BLOG 2010 WEEK 01: 0101-0109: The Boys of Mullabawn

I opened the book, More Irish Street Ballads (The Three Candles, Dublin, 1965) at The Boys of Mullabawn. I presume this is the same Mullaghbawn not far from Newry City, Ireland. 

It's a track I remember hearing years ago on a tape called Songs Out of Oriel, recorded by the sons of Irish musicologist, Sean O'Baoill, whose daughter, Eilis, was our friend and neighbour for many years. My father sent me these recordings, as a keepsake from home. 

He also sent me a copy of Sean O’Baoill’s book, called Ogham, The Poet's Secret, all about 20-character Irish alphabetic cipher (as referring to the 20-note scale of the harp), published posthumously by his sons, who also recorded the Songs Out of Oriel, which included their arrangement of the Boys of Mullabawn. 

Oriel is the old, poetic name for the part of Ulster stretching along the east west axis from Down to Fermanagh. 

I remember Mullabawn only as the place where some classmates came from. The song as the O'Baoills recorded it, has a haunting air, and I was very pleased to find it in this book. 

More Irish Street Ballads has some other songs from Newry district, such as, The Newry Prentice Boy and The Newry Highwayman. The Boys from Mullabawn is in the a sad, romantic scale key of E flat. 

The book, by the way, written by Colm O'Lochlainn, is beautifully designed and illustrated with woodcuts throughout the book, including 7 by Thomas Bewick, lent by Miss Pauline Bewick of Dublin, a descendent of his.

I copied the score of the song into my songbook, and scanned it here. The staves have been rearanged to fit the phrasing of the ballad. 

The Boys of Mullabawn

 

I beg your pardon ladies, and ask you this one favour,
I hope it is no treason on you I must now call,
I'm condoling late and early, my heart is nigh to breaking,
All for a noble lady that lives near Mullabawn.

Squire Jackson he's unequalled for honour and for reeason,
He never turned a traitor, nor betrayed the Rights of Man,
But now we are in danger, from a vile deceiving stranger,
Who has ordered transportation for the Boys of Mullabawn.

As those heroes crossed the ocean, I'm told the ship in motion
Would stand in wild commotion as if the seas ran dry;
The trout and salmon gaping, as "The Cuckoo" left her station,
Saying "Fare you well, old Erin, and the hills of Mullabawn."

So to end my lamentation, we are all in consternation
None cares for recreation until the day do dawn;
For without hesitation, we are charged with combination
And sent for transportation from the hills of Mullabawn.

BLOG 2009 WEEK 47: 1115-1121 A Poem:The Wonder

THE WONDER

Back in '77, one Indian summer
afternoon, his sister Margrit came
to visit with her child, then 2-years-old.
He took them out to Stanley Park, to see
the giant firs around the Lost Lagoon.

As they were walking by the water's edge
the child fell in the lake, and sank like stone.

His sister froze in shock. He scanned the lake;
the child had disappeared, without a trace.
The lake was smooth as glass, the bottom grey;
the clay mud angled sloping steeply down,
then fell away fast, plunging out of sight.

The vanished child could drown at any time,
but Marge and he had never learned to swim.
So he stepped forward, onto the water.
A few steps farther, still there was no sign,
but then he heard a submarine child's voice
that sounded small as insects wings around
behind his head and coming from the right.

He spins around, looks down, and there appears
a row of rippling wavelets at his feet
like shining grains of shimmering silver sand
vibrating on a perspex drum. He reaches
his left hand in to find his niece's head,
and hauls her up to air. He hands the girl
to Marge and she and child begin to scream,
the girl more scared by Marge's fearful yells.

Too crazed by shock Marge never stops to wonder
that only his left forearm is soaked through.

Aidan Meehan

091009 Fri. 17:30

BLOG 2009 WEEK 46: 1108-1114 SAVITRI

I finally sorted Myspace. Here is the first song from Music of Aidan recorded at Findhorn Studios in 1974; the title is from the name of a poem by Sri Aurobindu, the lyrics are based on words from his poem of that name.  

SAVITRI

Into this fallen 
human sphere they came,

Faces that wore
the immortals' glory still

Voices that still communed
with the thoughts of god

Bodies made beautiful
by the spirit's light,

Carrying 
the magic wand,
the mystic fire
the cup of joy:

The sun-eyed children
of a marvelous dawn,
Approaching eyes of
diviner man,

Their tread, one day,
will change this suffering world,

And we shall justify
the light on nature's face.

Words and music by Aidan Meehan, 1974

(you mayhear the MP3 sample of this track at http:// myspace.com/aidanmeehan)

BLOG 2009 WEEK 45: 1101-1107 NEW BEGINNING

The Celtic new year used to begin at November 1st, the autumn festival of Samhain, as it was called in Irish. I have been falling behind with my blog,  and so I am going to leap into the present, and catch as I go along from week to week, to bridge the gap. 

