{"id":280,"date":"2012-06-05T03:18:18","date_gmt":"2012-06-05T10:18:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.valeriekampmeier.com\/?p=280"},"modified":"2017-10-18T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2017-10-18T12:58:35","slug":"precious-nonsense","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/archives\/280-precious-nonsense.html","title":{"rendered":"Precious Nonsense"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The other morning I chanced upon this poem, and it blew past my defences and burst me open.<\/p>\n

i thank You God for most this amazing<\/em><\/p>\n

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees<\/em><\/p>\n

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything<\/em><\/p>\n

which is natural which is infinite which is yes<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(i who have died am alive again today,<\/em><\/p>\n

and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth<\/em><\/p>\n

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay<\/em><\/p>\n

great happening illimitably earth)<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

how should tasting touching hearing seeing<\/em><\/p>\n

breathing any-lifted from the no<\/em><\/p>\n

of all nothing-human merely being<\/em><\/p>\n

doubt unimaginable You?<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

(now the ears of my ears awake and<\/em><\/p>\n

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)<\/em><\/p>\n

~ e.e. cummings ~<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Why should a poem that one can\u2019t make sense of have such an impact? It\u2019s like some part of the psyche makes sense of it when the other parts cannot. Maybe the lack of sense confounds those parts and meaning jumps into the space left behind. In his book, “Precious Nonsense”<\/a>, Professor Stephen Booth\u00a0 suggests that the greatest appeal of our most valued works of literature may be that they are, in one way or another, nonsensical. Precious nonsense is precious indeed.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been wondering whether the same happens in other arts. In painting, I would say yes. It\u2019s what happens in a still life with the appearance of a sudden skull. It happens either when something unexpected is there, or something unexpected happens inside me when I see it. \u201cIt frustrates your expectations, actually\u201d, as our aesthetics Professor used to say. So if it\u2019s about what happens inside the viewer, then it\u2019s not within the control of the artist. And no two people may experience the same thing.<\/p>\n

I think of Magritte and Dali- except I feel there is such a sense of deliberate provocation in both cases. They want us to be surprised and perplexed- and it\u2019s obvious why we should be.<\/p>\n

At the recent da Vinci exhibition in the National Gallery, London, his two \u201cMadonna of the Rocks\u201d paintings hung opposite each other. Same artist, same composition, completely different result. In the painting from the Louvre, the figures radiate a tender peace, every limb is gracefully rounded, their faces glow. In the London painting, however, their faces are pale, angular and ghostly, their presences lifeless, flat and posed. Surely this must be the earlier painting- it has no spirit. Yet no, the experts think it is from a later date.<\/p>\n

I also think of the medieval painters\u2019 way of depicting subjects such as the Annunciation- Flemish painters showing Mary surprised by Gabriel as she makes lace or cooks waffles; or the cat takes centre stage<\/a>, its fur on end as the angel appears. In one painting of the Ascension, only Jesus\u2019 feet can be seen protruding from a cloud. Did the medieval viewers laugh as hard as I did when I saw those? Did they laugh at all?<\/p>\n

What about music? Are there pieces that transcend or flout the expectations of the intellect? Everywhere. Mozart\u2019s \u201cDissonance\u201d quartet is a classic example. Steve Reich\u2019s Six Pianos that morphs from the microcosmic to the macrocosmic \u2013 infinitely busy to infinitely peaceful- and back again. Beethoven\u2019s Grosse Fugue, which initially seems to have no coherence or tonal centre. The moment in the Gloria from Bach\u2019s B Minor Mass where the music moves from 3\/4 to 4\/4 symbolizing the spiritual contrasting with the material (the number three traditionally representing the Trinity and four Earth), when I feel more elation as the music descends to earth than I did when it hovered in the stratosphere. The mystery of how the Goldberg Variations can sound as fresh at the 50th<\/sup> hearing (or the 500th) as they did the first- if not more so.<\/p>\n

Such moments of surprise can be found anywhere.\u00a0 I recently discovered a Soviet-era version of Winnie the Pooh in which the classic childhood character morphed into a fretful, obsessed, existential little bear who sang aggressive tuneless snippets as he stomped across the Steppes. He was still using a lot of A.A. Milne\u2019s words and plot lines, but he was no English Winnie.<\/p>\n

I want to write like greenly day-mazing cummings. I want to care as little as he did about what others thought of his work. I want to blow myself open and share the freshness of my imagination.\u00a0 Starting today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The other morning I chanced upon this poem, and it blew past my defences and burst me open. i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes   (i who have …<\/p>\n

Precious Nonsense<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6],"tags":[22,113,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.free2create.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}