is art only for the initiated?

Hearing someone talk about Olivier Messiaen on the radio the other day, I started thinking about this again. I'm ready to admit that Messiaen is a good composer, but I can't say I really want to listen to it much. I have a feeling, however, that it's one of those things that will grow on you the more you're exposed to it. That definitely happens with opera and other classical music. Exposure to classical music gives one a greater appreciation for it, and some great works get better and better the more you hear them (as opposed to the top forty, which tend to get worse and worse). Training in music technique and theory make it even more enjoyable. I can't really speak about the visual arts because I've had so little experience with them, but what little I have learned has made a world of difference in how I think during my visits to the art gallery. (Mind you, even when all I can do is stare at the visual stimuli, being completely ignorant of everything else going on, I always like the art gallery) All I'm trying to say is that it really does appear to be the case that some kind of 'initiation' creates a different taste for art.

Questions: Does all good art 'improve' for us the more we're exposed to it. Do we all have this inner knowledge of what is good? Where does taste fit in? Is something definitely good if ppl who've been around a lot of art say it's good?

I think that the idea of the 'initiated' that I don't like involves some sort of secret inaccessible gnosticism. This is totally different from just having been around art a lot. It's even different than talking and thinking a lot about that art. That's not some cliquey club it's just something that gets more enjoyable and plays a bigger part in forming you if you've put a little work into it.

But we always have to be willing to think and make a judgment call. You have to be willing to say that some art is bad. If there is such a thing as truth and right and wrong then it has to apply not only to whether or not you have to pay your taxes and tell the truth but also to whether something is good to look at or listen to.

prayers I like.

Thanks be to Thee, our Lord Jesus Christ,
for all the benefits which Thou hast given us,
for all the pains and insults which Thou has borne for us.
Most merciful Redeemer, Friend and Brother,
May we know Thee more clearly,
Love Thee more dearly,
And follow Thee more nearly,
Day by day. Amen
(Richard of Chichester 1197 - 1253)

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

(Francis of Assisi)

Make us worthy, Lord,
To serve our fellow men
Throughout the world who live and die
In poverty or hunger.
Give them through our hands
this day, their daily bread;
And by our understanding love
give peace and joy. Amen
(Mother Teresa, Calcutta (1910 - 1997)

Grant to me, O Lord,
to know what I ought to know,
to love what I ought to love,
to praise what delights thee most,
to value what is precious in thy sight,
to hate what is offensive to Thee.
Do not suffer me to judge according to the sight of my eyes,
nor to pass sentence according to the hearing of the ears of ignorant men;
but to discern with true judgment between things visible and spiritual,
and above all things to inquire what is the good pleasure of thy will.
(Thomas A Kempis)

Be present, O Merciful God, and protect us through the silent hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this fleeting world may repose upon thy eternal changelessness; though Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.

(Book of Common Prayer)

Show me your ways, O Lord, teach me your paths; guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my Saviour and my hope is in you all day long.

Remember, O Lord, your great mercy and love, for they are from of old. Remember not the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me for you are good, O Lord... For the sake of your name, O Lord, forgive my iniquity, though it is great.

(King David ~1000BC (Ps 25)

a night off.

I'm sitting on the couch listening to a Frank Sinatra and friends show that I happened to find on tv. It's truly quality entertainment- why don't they do things like this anymore??
I'm getting used to being at home. My parents have been in Calgary this week so I've had some time to myself. This afternon after my shift I made some of Emily's chocolate-orange-chocolate cookies. I wasn't needed at work tonight, so instead I had a little visit with my grandparents and my aunt who is here visiting, delivered some of the cookies to the people who were working at Boston Pizza, then came home for a walk out in the yard. I picked some crocuses and walked down through the coulee. The sunset was pretty, the wind was cleansing, the quiet was restoring, and the light...! The light was that which can only be seen on the prairies. Every twig and blade of grass and dip in the land is illuminated in a clear and easy light and contrasted with soft blue shadows. Everywhere you look is a stilling and glorious image. Pairs of geese honked their way overhead, ducks flapped up from the coulee, and a prairie chicken squawked in the neighbour's yard. The wind had blown its fierceness out and the air was just the right temperature to make you feel alive right through to your lungs. I love this country.

academics week March 31-April 4

I just wrote a whole blog, and then it accidentally deleted!!!!! boo. It was intense with the philosophy too. I refuse to write it all again, sorry. Today is a BEAUTIFUL day so I went for ice cream and a long walk. Also, we went to the Eastern Orthodox church this morning where our classmate Landon attends, it was very beautiful!
We had two philosophy classes this week, went to the Art gallery, and wrote a bunch of papers! One week of classes left- I can't believe it!
I have all my rough drafts done for this week's assignments. I'll be handing in two research papers and one creative piece for lit which we'll read out loud to the class. There are also two other presentations, in Science and Scriptures (the scriptures one is no big deal though). Somehow, I have to find time to start studying, since we have 7 exams the next week....