This week I have been wrestling with Myspace, which I find very confusing. Its not that I am a complete doofus, I've been designing my own web pages since 1996. I am trying to post music, and it seems that Myspace is set up to do that, only I soon found out that I need to sign up as a musician, and not as a regular person.

I learned all this too late. I had already signed on as a regular, and when I then signed on as a musician, found that Myspace only recognises one profile, and my non-music profile kept popping up when I true to edit the profile on my music page.

So I deleted my first account. Then my music page wa nolonger available.  I reapplied, but had to use a different email than the google address I used before.  Next thing I am up and running, only when I load up my music onto my music page it doesn't show up.  Somehow my old music page had revived, and the track have turned up on the one I thought I had deleted.

I wound up with 2 music pages, but can only install music on the first!  I am not sure if I should delete my account altogether and start over.  If I delete the first account, will the second disappear also? I do not know. I have already advertised the music I uploaded as supposed to be available on the second one. I think I will just have to start over, and hope it will work out, 3rd time lucky. 

Why doesn't facebook just allow people to upload their music? I guess they are afraid that people will upload pirated tracks, and then get sued for allowing it. Meanwhile, muscians are stuck with Myspace.  Stay tuned!

BLOG 2009 WEEK 37: 0906-0912 CORACLE VOL 02 .12

NOW ONLINE AT: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/12/index.html

I am currently gathering material for an in-depth study of the art of flourishing, which is almost complete. I have studies drawn from 10 years of practice, and a lot from historic sources to give an overview from the 16th-18th century, up to the beginning of the modern tradition, starting from George Bickham in the 1740's.

After that, the tradition divides into the period from about 1800 to 1850, when flourishes were still influenced by the use of the quill, and those which, from about 1830 follow from the introduction of the pointed metal nib. 

I trace the art itself to roots in the 16th century, leaving aside its development of from its earlier knotwork ornament. I begin with Durer, in 1515, and trace the art him to Bickham through those two centuries, and from around Europe during that time.

The material from this, the copperplate period shows how the art of decorating became commercialized, as penmanship became more intensely linked to bookkeeping and accounting, reflecting the spread of business education through copperplate-printed copybooks. 

For better or for worse, the art of flourishing became the business of enterprising penmen schoolmasters, aiming to attract students by offering the art of penmanship as a way to self improvement, financial independence and business success. 

This is the basis of the tradition stemming from the first manual produced in north American continent, John Jenkins’ Art of Penmanship. In that book, on the frontispiece, we see the finely flourished swan that was to be copied of the next hundred years, with greater or lesser competence, by thousands of followers. Their accumulated practice is cherished today as Folk art. 

Apart from this flourished swan, other motifs, such as the quill, the eagle, the bird in the nest, winged heads, and scrolls, combined with abstract flourished, became the stock in trade through the 19th century.

While I see this growth as more deeply rooted in the early middle ages, I also see it as a new growth beginning in the early 16th century and flowering to the present day. In presenting the history of flourishing from an artist's point of view, I would like to take the opportunity to give a critical assessment of the art form. 

I propose to review of the engraved models of flourishing, so as to reinstate the ornaments according to how they may be drawn with the traditional goose quill pen. The artist, taking up this artform, needs models which can be done with the quill, rather than relying on those which have been engraved, or models copied directly from engravings, using the steel pen to replicate the metallic precision of the engraved line. 

Many designs which were originally done with the quill, were first translated into copperplate engravings, then replicated by the metal-nibbed pen, exactly reproducing the appearance of printed models. Old-time pen masters benefited in two way by doing this. They saved money on steel plates, by writing business cards or one-off posters, or certificates, that looked as if they had been engraved; and they impressed the public with their prowess—it is impressive to see a drawing which is indistinguishable from a print.

The metal pen nib made this exact appearance of an engraved model possible. The immediate object was to convince the viewer that the penman was qualified to teach penmanship to this highest conceivable degree of attainment in a short time, for a fee, in return for attending his school. In adopting the art flourishing to advertising purposes, and while reproducing it in such a way as to resemble the engraved plate, flourishing was taken over by the steel pen, and adapted to its form, which significantly differs from that of the quill. 

The history of calligraphy in the 20th century developed from the idea that writing and lettering, as a whole had degenerated as a consequence of the replacement of the quill by the metal nib, and ought to be reformed by a revival of the use of the quill. Just as the recovery of the quill in the 20th century provided a vital impulse which revived the art of the scribe, the revival of flourishing should be founded on the goose quill as the ideal tool with which to test a model. It is the ideal tool for reconstructing the model from which the engraving was produced. Reconstruction is better rather than just copying the engraving, which may have been tampered with by the engraver.

