File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2001/lyotard.0107, message 93


Date: Tue, 17 Jul 2001 17:09:17 -0100
From: hbone <hbone-AT-optonline.net>
Subject: Re: Can't buy me Love! - or Philosophy!


Eric and All,

We keep coming back to ideas about the spiritual, the religious, the
ephemeral, the sublime.  This is a rambling post, but some of it, hopefully,
will resonate

Think of  a whole community, young and old, fiesta, ceremony, singing and
dancing, dark to dawn, night after night, eating and drinking to exhaustion.
I have a faint
memory of a movie, "Black Orpheus".  Past and present fuse into timeless
moments, the celebrators are one with their ancestors.

Three names, two of them, mentioned recently are Octavio Paz and Harold
Bloom.  I'll add Malraux.  All are characterized by a serious interest in
the arts:  Paz a poet, Malraux a novelist, Bloom a critic.

In a TV interview Bloom recommended "Blood Meridian" as an outstanding novel
by Cormac McCarthy. (I've mentioned it before.)  At the end the book, the
protagonist was "dancing", "dancing", "he will never die", he keeps on
dancing, dancing, he will never die  It was the most violent book I ever
read and is said to be based on historical facts.

Paz wrote many essays.  I liked the essays better than his poetry. He lived
in Paris for some time and knew Breton and other Surrealists.  If I remember
correctly he was Mexico's Ambassador to India at one time, but resigned when
Mexican troops or police shot down student demonstrators in Mexico City

Malraux wrote "Man's Fate", a novel about communist revolution in China.  He
had a notable political career, and is buried in the Pantheon in Paris.
Toward the end of his life he wrote a great deal about art.  At age 21 he
was exploring an ancient temple in the
Cambodian jungle.  Of all his work, I only read "Man's Fate".

So politics, religion, art and history were lived and portrayed in the works
o
these real and fictional persons.  We keep returning to the same ideas, but
with new insight..

Cheers,
Hugh

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Eric wrote,

>In Zarathustra, Nietzsche says: "I could only
> believe in a god who knew how to dance." Perhaps, instead of writing so
> many books, philosophers should spend more time singing and dancing."

>Along these lines, I remember a essay from Octavio Paz in which he
>compared the various movements of modern art with the need of the
>corporation under capitalism to innovate to stimulate consumer demand.
>In this sense, theft or innovation is merely a new product line. Cliche
>is merely an indicator that the item has reached the end of its product
>cycle.  The way Hollywood operates is no different in principle from
>Detroit or Silicon Valley.



   

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