I'm going to eat supper and read my book!

love love love love love,
S

encouragement

God moves in a mysterious way

His wonders to perform;

He plants His footsteps in the sea

And rides upon the storm.

Deep in unfathomable mines

Of never failing skill

He treasures up His bright designs

And works His sovereign will.

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;

The clouds ye so much dread

Are big with mercy and shall break

In blessings on your head.

Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,

But trust Him for His grace;

Behind a frowning providence

He hides a smiling face.

His purposes will ripen fast,

Unfolding every hour;

The bud may have a bitter taste,

But sweet will be the flower.

Blind unbelief is sure to err

And scan His work in vain;

God is His own interpreter,

And He will make it plain.

-William Cowper.

I could comment on what this means in my life right now, but maybe I'll just let you apply it to your own life.

Academics week March 25-28

"If you knew Time as well as I do," said the Hatter, "you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him."
"I don't know what you mean," said Alice.
"Of course you don't!' the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. I dare say you never even spoke to Time!"

Caspar David Friedrich- Monk by the Sea.

"God sits in the chamber of our being in which the candle of our consciousness goes out into darkness... All drams are not false; some dreams are truer than the plainest facts. Fact at best is but a garment of truth, which has ten thousand changes of raiment woven on the same loom. Let the dreamer only do the truth of his dream, and one day he will realize all that was worth realizing in it." -George Macdonald

"The rational man will adapt to his environment, The irrational man expects to alter his environment to suit his needs. Therefore all progress depends on irrational men. " -George Bernard Shaw

Isaiah (finger in the air and somewhat oblivious of the historical superiority of the modern audience): The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field…

Edward O. Wilson (somewhat impressed, but nonetheless determined to do his bit for "evolutionary progress"): But… But sir! Are you aware of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum?

CURTAIN
-Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle

I highly recomment reading Wendell Berry's Life is a Miracle, it's fantastic. There were no classes on Easter Monday, so we missed philosophy and one Latin class. We'll be having two philosophy classes this week to make up for it- it's gonna be intense!

Art- "Impressionism and other 19th Century 'isms'" was the title of the lecture. We started the class talking about Caspar David Friedrich who painted at the beginning of the 19th C. He was a Christian artist, and Dr. Tingley's hypothesis is that he was a "painter of relationships". You can see communication with nature and with others in his work. I really liked his stuff, its interesting that a lot of them show people in the foreground with their back to the viewer, it kinda brings you into the relationship, you know? The mainly talked about one called "On the Sailingboat" that is a picture about marriage. Instead of just being focused on each other they are focused on a shared goal that they're moving towards.

"On the Sailing Boat"

"The Wanderer above the Mists""Woman Before the Rising Sun""Two Men Contemplating the Moon"

"Abbey in the Oakwood"

Then we moved on to modern art. We mostly talked about realism and naturalism in Manet and Courbet, then on to impressionism, mostly looking at Monet and Renoir, and then with post-impressionism we looked at Gaugin and Van Gogh. Whew, we are just flying!

Monet- self portraitManet- Luncheon on the Grass. This caused quite a stir; he was using classical subjects and forms in a painting set in the present. Was this appropriate?


Renoir- luncheon. "Impressionism was a celebration of the pleasures of middle class life. Did it not play beautifully into a consumerist relation to the world?"

Dr. Patrick was gone, so we had a researcher friend of his come in to tell us about molecular biology. It was okay, but he just talked about his research when I think Dr. Patrick was hoping he would explain something to do with how molec. bio relates to evolution. Oh well. I have to start writing my paper for this class this week, and I'm terrified that it's going to be very hard...

We're still doing the passive system in Latin, but I think there's a whole new verb system coming up tomorrow. It'll be the last chapter though!

Music-We talked about and listened to opera-Verdi, Wagner, and Puccini! Prof. Warren had a great time listing off German words for Wagner such as 'Gesamtkunstwerk' (which means 'a complete work of art'). He also played along to Verdi's Anvil Chorus on the dinner triangle we use to call people to class and meals- the man is hilarious. After class we listened to Anna Russel's version of the Ring Cycle, which was hilarious of course.

