental and inspiring of the rest. From great works of Literature, other literatures, great music, sculptures, paintings and dances were inspired. How do you make a play or a movie without writing lines or a script? And it is in the High Literature where we find the best descriptions of the world and of ourselves, we introject powerful symbols to be able to not only think, but reason, meditate, contemplate and arrive at other truths and conclusions that are not accessible to mere sensory perceptions and experiences of life.
There is no Science, nor Politics, nor many of the other Arts, nor Bible (and other religious books), nor Grammar, nor Communication, nor Imagination, nor Reasoning without Language (Idiomatic) and without Literature. And in High Literature we have the best of the creation and manipulation of this universe apart from Language, Imagination and Discourse.
Any great work of a genius of Literature (Poetry or Prose) creates a universe apart in each one of us, in a “woken and directed dream”
In Literature all images, people, animals, sounds, smells, creatures, flavors, sensations, habits, actions, emotions, landscapes, rules, worlds, dreams and everything else are created only by text, out of nothing, erecting true universes just by words. That is why Literature is the Mother of Liberal Arts, the one that stops many of the other expressive and interpretive arts, and the one that grants the greatest imaginative, creative, associative, pedagogical and symbolic power that there is.
Words and phrases take on intelligible forms, sensations, emotions and reactions in us that are clearer, more precise, beautiful and complex, according to the talent of the writer. Literature generates the appearance of people in the reader (with faces, voices, clothes, mania, virtues and vices); places and scenarios that spring up as we read; experiences and situations that we have never experienced and that are incorporated into those that we already have. And with greater degree and skill of the literary genius, the author — a demiurge — manages to immerse us more in his world; whether this is possible or impossible.
When you read a novel or play, you cannot judge the verisimilitude of situations and characters if you do not let the plot impress you and be revived inwardly like a dream. That’s what fiction is: a directed daydream. As the characters do not physically exist (even if they may have existed historically in the past), you can only find them in your own soul, as symbols of human possibilities that are in you as they are in everyone, but that they embody more clear and exemplary, separate from the contingencies that can make everyday experience obscure. Fiction reading is an exercise in self-knowledge before it can be literary analysis, school activity or even fun: it is not fun to follow an opaque story, whose moves do not evoke the corresponding emotions.
The same requirement applies to history books, with the mitigation that in general the historian has already processed the data intellectually and provides us with a principle of understanding instead of the crude plot of events. If you do not apprehend the actions of historical characters as symbols invested with psychological verisimilitude, you are in no condition to assess whether they are historically true or not. A history book has to be read first as fiction, then as reality.
This whole process increases and refines your vocabulary, writing, style and memory; enhance your knowledge of beings, possibilities and phenomena; enrich your experiences, images, sensations, associations, concepts and emotions; expand your reasoning, conscience, judgment and your own soul — which incorporates all of this in your permanence — to levels that inflate your intelligence towards a state of wisdom. And it is the dialogues and narratives of the great sages — of writing and speaking — that most ignite our intelligence, transferring their personalities, imaginations, worldviews and wisdoms through a mere text, in an idiomatic code. It is the identity of the giants passed indirectly by the Letters. And the ability to recognize the uniqueness of great writers by their texts is the proof that geniuses are few and do stand out (indirectly and through time; revealing their people to us impersonally); mediocre ones are many and they get confused.
Behold, everything that comes out of the pen, of the great poets and writers only, is so worth it. They start everything for the expansion of human intelligence, rolling up vocabularies, structures, aesthetics, styles, impressions, descriptions, simplifications, relationships, explanations… Everything! From there come all the other speeches: the persuasive ones of rhetoric, so dear to panegyricists, advertisements, political oratories and defenses of positions; the contestants of dialectics, indispensable to discussions, scientific debates and the search for truth; and, finally, the logics, pillars of analysis, reasoning and proof.
To write well is to read a lot, to read a lot is to know more, it is to live many lives, places, times, sensations, emotions, feelings, experiences and cultures in a single life of, at most, decades, through the powerful weapons that are books. To enjoy High Literature and the great poets and writers is to access more of the world and the human knowledge advised by the great guides who discovered, encoded and decoded them. Being cultured is essentially having a literary culture: the highest, the most noble, the most beautiful and the most perennial. It all starts there.