Engravers tampering with the model compromises the freedom of the pen to execute the design, forcing penlifts and workarounds such as turning the paper to follow the motion of the burin on the plate. Or worse, trying to copy a design which has been engraved in reverse, or printed upside down, or printed white on black.

Black-on-white, or negative imaging became popular in engraving about 150 years ago, and was soon emulated by engrossers by writing white ink on black paper. But this is emulation of lazy or incompetant printers, who rolled ink onto the plate and printed the background black, leaving the envraved line empty, instead of removing the ink from all but the engraved lines, which needs more skill, and takes longer to do. This short-cut was found to be visually effective for classified ads, because it stands out in a page of newsprint and so it was taken up as an advertising gimmick.

Then, when photo-mechanical processing came into vogue, from the 1870s on, photographic negatives were used to produce negative images of the same kind, for graphic effect -- this is just one example of how the engraving process has taken us further away from the purpose of flourishng, that was originally command of hand: that is, direct, spontanaeous, freehand performance of the flourish, with as few penlifts and strokes as possible, with quill and ink-struck with calligraphic gestural freedom.

I would like to show examples of drawings made with the quill, compared with models drawn from engravings, and with a metal pen; to illustrate the different feel of each medium, and to show the natural look of the quill-formed, calligraphic flourish. My approach would illustrate the construction of the flourish, to show how the design my be reproduced more naturally, with greater freedom, and therefore truer art, by using the goose quill. 

It would be helpful also to point out bad examples that have been published and republished, since the 19th century. For example, while transcribing flourishes presented by George Becker in the 1870s, I found that some of his models had been misleadingly executed by the engraver, producing shades that can only be reproduced by the pen by lifting it or turning the paper around. Rather than turning the paper in all directions to reproduce illogical shades found in many engraved models, the engraved models can be corrected, and restored to quill-drawn form. Other models were printed in reverse, or upside down. Theses examples cause trouble to calligraphers who try to copy them.

The pen drawing can be demonstrated stroke by stroke, restoring the motifs to their source as aids for learning to use and control the quill, to test its cut, and to test the flow and blackness of the ink. I hope this project will provide a service to future generations of graphic artists, enabling them not only to take part in the revival of this rich calligraphic heritage, but at the same time to learn how to master this most excellent of drawing tools, the original form of the pen from which the art of flourishing arose, the properly-prepared goose quill.

BLOG 2009 WEEK 36: 0830-0905 CORACLE VOL 2.11

  CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE ELEVEN Now online: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/11/index.html

Blog 2009 WEEK 35: 0823-0829

CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE TEN NOW ONLINE AT: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/10/index.html

Isle of Glass

There is an Isle of Glass
Isle of the blessed, Hy Brasil—In the west;  
Ruins of cities chopped off by the sea; 
Ancient maps and myths, and mystery. 

Who ever knows the truth 
Objectively 
Can never show the proof 
So all agree: 
The Torah; The Upanishad; Lao Tse? 
Muhammad; Dammapada; Christianity? 

There is one myth that's true, 
That lights my life, 
A golden thread run though  vBoth sides alike;  
So in and out are equally to me 
But oscillations of the unity: 

The memory of a Golden Age— 
Long gone and yet to come; 

  The remnant of a divine race 
  In longboats from the sun— 
  The memory of a timeless face, 
  When all the words become 
  A single trackwayto a field of grass— 
  Where I am dazzled. 

There is a place so clear, 
It strikes a chord; 
My mind contracting near- 
Imagined border— 
Here hang the shining fruit upon the tree; 
Yonder, ocean, beckoning me. 

Here, close at hand 
Is certainty, 
Here, fertile land; 
Yonder the sea. 
I am a stream has never known 
Beyond its boundary, 
Does not shrink back into earth 
It’s laboured through so long; 
But dissolves, and dying, finds rebirth,  
Such a one was never born! 

  For what is all the knowledge worth  
  If, when, before a thing is known, 
  One simple word of what is real 
  Does all reveal? 

There is an Isle of Glass 
Isle of the blessed, Hy Brasil— 
In the west;  
Ruins of cities chopped off by the sea; 
Ancient maps and myths, and mystery. 

—Aidan Meehan, Jan 1979- Dec 2009 

BLOG 2009 WEEK 34: 0816-0822

CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE NINE   NOW ONLINE AT: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/09/index.html

Reading Caesar and Cleopatra, George Bernard Shaw. It's good.

