From: "John Foster" <borealis-AT-mercuryspeed.com>
Subject: Sensuous Metaphor
Date: Sat, 17 Nov 2001 11:16:14 -0800


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Music is a prism (body) of feeling (mind) in which the 'sensuous metaphor' evolves and arises from special material, substrate and is only virtually unrelated to the material. Music has it's own substantiality, it's own secondary illusion apart from tone, and cadence. Langer calls the 'sensuous metaphor' the 'symbolic equivalence of sensations'. This could be the 'sudden impression of color in music, or eloquence in the lines of a statue, an element is created that seems to belong to a different symbolic projection altogether from the substance of the work. The effect is a sublimation of expressive form." [S. K. Langer, the Import of Art, p. 230, In: Mind: an essay on human feeling, vol. 1]

The astonishing illusion could be the very substrate of the art, however:

'"The basic materials of both the ballet and film are similar....It is, in fact, only that the idiom, the turn of phrase, is different. The difference between ballet and film is very similar to that between two languages having a common origin....The ballet is a projection of the dream into the rational life of man....When the spectator looks at a ballet and listens to the music, he is, in effect, seeing a living dream..."aris[ing] in various degrees from the unbroken interaction of virtual powers.'Borodin quoted by  Langer, p.231, fn: Langer quoted in italics]

Music and art in general have these virtual powers of placing into parenthesis all forms of objectivity; thus the power of the interaction enabling secondary illusions as 'sensuous metaphor', and 'harmonic space'....

Music therefore is a form of symboling which borrows from natural forms. To build up a 'world' is also to become presentable to 'abstractable forms' found in the 'external world' and it's

"process of objectification engenders its counterpart, the symbolic use of natural forms with the emotional import, mystical, and mythical and moral. That is the subjectifcation of nature. The dialectic of these two functions is, I think, the process of human experience. Its image is 'the poetic', more generally 'the artistic,' and it can appear in art from either pole of the dialectical tension - the artist sees it constantly in the quality which he finds in his world, and which emerges in his successful work, and in his best work may even go beyond anything he has ever known."

"It has been said that the high moment in any work which achieves such a sublimation is 'an unreality between two realities.' It is the element in which the transition from somatic feeling, which is our ordinary reality, to imagination, the autonomous act of envisagement, come to formal expression. Here is the dynamic pattern of the conceptual act, the strangeness and 'otherness' and bodilessness of symbolic imagery, projected in the structure of great art."

still chuckling

john foster

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