And how beauty is manifested. Or so we are claiming because if you run your eye across to the right hand side of this page, and click on the A Manifesto link, you will find there (item 10) the statement that “There is an aesthetic”.
That is a creative system, And what is it? From our dialogic strap line comes the idea that it is an exchange system, a mix of questions and… – , a mix of questions and statements (I would prefer to say that rather than questions and answers) – concerning the spiritual life.
As opposed to the “spiritually lifeless”, a phrase I picked up recently on reading an online essay by CK Williams the American poet (‘All Around the World the Same Song…’ (2009)), in order to describe when a form has become “the end in itself”…
…And not worth the effort of bothering with. Like the majority of Anglo-Saxon based publishing these days, one of the Colonels bellows up from below, Like most English novels, another one chips in, And much of the poetry too.
It cannot be denied we tend to spend a lot of our literary time here abroad. These last few months we’ve been on the Argentine pampas, coming across hitherto unfamilar names such as Alejandra Pizarnik (Alejandra, alejandra / debayo estoy yo / alejandra), and Néstor Perlongher . Before that – Or is it simultaneously given Alejandra’s lost Russian-Jewish ancestry? – we were in eastern Europe and talking with some of our friends from there about the likes of Adam Zagajewski and Jenny Erpenbeck, and the many others who they intercept at their ‘Listening Stations’ and help us with translations.
A continental reach which is embodied here as walking, talking and writing, and that works as an ongoing movement between question and statement. It is also a one-way-street system, meaning that it is always moving from the transparent to the opaque, always failing to arrive in any final sense, constantly having to move on.
CK Williams happens to be reminding us about something else similarly one-way currently: About our age, What's that? Well, sunshine, we are getting old. This year Williams intends to visit England (in fact three times) in order to deliver a lecture entitled On Being Old.
That Being Old is also an important part of our aesthetic, incorporating a bubbling soup of ingredients including ‘late style’, decadence, late capitalism, the comic edge of aging, and other forms of corporeal and incorporeal limitedness and endings. Seeking for one word to name it, we sometimes call it The Coda:
You say she’s gone off now in her blue dress, and that she has taken a white horse with her too. There was a tone of finality in your voice so that it sounded sad when you spoke, but as I have been standing outside much of this weekend in the beautiful sunshine soaking up the warmth from off the white washed walls and enjoying that very same tobacco you had previously saved to give to her, a shadow has been slowly stretching across the wall, first a hand with the fingers moving like they are gently stroking the air, and then an arm turning and stretching, so that I begin to think of it as an invitation, and that I might bend my body sideways and put out my arm to see if I can join it with hers.
No smoke, gitane, I am sure there is music in the air as well.
(For Linda Chase Broda who died after a short illness on Friday 8th April)