“The poet (…) uses these two crude, primitive and archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind”.
- Northrop Frye
The world is divided into before and after writing; before and after Literature (of poets and prose writers). Thus, the best literacy of the child is the greatest mission of Education; and the best and most complete Education begins with the best of Language and Imagination, which lie in High Literature. Without qualifying a human for the ability to access and understand the great writers of Humanity, Education becomes innocuous, a deceit, an act, a waste, a fraud, a cripple and a barbaric cruelty.
The denial of the best of Education residing in High Literature is what charlatan ideologues promise with their malice, incompetence and ineptitude. These impostors must be identified and swept from the educational, public and private spheres. Primarily in public schools, as it is a fraud that is compulsorily paid with the people’s money (in its simplest stratum), which suffers the most with this genocide of intelligence and the maintenance of stupidity. Cultural, moral, intellectual and spiritual backwardness hangs in this type of evasion of intelligence. In the negation, concealment, or boycott of High Literature.
Language, for these magnanimous masters of Poetics, is something that deeply means and that establishes, expands and improves communication, expression, imagination, simplification, awareness, explanation and association beyond the mere sensitive perceptions already filed in raw memories and that became our retained primitive intelligible perceptions. The nominative, descriptive and expressive symbolic improvement through mainly the Language creates, filters, polishes and improves the existing symbolic libraries — and yet to be worked on more — , thus serving as new, superior and powerful standards for the highest and most complex impressions, imaginations, interpretations, assumptions, reasoning and insights that we can have.
In the texts of the great writers of High Literature (especially speaking of Poetics, which is a linguistic and discursive layer in which man names and describes the world and through which he expresses his interior to everyone, whether in prose or poetic style), each word, each punctuation and, countless times, each sound and each pause has a purpose, an intention of reaction, either for clarification or camouflage, either to produce certainty or to raise doubts, or to appease or terrify, or to like or detest, or to laugh or to cry.
The order of the words, the form of the sentences, the style of the paragraph, the chaining of the texts, the narrative of comedies and tragedies are works of engineering, architecture, music, psychology, hermeneutics, creation and stylistics, they are treated of transferring personalities and mnemonic intelligences in a linguistic code. It is as if the genetic codes of great literatures were transposed through ordered alphabetical codes.
No wonder, every great writer (as well as every great musician, painter, sculptor, playwright, filmmaker) can easily be recognized for his own art. Even though his works are being read centuries or millennia after he died, by people who have no idea what the author was like. Firstly, for his genius and personality that already set him apart from other people; then for his mastery and ability in the greatest, and which is the queen of expressive arts and human knowledge: Literature. He remains alive among us for his works.
“Literature as a whole is not an aggregate of exhibitions with red and blue ribbons attached to them, like an exhibition of cats, but the range of articulated human imagination, which extends from the height of the imaginative sky to the depth of imaginative hell”.
- Northrop Frye
From the Liberal Arts, Literature is the most fundamental and inspiring of the rest. From great works of Literature, other literatures, great music, sculptures, paintings and dances were inspired. How do you make a play or a movie without writing lines or a script? And it is in the High Literature where we find the best descriptions of the world and of ourselves, we introject powerful symbols to be able to not only think, but reason, meditate, contemplate and arrive at other truths and conclusions that are not accessible to mere sensory perceptions and experiences of life.
There is no Science, nor Politics, nor many of the other Arts, nor Bible (and other religious books), nor Grammar, nor Communication, nor Imagination, nor Reasoning without Language (Idiomatic) and without Literature. And in High Literature we have the best of the creation and manipulation of this universe apart from Language, Imagination and Discourse.
Any great work of a genius of Literature (Poetry or Prose) creates a universe apart in each one of us, in a “woken and directed dream”
In Literature all images, people, animals, sounds, smells, creatures, flavors, sensations, habits, actions, emotions, landscapes, rules, worlds, dreams and everything else are created only by text, out of nothing, erecting true universes just by words. That is why Literature is the Mother of Liberal Arts, the one that stops many of the other expressive and interpretive arts, and the one that grants the greatest imaginative, creative, associative, pedagogical and symbolic power that there is.