Had a dream in which I heard a piece of music, woke up with the tune in my head. Wrote it down, titled it Marching in the Street, though that is not quite what the music was about. It was in the street— Broadway—and it was a kind of march: It was being sung by a soprano, and people were standing in a crowd, listening to her voice, rather passively. I had in mind also a song of triumph—‘Street March’—but that might as well suggest the idea of a marching tune heard in the street, or performed on a street. The title I gave it sounds like a protest movement. There must be a word for a victory song. Paean, perhaps: a song of praise or triumph. Street Paean? Works for me, but perhaps a bit obscure for anyone else. Should I care? No, titles are just meaningless labels anyway. What does the _name_ of a house matter to its architect? The name is an after thought, used to identify the building, not necessarily a clue to its "meaning". I’m thinking of Irish fiddle tune titles: Scatter the Mud; Billy Barlow; Drive the Cows Home; The Hare in the Corn; Red Stockings; The Silken Wallet; Toss the Feathers; Boiled Goat’s Milk; The Thrush’s Nest; Tie the Petticoat Tighter; Money in Both Pockets; Banish Misfortune; Cherish the Ladies; The Kid on the Mountain; The Man from Newry.

I like Eric Satie’s titles the best.  

Blog 2009 WEEK 33 0809-0815: Meaning of Celtic Knots; Mahler's 2nd

CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE EIGHT http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/08/index.html

I have put my best print, Devenish up for sale on my website:   http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/p/0055/index.html

I recently wrote a letter to a correspondent, a clerical student, talking about the symbolism of knotwork, from a cosmolgical view point. With students who are trained in a theological background, I feel comfortable in speaking to them in these terms, which draw upon a way of thinking for which I rarely meet an audience. It is symbolic thinking, and I can draw on my own experience with drawing knots, remembering how significant even the simple act of placing a dot on the blank paper could be to me, it made me imagine the beginning of the universe, the birth of the cosmos. This was my introduction to the intelligibility of form in traditional pattern. 

I remember Coomaraswamy's dictum that symbolic art of this kind serves as a support of comntemplation of first principles, and these principles are most naturally expressed in myth and sacred scriptures as accounts of how the world began. Cosmogenesis is a genre of philosophical speculation, which I first met in comparative religious studies, through the writings of Coomaraswamy and Guenon, Schuon and others of that mid-20th century, comparative religion studies group. 

How many people still read those authors? I doubt if many ever did, they were an obscure specialist niche within the field of comparative religion even then. But now when I meet a student with a back ground in religious studies, I tend to take advantage of the possibliity that they are familiar enough with the cant of cosmology and ontology to tolerate my airing my speculations and special interest, as an artist, in the subject.

Finished my book of Somerset Maugham stories. Interesting change of style in the last two, Miss King and The Hairless Mexican, from his Ashenden spy series: written in a snappy thriller style, evey sentence a statement of fact, furthering the narrative, like a detective's report, barely relieved by dialogue or descriptive observations. 

Miss King is oddly anticlimactic. I did not get it at all on first reading. Maybe I will when I reread it. It seems like a dream, inconclusive and disjointed. The narrative is hard to follow, there are so many characters, he takes the reader to a hotel and lists every guest one after that other, it seems, then introduces Miss King, only to kill her off with a stroke saying only "England", but we don't know what she means by that, it seems we are left to make of it whatever we want. (Could it be that he recorded this story as received in a dream? That would explain the combination of structured story and illogical, disjointed subject).  

He speculates, as if to give us a choice of interpretations, but leaves it swinging in the wind--most unsatisfying. Is he parodying the taste of the day for flouting the rules of good story writing, for originality at all cost, the unexpected, for its own sake? He has criticised modern writing often enough, he seems to have come around to it, and perhaps his ambivalence leads him to subvert the form because the times have forced him to adopt it, the market demands it, to prove he is not outdated, but he does it with an ill grace, and yet, despite himself, has fun with it. That would be plausible if he was feeling cynical about literature, the craft of authorship, when he wrote it. The style is infuenced by the spy genre, the mystery novel, the detective story. The lack of plot seems modernistic and existential, Beckett meets James Bond.  

I popped into the framer’s, and found they sell canvas stretcher bars, cheaper that de Serres or Opus. Good prices, could maybe buy stretcher bars in bulk from them. It would mean standardising my sizes, do I really want to do that? I don't know that I do. 

My gut rebels at the thought of standardising my artwork, bu this may be thoughtless reaction. I recall seeing a photo of Francis Bacon working at a large canvas on which he had a portrait happening that was all ruled out square, but had acres of margin, allowing for possible alterations of proportion as the picture evolved. I could imagine doing a figure, then feeling inspired to add a border, and make the picture bigger. Best to start on a large expanse, and cut the canvas to size after the work is finished so that it does not become cramped by the predetermined size of a canvas that may be too small for the image as it turns out. I have felt this about some canvases I did earlier. Maybe I should try this. I can have the canvas stretched afterwords, if I choose. 

