Some good thoughts. I guess Hemingway wrote for the newspaper and movie generation. I'm not sure what the Flicker generation will relate to. Haiku?
---- Gabriel Orgrease <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Larry,
> > Interesting idea. I'm forwarding this to a friend of mine, John Agnew...
> good morning... interesting Mr. Agnew... I like his 450 million year old
> Ordovician marine fossils in the backyard. Will spend some time browsing.
> > He did the cover for my book.
> >
> got it
> > A. Huxley in Doors of Perception mentions cathedrals and stain glass as man made psychedelics that transport the mind into a religious frame of mind. It may be that these soaring spaces convey a mixture of safety and risk (vastness) as do large spaces in caves. I had a similar feeling in the rocket assembly plant at Cape Kennedy back when they would let you go there.
> >
> Long time since I read that book. Thank you for the reminder. It is
> difficult for anyone to not have a feeling of something when they visit
> a sacred place. And it is this sense of presence in space and the
> stimulation of the senses that I feel is important to the art of
> architecture. The story of the silver gate of St. Sophia of Kiev, and
> the play of eastern light through the windows behind the iconostasis and
> how they shine through the gate provides an aura of the supplicant
> communing directly with the light of wisdom of the divine. Then ad in
> censers of incense and chants mumbled prayers and the echo of sound from
> the surrounding masonry. Difficult not to be transfixed and/or feel
> transcendent.
>
> I had a similar feeling when as a boy I walked with my brother and
> stepfather through the donut tunnel of the synchrotron at Cornell. I get
> the same eerie feelings when I visit the reactor up the road from us at
> Brookhaven Labs.
> > Another thing I notice in art that I enjoy is a mixture chaos and order. Too chaotic = not understandable. Too ordered = boring.
> I agree on the pleasure of the mix. This discussion can be come at from
> a whole slew of directions. In writing I enjoy the sequential nature of
> the mind of the reader (my mind in reading also) to have to jump from
> word to word, thought to thought. If the jumps are too close together,
> too obvious, then the writing feels slow, if the jumps are too far apart
> then the reader cannot assimilate a sense of meaning or flow -- and it
> is chaos that occurs [and why I suspect that I tend to detest Pynchon
> and a whole lot of his derivatives]. But there is also a pleasure for a
> reader in the challenge to make a series of successful jumps. It is
> similar to moving pictures in that respect. We can show each frame of a
> movie very slowly, or we can speed them up beyond real time, but there
> is only a small range of slow or fast timing in which we can hope to
> maintain the interest of the viewer, or the reader. And though we want
> the viewer to be responsive to the timing, we do not want them
> necessarily to be conscious of it as an artifice. I reflect on this when
> reading older literature in a time when readers had less media to
> stimulate the senses and writers would go much slower, would take longer
> to get to where they were going, I think in part that these writers
> resonated with their readers being in a mode to read slowly. When we
> pick them up with our internet fueled reading habits they seem to go on
> forever to get nowhere, or at least where they get to we are so worn out
> that we are not sure where we had wandered. A bit how we have
> discussions re: the comparison of television with radio, how with a
> radio drama the mode of experience is to sit back, shut off all the
> other senses but to focus on our hearing, and to recreate the scene in
> our mind's eye.
>
> Later,
> ][<en
>
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