“The ripened sensate mentality of today, seeing human beings as no more than physical objects moved by instincts, reflexes, and drives, virtually disallows any attempt to raise them above the animal level. Genuine heroes are all by banned from literature and all but impossible for authors to create.” (B.G. Brander, Staring Into Chaos, pp. 300-301).
But What If Metaphor Is Ultimate Truth?
“But, at the same time, no one should nervously imagine that this critique of the Enlightenment proceeds from any relativistic postmodern nonsense. The modernist and postmodernist share this one thing in common: They both hold, at bottom, that metaphor is meaningless. The modernist goes off to find meaning somewhere else, suitably formulaic, and the postmodernist …
Redoubling Failed Efforts
“Instead of closing shop as a result of all its failures, desire, urged on by truth, plunges deeper into the abyss; at every turn in the road, it must transform the last dreadful mess that it has made into a new model and a new point of departure, a still shakier platform for the launching …
Special Effects, Dry Ice, and Lasers
“Instruments continued growing in size and complexity. Everything else about music grew as well, as colossalism transformed the art. Some theaters seated up to forty thousand people. In one play a thousand mules pranced about the stage. Concerts featured a hundred blaring trumpets, accompanying thousands of actors and acrobats. ‘Not being able to make it …
Metamorphing
“In our entertainment-crazed times, we have to take care not to use stories that have been transformed into something else. I call the process ‘metaphor-morphing,’ or ‘metamorphing’ for short. In this process the basic metaphors of story built into the world by God are reversed. For example, the serpent in the Garden was a dragon, …
Hungry For Praise
“Adulation is one of those things that are impossible to come by if we have to beg for them” (Girard, A Theater of Envy, p. 148).
Guess You Kinda Had To Have Been There
Merold Westphal has another essay in this book entitled “Laughing at Hegel.” I read the whole thing. “Christmas Humpheys says, ‘There is more honest ‘belly laughter’ in a Zen monastery than surely in any other religious institution on earth’ — and the faithful chant before Maitreya, the Messianic Buddha whose avatar is a clown: When …
Easter All the Time
He is risen. He is risen indeed! On this day, two thousand years ago, the Lord Jesus rose from the dead, conquering it forever, throwing down the collected might of all the principalities and powers, releasing the redeemed human race from its fear of death, and reversing the power of death that had dominated our …
Sensate Frenzy
“As ideational and integral art are static in their inner nature, sensate art is vividly, even violently dynamic. The phenomena of the sensate world is always changing. Light and shadow vary, color and form shift in ceaseless flux. Human subjects, too, show incessant variation. The art must be dynamic simply to follow its subjects. Equally …
Imagine That
“The Christian imagination is not icing for the cake of education. A true understanding of the imagination is at the center of all true education . . . Works of imagination are not the dessert of educaqtion; they are the meal. We have to get the students to master some basic details so that they …