Taking the bus home, I found I had time left on my ticket, and so I thought I would go have a coffee and write some music; I had a tune running through my mind all the way there,  but when I got to Broadway, and popped into the coffee shop on Commercial there, found I had forgotten my wallet; after ordering a coffee I could not pay for it. The waitress was friendly, said it didn't matter, and I caught the bus back, just in time. But I wrote the song down, on the way up to Broadway, and called it Heat Wave, which it felt like inside that bus.  

After 7 months, I can at last write a simple melody in notation now. I am beginning to be able to identify the key signature in my mind, by extending the scale up or down a few notes, to find the half notes, and by counting the whole intervals between one half note and another, I can identify the key note, and write the melody exactly as it comes into my mind.

This is kindergarten music theory, I realise, but I find it very exciting. I wish I had been taught to write music by a competent teacher, when I was a child, beying the tonic solfa we learned in church choir. This is an invisible and almost completely overlooked part of the curriculum. But art af any kind was almost wholly absent from my schooling. We were taught to sing, not to read music. We did into have an art teacher until half way through my secondary school education, in my mid- teens.  There was no teaching of playing instruments, instruments, there was no dance at all.  I don't supose my schooling was any worse than average, during the 1960s.

Heard a nice tune on the radio, Lou Reed playing a very beautiful guitar riff backing on a feel-good anthem by Bare Naked Ladies's Kevin Hearne, from his new recording, Coma. I'd like to get.

Listening to Posner and Garvelman playing Trimble's arrangements of Irish traditional tunes for 4-hand piano, I like it a lot. It has the freshness of modern classical music, in the traditional of Vaughan Williams, and Percy French, but with the zest of Irish tradition, which I am currently catching up on, as of a few months ago.

Updated my website to reflect addition of the new book, Maze patterns: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/t/0006/index.html

I have started collecting together graphics for a study of the devlopment of flourishing with the quill pen 1515-1950. I have 45 pages of illustrations in one collection, and I don't know yet how many more may be turned up.

Listened to Jeno Jando on piano, playing Beethoven. I like the way he plays, he seems to play without obvious interpretation, just lets the music speak for itself. I listen to Beethoven's thought, rather than the pianist's. I think that is the mark of a great classical pianist.  He's not to everyone's taste, I know, but his transparent style appeals to me. 

Read some Leacock, Sunshine Sketches.

I had forgotten about Mahler. Listening to the opening of his second, the Resurection symphony, is just electifying. I love rock'n'roll bass lines in classical music (Beethoven's 5th, 3rd movement, for example), and this is one. He achieves with massive orchestration what Hendrix achieved with banks of amps, the wall of white noise, in this case, percussion and bass in fusion. Double bass, kettle drums, bottom feeding brass and woodwind supply the underworld substratum from which the first movement struggles to extricate itself in to the light of day. It's a thriller. 

I am listening to it on the headphones while writing up the web pages for the Coracle Volume 2 Issue 8.

The reprise of those thunderous bombshells, is even more profoundly abysmal. Then the funeral march picks up again, once again, rising through an imperial death dance to a crescendo that colapses back into the pit whence it came, only to gather all its courage together and climb back out of the grave, defiantly, quickly securing a footing on the surface of the earth, when it pauses, basks in ecstatic wonder as dawn breaks on a vast plane of oceanic relief. 

Barely has this registered when a shadow begins to rise from behind the horizon, storm clouds gather, swelling up to mass overhead, where they part, in a slow spiral, broken by sporadic flashes. 

Out of this descend slowing winding notes of brass, to a tattoo of kettle drums, then they collapse, and alight, gently, on the earth, and rest. 

The second movement opens with a complete change of mood, stately, courtly, romantic waltzing strings introduce a rapid staccato backbeat that scatters the atmosphere. 

Out of this, the waltz returns, sounding slightly dazed, less complacent. It sways to a halt. In rolls the staccato, with a heavier ballast, and the waltz rouses itself to compete with it. The two contraries fuse, esplode. Plucked strings pick up the pieces and perform a cabaret carousel that turns around and around, until swept up by the waltz, in full fig, all crinoline and handsome hussars, waving ostrich plumes and fluttering fans, until the dance subsides into a serene caress.  

Downloading Kevin Burke's 1999 Solo Fiddle and 1997 Hoof and Mouth albums from eMusic (building a reference library of Irish traditional revival of the last 5o years). I prefer the first, as I am more interested in the traditional fiddle tunes than the more modern folk-rock feel of the original material in the second, though I got a chuckle out of his song, Oedipus Rex, though, off the Hoof and Mouth album.