We talked about Annie Dillard in lit. after reading the first two chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. She sees herself as an aeolian harp- lets the wind just blow through her and produce what it may. The book alternates between scrutinous observation and reflections on those observations- the main theme is seeing. Prof. Tucker gave us yet another assignment- we are supposed to go out at find 5-10 objects (not from our appartment of school) and then 'write an Annie Dillard style anecdote' using them as inspiration. I think there is potential for this to be fun, I mean it allows us to be creative and stuff, but there are a couple of problems, like the fact that none of us can just write like a Pulitzer winning author on demand, and also the objects we use are supposed to be ones we can bring in to class, which pretty much excludes nature (trees, light on the water, icicles melting etc.) and limits us to the garbage we see on the street on our walks to and from school. Annie Dillard is all about nature, and although I've no doubt she could talk about garbage, I'm a little more inspired by other things... anyway, I started writing my paper for his class yesterday so I'll get that done first. I'm talking about a the emphasis on relationships in Lilith by George macdonald. There's an interesting article by him called "The Fantastic Imagination" on writing fairy tales (he had a huge influence on CS Lewis). You can read it at: http://gaslight.mtroyal.ab.ca/ortsx14.htm.

Scriptures- John Wesley. Hearing the history about the Methodists was interesting. We had read A Plain Account of Genuine Christianity (1753) and Covenant Service Directions for Renewing our Covenant with God (1780).

John Wesley

Science with Dr. Metelski was about electricity and magnetism, Maxwell equations, how these advancements affect our lives...

Trivium was great again. We read and criticized some more little apologetic paragraphs we'd written, and then we talked about socratic dialogues (which Peter Kreeft uses in most of his books). Since our science paper is supposed to be written in a dialogue, this was very helpful.

Today is beautiful and sunny, and things are melting but I am feeling rather exhausted so I think I'm going to stay in and read. We have some people coming over for supper tonight, and then we're going to go sing karaoke! I'm looking forward to it.

Academics week March 17-20

We had a short week because there were no classes on Good Friday. Also, we have Monday off, so that should give us a chance to get caught up a little bit on some work and also keeps us from having Philosophy and latin homework (although I'm sad there'll be no philosophy lecture!).

Here are the highlights from last week:

Philosophy

We continued to talk about John Stuart Mill and utilitarianism. It differs from past ethical systems in that it says actions have to be decided on with regards to their outcome, but the only way to know their outcome is from human experience. There is no set end like Aristotle's "Man of Virtue", Mill simply determines right and wrong by way of a test: since the aim is to increase pleasure and decrease pain, only do things which do this. To decide between two pleasures, ask someone who has experienced both and is endowed with an appreciation for his 'higher faculties' (i.e. reason) which is the higher of the two. Mill is also differend from Hume who said our judgements of right and wrong are feelings within us. Mill says we can have no sensory instinct informing us of right and wrong. He also objected to Kant, because he says Kantian ethics "does not logically rule out the adoption by all rational beings of the most outrageous immoral rules of conduct." Kant doesn't give us any list of what is right/wrong, he just gives us a standard to apply to actions:If people are universally in agreement about an action, it is acceptable. It is an ethics of what you should do in trying to figure out what to do, but not an actual ethics of what you should do. Is it not possible that people might be able to universalize things that are not good? So Mill thought he'd really come up with something in utilitarianism that would make it impossible for this to happen: do that which brings the greatest happiness. This sounds quite sensible, even in agreement with Aristotle and Aquinas where the good man is the happy man. But we know that it all depends on your definition of happiness. For Aristotle happiness=excellence, a state of being in accord with what your function/purpose is. This is very different from a feeling. But Mill talks about happiness in relation to pleasure. So his argument that his ethics would not give rise to immoral conduct is doesn't make much sense- for example, the sexual immorality of our day has been in "pursuit of happiness and pleasure"! Mill's problem with Kant comes up again in his own ethics.

We talked about various other problems with the system:

-there is no recognition of absolutes, such as absolute rights like the right to life

-it's implicit metaphysical materialism. It is committed to materialism, even though of course the presumption materialism is not a question of facts but of faith, because its not provable.

-it has a reductionist view of evil. Evil (for example, the holocaust) is seen only as a wrong calculation of consequences.

-it can hardly be called 'ethics' at all, because it doesn't anser the basic ethical question: Why be Good? He says 'we should all be concerned for the happiness of all" but doesn't give any backing to his 'should'.

J.S. Mill

We also started talking about Martin Buber's I and Thou. More on him next week...