Words and phrases take on intelligible forms, sensations, emotions and reactions in us that are clearer, more precise, beautiful and complex, according to the talent of the writer. Literature generates the appearance of people in the reader (with faces, voices, clothes, mania, virtues and vices); places and scenarios that spring up as we read; experiences and situations that we have never experienced and that are incorporated into those that we already have. And with greater degree and skill of the literary genius, the author — a demiurge — manages to immerse us more in his world; whether this is possible or impossible.
When you read a novel or play, you cannot judge the verisimilitude of situations and characters if you do not let the plot impress you and be revived inwardly like a dream. That’s what fiction is: a directed daydream. As the characters do not physically exist (even if they may have existed historically in the past), you can only find them in your own soul, as symbols of human possibilities that are in you as they are in everyone, but that they embody more clear and exemplary, separate from the contingencies that can make everyday experience obscure. Fiction reading is an exercise in self-knowledge before it can be literary analysis, school activity or even fun: it is not fun to follow an opaque story, whose moves do not evoke the corresponding emotions.
The same requirement applies to history books, with the mitigation that in general the historian has already processed the data intellectually and provides us with a principle of understanding instead of the crude plot of events. If you do not apprehend the actions of historical characters as symbols invested with psychological verisimilitude, you are in no condition to assess whether they are historically true or not. A history book has to be read first as fiction, then as reality.
This whole process increases and refines your vocabulary, writing, style and memory; enhance your knowledge of beings, possibilities and phenomena; enrich your experiences, images, sensations, associations, concepts and emotions; expand your reasoning, conscience, judgment and your own soul — which incorporates all of this in your permanence — to levels that inflate your intelligence towards a state of wisdom. And it is the dialogues and narratives of the great sages — of writing and speaking — that most ignite our intelligence, transferring their personalities, imaginations, worldviews and wisdoms through a mere text, in an idiomatic code. It is the identity of the giants passed indirectly by the Letters. And the ability to recognize the uniqueness of great writers by their texts is the proof that geniuses are few and do stand out (indirectly and through time; revealing their people to us impersonally); mediocre ones are many and they get confused.
Behold, everything that comes out of the pen, of the great poets and writers only, is so worth it. They start everything for the expansion of human intelligence, rolling up vocabularies, structures, aesthetics, styles, impressions, descriptions, simplifications, relationships, explanations… Everything! From there come all the other speeches: the persuasive ones of rhetoric, so dear to panegyricists, advertisements, political oratories and defenses of positions; the contestants of dialectics, indispensable to discussions, scientific debates and the search for truth; and, finally, the logics, pillars of analysis, reasoning and proof.
To write well is to read a lot, to read a lot is to know more, it is to live many lives, places, times, sensations, emotions, feelings, experiences and cultures in a single life of, at most, decades, through the powerful weapons that are books. To enjoy High Literature and the great poets and writers is to access more of the world and the human knowledge advised by the great guides who discovered, encoded and decoded them. Being cultured is essentially having a literary culture: the highest, the most noble, the most beautiful and the most perennial. It all starts there.
“The poet (…) uses these two crude, primitive and archaic forms of thought (simile and metaphor) in the most uninhibited way, because his job is not to describe nature, but to show a world completely absorbed and possessed by the human mind”.
- Northrop Frye
The world is divided into before and after writing; before and after Literature (of poets and prose writers). Thus, the best literacy of the child is the greatest mission of Education; and the best and most complete Education begins with the best of Language and Imagination, which lie in High Literature. Without qualifying a human for the ability to access and understand the great writers of Humanity, Education becomes innocuous, a deceit, an act, a waste, a fraud, a cripple and a barbaric cruelty.
The denial of the best of Education residing in High Literature is what charlatan ideologues promise with their malice, incompetence and ineptitude. These impostors must be identified and swept from the educational, public and private spheres. Primarily in public schools, as it is a fraud that is compulsorily paid with the people’s money (in its simplest stratum), which suffers the most with this genocide of intelligence and the maintenance of stupidity. Cultural, moral, intellectual and spiritual backwardness hangs in this type of evasion of intelligence. In the negation, concealment, or boycott of High Literature.