Blog 2009 WEEK 32: 0802-0808 On Reading Maugham, Truth, Neauty, Goodness

CORACLE VOLUME TWO ISSUE SEVEN  Now online: http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/vol02/07/index.html

Somerset Maugham’s The Unconquered is a change of scene for him, from the South Seas and the Riviera to wartime Germany, after the fall of the Maginot line. This is the 4th story of his in this selection so far to end in death by drowning. It seems to have been a habit with Maugham. The Rain, The Pool, and Macintosh all end up under water. 

My reading was interrupted by a late snack: I pulverised the anchovies remaining in a can opened last week, ground them in a mortar with some paprika and soy, and made a kind of anchovy paste, which I spread on crackers and ate with a thin slice of cheddar covered with antipasto from a jar. It was all very tasty. Surprisingly good. I was glad to find a use for anchovies that have been sitting open in the fridge too long. I was worried they might be going off, but was assured that they smelt no worse than they usually do. 

I later read another Maugham story, The Voice of the Turtle, about the prima donna with the funny handle, La Falterona. It ends up with his description of her singing the swan song of Wagner's Isolde. I had to get up, and get the track, and play it over the speakers in the bedroom. I went out like a light, smiling.

Later in the week, I read story after story of Maugham. One morning I got up, looking for another book of short stories containing one by Maugham where it gave his dates birth and death. I did not find it. Instead, all I found was an entry in Whit Burnett's anthology of Greatest Living Authors, in The Worlds Best of 1950, when Maugham was still alive. 

A selection from his autobiography was chosen for inclusion, under the title, Truth, Beauty, Goodness. I found it too boring to finish, what I read of it seemed uninspired. His view of beauty, as the end of art, left me cold. He reduced it to aesthetics, with are at best subjective, and change from generation to generation, and from place to place. Having based his definition of beauty on this shifting ground, he has to conclude that beauty, and therefore art, is an elusive and unreliable chimera, unless it serve the greater good of all. I do not agree either that beauty is not objectively definable, or that it should serve a moral imperative, as to serve good is as subjective a motive for art as aesthetics.  

Aesthetics is not about beauty, is is about what feels good, or pleases the eye, or tickles the palette, or arouses desire, that is, whatever appeals to the senses. That is no more beauty than it is the deifinition of goodness. Beauty, like goodness, are qualities that can be defined philisophically, and therefore objectively. Goodness can be considered as the object of ethical studies, in the same way that beauty is the object of the artist’s lifework. Aesthetics has to do with what is in fashion, as whatever looks good to the trend setter, or whatever is the undustry standard for the look of the moment, beauty spelled with a small-b, only glamour. 

The objective quality of beauty, like mercy, is not strained; it droppeth on the glamourous and unglamourous alike; it is in the heart, not the eye of the beholder; it rings true, because it is real. We cannot define these qualities—truth, reality, goodness—but we know them when we witness them, and they awaken the recognition of their existence in us through those rare encounters with the real, the good, the true, in art. 

When we encounter any and all of these qualities (for they are one and the same) in art, we can agree objectively that that is beautiful. It may not be pretty, but it rings true. And not only for us, but for anyone with the capacity to appreciate the real thing—not only today, or for a season, or a generation, but for all generations, for all time. This constant, perrenial revelation of great art has the power to make us feel, as Rilke did before the marble of Apollo, “I have to change my life”. 

Since Maugham’s argument is so weak, his conclusion is anti-climactic: that beauty in art is that which must improve the lot of humanity or uplift the individual to be a better person: "Goodness is the only value that seems in this world of appearances to have any claim to be an end in itself. Virtue is its own reward. I am ashamed to have reached so commonplace a conclusion. With my instinct for effect I should have liked to end my book with startling and paradoxical announcement or with a cynicism that my reader would have recognised with a chuckle as characteristic. It seems I have little more to say than can be read in any chapbook or heard from any pulpit. I have gone a long way round to discover what everyone knew already." 

I believe that beauty in art is the perception of intelligible form. When you first look at a painting, say, without knowing the form, or understanding the artist's intention, the work may be unintelligible. Since the aesthetic reaction does not depend on intelligibility, one may find the painting beautiful, or not, according to your subjective, aesthetic response. This is the level of art appreciation that need not know art, but it knows what it likes. We share this capacity with our pets. Without it, we feel nothing, that is what the word, an-aesthetic, without feeling, implies. The corrollory of this etymological fact is that aesthetics concerns dentistry, or surgery, more than art. 

This arbitrary, aesthetic response is not relevant to art work, because whether a particular viewer likes it, is no foundation on which any artist should base his work. Equally, whether anyone will buy the work, is not an artistic concern.

