Beautiful Songs
- Thread starter sadmanbarty
- Start date
luka
Well-known member
I'm speaking about this now, via email with somebody else, somebody who says we need a paradiso. The culture, the civilisation, the world needs an attained paradiso. But yes, the ugliness of the built environment is hugely distressing at present. And also moral ugliness. Does beauty have a moral dimension?
version
Well-known member
"Perhaps we are in limbo," he said. "Or like the place we met: some still point between hell and purgatory. Strange there's no Via del Paradiso anywhere in Florence."
"Perhaps nowhere in the world."
entertainment
Well-known member
Nature is beautiful and that shares no concern for morality. I don't know if beauty has a moral criteria, I wouldn't like it if we should scrutinize our experience of beauty with moral considerations.
But I think beauty in itself is moral in a redemptional sense, as it leads us to value stuff and guides our judgement.
What do you mean by paradiso?
But I think beauty in itself is moral in a redemptional sense, as it leads us to value stuff and guides our judgement.
What do you mean by paradiso?
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
surrender's crucial. willing surrender, not something you're battered into.
the parasympathetic nervous system.
the list in my first post is full of cradling signifiers, rocking (mum's arms/boat on gentle waves) signifiers, maternal signifiers, sleeping/resting signifiers.
it's not hot nor too. goldilocks music.
definitely not repulsive, but stillness doesn't seem to be a prerequisite.
it's the individual at peace with their environment. there's nothing attacking or threatening. no physical strain needs to be made. the maternal thing means there's unconditional love in it, no need to show off or for ego or attention seeking.
the parasympathetic nervous system.
the list in my first post is full of cradling signifiers, rocking (mum's arms/boat on gentle waves) signifiers, maternal signifiers, sleeping/resting signifiers.
it's not hot nor too. goldilocks music.
definitely not repulsive, but stillness doesn't seem to be a prerequisite.
it's the individual at peace with their environment. there's nothing attacking or threatening. no physical strain needs to be made. the maternal thing means there's unconditional love in it, no need to show off or for ego or attention seeking.
version
Well-known member
Last edited:
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
as far as the morality goes, beauty is amoral like a baby. it's innocent; too helpless and incognisant to even understand morals or to affect its environment.
you can't affect change with beauty; it's the world catered to your every need and requirement.
that's also why it's melancholic. the eden from which we've fallen. the womb to which we can never return. the distant honeymoon romance long since dwindled.
you can't affect change with beauty; it's the world catered to your every need and requirement.
that's also why it's melancholic. the eden from which we've fallen. the womb to which we can never return. the distant honeymoon romance long since dwindled.
luka
Well-known member
If you think of Classical Greek sculpture, which operated as a gold standard for beauty for so long, you tend not to have strain. Muscles register the distribution of weight, tension, but not strain.
There's a bit in Gombrich's Story of Art book where he contrasts an Italian and a German rennassaince self portrait and remarks disparagingly on the latter's "self conscious intensity" i.e a kind of strain and more generally what happens as the rennassiance moves north out of the warm Mediterranean climate is that ugliness appears, not just because the people are uglier, but because they strain against their environment, by necessity.
There's a bit in Gombrich's Story of Art book where he contrasts an Italian and a German rennassaince self portrait and remarks disparagingly on the latter's "self conscious intensity" i.e a kind of strain and more generally what happens as the rennassiance moves north out of the warm Mediterranean climate is that ugliness appears, not just because the people are uglier, but because they strain against their environment, by necessity.
Last edited:
entertainment
Well-known member
A beautiful song but also a song about beauty. Surrendering your life to the higher, divine beauty that renders everything else trivial or hollow in its glow. Redemption in beauty.
luka
Well-known member
Perhaps morality is the wrong word. What I mean is a value system and a conception of reality, humans, the world, the universe, art. Whether or not the creation of beauty and the perception of beauty depend on these things. Barty is talking about very small scale beauty, almost wistfulness, but what about sublime beauty?
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
how strange. a story my mum always tells is that when i was a baby if i was crying she'd sing this and i'd stop and go to sleep.
luka
Well-known member
So Waterloo Sunset for instance, doesn't seem to live up to the exalted conception of beauty entertainment was sketching out last night. It's wistful. It's pretty. He's watching the sunset over the city. But it's small scale. It's not a paradise. It's a moment, won and cherished certainly but that's all. He's not internally reconfigured, he's not redeemed. The angels don't start singing.
luka
Well-known member
"But nobody believes in Dante's worldview -- which was everyone's worldview at the time -- anymore so the Paradise just seems cheesy to most. Much easier to believe in the Inferno, or even Purgatory, because we can see it all around us. But the true task of literature and art in our time, as I see it, is to get us back to Eden and then up to the spheres. Of course this needs to be something entirely different than it was in the Middle Ages -- it can't be a Evolian return to Traditionalism and feudal hierarchy -- but it would need to be as powerful."
luka
Well-known member
So if you increase the pitch of beauty, the intensity of it threatens to overwhelm, as Rilke has it
"“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”
"“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,
because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrible.”
Last edited:
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
Ok, I’ve got you.
I think sublime beauty is humbling.
Those Greek statues cuckold me with their graceful muscularity.
Cathedrals dwarf you. Those bit mosques with the onion roofs engulf you. The stars in the sky portray your insignificance.
The bibles depictions of heavenly phenomena are overcrowded; trumpets, lights, singing, strange spectacles, millions of angels, all the creatures in gods earth, etc. It all speaks to dwarfing the individual
I think sublime beauty is humbling.
Those Greek statues cuckold me with their graceful muscularity.
Cathedrals dwarf you. Those bit mosques with the onion roofs engulf you. The stars in the sky portray your insignificance.
The bibles depictions of heavenly phenomena are overcrowded; trumpets, lights, singing, strange spectacles, millions of angels, all the creatures in gods earth, etc. It all speaks to dwarfing the individual
sadmanbarty
Well-known member
The effortlessness abs gracefulness with which the object if the beauty does this is crucial.
Shredding I grand scale and humbling but isn’t beautiful because it’s not graceful or effortless.
Shredding I grand scale and humbling but isn’t beautiful because it’s not graceful or effortless.