In a message dated 4/8/10 7:39:57 PM, [email protected] quotes Borges:
> - The aesthetic event is something as evident, as immediate, as
> indefinable
> as love, the taste of fruit, of water. We feel poetry as
> we feel the closeness of a woman, or as we feel a mountain or a bay. If
> we
> feel it immediately, why dilute it with other words, which no doubt will
> be
> weaker than our feelings?
>
> Jorge Luis Borges
>
Borges's lines are a luscious rhapsody to the "aesthetic event", but they
don't persuade me. The last century's non-Victorian examination of mechanical
aspects of sexual activity were not simply a dilution of "love-making" and
orgasms with words. His male-centric thinking ("we feel the closeness of a
woman") seems oblivious to how much men and women found out about how and why
to give pleasure to the woman. The old line of the British lady always
struck me as a hideous indictment: When confronted with the sexual demands of
her husband, the woman of Victorian times was advised to "Just lie back, and
think of England." Google that line.
Why teach young artists of any genre if it isn't to help them "do it
better"? Granted, no amount of teaching will raise a student to creating "art"
if
the innate gift isn't there, but if it IS there. . .?
I claim my question, "What is happening during an 'a.e.'?" is potentially
useful. Besides, just achieving a greater "understanding" is gratifying in
itself. Does anybody believe Aristotle's "Poetics" was a bad, diluting
thing?