Artists who set out to please the crowd, aiming solely to profit by making art for the market, build their notion of beauty on fickle opinion. The market is the general public, who "don't know anything about art, but know what they like". When an artist guesses what the mass of people, at the present time, like, and delivers it, he is not producing either art or beauty, but what people want at that time, which may not be art, may not be beautiful. 

If, on the other hand, the artist is concerned with the form of the medium, and understands what has been done in the field up to that time, and sees a way to take that form forward in a new direction, in a way that allows others to understand the form in a new way, then that work is intelligible. It has meaning, in its own form, which other other artists who work in that form can see, and understand. 

It may be a revolution that will encourage the exploration of a new direction, that may even change the course of the history of art. This may in turn become fashionable, as a result of top-down filtering; and it may become identifiable with a certain period; but there are in every art depths of formal intelligibility that can transcend time, such as a painting by Rembrandt which continues to inspire painter centuries after his death, because he reveals a truth about the art of representation of the figure by means of light and colour; a truth about the relation between breadth of handling and the engagement of the viewer's visual imagination; a truth about the representation of the individual humanity of the subject, depicted through the universal language of the body and the facial expression alone. 

If the truth of the form is there, the work is beautiful to anyone with the slightest capacity for appreciation, it endures because, to stick with the form of painting for an example, from the formulation of the paint and the handling of the brush, to the choice of subject and its composition, nevermind the theory of light, perspective, colour, and the foundation of drawing underneath all, a Rembrandt painting stands outside of time, untouched by fashion, for all ages, even though it may well have offended the fashion of its own time. 

In the same way, Van Gogh changed the history of painting in his work, although his paintings were unintelligible to the market of his own day. They were understood later, as the mass of human beings have come around to appreciate Vincent's work, through the work of all the art movements which sprang up after his death, exploring new ways to use colours, new ways to apply paint, new ways to give vitality and expressiveness to the surface of the canvas, indeed, to recognise that it is nothing else than paint on a surface, and that the medium and the artist's imposition of his feelings are as important, or more so, than the exact resemblance of the likeness of the portrait, or the appearance of the landscape. Vincent's form of painting succeeded because it shocked even painters of greater facility than him to attempt to be more true to themselves, more personally expressive, in their painting. And the mass of people eventually began to judge as beautiful, what first they thought was ugly. 

I don't condemn art motivated by the desire to make money; that does not guarantee a beautiful work of art, and if that is the only motive, I question if it is art. To be art, I judge, it would have to have an intelligible form, the artist must demonstrate a knowledge of the form: if it is painting, it must be understandable to painters, as demonstrating a command of the form; to be judged competent, it must meet some standard, or demonstrate some familiarity with accepted forms of the art, even if only to breach the accepted rules. But if it commands a high price, or becomes famous, that alone does not mean that it is successful or even good, as art. 

That may seem to go without needing to be said. I only make a point of it in order to draw the comparison with the assumption that virtue or goodness is an acceptable definition of art, as Maugham suggests. Just as an artist may do art chiefly or even totally for money, that does not guarantee that the result will be good art, or necessarily beautiful,even if it commands a high price. 

In just the same way, an artist may be motivated to further the public good, whether by social comment or service. However good the cause, the result is not guaranteed to be a beautiful work of art, any more than if the motive was selfish money-grubbing. So, just as money-earning ability should not be taken as a measure of an artist, neither should the social benefit of the work. 

From where I sit, it is equally irrelevant to the value of the art whether it is judged beautiful or ugly. A great work of art can depict a subject which may very well affront the moral values of the majority of people who attend its first exhibition. The history of art is full of examples of works which were condemned as decadent or degenerate by the society which viewed them at the time. And so the artist must look further for meaning and purpose of art than income or social relevancy. The market place may praise the work that sells, and the community may reward the artist who serves it, but the praises and rewards of society at large are unfortunately accorded by the masses who care nothing for art, and whose praises or condemnations should therefore properly be ignored by the artist on the trail of truth, goodness and beauty in art.  

Blog 2009 WEEK 31: 0726-0801: Reading Maugham's 3 Fat Women

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Read a funny story, The three Fat Woman of Antibes, by Somerset Maugham. It made me think of some women’s lifelong struggle to overcome gluttony. Maugham's own view is expressed through the attitude of the doctor in the story, "She upbraided the doctor but got no sympathy from him. He pointed out to her various plain and simple facts." The fact being that many people are fat because they will not curtail the appetite, but abitually indulge it. It is a problem of the will, a vice, and deserves to be disapproved by the doctor. 

Disapproval is justified by those who do not indulge in gluttony, rather than the young, who pig out and burn it off, and condemn their elders who eating no more than their juniors, but metabolise it less efficiently, and exercise less. 

