“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 …
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, …
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 …
Art Goes to Seed
“In the sensate style, techniques become elaborate, complex, highly skilled, often showy. They are designed to impress, even to stun viewers. The means used to produce sensate art are varied and enormous in scope. Often a work’s mere size—its hugeness—passes for quality; the bigger a statue or building, the better it is thought to be. …
Truth Has A Face
“However, the biblical story is pretty unwieldy and remains storylike despite our best efforts. But over the course of the last 350 years, we have risen to the occasion and have trained ourselves to think of the story as just so much external baggage carrying around the internal, timeless truths. Depending on how the story …
Integral Art
“In technique, integral art approaches perfection. Figures no longer are portrayed frontally. Statues come to life. The means of execution remain moderate but are used to marvelous effect. Though visual in form, the art continues, in the ideational tradition, to ignore the vulgar, the debasing, the ugly, the immoral, the eccentric. If something base appears …
Mystical Ratios
“There are many cultural reasons why we fall into this confusion about grading, many of them having to do with the lust for scientific precision that came out of the Enlightenment. Now it makes sense, for example, if the children are taking a vocabulary test of 100 words, and one of the kids misses thirteen …
A Word to NSA Students
We are halfway through Jerusalem Term, and so it is appropriate for me to bring you a few words of exhortation — what your academic dean described to me as a few kicks and hugs. This I am happy to do, and after thinking it over, I decided to speak to you in a Mosaic …