Art

We had a really great class on Romanticism, although I was a little tired since I'd stayed up late finishing my paper. Since artists weren't under patrons anymore but were vying for popularity at the salons and in the art academies, their aim was to stand out and make an impression. The idea of avant-garde came in, and instead of portraying "the good" artists started to focus on losses and human failure. Romantic culture accepts the middle class, but it also has a streak of disaffection with culture altogether.

This is "Marengo", Napoleon's horse. People had seen Napoleon's horrific reign that so utterly failed to live up to expectations.

Fransisco Goya was drawn to macabre subjects. He painted terrifying images of war and nightmarish subjects.

Humor entered art, and Blake started making images of his own fantasy world. In the last part of the class we looked at Kenneth Clark's claim that "Landscape was the chief artistic creation of the 19th Century".

J.M.W. Turner saw meaning and beauty in everyday scenes.

Latin

We had a test on relative pronouns and subordinate clauses, we're now only the passive system and have a whole load of memorizing to do, once again.

Music

Berlioz, Franck, Bruckner and Tchaikovsky! We heard the last movement of Berlioz's Symphony Fantastique (the Dream of the Witches' Sabbath- which funnily enough we'd seen Goya's paintings of on Tuesday), some choral music by Franck, a bunch of orchestral stuff by Tchaikovsky and the Os Justi motet by Bruckner which is really pretty. It sounds almost like Renaissance, Palestrina-esque. He adds a little bit of chant at the very end, which was being recalled during his day. "The mouth of the righteous man utters wisdom, and his tongue speaks what is just. The law of his God is in his heart; his feet do not slip."

Literature

We talked about two short stories by Wendell Berry: Pray without Ceasing and A Jonquil for Mary Penn. These are beautiful pieces, really well written and all about family and home and although they are realistic they are hopeful, unlike a lot of 'realistic' writing that is really depressing. We also watched the first half of a film called "The Apostle" which kinda relates to Frederich Bueckner somehow... (obviously I wasn't listening very well). Its a super uncomfortable film about a preacher from the south who goes around doing tent revivals yet his personal life is super messed up. We'll watch the rest of it next week...

Scriptures

We had a small class since a lot of people had gone home for Easter by this time. We finished up with Calvin, talking about the sections in his institutes on the Ministry of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and Eschatology, and also his commentary on Romans 8. Even though he saw people as very rotten to the core, he was able to hope in the fact that Christ is our Head and God would not sever the Head from the Body. Doubts will assail us but they will not overwhelm us. Next week we start on John Wesley. I've started writing my Sciptures paper on the Resurrection (appropriate for this time of year, I think) and what Augustine, Aquinas, and Calvin say about it, especially with regard to what it means for us. We are assured of the victory of our faith and our God over death, we can have new spiritual life and live righteously, and we can wait in hope for the resurrection of our bodies in the last day.

I get really frustrated with myself for struggling as I do with writing papers. It takes me so long to get my thoughts into ordered and coherent paragraphs! I also have a hard time knowing how to get just the right thesis, not trying to cover too much. 'm definitely better at grasping concepts like in math or physics, but I'm grateful for the practice I'm getting with all of this and I'm trying to remind myself that my grades here don't actually count for anything, so its nothing to stress about. Am I better at thinking than I was in September? Absolutely. Am I better at producing those thoughts in the form of a paper? Probably, but as the papers get more challenging and I deal with stuff I haven't thought about much before it feels like I'm not making a lot of progress. Also, my roommates are both really quick and good at writing cohesive and coherent papers. I'm thankful that I have them for inspiration and for their editing ability haha but I do fell a bit of an inferiority complex some times, especially in busy times like this when I realize how much longer I have to spend on everything than they do. So while my roommates take a four day weekend, I am only taking today off and hope to have things somewhat out of panic mode for next week.

There are 3 papers and 3 presentations left for the next 3 weeks. Time is flying and I'll be so sad when its over, although there is no way I could keep the frantic pace up for very much longer. I bought my bus ticket home this week- it was only 147 dollars to get from here to Regina! I'll have to pay a bit extra for the extra baggage I'll have, but still, so cheap. Surely it'll be worth the 50 hours of travelling, right???

We've been invited out to the Tucker's once again tonight for Easter dinner and a film night. I plan on reading a little this afternoon and playing some guitar. I wish I could be in Vancouver this weekend to hear Robyn's opera, be with the fam, and see some green. Tonight will be fun, however. We'll get to see the Tucker's kids who are soooo much fun!

peace and love,

Starr