Disapproval of the fat is not justified in those fortunates for whom food is only fuel, who claimed not to care particularly what they put in their mouths, they did not care for food as such, they eat to maintain physical strength, for no other reason than that. I pitied those people, if what they claim is true, for taste is one of the senses, and food should be enjoyed as a sensory, if not sensual experience, to develop the palate just as music should be appreciated to develop the ear. Those who do not appreciate the pleasures of the table are puritanical, in the original sense of that word, and have a streak of asceticism that runs deep in European culture, asceticism having been a popular pastime in ancient times. 

Most overweight people are hedonists; but that’s not why we are fat. It is not that we cannot say no to food. We can, but we are unwilling to do so. We say we have no will power, but we do: we exercise it every time we will ourselves to eat more than we know we need. we apply our will power to overeating. That is what we are able and willing to do. This is what frustrates the doctor. Essentially, there is nothing a doctor can do, because this is not a disease, the problem is the patient is unwilling to take advice, and persists in choosing to do the self-destructive thing, unwilling to stop it. To lament, “I can’t stop myself!” is hypocritical. We stop ourselves from eating right all the time. That’s why we’re fat!

BLOG 2009 WK 30: 0719-072: Celtic Borders, Reading Maugham

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Set up ordering form for my book, Celtic Borders, and uploaded to web page:  http://mypage.direct.ca/a/ameehan/t/0011/index.html

I am reading a book of Somerset Maugham's short stories, selected from his complete short stories, which I would very much like to have, as I really enjoy all his stories I have read so far. Either I am developing a taste for short stories, or Maugham is just a very good story teller. By which I suppose I mean that his style of storytelling is the sort I should like to write myself. 

His stories are much more immediately satisfying than Joyce's, for example, although Joyce's are more convincing, subtler, less dramatic. Maugham's stories are focused on moving the action forward, and he captures the interest by providing emotional intensity, his characters portray passions, caught in circumstances that push them to emotional extremes, and he describes what they are feeling, so that you identify and sympathise with them. Joyce’s short stories frame a moment in time, produce the effect of impressionist painting in words, a cinematographic snapshot of a moment. Maugham’s grip the reader's sympathies, hold the attention, so that it is hard to put down the book until the story ends. 

These may have been written for magazine publication, in the days when people read stories in magazines, and page turning was the commercial rule. Joyce is not a page-turner, but his stories are more realistic; he creates a feeling of authenticity, convinces the reader—especially an Irish reader born in the 7 decades of the last century, that what he is describing is what the reader recalls from his own experience, and is somehow persuaded into believing that the events of the story are drawn from his own memories. 

Joyce is the greater artist. His art is more existential, subtler, intellectual, and his effect is deeper, more lasting. Still, I enjoy Maugham's tales, especially thse early ones of the South Sea, that read like Stevenson adventures, but with a more modern sensibility, more disillusionment, less tolerance for religious hypocrisy, a colder, sharper, more penetrating psychological insight, and more awareness of the female point of view. 

At the same time, he reports with detachment the prejudices and pretensions of his time; the end of the Victorian era, the turn of the century, the snobbery, the racism, the sexism of his characters does not seem to be satirical, but is presented as how people then thought, and expressed themselves; white people, raised to believe they were superior to all others, to whom the whole world was viewed as their colonial possession. In some ways like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in his dissection of the meanness of that mentality. In his short stories, Rain, Honolulu, Maugham charts a course midway between Stevenson's South Seas and Conrad's Africa.

BLOG 2009 WEEK 29: 0712-0718: Fiction: Turgenev; Mann

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Read a story by Turgenev, The Hamlet of the Schigri District. I found it interesting, although I do not quite get it, as a story. The narrator goes to a gathering, winds up sharing a room with another character, who declares himself to be an nonentity, and goes on to tell his life story, how he came to be nobody. Then he rolls over and goes to sleep, without telling his name. So there are two narrators, the purpose of the first being to introduce the second, and the nonentity's life story is easily the life story of any middle aged man of middle class background. Written in 1849, it might be considered a foreshadowing of the existential literature of the 20th century. 

I reread Thomas Mann's Disorder and Early Sorrow, written in1925, though whether that is the date of the story or the translation, I am not sure. I think it may be the date of the story, if it is autobiographical; andI think it is, as the family in the story sounds like Mann's own, with four children, two adults and two infants, as I believe was his case in the early 20's. It is a complete and tender recreation of his home life. Rereading it is for me like a visit home, back in time, recalling to my mind the atmosphere of my early childhood. My time and circumstances were different. The way he paints the picture is so skillful, that it evoke similar recollections in every reader, even one like me, coming from a subsequent generation.